The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding Read online

  ‘If you want to discuss murder,’ said Raymond, ‘you must talk to my Aunt Jane.’

  ‘Your Aunt Jane? Do you mean Miss Marple?’ He felt a little at a loss.

  The charming old-world lady to whom he had been introduced the night before seemed the last person to be mentioned in connection with murder.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ said Raymond. ‘Murder is a speciality of hers.’

  ‘But my dear, how intriguing. What do you really mean?’

  ‘I mean just that,’ said Raymond. He paraphrased: ‘Some commit murder, some get mixed up in murders, others have murder thrust upon them. My Aunt Jane comes into the third category.’

  ‘You are joking.’

  ‘Not in the least. I can refer you to the former Commissioner of Scotland Yard, several Chief Constables and one or two hard-working inspectors of the CID.’

  Horace said happily that wonders would never cease. Over the tea table they gave Joan West, Raymond’s wife, Lou Oxley her niece, and old Miss Marple, a résumé of the afternoon’s happenings, recounting in detail everything that Miss Greenshaw had said to them.

  ‘But I do think,’ said Horace, ‘that there is something a little sinister about the whole set-up. That duchess-like creature, the housekeeper – arsenic, perhaps, in the teapot, now that she knows her mistress has made the will in her favour?’

  ‘Tell us, Aunt Jane,’ said Raymond. ‘Will there be murder or won’t there? What do you think?’

  ‘I think,’ said Miss Marple, winding up her wool with a rather severe air, ‘that you shouldn’t joke about these things as much as you do, Raymond. Arsenic is, of course, quite a possibility. So easy to obtain. Probably present in the toolshed already in the form of weed killer.’

  ‘Oh, really, darling,’ said Joan West, affectionately. ‘Wouldn’t that be rather too obvious?’

  ‘It’s all very well to make a will,’ said Raymond, ‘I don’t suppose really the poor old thing has anything to leave except that awful white elephant of a house, and who would want that?’

  ‘A film company possibly,’ said Horace, ‘or a hotel or an institution?’

  ‘They’d expect to buy it for a song,’ said Raymond, but Miss Marple was shaking her head.

  ‘You know, dear Raymond, I cannot agree with you there. About the money, I mean. The grandfather was evidently one of those lavish spenders who make money easily, but can’t keep it. He may have gone broke, as you say, but hardly bankrupt or else his son would not have had the house. Now the son, as is so often the case, was an entirely different character to his father. A miser. A man who saved every penny. I should say that in the course of his lifetime he probably put by a very good sum. This Miss Greenshaw appears to have taken after him, to dislike spending money, that is. Yes, I should think it quite likely that she had quite a good sum tucked away.’

  ‘In that case,’ said Joan West, ‘I wonder now – what about Lou?’

  They looked at Lou as she sat, silent, by the fire.

  Lou was Joan West’s niece. Her marriage had recently, as she herself put it, come unstuck, leaving her with two young children and a bare sufficiency of money to keep them on.

  ‘I mean,’ said Joan, ‘if this Miss Greenshaw really wants someone to go through diaries and get a book ready for publication . . .’

  ‘It’s an idea,’ said Raymond.

  Lou said in a low voice:

  ‘It’s work I could do – and I’d enjoy it.’

  ‘I’ll write to her,’ said Raymond.

  ‘I wonder,’ said Miss Marple thoughtfully, ‘what the old lady meant by that remark about a policeman?’

  ‘Oh, it was just a joke.’

  ‘It reminded me,’ said Miss Marple, nodding her head vigorously, ‘yes, it reminded me very much of Mr Naysmith.’

  ‘Who was Mr Naysmith?’ asked Raymond, curiously.

  ‘He kept bees,’ said Miss Marple, ‘and was very good at doing the acrostics in the Sunday papers. And he liked giving people false impressions just for fun. But sometimes it led to trouble.’

  Everybody was silent for a moment, considering Mr Naysmith, but as there did not seem to be any points of resemblance between him and Miss Greenshaw, they decided that dear Aunt Jane was perhaps getting a little bit disconnected in her old age.

  II

  Horace Bindler went back to London without having collected any more monstrosities and Raymond West wrote a letter to Miss Greenshaw telling her that he knew of a Mrs Louisa Oxley who would be competent to undertake work on the diaries. After a lapse of some days, a letter arrived, written in spidery old-fashioned handwriting, in which Miss Greenshaw declared herself anxious to avail herself of the services of Mrs Oxley, and making an appointment for Mrs Oxley to come and see her.

