Complete Short Stories Of Miss Marple mm-16 Page 5

  'Emma Gaunt looked inquiringly at me as if to know whether she could leave the room. I nodded reassuringly and she went out - first stopping to pick up the blue envelope which I had let slip to the ground in my moment of anxiety. She handed it to me and I slipped it into my coat pocket and then she went out.

  'You are annoyed, Petherick,' said Simon Clode. 'You are prejudiced, like everybody else.'

  'It is not a question of prejudice,' I said. 'Mrs. Spragg may be all that she claims to be. I should see no objection to you leaving her a small legacy as a memento of gratitude; but I tell you frankly, Clode, that to disinherit your own flesh and blood in favour of a stranger is wrong.'

  'With that I turned to depart. I had done what I could and made my protest.

  'Mary Clode came out of the drawing-room and met me in the hall.

  'You will have tea before you go, won't you? Come in here,' and she led me into the drawing-room.

  'A fire was burning on the hearth and the room looked cosy and cheerful. She relieved me of my overcoat just as her brother, George, came into the room. He took it from her and laid it across a chair at the far end of the room, then he came back to the fireside where we drank tea. During the meal a question arose about some point concerning the estate. Simon Clode said he didn't want to be bothered with it and had left it to George to decide. George was rather nervous about trusting to his own judgment. At my suggestion, we adjourned to the study after tea and I looked over the papers in question. Mary Clode accompanied us.

  'A quarter of an hour later I prepared to take my departure. Remembering that I had left my overcoat in the drawing-room, I went there to fetch it. The only occupant of the room was Mrs. Spragg, who was kneeling by the chair on which the overcoat lay. She seemed to be doing something rather unnecessary to the chair's slipcover. She rose with a very red face as we entered.

  'That cover never did sit right,' she complained. 'My! I could make a better fit myself.'

  'I took up my overcoat and put it on. As I did so I noticed that the envelope containing the will had fallen out of the pocket and was lying on the floor. I replaced it in my pocket, said good-bye, and took my departure.

  'On arrival at my office, I will describe my next actions carefully. I removed my overcoat and took the will from the pocket. I had it in my hand and was standing by the table when my clerk came in. Somebody wished to speak to me on the telephone, and the extension to my desk was out of order. I accordingly accompanied him to the outer office and remained there for about five minutes engaged in conversation over the telephone.

  'When I emerged I found my clerk waiting for me.

  'Mr. Spragg has called to see you, sir. I showed him into your office.'

  'I went there to find Mr. Spragg sitting by the table. He rose and greeted me in a somewhat unctuous manner, then proceeded to a long discursive speech. In the main it seemed to be an uneasy justification of himself and his wife. He was afraid people were saying, etc., etc. His wife had been known from her babyhood upwards for the pureness of her heart and her motives… and so on and so on. I was, I am afraid, rather curt with him. In the end I think he realised that his visit was not being a success and left somewhat abruptly. I then remembered that I had left the will lying on the table. I took it, sealed the envelope, and wrote on it and put it away in the safe.

  'Now I come to the crux of my story. Two months later Mr. Simon Clode died. I will not go into long-winded discussions, I will just state the bare facts. When the sealed envelope containing the will was opened it was found to contain a sheet of blank paper.'

  He paused, looking around the circle of interested faces. He smiled himself with a certain enjoyment.

  'You appreciate the point, of course? For two months the sealed envelope had lain in my safe. It could not have been tampered with then. No, the time limit was a very short one. Between the moment the will was signed and my locking it away in the safe. Now who had had the opportunity, and to whose interest would it be to do so?

  'I will recapitulate the vital points in a brief summary: The will was signed by Mr. Clode, placed by me in an envelope - so far so good. It was then put by me in my overcoat pocket. That overcoat was taken from me by Mary and handed by her to George, who was in full sight of me whilst handling the coat. During the time that I was in the study Mrs. Eurydice Spragg would have had plenty of time to extract the envelope from the coat pocket and read its contents and, as a matter of fact, finding the envelope on the ground and not in the pocket seemed to point to her having done so.

