Sleeping Murder (9 page)

“And so he hated my father,” said Gwenda. “And he wanted him to suffer.”

“So that's where we come up against it,” said Giles. “We know what kind of a girl Helen was—” he hesitated.

“Man mad,” supplied Gwenda.

Miss Marple looked up suddenly as though to speak, and then stopped.

“—and that she was beautiful. But we've no clue to what other men there were in her life besides her husband. There may have been any number.”

Miss Marple shook her head.

“Hardly that. She was quite young, you know. But you are not quite accurate, Mr. Reed. We do know something about what you have termed ‘the men in her life.' There was the man she was going out to marry—”

“Ah yes—the lawyer chap? What was his name?”

“Walter Fane,” said Miss Marple.

“Yes. But you can't count him. He was out in Malaya or India or somewhere.”

“But was he? He didn't remain a tea-planter, you know,” Miss Marple pointed out. “He came back here and went into the firm, and is now the senior partner.”

Gwenda exclaimed: “Perhaps he followed her back here?”

“He may have done. We don't know.”

Giles was looking curiously at the old lady.

“How did you find all this out?”

Miss Marple smiled apologetically.

“I've been gossiping a little. In shops—and waiting for buses. Old ladies are supposed to be inquisitive. Yes, one can pick up quite a lot of local news.”

“Walter Fane,” said Giles thoughtfully. “Helen turned him down. That may have rankled quite a lot. Did he ever marry?”

“No,” said Miss Marple. “He lives with his mother. I'm going to tea there at the end of the week.”

“There's someone else we know about, too,” said Gwenda suddenly. “You remember there was somebody she got engaged to, or entangled with, when she left school—someone undesirable, Dr. Kennedy said. I wonder just
why
he was undesirable….”

“That's two men,” said Giles. “Either of them may have had a grudge, may have brooded … Perhaps the first young man may have had some unsatisfactory mental history.”

“Dr. Kennedy could tell us that,” said Gwenda. “Only it's going to be a little difficult asking him. I mean, it's all very well for me to go along and ask for news of my stepmother whom I barely remember. But it's going to take a bit of explaining if I want to know about her early love affairs. It seems rather excessive interest in a stepmother you hardly knew.”

“There are probably other ways of finding out,” said Miss Marple. “Oh yes, I think with time and patience, we can gather the information we want.”

“Anyway, we've got two possibilities,” said Giles.

“We might, I think, infer a third,” said Miss Marple. “It would be, of course, a pure hypothesis, but justified, I think, by the turn of events.”

Gwenda and Giles looked at her in slight surprise.

“It is just an inference,” said Miss Marple, turning a little pink. “Helen Kennedy went out to India to marry young Fane. Admittedly she was not wildly in love with him, but she must have been
fond of him, and quite prepared to spend her life with him. Yet as soon as she gets there, she breaks off the engagement and wires her brother to send her money to get home. Now why?”

“Changed her mind, I suppose,” said Giles.

Both Miss Marple and Gwenda looked at him in mild contempt.

“Of course she changed her mind,” said Gwenda. “We know that. What Miss Marple means is—why?”

“I suppose girls do change their minds,” said Giles vaguely.

“
Under certain circumstances,
” said Miss Marple.

Her words held all the pointed innuendo that elderly ladies are able to achieve with the minimum of actual statement.

“Something he did—” Giles was suggesting vaguely, when Gwenda chipped in sharply.

“Of course,” she said. “Another man!”

She and Miss Marple looked at each other with the assurance of those admitted to a freemasonry from which men were excluded.

Gwenda added with certainty: “On the boat! Going out!”

“Propinquity,” said Miss Marple.

“Moonlight on the boat deck,” said Gwenda. “All that sort of thing. Only—it must have been serious—not just a flirtation.”

“Oh yes,” said Miss Marple, “I think it was serious.”

“If so, why didn't she marry the chap?” demanded Giles.

“Perhaps he didn't really care for her,” Gwenda said slowly. Then shook her head. “No, I think in that case she would still have married Walter Fane. Oh, of course, I'm being stupid. Married man.”

She looked triumphantly at Miss Marple.

“Exactly,” said Miss Marple. “That's how I should reconstruct it. They fell in love, probably desperately in love. But if he was a married man—with children, perhaps—and probably an honourable type—well, that would be the end of it.”

“Only she couldn't go on and marry Walter Fane,” said Gwenda. “So she wired her brother and went home. Yes, that all fits. And on the boat home, she met my father….”

She paused, thinking it out.