  Lou duly kept the appointment, generous terms were arranged and she started work on the following day.

  ‘I’m awfully grateful to you,’ she said to Raymond. ‘It will fit in beautifully. I can take the children to school, go on to Greenshaw’s Folly and pick them up on my way back. How fantastic the whole set-up is! That old woman has to be seen to be believed.’

  On the evening of her first day at work she returned and described her day.

  ‘I’ve hardly seen the housekeeper,’ she said. ‘She came in with coffee and biscuits at half past eleven with her mouth pursed up very prunes and prisms, and would hardly speak to me. I think she disapproves deeply of my having been engaged.’ She went on, ‘It seems there’s quite a feud between her and the gardener, Alfred. He’s a local boy and fairly lazy, I should imagine, and he and the housekeeper won’t speak to each other. Miss Greenshaw said in her rather grand way, “There have always been feuds as far as I can remember between the garden and the house staff. It was so in my grandfather’s time. There were three men and a boy in the garden then, and eight maids in the house, but there was always friction.”’

  On the following day Lou returned with another piece of news.

  ‘Just fancy,’ she said, ‘I was asked to ring up the nephew this morning.’

  ‘Miss Greenshaw’s nephew?’

  ‘Yes. It seems he’s an actor playing in the company that’s doing a summer season at Boreham on Sea. I rang up the theatre and left a message asking him to lunch tomorrow. Rather fun, really. The old girl didn’t want the housekeeper to know. I think Mrs Cresswell has done something that’s annoyed her.’

  ‘Tomorrow another instalment of this thrilling serial,’ murmured Raymond.

  ‘It’s exactly like a serial, isn’t it? Reconciliation with the nephew, blood is thicker than water – another will to be made and the old will destroyed.’

  ‘Aunt Jane, you’re looking very serious.’

  ‘Was I, my dear? Have you heard any more about the policeman?’

  Lou looked bewildered. ‘I don’t know anything about a policeman.’

  ‘That remark of hers, my dear,’ said Miss Marple, ‘must have meant something.’

  Lou arrived at her work the next day in a cheerful mood. She passed through the open front door – the doors and windows of the house were always open. Miss Greenshaw appeared to have no fear of burglars, and was probably justified, as most things in the house weighed several tons and were of no marketable value.

  Lou had passed Alfred in the drive. When she first caught sight of him he had been leaning against a tree smoking a cigarette, but as soon as he had caught sight of her he had seized a broom and begun diligently to sweep leaves. An idle young man, she thought, but good looking. His features reminded her of someone. As she passed through the hall on her way upstairs to the library she glanced at the large picture of Nathaniel Greenshaw which presided over the mantelpiece, showing him in the acme of Victorian prosperity, leaning back in a large arm-chair, his hands resting on the gold albert across his capacious stomach. As her glance swept up from the stomach to the face with its heavy jowls, its bushy eyebrows and its flourishing black moustache, the thought occurred to her that Nathaniel Greenshaw must have been handsome
as a young man. He had looked, perhaps, a little like Alfred . . .

  She went into the library, shut the door behind her, opened her typewriter and got out the diaries from the drawer at the side of the desk. Through the open window she caught a glimpse of Miss Greenshaw in a puce-coloured sprigged print, bending over the rockery, weeding assiduously. They had had two wet days, of which the weeds had taken full advantage.

  Lou, a town bred girl, decided that if she ever had a garden it would never contain a rockery which needed hand weeding. Then she settled down to her work.

  When Mrs Cresswell entered the library with the coffee tray at half past eleven, she was clearly in a very bad temper. She banged the tray down on the table, and observed to the universe:

  ‘Company for lunch – and nothing in the house! What am I supposed to do, I should like to know? And no sign of Alfred.’

  ‘He was sweeping in the drive when I got here,’ Lou offered.

  ‘I dare say. A nice soft job.’

  Mrs Cresswell swept out of the room and banged the door behind her. Lou grinned to herself. She wondered what ‘the nephew’ would be like.

