A Caribbean Mystery

by Agatha Christie

  “And he spoke of the murderer as a man?”

  “Yes.”

  “Right. That cuts out Evelyn Hillingdon, Lucky and Esther Walters. So your murderer, allowing that all this far-fetched nonsense is true, your murderer is Dyson, Hillingdon or my smooth-tongued Jackson.”

  “Or yourself,” said Miss Marple.

  Mr. Rafiel ignored this last point.

  “Don’t say things to irritate me,” he said. “I’ll tell you the first thing that strikes me, and which you don’t seem to have thought of. If it’s one of those three, why the devil didn’t old Palgrave recognize him before? Dash it all, they’ve all been sitting round looking at each other for the last two weeks. That doesn’t seem to make sense.”

  “I think it could,” said Miss Marple.

  “Well, tell me how.”

  “You see, in Major Palgrave’s story he hadn’t seen this man himself at any time. It was a story told to him by a doctor. The doctor gave him the snapshot as a curiosity. Major Palgrave may have looked at the snapshot fairly closely at the time but after that he’d just stack it away in his wallet and keep it as a souvenir. Occasionally, perhaps, he’d take it out and show it to someone he was telling the story to. And another thing, Mr. Rafiel, we don’t know how long ago this happened. He didn’t give me any indication of that when he was telling the story. I mean this may have been a story he’s been telling to people for years. Five years—ten years—longer still perhaps. Some of his tiger stories go back about twenty years.”

  “They would!” said Mr. Rafiel.

  “So I don’t suppose for a moment that Major Palgrave would recognize the face in the snapshot if he came across the man casually. What I think happened, what I’m almost sure must have happened, is that as he told his story he fumbled for the snapshot, took it out, looked down at it studying the face and then looked up to see the same face, or one with a strong resemblance, coming towards him from a distance of about ten or twelve feet away.”

  “Yes,” said Mr. Rafiel consideringly, “yes, that’s possible.”

  “He was taken aback,” said Miss Marple, “and he shoved it back in his wallet and began to talk loudly about something else.”

  “He couldn’t have been sure,” said Mr. Rafiel, shrewdly.

  “No,” said Miss Marple, “he couldn’t have been sure. But of course afterwards he would have studied the snapshot very carefully and would have looked at the man and tried to make up his mind whether it was just a likeness or whether it could actually be the same person.”

  Mr. Rafiel reflected a moment or two, then he shook his head.

  “There’s something wrong here. The motive’s inadequate. Absolutely inadequate. He was speaking to you loudly, was he?”

  “Yes,” said Miss Marple, “quite loudly. He always did.”

  “True enough. Yes, he did shout. So whoever was approaching would hear what he said?”

  “I should imagine you could hear it for quite a good radius round.”

  Mr. Rafiel shook his head again. He said, “It’s fantastic, too fantastic. Anybody would laugh at such a story. Here’s an old booby telling a story about another story somebody told him, and showing a snapshot, and all of it centring round a murder which had taken place years ago! Or at any rate, a year or two. How on earth can that worry the man in question? No evidence, just a bit of hearsay, a story at third hand. He could even admit a likeness, he could say: ‘Yes, I do look rather like that fellow, don’t I! Ha, ha!’ Nobody’s going to take old Palgrave’s identification seriously. Don’t tell me so, because I won’t believe it. No, the chap, if it was the chap, had nothing to fear—nothing whatever. It’s the kind of accusation he can just laugh off. Why on earth should he proceed to murder old Palgrave? It’s absolutely unnecessary. You must see that.”

  “Oh I do see that,” said Miss Marple. “I couldn’t agree with you more. That’s what makes me uneasy. So very uneasy that I really couldn’t sleep last night.”

  Mr. Rafiel stared at her. “Let’s hear what’s on your mind,” he said quietly.

  “I may be entirely wrong,” said Miss Marple hesitantly.

  “Probably you are,” said Mr. Rafiel with his usual lack of courtesy, “but at any rate let’s hear what you’ve thought up in the small hours.”

  “There could be a very powerful motive if—”

  “If what?”

  “If there was going to be—quite soon—another murder.”

  Mr. Rafiel stared at her. He tried to pull himself up a little in his chair.

  “Let’s get this clear,” he said.

  “I am so bad at explaining.” Miss Marple spoke rapidly and rather incoherently. A pink flush rose to her cheeks. “Supposing there was a murder planned. If you remember, the story Major Palgrave told me concerned a man whose wife died under suspicious circumstances. Then, after a certain lapse of time, there was another murder under exactly the same circumstances. A man of a different name had a wife who died in much the same way and the doctor who was telling it recognized him as the same man, although he’d changed his name. Well, it does look, doesn’t it, as though this murderer might be the kind of murderer who made a habit of the thing?”

