A Murder Is Announced (9 page)

Miss Marple was all embarrassment.

“I'm afraid you've been listening to Sir Henry. Sir Henry is always too kind. He thinks too much of any little observations I may have made in the past. Really, I have no gifts—no gifts at all—except perhaps a certain knowledge of human nature. People, I find, are apt to be far too trustful. I'm afraid that I have a tendency always to believe the
worst.
Not a nice trait. But so often justified by subsequent events.”

“Read these,” said Rydesdale, thrusting the typewritten sheets upon her. “They won't take you long. After all, these people are your kind—you must know a lot of people like them. You may be able to spot something that we haven't. The case is just going to be closed. Let's have an amateur's opinion on it before we shut up the files. I don't mind telling you that Craddock here isn't satisfied. He says, like you, that it doesn't make sense.”

There was silence whilst Miss Marple read. She put the typewritten sheets down at last.

“It's very interesting,” she said with a sigh. “All the different things that people say—and think. The things they see—or think that they see. And all so complex, nearly all so trivial and if one thing isn't trivial, it's so hard to spot which one—like a needle in a haystack.”

Craddock felt a twinge of disappointment. Just for a moment or two, he wondered if Sir Henry might be right about this funny old lady. She might have put her finger on something—old people were often very sharp. He'd never, for instance, been able to conceal
anything from his own great aunt Emma. She had finally told him that his nose twitched when he was about to tell a lie.

But just a few fluffy generalities, that was all that Sir Henry's famous Miss Marple could produce. He felt annoyed with her and said rather curtly:

“The truth of the matter is that the facts are indisputable. Whatever conflicting details these people give, they all saw one thing. They saw a masked man with a revolver and a torch open the door and hold them up, and whether they think he said ‘Stick 'em up' or ‘Your money or your life,' or whatever phrase is associated with a hold-up in their minds, they
saw
him.”

“But surely,” said Miss Marple gently. “They couldn't—actually—have seen anything at all….”

Craddock caught his breath. She'd got it! She was sharp, after all. He was testing her by that speech of his, but she hadn't fallen for it. It didn't actually make any difference to the facts, or to what happened, but she'd realized, as he'd realized, that those people who had seen a masked man holding them up couldn't really have
seen
him at all.

“If I understand rightly,” Miss Marple had a pink flush on her cheeks, her eyes were bright and pleased as a child's, “there wasn't any light in the hall outside—and not on the landing upstairs either?”

“That's right,” said Craddock.

“And so, if a man stood in the doorway and flashed a powerful torch into the room,
nobody could see anything but the torch,
could they?”

“No, they couldn't. I tried it out.”

“And so when some of them say they saw a masked man, etc.,
they are really, though they don't realize it, recapitulating from what they saw
afterwards
—when the lights came on. So it really all fits in very well, doesn't it, on the assumption that Rudi Scherz was the—I think, ‘fall guy' is the expression I mean?”

Rydesdale stared at her in such surprise that she grew pinker still. “I may have got the term wrong,” she murmured.

“I am not very clever about Americanisms—and I understand they change very quickly. I got it from one of Mr. Dashiel Hammett's stories. (I understand from my nephew Raymond that he is considered at the top of the tree in what is called the ‘tough' style of literature.) A ‘
fall guy
,' if I understand it rightly, means someone who will be blamed for a crime really committed by someone else. This Rudi Scherz seems to me exactly the right type for that. Rather stupid really, you know, but full of cupidity and probably extremely credulous.”

Rydesdale said, smiling tolerantly:

“Are you suggesting that he was persuaded by someone to go out and take pot shots at a room full of people? Rather a tall order.”

“I think he was told that it was a
joke,
” said Miss Marple. “He was paid for doing it, of course. Paid, that is, to put an advertisement in the newspaper, to go out and spy out the household premises, and then, on the night in question, he was to go there, assume a mask and a black cloak and throw open a door, brandishing a torch, and cry ‘Hands up!'”

“And fire off a revolver?”

“No, no,” said Miss Marple. “He never had a revolver.”

“But everyone says—” began Rydesdale, and stopped.

“Exactly,” said Miss Marple. “Nobody could possibly have
seen
a revolver even if he had one. And I don't think he had. I think that
after he'd called ‘Hands up' somebody came up quietly behind him in the darkness and fired those two shots over his shoulder. It frightened him to death. He swung round and as he did so, that other person shot him and then let the revolver drop beside him….”

The three men looked at her. Sir Henry said softly:

“It's a possible theory.”

“But who is Mr. X who came up in the darkness?” asked the Chief Constable.