  She finished her coffee and settled down to her work again. It was so absorbing that time passed quickly. Nathaniel Greenshaw, when he started to keep a diary, had succumbed to the pleasure of frankness. Trying out a passage relating to the personal charm of a barmaid in the neighbouring town, Lou reflected that a good deal of editing would be necessary.

  As she was thinking this, she was startled by a scream from the garden. Jumping up, she ran to the open window. Miss Greenshaw was staggering away from the rockery towards the house. Her hands were clasped to her breast and between them there protruded a feathered shaft that Lou recognized with stupefaction to be the shaft of an arrow.

  Miss Greenshaw’s head, in its battered straw hat, fell forward on her breast. She called up to Lou in a failing voice: ‘. . . shot . . . he shot me . . . with an arrow . . . get help . . .’

  Lou rushed to the door. She turned the handle, but the door would not open. It took her a moment or two of futile endeavour to realize that she was locked in. She rushed back to the window.

  ‘I’m locked in.’

  Miss Greenshaw, her back towards Lou, and swaying a little on her feet was calling up to the housekeeper at a window farther along.

  ‘Ring police . . . telephone . . .’

  Then, lurching from side to side like a drunkard, she disappeared from Lou’s view through the window below into the drawing-room. A moment later Lou heard a crash of broken china, a heavy fall, and then silence. Her imagination reconstructed the scene. Miss Greenshaw must have staggered blindly into a small table with a Sèvres teaset on it.

  Desperately Lou pounded on the door, calling and shouting. There was no creeper or drain-pipe outside the window that could help her to get out that way.

  Tired at last of beating on the door, she returned to the window. From the window of her sitting-room farther along, the housekeeper’s head appeared.

  ‘Come and let me out, Mrs Oxley. I’m locked in.’

  ‘So am I.’

  ‘Oh dear, isn’t it awful? I’ve telephoned the police. There’s an extension in this room, but what I can’t understand, Mrs Oxley, is our being locked in. I never heard a key turn, did you?’

  ‘No. I didn’t hear anything at all. Oh dear, what shall we do? Perhaps Alfred might hear us.’ Lou shouted at the top of her voice, ‘Alfred, Alfred.’

  ‘Gone to his dinner as likely as not. What time is it?’

  Lou glanced at her watch.

  ‘Twenty-five past twelve.’

  ‘He’s not supposed to go until half past, but he sneaks off earlier whenever he can.’

  ‘Do you think – do you think –’

  Lou meant to ask ‘Do you think she’s dead?’ but the words stuck in her throat.

  There was nothing to do but wait. She sat down on the window-sill. It seemed an eternity before the stolid helmeted figure of a police constable came round the corner of the house. She leant out of the window and he looked up at her, shading his eyes with his hand. When he spoke his voice held reproof.

  ‘What’s going on here?’ he asked disapprovingly.

  From their respective windows, Lou and Mrs Cresswell poured a flood of excited information down on him.

  The constable produced a note-book and pencil. ‘You ladies ran upstairs and locked yourselves in? Can I have your names, please?’

  ‘No. Somebody else locked us in. Come and let us out.’

  The constable said reprovingly, ‘All in good time,’ and disappeared through the window below.

  Once again time seemed infinite. Lou heard the sound of a car arriving, and, after what seemed an hour but was actually three minutes, first Mrs Cresswell and then Lou were released by a police sergeant more alert than the original constable.

  ‘Miss Greenshaw?’ Lou’s voice faltered. ‘What – what’s happened?’

  The sergeant cleared his throat.

  ‘I’m sorry to have to tell you, madam,’ he said, ‘what I’ve already told Mrs Cresswell here. Miss Greenshaw is dead.’

  ‘Murdered,’ said Mrs Cresswell. ‘That’s what it is – murder.’

  The sergeant said dubiously:

  ‘Could have been an accident – some country lads shooting with bows and arrows.’

  Again there was the sound of a car arriving. The sergeant said:

  ‘That’ll be the MO,’ and started downstairs.

  But it was not the MO. As Lou and Mrs Cresswell came down the stairs a young man stepped hesitatingly through the front door and paused, looking round him with a somewhat bewildered air.

  Then, speaking in a pleasant voice that in some way seemed familiar to Lou – perhaps it had a family resemblance to Miss Greenshaw’s – he asked:

  ‘Excuse me, does – er – does Miss Greenshaw live here?’

  ‘May I have your name if you please,’ said the sergeant advancing upon him.

