Agatha Christie – A Murder Is Announced

‘I think it’s your story, Miss Marple,’ said Craddock.

‘Oh no, my dear boy. I only just helped a little, here and there. You were in charge of the whole thing, and conducted it all, and you know so much that I don’t.’

‘Well, tell it together,’ said Bunch impatiently. ‘Bit each. Only let Aunt Jane start because I like the muddly way her mind works. When did you first think that the whole thing was a put-up job by Blacklock?’

‘Well, my dear Bunch, it’s hard to say. Of course, right at the very beginning, it did seem as though the ideal person—or rather the obvious person, I should say—to have arranged the hold-up was Miss Blacklock herself. She was the only person who was known to have been in contact with Rudi Scherz, and how much easier to arrange something like that when it’s your own house. The central heating, for instance. No fires—because that would have meant light in the room. But the only person who could have arranged not to have a fire was the mistress of the house herself.

‘Not that I thought of all that at the time—it just seemed to me that it was a pity it couldn’t be as simple as that! Oh, no, I was taken in like everyone else, I thought that someone really did want to kill Letitia Blacklock.’

‘I think I’d like to get clear first on what really happened,’ said Bunch. ‘Did this Swiss boy recognize her?’

‘Yes. He’d worked in—’

She hesitated and looked at Craddock.

‘In Dr Adolf Koch’s clinic in Berne,’ said Craddock. ‘Koch was a world-famous specialist on operations for goitre. Charlotte Blacklock went there to have her goitre removed and Rudi Scherz was one of the orderlies. When he came to England he recognized in the hotel a lady who had been a patient and on the spur of the moment he spoke to her. I dare say he mightn’t have done that if he’d paused to think, because he left the place under a cloud, but that was some time after Charlotte had been there, so she wouldn’t know anything about it.’

‘So he never said anything to her about Montreux and his father being a hotel proprietor?’

‘Oh, no, she made that up to account for his having spoken to her.’

‘It must have been a great shock to her,’ said Miss Marple, thoughtfully. ‘She felt reasonably safe—and then—the almost impossible mischance of somebody turning up who had known her—not as one of the two Miss Blacklocks—she was prepared for that—but definitely as Charlotte Blacklock, a patient who’d been operated on for goitre.

‘But you wanted to go through it all from the beginning. Well, the beginning, I think—if Inspector Craddock agrees with me—was when Charlotte Blacklock, a pretty, light-hearted affectionate girl, developed that enlargement of the thryoid gland that’s called a goitre. It ruined her life, because she was a very sensitive girl. A girl, too, who had always set a lot of stress on her personal appearance. And girls just at that age in their teens are particularly sensitive about themselves. If she’d had a mother, or a reasonable father, I don’t think she would have got into the morbid state she undoubtedly did get into. She had no one, you see, to take her out of herself, and force her to see people and lead a normal life and not think too much about her infirmity. And, of course, in a different household, she might have been sent for an operation many years earlier.

‘But Dr Blacklock, I think, was an old-fashioned, narrow-minded, tyrannical and obstinate man. He didn’t believe in these operations. Charlotte must take it from him that nothing could be done—apart from dosage with iodine and other drugs. Charlotte did take it from him, and I think her sister also placed more faith in Dr Blacklock’s powers as a physician than he deserved.

‘Charlotte was devoted to her father in a rather weak and soppy way. She thought, definitely, that her father knew best. But she shut herself up more and more as the goitre became larger and more unsightly, and refused to see people. She was actually a kindly affectionate creature.’