Miss Marple coughed.

“You'll have to find out from Miss Blacklock who wanted to kill her.”

Good for old Dora Bunner, thought Craddock. Instinct against intelligence every time.

“So you think it was a deliberate attempt on Miss Blacklock's life,” asked Rydesdale.

“It certainly has that appearance,” said Miss Marple. “Though there are one or two difficulties. But what I was really wondering about was whether there mightn't be a short cut. I've no doubt that whoever arranged this with Rudi Scherz took pains to tell him to keep his mouth shut, but if he talked to anybody it would probably be to that girl, Myrna Harris. And he may—he just may—have dropped some hint as to the kind of person who'd suggested the whole thing.”

“I'll see her now,” said Craddock, rising.

Miss Marple nodded.

“Yes, do, Inspector Craddock. I'll feel happier when you have. Because once she's told you anything she knows she'll be much safer.”

“Safer?… Yes, I see.”

He left the room. The Chief Constable said doubtfully, but tactfully:

“Well, Miss Marple, you've certainly given us something to think about.”

III

“I'm sorry about it, I am really,” said Myrna Harris. “It's ever so nice of you not to be ratty about it. But you see Mum's the sort of person who fusses like anything. And it did look as though I'd—what's the phrase?—been an accessory before the fact” (the words ran glibly off her tongue). “I mean, I was afraid you'd never take my word for it that I only thought it was just a bit of fun.”

Inspector Craddock repeated the reassuring phrase with which he had broken down Myrna's resistance.

“I will. I'll tell you
all
about it. But you will keep me out of it if you can because of Mum? It all started with Rudi breaking a date with me. We were going to the pictures that evening and then he said he wouldn't be able to come and I was a bit standoffish with him about it—because after all, it had been his idea and I don't fancy being stood up by a foreigner. And he said it wasn't his fault, and I said that was a likely story, and then he said he'd got a bit of a lark on that night—and that he wasn't going to be out of pocket by it and how would I fancy a wristwatch? So I said, what do you mean by a lark? And he said not to tell anyone, but there was to be a party somewhere and he was to stage a sham hold-up. Then he showed me the advertisement he'd put in and I had to laugh. He was a bit scornful about it all. Said it was kid's stuff, really—but that was just like the English. They never really grew up—and of course, I said what
did he mean by talking like that about Us—and we had a bit of an argument, but we made it up. Only you can understand, can't you, sir, that when I read all about it, and it hadn't been a joke at all and Rudi had shot someone and then shot himself—why, I didn't know
what
to do. I thought if I said I knew about it beforehand, it would look as though I were in on the whole thing. But it really did seem like a joke when he told me about it. I'd have sworn he meant it that way. I didn't even know he'd got a revolver. He never said anything about taking a revolver with him.”

Craddock comforted her and then asked the most important question.

“Who did he say it was who had arranged this party?”

But there he drew a blank.

“He never said who it was that was getting him to do it. I suppose nobody was, really. It was all his own doing.”

“He didn't mention a name? Did he say he—or she?”

“He didn't say anything except that it was going to be a scream. ‘I shall laugh to see all their faces.' That's what he said.”

He hadn't had long to laugh, Craddock thought.

IV

“It's only a theory,” said Rydesdale as they drove back to Medenham. “Nothing to support it, nothing at all. Put it down as old maid's vapourings and let it go, eh?”

“I'd rather not do that, sir.”

“It's all very improbable. A mysterious X appearing suddenly in the darkness behind our Swiss friend. Where did he come from? Who was he? Where had he been?”

“He could have come in through the side door,” said Craddock, “just as Scherz came. Or,” he added slowly, “he could have come from the kitchen.”

“
She
could have come from the kitchen, you mean?”

“Yes, sir, it's a possibility. I've not been satisfied about that girl all along. She strikes me as a nasty bit of goods. All that screaming and hysterics—it could have been put on. She could have worked on this young fellow, let him in at the right moment, rigged the whole thing, shot him, bolted back into the dining room, caught up her bit of silver and her chamois and started her screaming act.”

“Against that we have the fact that—er—what's his name—oh, yes, Edmund Swettenham, definitely says the key was turned on the outside of the door, and that he turned it to release her. Any other door into that part of the house?”

“Yes, there's a door to the back stairs and kitchen just under the stairs, but it seems the handle came off three weeks ago and nobody's come to put it on yet. In the meantime you can't open the door. I'm bound to say that story seems correct. The spindle and the two handles were on a shelf outside the door in the hall and they were thickly coated with dust, but of course a professional would have ways of opening that door all right.”