  'But here we come to a curious point: she had the opportunity of substituting the blank paper, but no motive. The will was in her favour, and by substituting a blank piece of paper she despoiled herself of the heritage she had been so anxious to gain. The same applies to Mr. Spragg. He, too, had the opportunity. He was left alone with the document in question for some two or three minutes in my office. But again, it was not to his advantage to do so. So we are faced with the curious problem: the two people who had the opportunity of substituting a blank piece of paper had no motive for doing so, and the two people who had a motive had no opportunity. By the way, I would not exclude the housemaid, Emma Gaunt, from suspicion. She was devoted to her young master and mistress and detested the Spraggs. She would, I feel sure, have been quite equal to attempting the substitution if she had thought of it. But although she actually handled the envelope when she picked it up from the floor and handed it to me, she certainly had no opportunity of tampering with its contents and she could not have substituted another envelope by some sleight of hand (of which anyway she would not be capable) because the envelope in question was brought into the house by me and no one there would be likely to have a duplicate.'

  He looked round, beaming on the assembly.

  'Now, there is my little problem. I have, I hope, stated it clearly. I should be interested to hear your views.'

  To everyone's astonishment Miss Marple gave vent to a long and prolonged chuckle. Something seemed to be amusing her immensely.

  'What is the matter, Aunt Jane? Can't we share the joke?' said Raymond.

  'Mr. Petherick's story is a catch. So like a lawyer! Ah, my dear old friend!' She shook a reproving head at him.

  'I wonder if you really know,' said the lawyer with a twinkle.

  Miss Marple wrote a few words on a piece of paper, folded them up and passed them across to him.

  Mr. Petherick unfolded the paper, read what was written on it and looked across at her appreciatively.

  'My dear friend,' he said, 'is there anything you do not know?'

  'I knew that as a child,' said Miss Marple. 'Played with it too. '

  ' I feel rather out of this, ' said Sir Henry. 'I feel sure that Mr. Petherick has some clever legal legerdemain up his sleeve. '

  'Not at all,' said Mr. Petherick. 'Not at all. It is a perfectly fair straightforward proposition. You must not pay any attention to Miss Marple. She has her own way of looking at things.'

  The lawyer shook his head.

  'I will go on where I left off. I was dumbfounded and quite as much at sea as all of you are. I don't think I should ever have guessed the truth probably not - but I was enlightened. It was cleverly done too.

  'I went and dined with Philip Garrod about a month later, and in the course of our after dinner conversation, he mentioned an interesting case that had recently come to his notice.

  'I should like to tell you about it, Petherick, in confidence, of course.'

  'Quite so,' I replied.

  'A friend of mine who had expectations from one of his relatives was greatly distressed to find that that relative had thoughts of benefiting a totally unworthy person. My friend, I am afraid, is a trifle unscrupulous in his methods. There was a maid in the house who was greatly devoted to the interests of what I may call the legitimate party. My friend gave her very simple instructions. He gave her a fountain pen, duly filled. She was to place this in a drawer in the writing-table in her master's room, but not the usual d
rawer where the pen was generally kept. If her master asked her to witness his signature to any document and asked her to bring him his pen, she was to bring him not the right one, but this one which was an exact duplicate of it. That was all she had to do. He gave her no other information. She was a devoted creature and she carried out his instructions faithfully.'

  'He broke off and said, 'I hope I am not boring you, Petherick.'

  'Not at all,' I said. 'I am keenly interested.' Our eyes met.

  'My friend is, of course, not known to you,' he said.

  'Of course not,' I replied.

  'Then that is all right,' said Philip Garrod.

  'He paused then said smilingly, 'You see the point? The pen was filled with what is commonly known as Evanescent Ink - a solution of starch in water to which a few drops of iodine has been added. This makes a deep blue-black fluid, but the writing disappears entirely in four or five days.'

  Miss Marple chuckled.

