The Thirteen Problems (20 page)
Read The Thirteen Problems Online
Authors: Agatha Christie
Yes, Sir Henry knew. The Joe Ellises of the world were peculiarly vulnerable. They trusted blindly. But for that very cause the shock of discovery might be greater.
He left the cottage baffled and perplexed. He was up against a blank wall. Joe Ellis had been working indoors all yesterday evening. Mrs Bartlett had actually been there watching him. Could one possibly get round that? There was nothing to set against it—except possibly that suspicious readiness in replying on Joe Ellis’s part—that suggestion of having a story pat.
‘Well,’ said Melchett, ‘that seems to make the matter quite clear, eh?’
‘It does, sir,’ agreed the Inspector. ‘Sandford’s our man. Not a leg to stand upon. The thing’s as plain as daylight. It’s my opinion as the girl and her father were out to—well—practically blackmail him. He’s no money to speak of—he didn’t want the matter to get to his young lady’s ears. He was desperate and he acted accordingly. What do you say, sir?’ he added, addressing Sir Henry deferentially.
‘It seems so,’ admitted Sir Henry. ‘And yet—I can hardly picture Sandford committing any violent action.’
But he knew as he spoke that that objection was hardly valid. The meekest animal, when cornered, is capable of amazing actions.
‘I should like to see the boy, though,’ he said suddenly. ‘The one who heard the cry.’
Jimmy Brown proved to be an intelligent lad, rather
small for his age, with a sharp, rather cunning face. He was eager to be questioned and was rather disappointed when checked in his dramatic tale of what he had heard on the fatal night.
‘You were on the other side of the bridge, I understand,’ said Sir Henry. ‘Across the river from the village. Did you see anyone on that side as you came over the bridge?’
‘There was someone walking up in the woods. Mr Sandford, I think it was, the architecting gentleman who’s building the queer house.’
The three men exchanged glances.
‘That was about ten minutes or so before you heard the cry?’
The boy nodded.
‘Did you see anyone else—on the village side of the river?’
‘A man came along the path that side. Going slow and whistling he was. Might have been Joe Ellis.’
‘You couldn’t possibly have seen who it was,’ said the Inspector sharply. ‘What with the mist and its being dusk.’
‘It’s on account of the whistle,’ said the boy. ‘Joe Ellis always whistles the same tune—“I wanner be happy”—it’s the only tune he knows.’
He spoke with the scorn of the modernist for the old-fashioned.
‘Anyone might whistle a tune,’ said Melchett. ‘Was he going towards the bridge?’
‘No. Other way—to village.’
‘I don’t think we need concern ourselves with this unknown man,’ said Melchett. ‘You heard the cry and the splash and a few minutes later you saw the body floating downstream and you ran for help, going back to the bridge, crossing it, and making straight for the village. You didn’t see anyone near the bridge as you ran for help?’
‘I think as there were two men with a wheelbarrow on the river path; but they were some way away and I couldn’t tell if they were going or coming and Mr Giles’s place was nearest—so I ran there.’
‘You did well, my boy,’ said Melchett. ‘You acted very creditably and with presence of mind. You’re a scout, aren’t you?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Very good. Very good indeed.’
Sir Henry was silent—thinking. He took a slip of paper from his pocket, looked at it, shook his head. It didn’t seem possible—and yet—
He decided to pay a call on Miss Marple.
She received him in her pretty, slightly overcrowded old-style drawing-room.
‘I’ve come to report progress,’ said Sir Henry. ‘I’m afraid that from our point of view things aren’t going
well. They are going to arrest Sandford. And I must say I think they are justified.’
‘You have found nothing in—what shall I say—support of my theory, then?’ She looked perplexed—anxious. ‘Perhaps I have been wrong—quite wrong. You have such wide experience—you would surely detect it if it were so.’