“Better look up the girl's record. See if her papers are in order. But it seems to me the whole thing is very theoretical.”

Again the Chief Constable looked inquiringly at his subordinate. Craddock replied quietly:

“I know, sir, and of course if you think the case ought to be closed, it must be. But I'd appreciate it if I could work on it for just a little longer.”

Rather to his surprise the Chief Constable said quietly and approvingly:

“Good lad.”

“There's the revolver to work on. If this theory is correct, it wasn't Scherz's revolver and certainly nobody so far has been able to say that Scherz ever had a revolver.”

“It's a German make.”

“I know, sir. But this country's absolutely full of Continental makes of guns. All the Americans brought them back and so did our chaps. You can't go by that.”

“True enough. Any other lines of inquiry?”

“There's got to be a motive. If there's anything in this theory at all, it means that last Friday's business wasn't a mere joke, and wasn't an ordinary hold-up, it was a cold-blooded attempt at murder.
Somebody tried to murder Miss Blacklock.
Now
why?
It seems to me that if anyone knows the answer to that it must be Miss Blacklock herself.”

“I understand she rather poured cold water on that idea?”

“She poured cold water on the idea that
Rudi Scherz
wanted to murder her. And she was quite right. And there's another thing, sir.”

“Yes?”

“Somebody might try again.”

“That would certainly prove the truth of the theory,” said the Chief Constable dryly. “By the way, look after Miss Marple, won't you?”

“Miss Marple? Why?”

“I gather she is taking up residence at the Vicarage in Chipping Cleghorn and coming into Medenham Wells twice a week for her treatments. It seems that Mrs. What'shername is the daughter of an old friend of Miss Marple's. Good sporting instincts, that old bean.
Oh, well, I suppose she hasn't much excitement in her life and sniffing round after possible murderers gives her a kick.”

“I wish she wasn't coming,” said Craddock seriously.

“Going to get under your feet?”

“Not that, sir, but she's a nice old thing. I shouldn't like anything to happen to her … always supposing, I mean, that there's anything
in
this theory.”

I

“I
'm sorry to bother you again, Miss Blacklock—”

“Oh, it doesn't matter. I suppose, as the inquest was adjourned for a week, you're hoping to get more evidence?”

Detective-Inspector Craddock nodded.

“To begin with, Miss Blacklock, Rudi Scherz was not the son of the proprietor of the Hotel des Alpes at Montreux. He seems to have started his career as an orderly in a hospital at Berne. A good many of the patients missed small pieces of jewellery. Under another name he was a waiter at one of the small winter sports places. His speciality there was making out duplicate bills in the restaurant with items on one that didn't appear on the other. The difference, of course, went into his pocket. After that he was in a department store in Zürich. There losses from shoplifting were rather above the average
whilst he was with them. It seems likely that the shoplifting wasn't entirely due to customers.”

“He was a picker up of unconsidered trifles, in fact?” said Miss Blacklock dryly. “Then I was right in thinking that I had not seen him before?”

“You were quite right—no doubt you were pointed out to him at the Royal Spa Hotel and he pretended to recognize you. The Swiss police had begun to make his own country rather too hot for him, and he came over here with a very nice set of forged papers and took a job at the Royal Spa.”

“Quite a good hunting ground,” said Miss Blacklock dryly. “It's extremely expensive and very well-off people stay there. Some of them are careless about their bills, I expect.”

“Yes,” said Craddock. “There were prospects of a satisfactory harvest.”

Miss Blacklock was frowning.

“I see all that,” she said. “But why come to Chipping Cleghorn? What does he think we've got here that could possibly be better than the rich Royal Spa Hotel?”

“You stick to your statement that there's nothing of especial value in the house?”

“Of course there isn't.
I
should know. I can assure you Inspector, we've not got an unrecognized Rembrandt or anything like that.”

“Then it looks, doesn't it, as though your friend Miss Bunner was right? He came here to attack
you.
”

(“There, Letty, what did I tell you!”

“Oh, nonsense, Bunny.”)

“But is it nonsense?” said Craddock. “I think, you know, that it's true.”

Miss Blacklock stared very hard at him.

“Now, let's get this straight. You really believe that this young man came out here—having previously arranged by means of an advertisement that half the village would turn up agog at that particular time—”

“But he mayn't have meant
that
to happen,” interrupted Miss Bunner eagerly. “It may have been just a horrid sort of warning—to
you,
Letty—that's how I read it at the time—‘
A murder is announced
'—I felt in my bones that it was sinister—if it had all gone as planned he would have shot you and got away—and how would anyone have ever known who it was?”