  'Disappearing ink,' she said. 'I know it. Many is the time I have played with it as a child.'

  And she beamed round on them all, pausing to shake a finger once more at Mr. Petherick.

  'But all the same it's a catch, Mr. Petherick, ' she said. 'Just like a lawyer.'

  The Thumb Mark of St Peter

  'And now, Aunt Jane, it is up to you,' said Raymond West

  'Yes, Aunt Jane, we are expecting something really spicy,' chimed in Joyce Lumpier.

  'Now, you are laughing at me, my dears,' said Miss Marple placidly. 'You think that because I have lived in this out-of-the-way spot all my life I am not likely to have had any very interesting experiences.'

  'God forbid that I should ever regard village life as peaceful and uneventful,' said Raymond with fervour. 'Not after the horrible revelations we have heard from you! The cosmopolitan world seems a mild and peaceful place compared with St Mary Mead.'

  'Well, my dear,' said Miss Marple, 'human nature is much the same everywhere, and, of course, one has opportunities of observing it at close quarters in a village.'

  'You really are unique. Aunt Jane,' cried Joyce. 'I hope you don't mind me calling you Aunt Jane?' she added. 'I don't know why I do it.'

  'Don't you, my dear?' said Miss Marple.

  She looked up for a moment or two with something quizzical in her glance, which made the blood flame to the girl's cheeks. Raymond West fidgeted and cleared his throat in a somewhat embarrassed manner.

  Miss Marple looked at them both and smiled again, and bent her attention once more to her knitting.

  'It is true, of course, that I have lived what is called a very uneventful life, but I have had a lot of experience in solving different little problems that have arisen. Some of them have been really quite ingenious, but it would be no good telling them to you, because they are about such unimportant things that you would not be interested - just things like: Who cut the meshes of Mrs Jones's string bag? and why Mrs Sims only wore her new fur coat once. Very interesting things, really, to any student of human nature. No, the only experience I can remember that would be of interest to you is the one about my poor niece Mabel's husband.

  'It is about ten or fifteen years ago now, and happily it is all over and done with, and everyone has forgotten about it. People's memories are very short - a lucky thing, I always think.'

  Miss Marple paused and murmured to herself:

  'I must just count this row. The decreasing is a little awkward. One, two, three, four, five, and then three purl; that is right. Now, what was I saying? Oh, yes, about poor Mabel.

  'Mabel was my niece. A nice girl, really a very nice girl, but just a trifle what one might call silly. Rather fond of being melodramatic and of saying a great deal more than she meant whenever she was upset She married a Mr Denman when she was twenty-two, and I am afraid it was not a very happy marriage. I had hoped very much that the attachment would not come to anything, for Mr Denman was a man of very violent temper - not the kind of man who would be patient with Mabel's foibles - and I also learned that there was insanity in his family. However, girls were just as obstinate then as they are now, and as they always will be. And Mabel married him.

  'I didn't see very much of her after her marriage. She came to stay with me once or twice, and they asked me there several times, but, as a matter of fact, I am not very fond of staying in other people's houses, and I always managed to make some excuse. They had been married ten years when Mr Denman died suddenly. There were no children, and he left all his money to Mabel. I wrote, of course, and offered to come to Mabel if she wanted me; but she wrote back a very sensible letter, and I gathered that she was not altogether overwhelmed by grief. I thought that was only natural, because I knew they had not been getting on together for some rime. It was not until about three months afterwards that I got a most hysterical letter from Mabel, begging me to come to her, and saying that things were going from bad to worse, and she couldn't stand it much longer.

  'So, of course,' continued Miss Marple, 'I put Clara on board wages and sent the plate and the King Charles tankard to the bank, and I went off at once. I found Mabel in a very nervous state. The house, Myrtle Dene, was a fairly large one, very comfortably furnished. There was a cook and a house-parlourmaid as well as a nurse-attendant to look after old Mr Denman, Mabel's husband's father, who was what is called "not quite right in the head". Quite peaceful and well behaved, but distinctly odd at times. As I say, there was insanity in the family.