“Not wildly in love,” she said. “But attracted … and then there was me. They were both unhappy … and they consoled each other. My father told her about my mother, and perhaps she told him about the other man … Yes—of course—” She flicked over the pages of the diary.

Yes—that's it. Helen and my father felt they were alike—and there was me to be looked after, and she thought she could make him happy—and she even thought, perhaps, that she'd be quite happy herself in the end.”

She stopped, nodded violently at Miss Marple, and said brightly: “That's it.”

Giles was looking exasperated.

“Really, Gwenda, you make a whole lot of things up and pretend that they actually happened.”

“They did happen. They must have happened. And that gives us a third person for X.”

“You mean—?”

“The married man. We don't know what he was like. He mayn't have been nice at all. He may have been a little mad. He may have followed her here—”

“You've just placed him as going out to India.”

“Well, people can come back from India, can't they? Walter Fane did. It was nearly a year later. I don't say this man
did
come back, but I say he's a possibility. You keep harping on who the men were in her life. Well, we've got three of them. Walter Fane, and some young man whose name we don't know, and a married man—”

“Whom we don't know exists,” finished Giles.

“We'll find out,” said Gwenda. “Won't we, Miss Marple?”

“With time and patience,” said Miss Marple, “we may find out a great deal. Now for my contribution. As a result of a very fortunate little conversation in the draper's today, I have discovered that Edith Pagett who was cook at St. Catherine's at the time we are interested in, is still in Dillmouth. Her sister is married to a confectioner here. I think it would be quite natural, Gwenda, for you to want to see her. She may be able to tell us a good deal.”

“That's wonderful,” said Gwenda. “I've thought of something else,” she added. “I'm going to make a new will. Don't look so grave, Giles, I shall still leave my money to you. But I shall get Walter Fane to do it for me.”

“Gwenda,” said Giles. “Do be careful.”

“Making a will,” said Gwenda, “is a most natural thing to do. And the line of approach I've thought up is quite good. Anyway, I want to see him. I want to see what he's like, and if I think that possibly—”

She left the sentence unfinished.

“What surprises me,” said Giles, “is that no one else answered that advertisement of ours—this Edith Pagett, for example—”

Miss Marple shook her head.

“People take a long time to make up their minds about a thing like that in these country districts,” she said. “They're suspicious. They like to think things over.”

L
ily Kimble spread a couple of old newspapers on the kitchen table in readiness for draining the chipped potatoes which were hissing in the pan. Humming tunelessly a popular melody of the day she leaned forward aimlessly studying the newsprint spread out before her.

Then suddenly she stopped humming and called: “Jim—Jim. Listen here, will you?”

Jim Kimble, an elderly man of few words, was washing at the scullery sink. To answer his wife, he used his favourite monosyllable.

“Ar?” said Jim Kimble.

“It's a piece in the paper. Will anyone with any knowledge of Helen Spenlove Halliday, née Kennedy, communicate with Messrs. Reed and Hardy, Southampton Row! Seems to me they might be meaning Mrs. Halliday as I was in service with at St. Catherine's. Took it from Mrs. Findeyson, they did, she and 'er 'usband.
Her
name was Helen right enough—Yes, and she was sister
to Dr. Kennedy, him as always said I ought to have had my adenoids out.”

There was a momentary pause as Mrs. Kimble adjusted the frying chips with an expert touch. Jim Kimble was snorting into the roller towel as he dried his face.

“Course, it's an old paper, this,” resumed Mrs. Kimble. She studied its date. “Nigh on a week or more old. Wonder what it's all about? Think as there's any money in it, Jim?”

Mr. Kimble said, “Ar,” noncommittally.

“Might be a will or something,” speculated his wife. “Powerful lot of time ago.”

“Ar.”

“Eighteen years or more, I shouldn't wonder … Wonder what they're raking it all up for now? You don't think it could be
police,
do you, Jim?

“Whatever?” asked Mr. Kimble.