“That's true enough,” said Miss Blacklock. “But—”

“I knew that advertisement wasn't a joke, Letty. I said so. And look at Mitzi—
she
was frightened, too!”

“Ah,” said Craddock, “Mitzi. I'd like to know rather more about that young woman.”

“Her permit and papers are quite in order.”

“I don't doubt that,” said Craddock dryly. “Scherz's papers appeared to be quite correct, too.”

“But why should this Rudi Scherz want to murder me? That's what you don't attempt to explain, Inspector Craddock.”

“There may have been someone behind Scherz,” said Craddock slowly. “Have you thought of that?”

He used the words metaphorically though it flashed across his mind that if Miss Marple's theory was correct, the words would also be true in a literal sense. In any case they made little impression on Miss Blacklock, who still looked sceptical.

“The point remains the same,” she said. “Why on earth should anyone want to murder
me?
”

“It's the answer to that that I want
you
to give me, Miss Blacklock.”

“Well, I can't! That's flat. I've no enemies. As far as I'm aware I've always lived on perfectly good terms with my neighbours. I don't know any guilty secrets about anyone. The whole idea is ridiculous! And if what you're hinting is that Mitzi has something to do with this, that's absurd, too. As Miss Bunner has just told you she was frightened to death when she saw that advertisement in the
Gazette.
She actually wanted to pack up and leave the house then and there.”

“That may have been a clever move on her part. She may have known you'd press her to stay.”

“Of course, if you've made up your mind about it, you'll find an answer to everything. But I can assure you that if Mitzi had taken an unreasoning dislike to me, she might conceivably poison my food, but I'm sure she wouldn't go in for all this elaborate rigmarole.

“The whole idea's absurd. I believe you police have got an anti-foreigner complex. Mitzi may be a liar but she's
not
a cold-blooded murderer. Go and bully her if you must. But when she's departed in a whirl of indignation, or shut herself up howling in her room, I've a good mind to make
you
cook the dinner. Mrs. Harmon is bringing some old lady who is staying with her to tea this afternoon and I wanted Mitzi to make some little cakes—but I suppose you'll upset her completely. Can't you
possibly
go and suspect somebody else?”

II

Craddock went out to the kitchen. He asked Mitzi questions that he had asked her before and received the same answers.

Yes, she had locked the front door soon after four o'clock. No, she did not always do so, but that afternoon she had been nervous
because of “that dreadful advertisement.” It was no good locking the side door because Miss Blacklock and Miss Bunner went out that way to shut up the ducks and feed the chickens and Mrs. Haymes usually came in that way from work.

“Mrs. Haymes says she locked the door when she came in at 5:30.”

“Ah, and you believe her—oh, yes, you believe her….”

“Do you think we shouldn't believe her?”

“What does it matter what I think? You will not believe
me.
”

“Supposing you give us a chance. You think Mrs. Haymes didn't lock that door?”

“I am thinking she was very careful not to lock it.”

“What do you mean by that?” asked Craddock.

“That young man, he does not work alone. No, he knows
where
to come, he knows that
when
he comes a door will be left open for him—oh, very conveniently open!”

“What are you trying to say?”

“What is the use of what I say? You will not listen. You say I am a poor refugee girl who tells lies. You say that a fair-haired English lady, oh, no,
she
does not tell lies—she is so British—so honest. So you believe her and not me. But I could tell you. Oh, yes, I could tell you!”

She banged down a saucepan on the stove.

Craddock was in two minds whether to take notice of what might be only a stream of spite.

“We note everything we are told,” he said.

“I shall not tell you anything at all. Why should I? You are all alike. You persecute and despise poor refugees. If I say to you that when, a week before, that young man come to ask Miss Blacklock for
money and she sends him away, as you say, with a flea in the ear—if I tell you that after that I hear him talking with Mrs. Haymes—yes, out there in the summerhouse—all you say is that I make it up!”

And so you probably are making it up, thought Craddock. But he said aloud:

“You couldn't hear what was said out in the summerhouse.”

“There you are wrong,” screamed Mitzi triumphantly. “I go out to get nettles—it makes very nice vegetables, nettles. They do not think so, but I cook it and not tell them. And I hear them talking in there. He say to her ‘But where can I hide?' And she say ‘I will show you'—and then she say, ‘At a quarter past six,' and I think, ‘Ach so! That is how you behave, my fine lady! After you come back from work, you go out to meet a man. You bring him into the house.' Miss Blacklock, I think, she will not like that. She will turn you out. I will watch, I think, and listen and then I will tell Miss Blacklock. But I understand now I was wrong. It was not love she planned with him, it was to rob and to murder. But you will say I make all this up. Wicked Mitzi, you will say. I will take her to prison.”