  “You mean like Smith, Brides in the Bath, that kind of thing. Yes.”

  “As far as I can make out,” said Miss Marple, “and from what I have heard and read, a man who does a wicked thing like this and gets away with it the first time, is, alas, encouraged. He thinks it’s easy, he thinks he’s clever. And so he repeats it. And in the end, as you say, like Smith and the Brides in the Bath, it becomes a habit. Each time in a different place and each time the man changes his name. But the crimes themselves are all very much alike. So it seems to me, although I may be quite wrong—”

  “But you don’t think you are wrong, do you?” Mr. Rafiel put in shrewdly.

  Miss Marple went on without answering. “—that if that were so and if this—this person had got things all lined up for a murder out here, for getting rid of another wife, say, and if this is crime three or four, well then, the Major’s story would matter because the murderer couldn’t afford to have any similarity pointed out. If you remember, that was exactly the way Smith got caught. The circumstances of a crime attracted the attention of somebody who compared it with a newspaper clipping of some other case. So you do see, don’t you, that if this wicked person has got a crime planned, arranged, and shortly about to take place, he couldn’t afford to let Major Palgrave go about telling this story and showing that snapshot.”

  She stopped and looked appealingly at Mr. Rafiel.

  “So you see he had to do something very quickly, as quickly as possible.”

  Mr. Rafiel spoke. “In fact, that very same night, eh?”

  “Yes,” said Miss Marple.

  “Quick work,” said Mr. Rafiel, “but it could be done. Put the tablets in old Palgrave’s room, spread the blood pressure rumour about and add a little of our fourteen-syllable drug to a Planters Punch. Is that it?”

  “Yes—But that’s all over—we needn’t worry about it. It’s the future. It’s now. With Major Palgrave out of the way and the snapshot destroyed, this man will go on with his murder as planned.”

  Mr. Rafiel whistled.

  “You’ve got it all worked out, haven’t you?”

  Miss Marple nodded. She said in a most unaccustomed voice, firm and almost dictatorial, “And we’ve got to stop it. You’ve got to stop it, Mr. Rafiel.”

  “Me?” said Mr. Rafiel, astonished, “Why me?”

  “Because you’re rich and important,” said Miss Marple, simply. “People will take notice of what you say or suggest. They wouldn’t listen to me for a moment. They would say that I was an old lady imagining things.”

  “They might at that,” said Mr. Rafiel. “More fools if they did. I must say, though, that nobody would think you had any brains in your head to hear your usual line of talk. Actually, you’ve got a logical mind. Very few women have.” He shifted himself uncomfortably in his c
hair. “Where the hell’s Esther or Jackson?” he said. “I need resettling. No, it’s no good your doing it. You’re not strong enough. I don’t know what they mean, leaving me alone like this.”

  “I’ll go and find them.”

  “No, you won’t. You’ll stay here—and thrash this out. Which of them is it? The egregious Greg? The quiet Edward Hillingdon or my fellow Jackson? It’s got to be one of the three, hasn’t it?”

  Seventeen

  MR. RAFIEL TAKES CHARGE

  “I don’t know,” said Miss Marple.

  “What do you mean? What have we been talking about for the last twenty minutes?”

  “It has occurred to me that I may have been wrong.”

  Mr. Rafiel stared at her.

  “Scatty after all!” he said disgustedly. “And you sounded so sure of yourself.”

  “Oh, I am sure—about the murder. It’s the murderer I’m not sure about. You see I’ve found out that Major Palgrave had more than one murder story—you told me yourself he’d told you one about a kind of Lucrezia Borgia—”

  “So he did—at that. But that was quite a different kind of story.”

  “I know. And Mrs. Walters said he had one about someone being gassed in a gas oven—”

  “But the story he told you—”

  Miss Marple allowed herself to interrupt—a thing that did not often happen to Mr. Rafiel.

  She spoke with desperate earnestness and only moderate incoherence.

  “Don’t you see—it’s so difficult to be sure. The whole point is that—so often—one doesn’t listen. Ask Mrs. Walters—she said the same thing—you listen to begin with—and then your attention flags—your mind wanders—and suddenly you find you’ve missed a bit. I just wonder if possibly there may have been a gap—a very small one—between the story he was telling me—about a man—and the moment when he was getting out his wallet and saying—‘Like to see a picture of a murderer.’”

  “But you thought it was a picture of the man he had been talking about?”

  “I thought so—yes. It never occurred to me that it mightn’t have been. But now—how can I be sure?”

  Mr. Rafiel looked at her very thoughtfully….