‘For one thing,’ said Sir Henry, ‘I can hardly believe it. And for another we are up against an unbreakable alibi. Joe Ellis was fixing shelves in the kitchen all the evening and Mrs Bartlett was watching him do it.’
Miss Marple leaned forward, taking in a quick breath.
‘But that can’t be so,’ she said. ‘It was Friday night.’
‘Friday night?’
‘Yes—Friday night. On Friday evenings Mrs Bartlett takes the laundry she has done round to the different people.’
Sir Henry leaned back in his chair. He remembered the boy Jimmy’s story of the whistling man and—yes—it would all fit in.
He rose, taking Miss Marple warmly by the hand.
‘I think I see my way,’ he said. ‘At least I can try…’
Five minutes later he was back at Mrs Bartlett’s cottage and facing Joe Ellis in the little parlour among the china dogs.
‘You lied to us, Ellis, about last night,’ he said crisply. ‘You were not in the kitchen here fixing the dresser between eight and eight-thirty. You were seen walking along the path by the river towards the bridge a few minutes before Rose Emmott was murdered.’
The man gasped.
‘She weren’t murdered—she weren’t. I had naught to do with it. She threw herself in, she did. She was desperate like. I wouldn’t have harmed a hair on her head, I wouldn’t.’
‘Then why did you lie as to where you were?’ asked Sir Henry keenly.
The man’s eyes shifted and lowered uncomfortably.
‘I was scared. Mrs B. saw me around there and when we heard just afterwards what had happened—well, she thought it might look bad for me. I fixed I’d say I was working here, and she agreed to back me up. She’s a rare one, she is. She’s always been good to me.’
Without a word Sir Henry left the room and walked into the kitchen. Mrs Bartlett was washing up at the sink.
‘Mrs Bartlett,’ he said, ‘I know everything. I think you’d better confess—that is, unless you want Joe Ellis hanged for something he didn’t do…No. I see you don’t want that. I’ll tell you what happened. You were out taking the laundry home. You came across Rose Emmott. You thought she’d given Joe the chuck
and was taking up with this stranger. Now she was in trouble—Joe was prepared to come to the rescue—marry her if need be, and if she’d have him. He’s lived in your house for four years. You’ve fallen in love with him. You want him for yourself. You hated this girl—you couldn’t bear that this worthless little slut should take your man from you. You’re a strong woman, Mrs Bartlett. You caught the girl by the shoulders and shoved her over into the stream. A few minutes later you met Joe Ellis. The boy Jimmy saw you together in the distance—but in the darkness and the mist he assumed the perambulator was a wheelbarrow and two men wheeling it. You persuaded Joe that he might be suspected and you concocted what was supposed to be an alibi for him, but which was really an alibi for
you
. Now then, I’m right, am I not?’
He held his breath. He had staked all on this throw.
She stood before him rubbing her hands on her apron, slowly making up her mind.
‘It’s just as you say, sir,’ she said at last, in her quiet subdued voice (a dangerous voice, Sir Henry suddenly felt it to be). ‘I don’t know what came over me. Shameless—that’s what she was. It just came over me—she shan’t take Joe from me. I haven’t had a happy life, sir. My husband, he was a poor lot—an invalid and cross-grained. I nursed and looked after him true. And then Joe came here to lodge. I’m not
such an old woman, sir, in spite of my grey hair. I’m just forty, sir. Joe’s one in a thousand. I’d have done anything for him—anything at all. He was like a little child, sir, so gentle and believing. He was mine, sir, to look after and see to. And this—this—’ She swallowed—checked her emotion. Even at this moment she was a strong woman. She stood up straight and looked at Sir Henry curiously. ‘I’m ready to come, sir. I never thought anyone would find out. I don’t know how you knew, sir—I don’t, I’m sure.’
Sir Henry shook his head gently.
‘It was not I who knew,’ he said—and he thought of the piece of paper still reposing in his pocket with the words on it written in neat old-fashioned handwriting.
‘Mrs Bartlett, with whom Joe Ellis lodges at 2 Mill Cottages.’