Craddock wondered. She might be making it up. But possibly she might not. He asked cautiously:

“You are sure it was this Rudi Scherz she was talking to?”

“Of course I am sure. He just leave and I see him go from the drive across to the summerhouse. And presently,” said Mitzi defiantly, “I go out to see if there are any nice young green nettles.”

Would there, the Inspector wondered, be any nice young green nettles in October? But he appreciated that Mitzi had had to produce a hurried reason for what had undoubtedly been nothing more than plain snooping.

“You didn't hear any more than what you have told me?”

Mitzi looked aggrieved.

“That Miss Bunner, the one with the long nose, she call and call me. Mitzi! Mitzi! So I have to go. Oh, she is irritating. Always interfering. Says she will teach me to cook.
Her
cooking! It tastes, yes, everything she does, of water, water,
water!
”

“Why didn't you tell me this the other day?” asked Craddock sternly.

“Because I did not remember—I did not think … Only afterwards do I say to myself, it was planned then—planned with
her.
”

“You are quite sure it was Mrs. Haymes?”

“Oh, yes, I am sure. Oh, yes, I am very sure. She is a thief, that Mrs. Haymes. A thief and the associate of thieves. What she gets for working in the garden, it is not enough for such a fine lady, no. She has to rob Miss Blacklock who has been kind to her. Oh, she is bad, bad, bad, that one!”

“Supposing,” said the Inspector, watching her closely, “that someone was to say that
you
had been seen talking to Rudi Scherz?”

The suggestion had less effect than he had hoped for. Mitzi merely snorted and tossed her head.

“If anyone say they see me talking to him, that is lies, lies, lies, lies,” she said contemptuously. “To tell lies about anyone, that is easy, but in England you have to prove them true. Miss Blacklock tells me that, and it is true, is it not? I do not speak with murderers and thieves. And no English policeman shall say I do. And how can I do cooking for lunch if you are here, talk, talk, talk? Go out of my kitchens, please. I want now to make a very careful sauce.”

Craddock went obediently. He was a little shaken in his suspicions of Mitzi. Her story about Phillipa Haymes had been told with great conviction. Mitzi might be a liar (he thought she was),
but he fancied that there might be some substratum of truth in this particular tale. He resolved to speak to Phillipa on the subject. She had seemed to him when he questioned her a quiet, well-bred young woman. He had had no suspicion of her.

Crossing the hall, in his abstraction, he tried to open the wrong door. Miss Bunner, descending the staircase, hastily put him right.

“Not that door,” she said. “It doesn't open. The next one to the left. Very confusing, isn't it? So many doors.”

“There are a good many,” said Craddock, looking up and down the narrow hall.

Miss Bunner amiably enumerated them for him.

“First the door to the cloakroom, and then the cloaks cupboard door and then the dining room—that's on that side. And on this side, the dummy door that you were trying to get through and then there's the drawing room door proper, and then the china cupboard and the door of the little flower room, and at the end the side door. Most confusing. Especially these two being so near together. I've often tried the wrong one by mistake. We used to have the hall table against it, as a matter of fact, but then we moved it along against the wall there.”

Craddock had noted, almost mechanically, a thin line horizontally across the panels of the door he had been trying to open. He realized now it was the mark where the table had been. Something stirred vaguely in his mind as he asked, “Moved? How long ago?”

In questioning Dora Bunner there was fortunately no need to give a reason for any question. Any query on any subject seemed perfectly natural to the garrulous Miss Bunner who delighted in the giving of information, however trivial.

“Now let me see, really quite recently—ten days or a fortnight ago.”

“Why was it moved?”

“I really can't remember. Something to do with the flowers. I think Phillipa did a big vase—she arranges flowers quite beautifully—all autumn colouring and twigs and branches, and it was so big it caught your hair as you went past, and so Phillipa said, ‘Why not move the table along and anyway the flowers would look much better against the bare wall than against the panels of the door.' Only we had to take down Wellington at Waterloo. Not a print I'm really very fond of. We put it under the stairs.”

“It's not really a dummy, then?” Craddock asked, looking at the door.”

“Oh, no, it's a
real
door, if that's what you mean. It's the door of the small drawing room, but when the rooms were thrown into one, one didn't need two doors, so this one was fastened up.”

“Fastened up?” Craddock tried it again, gently. “You mean it's nailed up? Or just locked?”

“Oh, locked, I think, and bolted too.”

He saw the bolt at the top and tried it. The bolt slid back easily—too easily….