The Murder at the Vicarage (Agatha Christie Mysteries Collection) Page 3

  Miss Hartnell, whose only topics of conversation are the purely personal, looked suspicious and unbelieving. Taking advantage of a momentary hesitation on her part as to how to proceed next, I bade her good night and walked rapidly away.

  I called in at a house farther down the village and returned to the Vicarage by the garden gate, passing, as I did so, the danger point of Miss Marple’s garden. However, I did not see how it was humanly possible for the news of my visit to Mrs. Lestrange to have yet reached her ears, so I felt reasonably safe.

  As I latched the gate, it occurred to me that I would just step down to the shed in the garden which young Lawrence Redding was using as a studio, and see for myself how Griselda’s portrait was progressing.

  I append a rough sketch here which will be useful in the light of after happenings, only sketching in such details as are necessary.

  I had no idea there was anyone in the studio. There had been no voices from within to warn me, and I suppose that my own footsteps made no noise upon the grass.

  I opened the door and then stopped awkwardly on the threshold. For there were two people in the studio, and the man’s arms were round the woman and he was kissing her passionately.

  The two people were the artist, Lawrence Redding, and Mrs. Protheroe.

  I backed out precipitately and beat a retreat to my study. There I sat down in a chair, took out my pipe, and thought things over. The discovery had come as a great shock to me. Especially since my conversation with Lettice that afternoon, I had felt fairly certain that there was some kind of understanding growing up between her and the young man. Moreover, I was convinced that she herself thought so. I felt positive that she had no idea of the artist’s feelings for her stepmother.

  A nasty tangle. I paid a grudging tribute to Miss Marple. She had not been deceived but had evidently suspected the true state of things with a fair amount of accuracy. I had entirely misread her meaning glance at Griselda.

  I had never dreamt of considering Mrs. Protheroe in the matter. There has always been rather a suggestion of Caesar’s wife about Mrs. Protheroe—a quiet, self-contained woman whom one would not suspect of any great depths of feeling.

  I had got to this point in my meditations when a tap on my study window aroused me. I got up and went to it. Mrs. Protheroe was standing outside. I opened the window and she came in, not waiting for an invitation on my part. She crossed the room in a breathless sort of way and dropped down on the sofa.

  I had the feeling that I had never really seen her before. The quiet self-contained woman that I knew had vanished. In her place was a quick-breathing, desperate creature. For the first time I realized that Anne Protheroe was beautiful.

  She was a brown-haired woman with a pale face and very deep set grey eyes. She was flushed now and her breast heaved. It was as though a statue had suddenly come to life. I blinked my eyes at the transformation.

  “I thought it best to come,” she said. “You—you saw just now?” I bowed my head.

  She said very quietly: “We love each other….”

  And even in the middle of her evident distress and agitation she could not keep a little smile from her lips. The smile of a woman who sees something very beautiful and wonderful.

  I still said nothing, and she added presently:

  “I suppose to you that seems very wrong?”

  “Can you expect me to say anything else, Mrs. Protheroe?”

  “No—no, I suppose not.”

  I went on, trying to make my voice as gentle as possible:

  “You are a married woman—”

  She interrupted me.

  “Oh! I know—I know. Do you think I haven’t gone over all that again and again? I’m not a bad woman really—I’m not. And things aren’t—aren’t—as you might think they are.”

  I said gravely: “I’m glad of that.”

  She asked rather timorously:

  “Are you going to tell my husband?”

  I said rather dryly:

  “There seems to be a general idea that a clergyman is incapable of behaving like a gentleman. That is not true.”

  She threw me a grateful glance.

  “I’m so unhappy. Oh! I’m so dreadfully unhappy. I can’t go on. I simply can’t go on. And I don’t know what to do.” Her voice rose with a slightly hysterical note in it. “You don’t know what my life is like. I’ve been miserable with Lucius from the beginning. No woman could be happy with him. I wish he were dead … It’s awful, but I do … I’m desperate. I tell you, I’m desperate.” She started and looked over at the window.