Miss Marple had been right again.
The Murder at the Vicarage
;
The Thirteen Problems
;
The Body in the Library
;
The Moving Finger
;
A Murder Is Announced
;
They Do It with Mirrors
;
A Pocket Full of Rye
;
4.50 from Paddington
;
The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side
;
A Caribbean Mystery
;
At Bertram’s Hotel
;
Nemesis
;
Sleeping Murder
;
Miss Marple’s Final Cases
The Murder at the Vicarage
(1930)
The murder of Colonel Protheroe—shot through the head—is a shock to everyone in St. Mary Mead, though hardly an unpleasant one. Now even the vicar, who had declared that killing the detested Protheroe would be ‘doing the world at large a favour,’ is a suspect—the Colonel has been dispatched in the clergyman’s study, no less. But tiny St. Mary Mead is overpopulated with suspects. There is of course the faithless Mrs Protheroe; and there is of course her young lover—an artist, to boot. Perhaps more surprising than the revelation of the murderer is the detective who will crack the case: ‘a whitehaired
old lady with a gentle, appealing manner.’ Miss Jane Marple has arrived on the scene, and crime literature’s private men’s club of great detectives will never be the same.
- Saturday Review of Literature
: ‘When she really hits her stride, as she does here, Agatha Christie is hard to surpass.’
The Thirteen Problems
(1932)
Over six Tuesday evenings a group gathers at Miss Marple’s house to ponder unsolved crimes. The company is inclined to forget their elderly hostess as they become mesmerized by the sinister tales they tell one another. But it is always Miss Marple’s quiet genius that names the criminal or the means of the misdeed. As indeed is true in subsequent gatherings at the country home of Colonel and Mrs Bantry, where another set of terrible wrongs is related by the assembled guests—and righted, by Miss Marple.
The stories: ‘The Tuesday Night Club’; ‘The Idol House of Astarte’; ‘Ingots of Gold’; ‘The Bloodstained Pavement’; ‘Motive
v
Opportunity’; ‘The Thumb Mark of St Peter’; ‘The Blue Geranium’; ‘The Companion’; ‘The Four Suspects’; ‘A Christmas Tragedy’; ‘The Herb of Death’; ‘The Affair at the Bungalow’; ‘Death by Drowning.’
- Daily Mirror
: ‘The plots are so good that one marvels…Most of them would have made a full-length thriller.’
The Body in the Library
(1942)
The very-respectable Colonel and Mrs Bantry have awakened to discover the body of a young woman in their library. She is wearing evening dress and heavy make-up, which is now smeared across her cold cheeks. But who is she? How did she get there? And what is her connection with another dead girl, whose charred remains are later discovered in an abandoned quarry? The Bantrys turn to Miss Marple to solve the mystery.
Of note: Many of the residents of St. Mary Mead, who appeared in the first full-length Miss Marple mystery twelve years earlier,
The Murder at the Vicarage
, return in
The Body in the Library
. Mrs Christie wrote
Body
simultaneously with the Tommy and Tuppence Beresford spy thriller
N or M?
, alternating between the two novels to keep herself, as she put it, ‘fresh at task.’
- The Times Literary Supplement
wrote of this second Marple novel: ‘It is hard not to be impressed.’
The Moving Finger
(1943)
Lymstock is a town with more than its share of shameful secrets—a town where even a sudden outbreak of anonymous hate-mail causes only a minor stir. But all of that changes when one of the recipients, Mrs Symmington, appears to have been driven to suicide. ‘I can’t go on,’ her final note reads. Only Miss Marple questions the coroner’s verdict.
Was
this the work of a poison pen? Or of a
poisoner
?
Of note:
The Moving Finger
was a favourite of its author. From
An Autobiography
(1977): ‘I find that…I am really pleased with…
The Moving Finger
. It is a great test to reread what one has written some seventeen or eighteen years before. One’s view changes. Some do not stand the test of time, others do.’
