A Murder Is Announced - Christie Agatha. Страница 25

He was almost sure he caught a note of fear in her voice.

‘Yes, Mrs Haymes.’

‘Whosays so?’

‘I am told that you had a conversation with this man, Rudi Scherz, and that he asked you where he could hide and you replied that you would show him, and that a time, a quarter-past six, was definitely mentioned. It would be a quarter-past six, roughly, when Scherz would get here from the bus stop on the evening of the hold-up.’

There was a moment’s silence. Then Phillipa gave a short scornful laugh. She looked amused.

‘I don’t know who told you that,’ she said. ‘At least I can guess. It’s a very silly, clumsy story-spiteful, of course. For some reason Mitzi dislikes me even more than she dislikes the rest of us.’

‘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.’

‘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 wordsthat 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 thesummer house?’

He decided to keep an open mind on the subject.

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’tsafe.’

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 oneknew 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.’

She nodded her head gently.

‘But it’s not like that any more. Every village and small country place is full of people who’ve just come and settled there without any ties to bring them. The big houses have been sold, and the cottages have been converted and changed. And people just come-and all you know about them is what they say of themselves. They’ve come, you see, from all over the world. People from India and Hong Kong and China, and people who used to live in France and Italy in little cheap places and odd islands. And people who’ve made a little money and can afford to retire. But nobodyknows any more who anyone is. You can have Benares brassware in your house and talk abouttiffin andchota Hazri -and you can have pictures of Taormina and talk about the English church and the library-like Miss Hinchcliffe and Miss Murgatroyd. You can come from the South of France, or have spent your life in the East. People take you at your own valuation. They don’t wait to call until they’ve had a letter from a friend saying that the So-and-So’s are delightful people and she’s known them all their lives.’

And that, thought Craddock, was exactly whatwas oppressing him. He didn’tknow. There were just faces and personalities and they were backed up by ration books and identity cards-nice neat identity cards with numbers on them, without photographs or fingerprints. Anybody who took the trouble could have a suitable identity card-and partly because of that, the subtler links that had held together English social rural life had fallen apart. In a town nobody expected to know his neighbour. In the country now nobody knew his neighbour either, though possibly he still thought he did…

Because of the oiled door, Craddock knew that there had been somebody in Letitia Blacklock’s drawing-room who was not the pleasant friendly country neighbour he or she pretended to be…

And because of that he was afraid for Miss Marple who was frail and old and who noticed things…

He said: ‘We can, to a certain extent, check up on these people…’ But he knew that that wasn’t so easy. India and China and Hong Kong and the South of France…It wasn’t as easy as it would have been fifteen years ago. There were people, as he knew only too well, who were going about the country with borrowed identities-borrowed from people who had met sudden death by ‘incidents’ in the cities. There were organizations who bought up identities, who faked identity and ration cards-there were a hundred small rackets springing into being. Youcould check up-but it would take time-and time was what he hadn’t got, because Randall Goedler’s widow was very near death.

It was then that, worried and tired, lulled by the sunshine, he told Miss Marple about Randall Goedler and about Pip and Emma.

‘Just a couple of names,’ he said. ‘Nicknames at that! They mayn’t exist. They may be respectable citizens living in Europe somewhere. On the other hand one, or both, of them may be here in Chipping Cleghorn.’

Twenty-five years old approximately-Who filled that description? He said, thinking aloud:

‘That nephew and niece of hers-or cousins or whatever they are…I wonder when she saw them last-’

Miss Marple said gently: ‘I’ll find out for you, shall I?’

‘Now, please, Miss Marple, don’t-’

‘It will be quite simple, Inspector, you really need not worry. And it won’t be noticeable if I do it, because, you see, it won’t be official. If there is anything wrong you don’t want to put them on their guard.’

Pip and Emma, thought Craddock, Pip and Emma? He was getting obsessed by Pip and Emma. That attractive dare-devil young man, the good-looking girl with the cool stare…

He said: ‘I may find out more about them in the next forty-eight hours. I’m going up to Scotland. Mrs Goedler, if she’s able to talk, may know a good deal more about them.’

‘I think that’s a very wise move.’ Miss Marple hesitated. ‘I hope,’ she murmured, ‘that you have warned Miss Blacklock to be careful?’

‘I’ve warned her, yes. And I shall leave a man here to keep an unobtrusive eye on things.’

He avoided Miss Marple’s eye which said plainly enough that a policeman keeping an eye on things would be little good if the danger was in the family circle…

‘And remember,’ said Craddock, looking squarely at her, ‘I’ve warnedyou.’

‘I assure you, Inspector,’ said Miss Marple, ‘that I can take care of myself.’