  “What was that? I thought I heard someone? Perhaps it’s Lawrence.”

  I went over to the window which I had not closed as I had thought. I stepped out and looked down the garden, but there was no one in sight. Yet I was almost convinced that I, too, had heard someone. Or perhaps it was her certainty that had convinced me.

  When I reentered the room she was leaning forward, drooping her head down. She looked the picture of despair. She said again:

  “I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what to do.”

  I came and sat down beside her. I said the things I thought it was my duty to say, and tried to say them with the necessary conviction, uneasily conscious all the time that that same morning I had given voice to the sentiment that a world without Colonel Protheroe in it would be improved for the better.

  Above all, I begged her to do nothing rash. To leave her home and her husband was a very serious step.

  I don’t suppose I convinced her. I have lived long enough in the world to know that arguing with anyone in love is next door to useless, but I do think my words brought to her some measure of comfort.

  When she rose to go, she thanked me, and promised to think over what I had said.

  Nevertheless, when she had gone, I felt very uneasy. I felt that hitherto I had misjudged Anne Protheroe’s character. She impressed me now as a very desperate woman, the kind of woman who would stick at nothing once her emotions were aroused. And she was desperately, wildly, madly in love with Lawrence Redding, a man several years younger than herself. I didn’t like it.

  Four

  I had entirely forgotten that we had asked Lawrence Redding to dinner that night. When Griselda burst in and scolded me, pointing out that it lacked two minutes to dinner time, I was quite taken aback.

  “I hope everything will be all right,” Griselda called up the stairs after me. “I’ve thought over what you said at lunch, and I’ve really thought of some quite good things to eat.”

  I may say, in passing, that our evening meal amply bore out Griselda’s assertion that things went much worse when she tried than when she didn’t. The menu was ambitious in conception, and Mary seemed to have taken a perverse pleasure in seeing how best she could alternate undercooking and overcooking. Some oysters which Griselda had ordered, and which would seem to be beyond the reach of incompetence, we were, unfortunately, not able to sample as we had nothing in the house to open them with—an omission which was discovered only when the moment for eating them arrived.

  I had rather doubted whether Lawrence Redding would put in an appearance. He might very easily have sent an excuse.

  However, he arrived punctually enough, and the four of us went in to dinner.

  Lawrence Redding has an undeniably attractive personality. He is, I suppose, about thirty years of age. He has dark hair, but his eyes are of a brilliant, almost startling blue. He is the kind of young man who does everything well. He is good at games, an excellent shot, a good amateur actor, and can tell a first-rate story. He is capable of making any party go. He has, I think, Irish blood in his veins. He is not, at all, one’s idea of the typical artist. Yet I believe he is a clever painter in the modern style. I know very little of painting myself.

  It was only natural that on this particular evening he should appear a shade distrait. On the whole, he carried off things very well. I don’t think Griselda or Dennis noticed anything wrong. Probably I should n
ot have noticed anything myself if I had not known beforehand.

  Griselda and Dennis were particularly gay—full of jokes about Dr. Stone and Miss Cram—the Local Scandal! It suddenly came home to me with something of a pang that Dennis is nearer Griselda’s age than I am. He calls me Uncle Len, but her Griselda. It gave me, somehow, a lonely feeling.

  I must, I think, have been upset by Mrs. Protheroe. I’m not usually given to such unprofitable reflections.

  Griselda and Dennis went rather far now and then, but I hadn’t the heart to check them. I have always thought it a pity that the mere presence of a clergyman should have a dampening effect.

  Lawrence took a gay part in the conversation. Nevertheless I was aware of his eyes continually straying to where I sat, and I was not surprised when after dinner he manoeuvred to get me into the study.

  As soon as we were alone his manner changed.

  “You’ve surprised our secret, sir,” he said. “What are you going to do about it?”

  I could speak far more plainly to Redding than I could to Mrs. Protheroe, and I did so. He took it very well.

  “Of course,” he said, when I had finished, “you’re bound to say all this. You’re a parson. I don’t mean that in any way offensively. As a matter of fact I think you’re probably right. But this isn’t the usual sort of thing between Anne and me.”

