Marple Read online

  “Prudence!” Miss Marple went to her friend and, with some difficulty, helped her to stand. “Are you all right? Are you hurt?”

  “I— I don’t know,” Prudence said, a little shakily. I mean: yes, I think I am—all right, that is. I just . . . just need to catch my breath. He pushed me, Jane! Did you see?”

  “Yes, yes. I saw—a frightful thing! Should we go to the police? I noticed we passed the station on the high street—”

  “No,” Prudence said, bravely. “I don’t want any fuss. Nothing’s broken. And he’ll be long gone by now, into the crowd. They’ll never find him. Just take my arm. It’s only a little way now.” She seemed miraculously unperturbed by the whole affair, but then Prudence had always been made of stern stuff.

  Miss Marple stooped to pick up the torch. As she did, she found something beside it, lying in the path: what appeared in the gloom to be a tiny, pale pebble. She picked it up and pocketed it.

  Soon they had reached the back of the house. Strains of music floated towards them: Madame Butterfly’s famous aria, “Un Bel Di,” if Miss Marple was not mistaken. All the lamps—including the outside lights—were on and blazing out into the darkness. A pair of French doors hung open and someone stood there stitched in silhouette against the brightness behind, featureless, still as a statue. As they drew closer, Miss Marple could make her out. A maid, a young girl, her face a mask of horror. She knew at once that it hadn’t been a screech owl they had heard.

  “Oh, missuses. Missuses . . . something terrible has happened.”

  “What is it, girl?” Prudence was suddenly all practicality. Miss Marple remembered her words before. You have to be firm with them. Show them what’s what. “Come on. Out with it.”

  The girl pointed a trembling finger towards the room behind her.

  “I know not to disturb her when she’s in the study. And the music was playing so loud on the gramophone—I didn’t hear anything. They must have come through the French doors. I— I can’t believe it.”

  A large walnut desk hid half the carpet from view. All they could make out at first was one small foot, clad in a green suede shoe. Then, as they rounded the desk, the rest became visible. The woman’s shawl—a theatrical affair in emerald cashmere—was spread all about her where she had fallen. On first glance the shawl appeared to have a burgundy-hued pattern—on a second glance it became clear that this was in fact blood, a great deal of it, which had soaked into it from a vicious slit just above the woman’s clavicle. She was evidently very dead indeed.

  There was a moment of silence as the three of them stared at the fallen form. In one hand, Miss Marple saw, the dead woman clutched a note. In the other a blank envelope. From here she could read the words, printed in capitals:

  I KNOW YOU.

  I KNOW WHAT YOU REALLY ARE.

  PAY WHAT YOU OWE OR EVERYONE WILL LEARN THE TRUTH.

  Miss Marple couldn’t help but notice the hand clutching the envelope. She always noticed hands. Fingernails too. There had been an incident she had been involved in a little while ago and fingernails had come into it. She saw that Celia Beautemps’ fingernails were ugly, misshapen affairs, thick and yellowed. She’d seen such a thing before—she simply had to remember where.

  The hair was in disarray, half-escaped from its chignon. Miss Marple could make out the mouse-coloured roots beneath a layer of black dye.

  “Have you called the police, girl?” Prudence demanded.

  The maid wrung her hands. “No, ma’am—I didn’t think. I was so shocked . . .”

  “Go and do it immediately. We must have them here at once.” Prudence glanced up at the clock in the study. “Five thirty. The rest of the choir will be here soon too.”

  As if in answer, there was a sudden sharp rap on the door. Prudence sent the maid to answer. “I’ll ring the police.”

  For a few moments Miss Marple was left on her own with the body. There was just time, she calculated, to make a quick study of the room, undisturbed, before chaos descended. She took another look at the note—the envelope too. She wandered over to the desk. Another stack of envelopes, these unopened, several stamped with the words FINAL REMINDER. A book of poetry, lying open on a poem entitled “My Lady of Shalott.”

  She moved to the wall hung with photographs of Celia Beautemps in her prime, performing on various different stages, alongside framed certificates from the Guildhall School of Music. On the mantlepiece sat a small, rather cheap-looking tin urn and next to it a small photograph of a woman wearing what looked like a white cap—though it was difficult to be certain because the image was old and foxed.