- The Times
: ‘Beyond all doubt the puzzle in
The Moving Finger
is fit for the experts.’
A Murder Is Announced
(1950)
The invitation spelled it out quite clearly: ‘A murder is announced and will take place on Friday, October 29th, at Little Paddocks, at 6:30 p.m.’ Everyone in town expected a simple party game—a secret ‘murderer’ is chosen, the lights go out, the ‘victim’ falls, and the players guess ‘whodunit.’ Amusing, indeed—until a real corpse is discovered. A game as murderous as this requires the most brilliant player of all: Jane Marple.
- Robert Barnard: ‘As good as Agatha Christie ever wrote.’
- A.A. Milne: ‘Establishes firmly her claim to the throne of detection. The plot is as ingenious as ever…the dialogue both wise and witty; while the suspense is maintained very skillfully…’
- The New York Times Book Review
: ‘A super-smooth Christie…neat murders in an English village…an assortment of her famous red herrings, all beautifully marinated.’
They Do It with Mirrors
(1952)
A sense of danger pervades the rambling Victorian mansion in which Jane Marple’s friend Carrie Louise lives—and not only because the building doubles as a rehabilitation centre for criminal youths. One inmate attempts, and fails, to shoot dead the administrator. But simultaneously, in another part of the building, a mysterious visitor is less lucky. Miss Marple must employ all her cunning to solve the riddle of the stranger’s visit, and his murder—while protecting her friend from a similarly dreadful fate.
- Guardian
: ‘Brilliant.’ - The New York Times
: ‘No one on either side of the Atlantic does it better.’
A Pocket Full of Rye
(1953)
Rex Fortescue, king of a financial empire, was sipping tea in his ‘counting house’ when he suffered an agonising and sudden death. The only clue to his murder: ‘loose grain’ found in his pocket. The murder seems without rhyme or reason—until shrewd Jane Marple recalls that delightful nursery rhyme, ‘Sing a Song of Sixpence.’ A playful hint indeed for a murder that is anything but child’s play.
- Times Literary Supplement
: ‘Ingenious.’ - The New York Times
: ‘The best of the novels starring Miss Marple.’
4.50 from Paddington
(1957)
For an instant the two trains ran side by side. In that frozen moment, Elspeth McGillicuddy stared helplessly out of her carriage window as a man tightened his grip around a woman’s throat. The body crumpled. Then the other train drew away. But who, apart from Mrs McGillicuddy’s friend Jane Marple, would take her story seriously? After all, there are no other witnesses, no suspects, and no case—for there is no corpse, and no one is missing. Miss Marple asks her highly efficient and intelligent young friend Lucy Eyelesbarrow to infiltrate the Crackenthorpe family, who seem to be at the heart of the mystery, and help unmask a murderer.
Of note: The introduction of Lucy Eyelesbarrow as a side-kick to Miss Marple was lauded by the critics, but her work with the older detective was limited to this novel.
The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side
(1962)
The quaint village of St. Mary Mead has been glamourized by the presence of screen queen Marina Gregg, who has taken up residence in preparation for her comeback. But when a local fan is poisoned, Marina finds herself starring in a real-life mystery—supported with scene-stealing aplomb by Jane Marple, who suspects that the lethal cocktail was intended for someone else. But who? If it was meant for
Marina, then why? And before the final fade-out, who else from St. Mary Mead’s cast of seemingly innocent characters is going to be eliminated?
- Times Literary Supplement
: ‘The pieces…drop into place with a satisfying click. Agatha Christie deserves her fame.’
A Caribbean Mystery
(1964)
As Jane Marple sat basking in the tropical sunshine she felt mildly discontented with life. True, the warmth eased her rheumatism, but here in paradise nothing ever happened. Then a question was put to her by a stranger: ‘Would you like to see a picture of a murderer?’ Before she has a chance to answer, the man vanishes, only to be found dead the next day. The mysteries abound: Where is the picture? Why is the hotelier prone to nightmares? Why doesn’t the most talked-about guest, a reclusive millionaire, ever leave his room? And why is Miss Marple herself fearful for her life?
