Agatha Christie – A Murder Is Announced

‘But if it’s Pip and Emma,’ said Bunch, ‘there are only two people it could be. It must be Patrick and Julia. They’re brother and sister and they’re the only ones who are the right age.’

‘My dear, it isn’t nearly as simple as that. There are all sorts of ramifications and combinations. There’s Pip’s wife if he’s married, or Emma’s husband. There’s their mother—she’s an interested party even if she doesn’t inherit direct. If Lotty Blacklock hasn’t seen her for thirty years, she’d probably not recognize her now. One elderly woman is very like another. You remember Mrs Wotherspoon drew her own and Mrs Bartlett’s Old Age Pension although Mrs Bartlett had been dead for years. Anyway, Miss Blacklock’s shortsighted. Haven’t you noticed how she peers at people? And then there’s the father. Apparently he was a real bad lot.’

‘Yes, but he’s a foreigner.’

‘By birth. But there’s no reason to believe he speaks broken English and gesticulates with his hands. I dare say he could play the part of—of an Anglo-Indian Colonel as well as anybody else.’

‘Is that what you think?’

‘No, I don’t. I don’t indeed, dear. I just think that there’s a great deal of money at stake, a great deal of money. And I’m afraid I know only too well the really terrible things that people will do to lay their hands on a lot of money.’

‘I suppose they will,’ said Bunch. ‘It doesn’t really do them any good, does it? Not in the end?’

‘No—but they don’t usually know that.’

‘I can understand it.’ Bunch smiled suddenly, her sweet rather crooked smile. ‘One feels it would be different for oneself…Even I feel that.’ She considered: ‘You pretend to yourself that you’d do a lot of good with all that money. Schemes…Homes for Unwanted Children…Tired Mothers…A lovely rest abroad somewhere for elderly women who have worked too hard…’

Her face grew sombre. Her eyes were suddenly dark and tragic.

‘I know what you’re thinking,’ she said to Miss Marple. ‘You’re thinking that I’d be the worst kind. Because I’d kid myself. If you just wanted the money for selfish reasons you’d at any rate see what you were like. But once you began to pretend about doing good with it, you’d be able to persuade yourself, perhaps, that it wouldn’t very much matter killing someone…’

Then her eyes cleared.

‘But I shouldn’t,’ she said. ‘I shouldn’t really kill anyone. Not even if they were old, or ill, or doing a lot of harm in the world. Not even if they were blackmailers or—or absolute beasts.’ She fished a fly carefully out of the dregs of the coffee and arranged it on the table to dry. ‘Because people like living, don’t they? So do flies. Even if you’re old and in pain and can just crawl out in the sun. Julian says those people like living even more than young strong people do. It’s harder, he says, for them to die, the struggle’s greater. I like living myself—not just being happy and enjoying myself and having a good time. I mean living—;waking up and feeling, all over me, that I’m there—ticking over.’

She blew on the fly gently; it waved its legs, and flew rather drunkenly away.

‘Cheer up, darling Aunt Jane,’ said Bunch. ‘I’d never kill anybody.’

Chapter 14

Excursion into the Past

After a night in the train, Inspector Craddock alighted at a small station in the Highlands.

It struck him for a moment as strange that the wealthy Mrs Goedler—an invalid—with a choice of a London house in a fashionable square, an estate in Hampshire, and a villa in the South of France, should have selected this remote Scottish home as her residence. Surely she was cut off here from many friends and distractions. It must be a lonely life—or was she too ill to notice or care about her surroundings?

A car was waiting to meet him. A big old-fashioned Daimler with an elderly chauffeur driving it. It was a sunny morning and the Inspector enjoyed the twenty-mile drive, though he marvelled anew at this preference for isolation. A tentative remark to the chauffeur brought partial enlightenment.

‘It’s her own home as a girl. Ay, she’s the last of the family. And she and Mr Goedler were always happier here than anywhere, though it wasn’t often he could get away from London. But when he did they enjoyed themselves like a couple of bairns.’