  I told him that people had been saying that particular phrase since the dawn of time, and a queer little smile creased his lips.

  “You mean everyone thinks their case is unique? Perhaps so. But one thing you must believe.”

  He assured me that so far—“there was nothing wrong in it.” Anne, he said, was one of the truest and most loyal women that ever lived. What was going to happen he didn’t know.

  “If this were only a book,” he said gloomily, “the old man would die—and a good riddance to everybody.”

  I reproved him.

  “Oh! I didn’t mean I was going to stick him in the back with a knife, though I’d offer my best thanks to anyone else who did so. There’s not a soul in the world who’s got a good word to say for him. I rather wonder the first Mrs. Protheroe didn’t do him in. I met her once, years ago, and she looked quite capable of it. One of those calm dangerous women. He goes blustering along, stirring up trouble everywhere, mean as the devil, and with a particularly nasty temper. You don’t know what Anne has had to stand from him. If I had a penny in the world I’d take her away without any more ado.”

  Then I spoke to him very earnestly. I begged him to leave St. Mary Mead. By remaining there, he could only bring greater unhappiness on Anne Protheroe than was already her lot. People would talk, the matter would get to Colonel Protheroe’s ears—and things would be made infinitely worse for her.

  Lawrence protested.

  “Nobody knows a thing about it except you, padre.”

  “My dear young man, you underestimate the detective instinct of village life. In St. Mary Mead everyone knows your most intimate affairs. There is no detective in England equal to a spinster lady of uncertain age with plenty of time on her hands.”

  He said easily that that was all right. Everyone thought it was Lettice.

  “Has it occurred to you,” I asked, “that possibly Lettice might think so herself?”

  He seemed quite surprised by the idea. Lettice, he said, didn’t care a hang about him. He was sure of that.

  “She’s a queer sort of girl,” he said. “Always seems in a kind of dream, and yet underneath I believe she’s really rather practical. I believe all that vague stuff is a pose. Lettice knows jolly well what she’s doing. And there’s a funny vindictive streak in her. The queer thing is that she hates Anne. Simply loathes her. And yet Anne’s been a perfect angel to her always.”

  I did not, of course, take his word for this last. To infatuated young men, their inamorata always behaves like an angel. Still, to the best of my observation, Anne had always behaved to her step-daughter with kindness and fairness. I had been surprised myself that afternoon at the bitterness of Lettice’s tone.

  We had to leave the conversation there, because Griselda and Dennis burst in upon us and said I was not to make Lawrence behave like an old fogy.

  “Oh dear!” said Griselda, throwing herself into an armchair. “How I would like a thrill of some kind. A murder—or even a burglary.”

  “I don’t suppose there’s anyone much worth burgling,” said Lawrence, trying to enter into her mood. “Unless we stole Miss Hartnell’s false teeth.”

  “They do click horribly,” said Griselda. “But you’re wrong about there being no one worthwhile. There’s some marvellous old silver at Old Hall. Trencher salts and a Charles II Tazza—all kinds of things like that. Worth thousands of pounds, I believe.”

  “The old man would probably shoot you with an army revolver,” said Dennis. “Just the sort of thing he’d enjoy doing.”

  “Oh, we’d get in first and hold him up!” said Griselda. “Who’s got a revolver?”

  “I’ve got a Mauser pistol,” said Lawrence.

  “Have you? How exciting. Why do you have it?”

  “Souvenir of the war,” said Lawrence briefly.

  “Old Protheroe was showing the silver to Stone today,” volunteered Dennis. “Old Stone was pretending to be no end interested in it.”

  “I thought they’d quarrelled about the barrow,” said Griselda.

  “Oh, they’ve made that up!” said Dennis. “I can’t think what people want to grub about in barrows for, anyway.”

  “The man Stone puzzles me,” said Lawrence. “I think he must be very absentminded. You’d swear sometimes he knew nothing about his own subject.”