  ‘Fletcher,’ said the young man. ‘Nat Fletcher. I’m Miss Greenshaw’s nephew, as a matter of fact.’

  ‘Indeed, sir, well – I’m sorry – I’m sure –’

  ‘Has anything happened?’ asked Nat Fletcher.

  ‘There’s been an – accident – your aunt was shot with an arrow – penetrated the jugular vein –’

  Mrs Cresswell spoke hysterically and without her usual refinement:

  ‘Your h’aunts been murdered, that’s what’s ’appened. You h’aunt’s been murdered.’

  III

  Inspector Welch drew his chair a little nearer to the table and let his gaze wander from one to the other of the four people in the room. It was the evening of the same day. He had called at the Wests’ house to take Lou Oxley once more over her statement.

  ‘You are sure of the exact words? Shot – he shot me – with an arrow – get help?’

  Lou nodded.

  ‘And the time?’

  ‘I looked at my watch a minute or two later – it was then twelve twenty-five.’

  ‘Your watch keeps good time?’

  ‘I looked at the clock as well.’

  The inspector turned to Raymond West.

  ‘It appears, sir, that about a week ago you and a Mr Horace Bindler were witnesses to Miss Greenshaw’s will?’

  Briefly, Raymond recounted the events of the afternoon visit that he and Horace Bindler had paid to Greenshaw’s Folly.

  ‘This testimony of yours may be important,’ said Welch. ‘Miss Greenshaw distinctly told you, did she, that her will was being made in favour of Mrs Cresswell, the housekeeper, that she was not paying Mrs Cresswell any wages in view of the expectations Mrs Cresswell had of profiting by her death?’

  ‘That is what she told me – yes.’

  ‘Would you say that Mrs Cresswell was definitely aware of these facts?’

  ‘I should say undoubtedly. Miss Greenshaw made a reference in my presence to beneficiaries not being able to witness a will and Mrs Cressw
ell clearly understood what she meant by it. Moreover, Miss Greenshaw herself told me that she had come to this arrangement with Mrs Cresswell.’

  ‘So Mrs Cresswell had reason to believe she was an interested party. Motive’s clear enough in her case, and I dare say she’d be our chief suspect now if it wasn’t for the fact that she was securely locked in her room like Mrs Oxley here, and also that Miss Greenshaw definitely said a man shot her –’

  ‘She definitely was locked in her room?’

  ‘Oh yes. Sergeant Cayley let her out. It’s a big old-fashioned lock with a big old-fashioned key. The key was in the lock and there’s not a chance that it could have been turned from inside or any hanky-panky of that kind. No, you can take it definitely that Mrs Cresswell was locked inside that room and couldn’t get out. And there were no bows and arrows in the room and Miss Greenshaw couldn’t in any case have been shot from a window – the angle forbids it – no, Mrs Cresswell’s out of it.’

  He paused and went on:

  ‘Would you say that Miss Greenshaw, in your opinion, was a practical joker?’

  Miss Marple looked up sharply from her corner.

  ‘So the will wasn’t in Mrs Cresswell’s favour after all?’ she said.

  Inspector Welch looked over at her in a rather surprised fashion.

  ‘That’s a very clever guess of yours, madam,’ he said. ‘No. Mrs Cresswell isn’t named as beneficiary.’

  ‘Just like Mr Naysmith,’ said Miss Marple, nodding her head. ‘Miss Greenshaw told Mrs Cresswell she was going to leave her everything and so got out of paying her wages; and then she left her money to somebody else. No doubt she was vastly pleased with herself. No wonder she chortled when she put the will away in Lady Audley’s Secret.’

  ‘It was lucky Mrs Oxley was able to tell us about the will and where it was put,’ said the inspector. ‘We might have had a long hunt for it otherwise.’

  ‘A Victorian sense of humour,’ murmured Raymond West. ‘So she left her money to her nephew after all,’ said Lou.

  The inspector shook his head.

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘she didn’t leave it to Nat Fletcher. The story goes around here – of course I’m new to the place and I only get the gossip that’s second-hand – but it seems that in the old days both Miss Greenshaw and her sister were set on the handsome young riding master, and the sister got him. No, she didn’t leave the money to her nephew –’ He paused, rubbing his chin, ‘She left it to Alfred,’ he said.