Agatha Christie – A Murder Is Announced

‘You deny it?’

‘Of course it’s not true…I never met or saw Rudi Scherz in my life, and I was nowhere near the house that morning. I was over here, working.’

Inspector Craddock said very gently:

‘Which morning?’

There was a momentary pause. Her eyelids flickered.

‘Every morning. I’m here every morning. I don’t get away until one o’clock.’

She added scornfully:

‘It’s no good listening to what Mitzi tells you. She tells lies all the time.’

III

‘And that’s that,’ said Craddock when he was walking away with Sergeant Fletcher. ‘Two young women whose stories flatly contradict each other. Which one am I to believe?’

‘Everyone seems to agree that this foreign girl tells whoppers,’ said Fletcher. ‘It’s been my experience in dealing with aliens that lying comes more easy than truth-telling. Seems to be clear she’s got a spite against this Mrs Haymes.’

‘So, if you were me, you’d believe Mrs Haymes?’

‘Unless you’ve got reason to think otherwise, sir.’

And Craddock hadn’t, not really—only the remembrance of a pair of over-steady blue eyes and the glib enunciation of the words that morning. For to the best of his recollection he hadn’t said whether the interview in the summerhouse had taken place in the morning or the afternoon.

Still, Miss Blacklock, or if not Miss Blacklock, certainly Miss Bunner, might have mentioned the visit of the young foreigner who had come to cadge his fare back to Switzerland. And Phillipa Haymes might have therefore assumed that the conversation was supposed to have taken place on that particular morning.

But Craddock still thought that there had been a note of fear in her voice as she asked:

‘In the summer house?’

He decided to keep an open mind on the subject.

IV

It was very pleasant in the Vicarage garden. One of those sudden spells of autumn warmth had descended upon England. Inspector Craddock could never remember if it was St Martin’s or St Luke’s Summer, but he knew that it was very pleasant—and also very enervating. He sat in a deck chair provided for him by an energetic Bunch, just on her way to a Mothers’ Meeting, and, well protected with shawls and a large rug round her knees, Miss Marple sat knitting beside him. The sunshine, the peace, the steady click of Miss Marple’s knitting needles, all combined to produce a soporific feeling in the Inspector. And yet, at the same time, there was a nightmarish feeling at the back of his mind. It was like a familiar dream where an undertone of menace grows and finally turns Ease into Terror…

He said abruptly, ‘You oughtn’t to be here.’

Miss Marple’s needles stopped clicking for a moment. Her placid china-blue eyes regarded him thoughtfully.

She said, ‘I know what you mean. You’re a very conscientious boy. But it’s perfectly all right. Bunch’s father (he was vicar of our parish, a very fine scholar) and her mother (who is a most remarkable woman—real spiritual power) are very old friends of mine. It’s the most natural thing in the world that when I’m at Medenham I should come on here to stay with Bunch for a little.’

‘Oh, perhaps,’ said Craddock. ‘But—but don’t snoop around…I’ve a feeling—I have really—that it isn’t safe.’

Miss Marple smiled a little.

‘But I’m afraid,’ she said, ‘that we old women always do moop. It would be very odd and much more noticeable if I didn’t. Questions about mutual friends in different parts of the world and whether they remember so and so, and do they remember who it was that Lady Somebody’s daughter married? All that helps, doesn’t it?’

‘Helps?’ said the Inspector, rather stupidly.

‘Helps to find out if people are who they say they are,’ said Miss Marple.

She went on:

‘Because that’s what’s worrying you, isn’t it? And that’s really the particular way the world has changed since the war. Take this place, Chipping Cleghorn, for instance. It’s very much like St Mary Mead where I live. Fifteen years ago one knew who everybody was. The Bantrys in the big house—and the Hartnells and the Price Ridleys and the Weatherbys…They were people whose fathers and mothers and grandfathers and grandmothers, or whose aunts and uncles, had lived there before them. If somebody new came to live there, they brought letters of introduction, or they’d been in the same regiment or served in the same ship as someone there already. If anybody new—really new—really a stranger—came, well, they stuck out—everybody wondered about them and didn’t rest till they found out.’