“Well, you know what I always thought,” said Mrs. Kimble mysteriously. “Told you at the time, I did, when we was walking out. Pretending that she'd gone off with a feller. That's what they say, husbands, when they do their wives in. Depend upon it, it was murder. That's what I said to you and what I said to Edie, but Edie she wouldn't have it at any price. Never no imagination, Edie hadn't. Those clothes she was supposed to have took away with her—well, they weren't right, if you know what I mean. There was a suitcase gone and a bag, and enough clothes to fill 'em, but they wasn't right, those clothes. And that's when I said to Edie, ‘Depend upon it,' I said, ‘the master's murdered her and put her in the cellar.' Only not really the cellar, because that Layonee, the Swiss nurse, she saw something. Out of the window. Come to the cinema along of me,
she did, though she wasn't supposed to leave the nursery—but there, I said, the child never wakes up—good as gold she was, always, in her bed at night. ‘And madam never comes up to the nursery in the evening,' I says. ‘Nobody will know if you slip out with me.' So she did. And when we got in there was ever such a schemozzle going on. Doctor was there and the master ill and sleeping in the dressing room, and the doctor looking after him, and it was then he asked me about the clothes, and it seemed all right at the time. I thought she'd gone off all right with that fellow she was so keen on—and him a married man, too—and Edie said she did hope and pray we wouldn't be mixed up in any divorce case. What was his name now? I can't remember. Began with an M—or was it an R? Bless us, your memory does go.”

Mr. Kimble came in from the scullery and ignoring all matters of lesser moment demanded if his supper was ready.

“I'll just drain the chips … Wait, I'll get another paper. Better keep this one. 'T wouldn't be likely to be police—not after all this time. Maybe it's lawyers—and money in it. It doesn't
say
something to your advantage … but it might be all the same … Wish I knew who I could ask about it. It says write to some address in London—but I'm not sure I'd like to do a thing like that … not to a lot of people in London … What do you say, Jim?”

“Ar,” said Mr. Kimble, hungrily eyeing the fish and chips.

The discussion was postponed.

I

G
wenda looked across the broad mahogany desk at Mr. Walter Fane.

She saw a rather tired-looking man of about fifty, with a gentle, nondescript face. The sort of man, Gwenda thought, that you would find it a little difficult to recollect if you had just met him casually … A man who, in modern phrase, lacked personality. His voice, when he spoke, was slow and careful and pleasant. Probably, Gwenda decided, a very sound lawyer.

She stole a glance round the office—the office of the senior partner of the firm. It suited Walter Fane, she decided. It was definitely old-fashioned, the furniture was shabby, but was made of good solid Victorian material. There were deed boxes piled up against the walls—boxes with respectable County names on
them. Sir John Vavasour-Trench. Lady Jessup. Arthur ffoulkes, Esq. Deceased.

The big sash windows, the panes of which were rather dirty, looked into a square backyard flanked by the solid walls of a seventeenth-century adjoining house. There was nothing smart or up to date anywhere, but there was nothing sordid either. It was superficially an untidy office with its piled-up boxes, and its littered desk, and its row of law books leaning crookedly on a shelf—but it was actually the office of someone who knew exactly where to lay his hand upon anything he wanted.

The scratching of Walter Fane's pen ceased. He smiled his slow, pleasant smile.

“I think that's all quite clear, Mrs. Reed,” he said. “A very simple will. When would you like to come in and sign it?”

Gwenda said whenever he liked. There was no particular hurry.

“We've got a house down here, you know,” she said. “Hillside.”

Walter Fane said, glancing down at his notes, “Yes, you gave me the address….”

There was no change in the even tenor of his voice.

“It's a very nice house,” said Gwenda. “We love it.”

“Indeed?” Walter Fane smiled. “Is it on the sea?”

“No,” said Gwenda. “I believe the name has been changed. It used to be St. Catherine's.”

Mr. Fane took off his pince-nez. He polished them with a silk handkerchief, looking down at the desk.

“Oh yes,” he said. “On the Leahampton road?”

He looked up and Gwenda thought how different people who habitually wear glasses look without them. His eyes, a very pale grey, seemed strangely weak and unfocussed.

It makes his whole face look, thought Gwenda, as though he isn't really there.

Walter Fane put on the pince-nez again. He said in his precise lawyer's voice, “I think you said you did make a will on the occasion of your marriage?”

“Yes. But I'd left things in it to various relatives in New Zealand who have died since, so I thought it would be simpler really to make a new one altogether—especially as we mean to live permanently in this country.”

Walter Fane nodded.

“Yes, quite a sound view to take. Well, I think this is all quite clear, Mrs. Reed. Perhaps if you come in the day after tomorrow? Will eleven o'clock suit you?”

“Yes, that will be quite all right.”

Gwenda rose to her feet and Walter Fane rose also.

Gwenda said, with exactly the little rush she had rehearsed beforehand, “I—I asked specially for you, because I think—I mean I believe—that you once knew my—my mother.”

“Indeed?” Walter Fane put a little additional social warmth into his manner. “What was her name?”

“Halliday. Megan Halliday. I think—I've been told—that you were once engaged to her?”

A clock on the wall ticked. One, two, one two, one two.