  Suddenly she became aware that she was no longer alone in the room. The little maid had returned. She saw now that the girl looked not just shocked and upset by what she had found. She looked truly grief-stricken.

  “Who could have done this?” she asked, plaintively.

  “I don’t know, child,” Miss Marple told her. “But we will find out.”

  “She were a good mistress. Not like others I’ve worked for. She treated me like a person. She bought me special gloves for cleaning and all.”

  “It sounds as though she was very kind to you.”

  “She was a kind lady, ma’am. But that’s not how they talk about her in Meon Maltravers. All sorts of horrible things they say. She thought someone was spreading lies about. Things to make people turn against her. But she said she’d get even in the end—”

  She stopped talking: someone had just burst into the room. It was a youngish man, pale and rather beautiful. He stopped dead at the sight of the body on the floor. Miss Marple suspected this might be the poet, Christopher Palfrey. Hot on his heels came a tall woman with angular, rather fierce looks. This had to be the wife, Annabelle. Just behind them followed a trim, grey-haired gentleman with a thick moustache and military aspect, a faded little woman in the clothes of a previous decade and, finally, a floridly handsome middle-aged man in a smart tweed jacket that was straining slightly at the buttons. All of them seemed to be peering over one another’s shoulders with a rather horrid, prurient interest.

  The faded woman—presumably the former choir mistress—let out a little cry. It was no doubt meant to signify horror but it sounded oddly like the cries of excitement Miss Marple had heard from the children watching the fireworks in St. Mary Mead.

  “Christ Almighty,” exclaimed the tweed-clad gentleman, who Miss Marple guessed to be Gordon Kipling, master of hounds. “Someone’s killed the bitch!”

  “Steady on, man,” said the moustachioed man.

  “Very sorry, Colonel,” Kipling said, quickly—seeming as appalled by his own outburst as the rest of them. “Damned shocking thing to see, though.”

  No doubt to his relief, the room’s attention was quickly caught by another commotion: a sudden, low groan, more animal than human; a sound of great pain. Christopher Palfrey had fallen to his knees in front of the body. “She’s dead,” he moaned, words muffled through the hands he held over his mouth. “She’s dead and I killed her.”

  A stunned hush settled over the room. And then: “For God’s sake,” Annabelle Palfrey said. She stepped towards him and put a claw-like hand on his shoulder, knuckles showing white. “Get up, you bloody fool,” she hissed. “Get up this second. Remember your heart. No over-excitement, Dr. Briggs said.” She hauled him to his feet. There was a flush high on her cheeks: from the cold, perhaps, or some recent physical exertion—or maybe just anger.

  Then she herself knelt over the body, felt for a pulse at both neck and wrist. “Medical training,” she threw back to them, by way of explanation. “Drove an ambulance in 1918.”

  Yet these ministrations might also, Miss Marple thought, be a way to account for any of her fingerprints appearing on the corpse.

  “I’ve called the police,” Prudence said, striding into the room. “They should be here any moment—the station’s only a couple of minutes’ drive away. And come out of here, all of you. It’s positively morbid.”

  A few moments later there was the sound of a car drawing up in the driveway outside and, in a couple of minutes more, two policemen had joined them inside. The taller man was clearly the more senior of the two. He looked rather like a policeman from a Raymond Chandler novel or an American noir film: the lantern jaw, the overcoat, the hat pulled low over his dark-shadowed eyes. Miss Marple suspected he might have dressed specially to create this impression. The overall effect was marred slightly by the fact that, when he opened his mouth, he had a broad Sussex accent. “I’m Inspector Eidel,” he told the assembled company. “And I’d like to ask you all a few questions.”

  A little while later, Miss Marple—nearly the last of the company to be interviewed—was led into a small sitting room by the more junior of the two policemen. He indicated an armchair opposite Inspector Eidel.

  “Jane Marple,” Inspector Eidel stated, then paused—perhaps because Miss Marple was looking beyond him, through the window towards the woods—and said, in a louder voice, “CAN YOU HEAR ME, MADAM?”