Of note:
A Caribbean Mystery
introduces the wealthy (and difficult) Mr Jason Rafiel, who will call upon Miss Marple for help in
Nemesis
(1971)—after his death.
- Observer
: ‘Liveliness…infectious zest…as good as anything Mrs Christie has done.’ - The New York Times
: ‘Throws off the false clues and misleading events as only a master of the art can do.’
At Bertram’s Hotel
(1965)
When Jane Marple comes up from the country for a holiday in London, she finds what she’s looking for at Bertram’s: a restored London hotel with traditional decor, impeccable service—and an unmistakable atmosphere of danger behind the highly polished veneer. Yet not even Miss Marple can foresee the violent chain of events set in motion when an eccentric guest makes his way to the airport on the wrong day…
Of note: Bertram’s was inspired by Brown’s Hotel in London, where the author was a frequent visitor.
- Saturday Review of Literature
: ‘One of the author’s very best productions, with splendid pace, bright lines.’ - The New York Times
: ‘A joy to read from beginning to end, especially in its acute sensitivity to the contrasts between this era and that of Miss Marple’s youth.’ - The New Yorker
: ‘Mrs Christie’s pearly talent for dealing with all the words and pomps that go with murder English-style shimmers steadily in this tale of the noisy woe that shatters the extremely expensive peace of Bertram’s famously old-fashioned hotel.’
Nemesis
(1971)
Even the unflappable Miss Marple is astounded as she reads the letter addressed to her on instructions from the recently deceased tycoon Mr Jason Rafiel, whom she had met on holiday in the West Indies (
A Caribbean Mystery
). Recognising in her a natural flair for justice and a genius for crime-solving, Mr Rafiel has bequeathed to Miss Marple a £20,000 legacy—and a legacy of an entirely different sort. For he has asked Miss Marple to investigate…his own murder. The only problem is, Mr Rafiel has failed to name a suspect or suspects. And, whoever they are, they will certainly be determined to thwart Miss Marple’s inquiries—no matter what it will take to stop her.
Of note:
Nemesis
is the last Jane Marple mystery that Agatha Christie wrote—though not the last Marple published.
- Best Sellers
: ‘The old charm is still there and a good deal of the old magic in plotting, too.’ - Times Literary Supplement
: ‘Miss Marple is an old lady now, knowing that a scent for evil is still, in the evening of her days, her peculiar gift.’
Sleeping Murder
(1976)
Soon after Gwenda Reed moves into her new home, odd things start to happen. Despite her best efforts to modernise the house, she only succeeds in dredging up its past. Worse, she feels an irrational sense of terror every time she climbs
the stairs…In fear, Gwenda turns to Jane Marple to exorcise her ghosts. Between them, they are to solve a ‘perfect’ crime committed many years before…
Of note: Agatha Christie wrote
Sleeping Murder
during World War II and had it placed in a bank vault for over thirty years.
- Chicago Tribune
: ‘Agatha Christie saved the best for last.’ - Sunday Express
: ‘A puzzle that is tortuous, surprising, and…satisfying.’
Miss Marple’s Final Cases
(1979)
Despite the title, the stories collected here recount cases from the middle of Miss. Marple’s career. They are: ‘Sanctuary’; ‘Strange Jest’; ‘Tape-Measure Murder’; ‘The Case of the Caretaker’; ‘The Case of the Perfect Maid’; ‘Miss Marple Tells a Story’; ‘The Dressmaker’s Doll’; ‘In a Glass Darkly’; ‘Greenshaw’s Folly.’
- The Republican
(Springfield, Massachusetts): ‘When it all becomes clear as day, the reader can only say, “Now why didn’t I think of that?” But he never does. Mrs Christie at her best.’