  'I was really shocked to see the change in Mabel. She was a mass of nerves, twitching all over, yet I had the greatest difficulty in making her tell me what the trouble was. I got at it, as one always does get at these things, indirectly. I asked her about some friends of hers she was always mentioning in her letters, the Gallaghers. She said, to my surprise, that she hardly ever saw them nowadays. Other friends whom I mentioned elicited the same remark. I spoke to her then of the folly of shutting herself up and brooding, and especially of the silliness of cutting herself adrift from her friends. Then she came bursting out with the truth.

  '"It is not my doing, it is theirs. There is not a soul in the place who will speak to me now. When I go down the High Street they all get out of the way so that they shan't have to meet me or speak to me. I am like a kind of leper. It is awful, and I can't bear it any longer. I shall have to sell the house and go abroad. Yet why should I be driven away from a home like this? I have done nothing."

  'I was more disturbed than I can tell you. I was knitting a comforter for old Mrs Hay at the time, and in my perturbation I dropped two stitches and never discovered it until long after.

  '"My dear Mabel," I said, "you amaze me. But what is the cause of all this?"

  'Even as a child Mabel was always difficult. I had the greatest difficulty in getting her to give me a straightforward answer to my question. She would only say vague things about wicked talk and idle people who had nothing better to do than gossip, and people who put ideas into other people's heads.

  '"That is all quite clear to me," I said. "There is evidently some story being circulated about you. But what that story is you must know as well as anyone. And you are going to tell me."

  '"It is so wicked," moaned Mabel.

  '"Of course it is wicked," I said briskly. "There is nothing that you can tell me about people's minds that would astonish or surprise me. Now, Mabel, will you tell me in plain English what people are saying about you?"

  'Then it all came out.

  'It seemed that Geoffrey Denman's death, being quite sudden and unexpected, gave rise to various rumours. In fact - and in plain English as I had put it to her - people were saying that she had poisoned her husband.

  'Now, as I expect you know, there is nothing more cruel than talk, and there is nothing more difficult to combat When people say things behind your back there is nothing you can refute or deny, and the rumours go on growing and growing, and no one can stop them. I was quite certain of one thing: Mabel was quite incapable of poisoning anyone. And I didn't see why life shou
ld be ruined for her and her home made unbearable just because in all probability she had been doing something silly and foolish.

  '"There is no smoke without fire," I said. "Now, Mabel, you have got to tell me what started people off on this tack. There must have been something."

  'Mabel was very incoherent, and declared there was nothing - nothing at all, except, of course, that Geoffrey's death had been very sudden. He had seemed quite well at supper that evening, and had taken violently ill in the night. The doctor had been sent for, but the poor man had died a few minutes after the doctor's arrival. Death had been thought to be the result of eating poisoned mushrooms.

  '"Well," I said, "I suppose a sudden death of that kind might start tongues wagging, but surely not without some additional facts. Did you have a quarrel with Geoffrey or anything of that kind?"

  'She admitted that she had had a quarrel with him on the preceding morning at breakfast time.

  '"And the servants heard it, I suppose?" I asked.

  '"They weren't in the room."

  '"No, my dear," I said, "but they probably were fairly near the door outside."

  'I knew the carrying power of Mabel's high-pitched hysterical voice only too well. Geoffrey Denman, too, was a man given to raising his voice loudly when angry.

  '"What did you quarrel about?" I asked.

  '"Oh, the usual things. It was always the same things over and over again. Some little thing would start us off, and then Geoffrey became impossible and said abominable things, and I told him what I thought of him."

  '"There had been a lot of quarrelling, then?" I asked.

  '"It wasn't my fault - "

  '"My dear child," I said, "it doesn't matter whose fault it was. That is not what we are discussing. In a place like this everybody's private affairs are more or less public property. You and your husband were always quarrelling. You had a particularly bad quarrel one morning, and that night your husband died suddenly and mysteriously. Is that all, or is there anything else?"