  Miss Marple gave a little start, then fixed her eyes on him. “Perfectly well, thank you.”

  “Your friend told me that you had an altercation with a masked man in the woods this evening. Coming in the other direction—from the house, along the path that leads from the back entrance. Correct?”

  “Not quite correct,” Miss Marple answered, brightly.

  “Pardon me?”

  Miss Marple tilted her head to show that he was, indeed, pardoned. “You see, it wasn’t the evening. It was a little past five o’clock—though at this time of year, when it gets dark so quickly, it’s so easy to forget, I do understand . . .”

  Inspector Eidel cleared his throat rather violently. “Apologies, ma’am, just a figure of speech—”

  “But it does seem so important to get these things right from the outset, doesn’t it? You as a policeman will know this, of course. Words are words but they can be so dangerous, so misleading. So: yes, I was there this afternoon. And we encountered a masked figure. My friend was pushed roughly to the ground—a very shocking thing. Almost, one might say, gratuitously so.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’m not sure exactly. Merely that it seemed particularly vicious. To push an old woman to the ground like that when they could simply have stepped around her. As though they were trying to make a point. What that was, of course, I cannot say.”

  “Well, ma’am,” Inspector Eidel said—a little patronisingly, Miss Marple thought—“we are talking here of the sort of person who had in all likelihood just murdered a woman. So perhaps it’s no great surprise. Unfortunately, whoever it was, they’ll be long gone by now into that crowd marching to the town cross. We’ll have to—”

  “I’m not so sure,” Miss Marple interjected. “That’s what they would want you to think, of course. But if we assume that masked figure was our murderer—and I do agree with you that it is an assumption we can hazard—then, from what Prudence says, many of the people who had a real quarrel with the victim are here in this very house. Don’t you see? It would have been a rather clever conceit to costume themselves as one of the revellers. And then it would have been the work of a moment to shrug off the disguise, conceal it in the woods, and return here in their ordinary clothes, ready for the choir practice—as though none of it had happened. So my two pennies’ worth, if you would like to hear it, Inspector,” Inspector Eidel seemed to understand he didn’t have much of a choice in the matter, “would be to search the woods near to where Prudence and I met our masked assailant, search for any signs of them: clothing, for example.”

  Inspector Eidel turned to the junior who sat perched on the edge of a chaise longue holding his notebook. A wordless exchange passed between them. The junior nodded. “I’ll put in a call to Honnington station, see if they can spare some chaps.”

  Eidel turned back to Miss Marple. “There was a note found in the dead woman’s hand.”

  “I know. I saw it. A rather threatening message.”

  “You aren’t from these parts, are you, Miss Marple?”

  “No, I live in St. Mary Mead. Have you heard of it? It’s not a very well-known place. A small village, rather charming—”

  “So,” Eidel cut in, “I suppose, not being from around here, it would be difficult for you to make a guess as to who might have sent it to the victim?”

  “Oh, but of course I know the answer to that. No one!”

  “Pardon?”

  Miss Marple tilted her head again. “The envelope tells us everything, of course.”

  “The envelope was blank, Miss Marple.”

  “Precisely! More than blank, it was pristine. It was unused. Which I believe tells us that nobody sent it. It had not yet found its intended recipient. The victim was the author of the note. She was blackmailing someone. And when she was killed, she had clearly been preparing to send it.”

  There was a longish silence. Miss Marple could hear Eidel breathing rather heavily through his mouth. Finally he spoke again.

  “One other thing. We have heard from several others that Christopher Palfrey said—”

  He looked to the junior, who cleared his throat and spoke, reading from his notebook: “She’s dead and I killed her.”

  Eidel turned to Miss Marple. “Is that—”

  “Correct. Indeed. He did say those words.”

  “Thank you, Miss Marple.”

  “But I don’t think it was a confession at all. These creative types—my nephew Raymond is one, you know—they do have a habit of making everything about themselves and their work.”

  Eidel frowned. “And how exactly do you make all of this out?”