Gwenda suddenly felt her heart beating a little faster. What a very
quiet
face Walter Fane had. You might see a house like that—a house with all the blinds pulled down. That would mean a house with a dead body in it. (What idiotic thoughts you do have, Gwenda!)

Walter Fane, his voice unchanged, unruffled, said, “No, I never
knew your mother, Mrs. Reed. But I was once engaged, for a short period, to Helen Kennedy who afterwards married Major Halliday as his second wife.”

“Oh, I see. How stupid of me. I've got it all wrong. It was Helen—my stepmother. Of course it's all long before I remember. I was only a child when my father's second marriage broke up. But I heard someone say that you'd once been engaged to Mrs. Halliday in India—and I thought of course it was my own mother—because of India, I mean … My father met her in India.”

“Helen Kennedy came out to India to marry me,” said Walter Fane. “Then she changed her mind. On the boat going home she met your father.”

It was a plain unemotional statement of fact. Gwenda still had the impression of a house with the blinds down.

“I'm so sorry,” she said. “Have I put my foot in it?”

Walter Fane smiled—his slow, pleasant smile. The blinds were up.

“It's nineteen or twenty years ago, Mrs. Reed,” he said. “One's youthful troubles and follies don't mean much after that space of time. So you are Halliday's baby daughter. You know, don't you, that your father and Helen actually lived here in Dillmouth for a while?”

“Oh yes,” said Gwenda, “that's really why we came here. I didn't remember it properly, of course, but when we had to decide where we'd live in England, I came to Dillmouth first of all, to see what it was really like, and I thought it was such an attractive place that I decided that we'd park ourselves right here and nowhere else. And wasn't it luck? We've actually got the same house that my people lived in long ago.”

“I remember the house,” said Walter Fane. Again he gave that
slow, pleasant smile. “You may not remember me, Mrs. Reed, but I rather imagine I used to give you piggybacks once.”

Gwenda laughed.

“Did you really? Then you're quite an old friend, aren't you? I can't pretend I remember you—but then I was only about two and a half or three, I suppose … Were you back on leave from India or something like that?”

“No, I'd chucked India for good. I went out to try tea-planting—but the life didn't suit me. I was cut out to follow in my father's footsteps and be a prosy unadventurous country solicitor. I'd passed all my law exams earlier, so I simply came back and went straight into the firm.” He paused and said, “I've been here ever since.”

Again there was a pause and he repeated in a lower voice, “Yes—ever since….”

But eighteen years, thought Gwenda, isn't really such a long time as all that….

Then, with a change of manner, he shook hands with her and said, “Since we seem to be old friends, you really must bring your husband to tea with my mother one day. I'll get her to write to you. In the meanwhile, eleven o'clock on Thursday?”

Gwenda went out of the office and down the stairs. There was a cobweb in the angle of the stairway. In the middle of the web was a pale, rather nondescript spider. It didn't look, Gwenda thought, like a real spider. Not the fat juicy kind of spider who caught flies and ate them. It was more like a ghost of a spider. Rather like Walter Fane, in fact.

II

Giles met his wife on the seafront.

“Well?” he asked.

“He was here in Dillmouth at the time,” said Gwenda. “Back from India, I mean. Because he gave me piggybacks. But he couldn't have murdered anyone—not possibly. He's much too quiet and gentle. Very nice, really, but the kind of person you never really notice. You know, they come to parties, but you never notice when they leave. I should think he was frightfully upright and all that, and devoted to his mother, and with a lot of virtues. But from a woman's point of view, terribly
dull.
I can see why he didn't cut any ice with Helen. You know, a nice safe person to marry—but you don't really want to.”

“Poor devil,” said Giles. “And I suppose he was just crazy about her.”

“Oh, I don't know … I shouldn't think so, really. Anyway, I'm sure he wouldn't be our malevolent murderer. He's not my idea of a murderer at all.”

“You don't really know a lot about murderers, though, do you, my sweet?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well—I was thinking about quiet Lizzie Borden—only the jury said she didn't do it. And Wallace, a quiet man whom the jury insisted did kill his wife, though the sentence was quashed on appeal. And Armstrong who everybody said for years was such a kind unassuming fellow. I don't believe murderers are ever a special type.”

“I really can't believe that Walter Fane—”

Gwenda stopped.

“What is it?”

“Nothing.”

But she was remembering Walter Fane polishing his eyeglasses and the queer blind stare of his eyes when she had first mentioned St. Catherine's.

“Perhaps,” she said uncertainly, “he
was
crazy about her….”