  “That’s love,” said Dennis. “Sweet Gladys Cram, you are no sham. Your teeth are white and fill me with delight. Come, fly with me, my bride to be. And at the Blue Boar, on the bedroom floor—”

  “That’s enough, Dennis,” I said.

  “Well,” said Lawrence Redding, “I must be off. Thank you very much, Mrs. Clement, for a very pleasant evening.”

  Griselda and Dennis saw him off. Dennis returned to the study alone. Something had happened to ruffle the boy. He wandered about the room aimlessly, frowning and kicking the furniture.

  Our furniture is so shabby already that it can hardly be damaged further, but I felt impelled to utter a mild protest.

  “Sorry,” said Dennis.

  He was silent for a moment and then burst out:

  “What an absolutely rotten thing gossip is!”

  I was a little surprised. “What’s the matter?” I asked.

  “I don’t know whether I ought to tell you.”

  I was more and more surprised.

  “It’s such an absolutely rotten thing,” Dennis said again. “Going round and saying things. Not even saying them. Hinting them. No, I’m damned—sorry—if I’ll tell you! It’s too absolutely rotten.”

  I looked at him curiously, but I did not press him further. I wondered very much, though. It is very unlike Dennis to take anything to heart.

  Griselda came in at that moment.

  “Miss Wetherby’s just rung up,” she said. “Mrs. Lestrange went out at a quarter past eight and hasn’t come in yet. Nobody knows where she’s gone.”

  “Why should they know?”

  “But it isn’t to Dr. Haydock’s. Miss Wetherby does know that, because she telephoned to Miss Hartnell who lives next door to him and who would have been sure to see her.”

  “It is a mystery to me,” I said, “how anyone ever gets any nourishment in this place. They must eat their meals standing up by the window so as to be sure of not missing anything.”

  “And that’s not all,” said Griselda, bubbling with pleasure. “They’ve found out about the Blue Boar. Dr. Stone and Miss Cram have got rooms next door to each other, BUT”—she waved an impressive forefinger—“no communicating door!”

  “That,” I said, “must be very disappointing to everybody.”

  At which Griselda l
aughed.

  Thursday started badly. Two of the ladies of my parish elected to quarrel about the church decorations. I was called in to adjudicate between two middle-aged ladies, each of whom was literally trembling with rage. If it had not been so painful, it would have been quite an interesting physical phenomenon.

  Then I had to reprove two of our choir boys for persistent sweet sucking during the hours of divine service, and I had an uneasy feeling that I was not doing the job as wholeheartedly as I should have done.

  Then our organist, who is distinctly “touchy,” had taken offence and had to be smoothed down.

  And four of my poorer parishioners declared open rebellion against Miss Hartnell, who came to me bursting with rage about it.

  I was just going home when I met Colonel Protheroe. He was in high good humour, having sentenced three poachers, in his capacity as magistrate.

  “Firmness,” he shouted in his stentorian voice. He is slightly deaf and raises his voice accordingly as deaf people often do. “That’s what’s needed nowadays—firmness! Make an example. That rogue Archer came out yesterday and is vowing vengeance against me, I hear. Impudent scoundrel. Threatened men live long, as the saying goes. I’ll show him what his vengeance is worth next time I catch him taking my pheasants. Lax! We’re too lax nowadays! I believe in showing a man up for what he is. You’re always being asked to consider a man’s wife and children. Damned nonsense. Fiddlesticks. Why should a man escape the consequences of his acts just because he whines about his wife and children? It’s all the same to me—no matter what a man is—doctor, lawyer, clergyman, poacher, drunken wastrel—if you catch him on the wrong side of the law, let the law punish him. You agree with me, I’m sure.”

  “You forget,” I said. “My calling obliges me to respect one quality above all others—the quality of mercy.”

  “Well, I’m a just man. No one can deny that.”

  I did not speak, and he said sharply:

  “Why don’t you answer? A penny for your thoughts, man.”

  I hesitated, then I decided to speak.

  “I was thinking,” I said, “that when my time comes, I should be sorry if the only plea I had to offer was that of justice. Because it might mean that only justice would be meted out to me….”