  “Palfrey recently dedicated a collection of poetry to Celia Beautemps. One of the poems was entitled ‘My Lady of Shalott.’ A nod to Tennyson, I imagine—I am so fond of Tennyson, I do like a poem that actually rhymes . . . perhaps that rather marks me out as the Victorian I am.” Miss Marple frowned. “Where was I? Oh yes! In the old tale the Lady of Shalott dies, as you’ll know, of course. I think that this is where Palfrey’s artistic egoism comes in—he no doubt believes that because he imagined Madame Beautemps dead in verse, he somehow visited the Fates upon her. The arrogance of the artistic temperament, you know: my nephew has it too, and I say that as his loving aunt.”

  “The artistic temperament,” Eidel repeated, a little weakly. “The . . . Fates?”

  “Besides, Palfrey couldn’t have been your masked figure.”

  “He couldn’t?”

  “No, because of his heart, of course!”

  “His heart?”

  “Annabelle Palfrey reminded him of his heart when he got so upset over the body. And I spoke to Colonel Woodage about it while we were waiting to be interviewed: he says Palfrey was exempted from active service because of it. I would be very surprised if he had been able to tear through the woods like that as a result.”

  There was another long silence.

  “Thank you, Miss Marple,” Eidel said, finally. “I think we have everything we need now. If you could send in—” he turned to his junior.

  “Gordon Kipling,” the other clarified.

  Miss Marple joined the group in the dining room. Like the sitting room—and indeed any parts of the house that Miss Marple had glimpsed—it had an uninhabited, provisional look to it. In contrast to the sumptuous furnishings of Fairweather House, for example, there didn’t seem to be quite enough furniture for the space, few pictures on the walls and no carpet upon the wooden floorboards. Around the table sat Prudence, the Palfreys, Mrs. Prufrock, Colonel Woodage, Gordon Kipling and the maid.

  Christopher Palfrey looked just as agonised as he had when confronted by the scene in the study. He sat white-faced and trembling slightly, slumped over to one side. His wife, her posture ramrod straight, seemed to be supporting him, the only thing preventing him from sliding off his seat and on to the floor.

  Miss Marple took the seat beside Prudence and, because no one seemed to be talking, took out her knitting.

  “I didn’t like the woman,” the Colonel said, suddenly, into the silence. “I’ll be the first to say it. Cards on the table. And not, before any of you say it, because she was French. In fact, I don’t think she was any more French than I am. Something off about that accent. Some dodgy vowels in there. No, I didn’t like her because there was something . . . crooked about her, something false.”

  Miss Marple noticed a little nod from Mrs. Prufrock, the former choir mistress, in response to this. She was reminded of the words on the note. I know what you really are. But if her hunch was correct, and she was sure it was, then Celia Beautemps had been calling someone else out on a deception. Colonel Woodage went on: “I like people to represent themselves honestly. I didn’t trust the woman. But I wouldn’t wish her dead. I hope they find the scoundrel that did this.”

  “She killed three of my hounds,” Gordon Kipling said. “I’m certain of it. So some might say it’s only just desserts—”

  He stopped as the door to the dining room swung open.

  The junior policeman stood in the doorway.

  “We would like to conduct a search of all your effects,” he said, a little nervously—as though he were asking a question rather than making a statement. “If you’ll submit to it. You don’t have to agree, but . . . ah . . . your refusal will be taken into account.”

  Miss Marple leaned towards Prudence. “That means they’ve found the disguise, I think. In the woods. But not the murder weapon.”

  “What do you mean, Jane?”

  “Oh, I think our murderer—and your assailant—is here somewhere. I think Eidel does too.”

  One by one they were called into the sitting room again. Miss Marple passed over her handbag to the policemen and waited as the contents were searched. She knew there was little in there beyond her knitting, her purse and some smelling salts—as a late-Victorian, she took them with her everywhere, since you never knew when such things might come in useful—but it did feel rather lowering, even violating, having these men paw through her personal effects. Afterwards, she waited outside while Prudence underwent the same treatment. Finally, they were free to go. But just as they were leaving through the front door, they heard a sound that seemed half shriek, half howl. “Get your hands off me! How dare you! Unhand me, you fools! This is an outrage!”