“I’ll go and find them.”
”No, you won’t. You’ll stay here—and thrash this out. Which of them is it? The egregious Greg? The quiet Edward Hillingdon or my fellow Jackson? It’s got to be one of the three, hasn’t it?”
17
MR. RAFTER TAKES CHARGE
“I DON’T know,” said Miss Marple.
”What do you mean? What have we been talking about for the last twenty minutes?”
“It has occurred to me that I may have been wrong.”
Mr. Rafter stared at her.
“Scatty after all!” he said disgustedly. “And you sounded so sure of yourself.”
“Oh, I am sure—about the murder. It’s the murderer I’m not sure about. You see I’ve found out that Major Palgrave had more than one murder story—you told me yourself he’d told you one about a kind of Lucrezia Borgia.”
“So he did, at that. But that was quite a different kind of story.”
“I know. And Mrs. Walters said he had one about someone being gassed in a gas oven—”
“But the story he told you—”
Miss Marple allowed herself to interrupt—a thing that did not often happen to Mr. Rafter.
She spoke with desperate earnestness and only moderate incoherence. “Don’t you see—it’s so difficult to be sure. The whole point is that—so often—one doesn’t listen. Ask Mrs. Walters. She said the same thing. You listen to begin with, and then your attention flags, your mind wanders and suddenly you find you’ve missed a bit. I just wonder if possibly there may have been a gap—a very small one—between the story he was telling me—about a man—and the moment when he was getting out his wallet and saying: ‘Like to see a picture of a murderer’.”
“But you thought it was a picture of the man he had been talking about?”
“I thought so—yes. It never occurred to me that it mightn’t have been. But now, how can I be sure?”
Mr. Rafter looked at her very thoughtfully.
“The trouble with you is” he said, “that you’re too conscientious. Great mistake. Make up your mind and don’t shilly shally. You didn’t shilly shally to begin with. If you ask me, in all this chit-chat you’ve been having with the parson’s sister and the rest of them, you’ve got hold of something that’s unsettled you.”
“Perhaps you’re right.”
“Well, cut it out for the moment. Let’s go ahead with what you had to begin with. Because, nine times out of ten, one’s original judgements are right—or so I’ve found. We’ve got three suspects. Let’s take ’em out and have a good look at them. Any preference?”
“I really haven’t,” said Miss Marple, “all three of them seem so very unlikely.”
“We’ll take Greg first,” said Mr. Rafter. “Can’t stand the fellow. Doesn’t make him a murderer, though. Still, there are one or two points against him. Those blood pressure tablets belonged to him. Nice and handy to make use of.”
“That would be a little obvious, wouldn’t it?” Miss Marple objected.
“I don’t know that it would,” said Mr. Rafter. “After all, the main thing was to do something quickly, and he’d got the tablets. Hadn’t much time to go looking round for tablets that somebody else might have. Let’s say it’s Greg. All right. If he wanted to put his dear wife Lucky out of the way—(Good job, too, I’d say. In fact I’m in sympathy with him)—I can’t actually see his motive. From all accounts he’s rich. Inherited money from his first wife who had pots of it. He qualifies on that as a possible wife murderer all right. But that’s over and done with. He got away with it. But Lucky was his first wife’s poor relation. No money there, so if he wants to put her out of the way it must be in order to marry somebody else. Any gossip going around about that?”
Miss Marple shook her head. “Not that I have heard. He—er—has a very gallant manner with all the ladies.”
“Well, that’s a nice, old-fashioned way of putting it,” said Mr. Rafter. “All right, he’s a stoat. He makes passes. Not enough! We want more than that. Let’s go on to Edward Hillingdon. Now there’s a dark horse, if ever there was one.”