  “The trouble with you is,” he said, “that you’re too conscientious. Great mistake—Make up your mind and don’t shilly shally. You didn’t shilly shally to begin with. If you ask me, in all this chit-chat you’ve been having with the parson’s sister and the rest of them, you’ve got hold of something that’s unsettled you.”

  “Perhaps you’re right.”

  “Well, cut it out for the moment. Let’s go ahead with what you had to begin with. Because, nine times out of ten, one’s original judgments are right—or so I’ve found. We’ve got three suspects. Let’s take ’em out and have a good look at them. Any preference?”

  “I really haven’t,” said Miss Marple, “all three of them seem so very unlikely.”

  “We’ll take Greg first,” said Mr. Rafiel. “Can’t stand the fellow. Doesn’t make him a murderer, though. Still, there are one or two points against him. Those blood pressure tablets belonged to him. Nice and handy to make use of.”

  “That would be a little obvious, wouldn’t it?” Miss Marple objected.

  “I don’t know that it would,” said Mr. Rafiel. “After all, the main thing was to do something quickly, and he’d got the tablets. Hadn’t much time to go looking round for tablets that somebody else might have. Let’s say it’s Greg. All right. If he wanted to put his dear wife Lucky out of the way—(Good job, too, I’d say. In fact I’m in sympathy with him.) I can’t actually see his motive. From all accounts he’s rich. Inherited money from his first wife who had pots of it. He qualifies on that as a possible wife murderer all right. But that’s over and done with. He got away with it. But Lucky was his first wife’s poor relation. No money there, so if he wants to put her out of the way it must be in order to marry somebody else. Any gossip going around about that?”

  Miss Marple shook her head.

  “Not that I have heard. He—er—has a very gallant manner with all the ladies.”

  “Well, that’s a nice, old-fashioned way of putting it,” said Mr. Rafiel. “All right, he’s a stoat. He makes passes. Not enough! We want more than that. Let’s go on to Edward Hillingdon. Now there’s a dark horse, if ever there was one.”

  “He is not, I think, a happy man,” offered Miss Marple.

  Mr. Rafiel looked at her thoughtfully.

  “Do you think a murderer ought to be a happy man?”

  Miss Marple coughed.

  “Well, they usually have been in my experience.”

  “I don’t suppose your experience has gone very far,” said Mr. Rafiel.

  In this assumption, as Miss Marple could have told him, he was wrong. But she forbore to contest his statement. Gentlemen, she knew, did not like to be put right in their facts.

  “I rather fancy Hillingdon myself,” said Mr. Rafiel. “I’ve an idea that there is something a bit odd going on between him and his wife. You noticed it at all?”

  “Oh yes,” said Miss Marple, “I have noticed it. Their behaviour is perfect in public, of course, but that one would expect.”

  “You probably know more about those sort of people than I would,” said Mr. Rafiel. “Very well, then, everything is in perfectly good taste but it’s a probability that, in a gentlemanly way, Edward Hillingdon is contemplating doing away with Evelyn Hillingdon. Do you agree?”

  “If so,” said Miss Marple, “there must be another woman.”

  Miss Marple shook her head in a dissatisfied manner.

  “I can’t help feeling—I really can’t—that it’s not all quite as simple as that.”

  “Well, who shall we consider next—Jackson? We leave me out of it.”

  Miss Marple smiled for the first time.

  “And why do we leave you out of it, Mr. Rafiel?”

  “Because if you want to discuss the possibilities of my being a murderer you’d have to do it with somebody else. Waste of time talking about it to me. And anyway, I ask you, am I cut out for the part? Helpless, hauled out of bed like a dummy, dressed, wheeled about in a chair, shuffled along for a walk. What earthly chance have I of going and murdering anyone?”

  “Probably as good a chance as anyone else,” said Miss Marple vigorously.

  “And how do you make that out?”

  “Well, you would agree yourself, I think, that you have brains?”

  “Of course I’ve got brains,” declared Mr. Rafiel. “A good deal more than anybody else in this community, I’d say.”

  “And having brains,” went on Miss Marple, “would enable you to overcome the physical difficulties of being a murderer.”

  “It would take some doing!”

  “Yes,” said Miss Marple, “it would take some doing. But then, I think, Mr. Rafiel, you would enjoy that.”

  Mr. Rafiel stared at her for a long time and then he suddenly laughed.

  “You’ve got a nerve!” he said. “Not quite the gentle fluffy old lady you look, are you? So you really think I’m a murderer?”

  “No,” said Miss Marple, “I do not.”

  “And why?”

  “Well, really, I think just because you have got brains. Having brains, you can get most things you want without having recourse to murder. Murder is stupid.”

  “And anyway who the devil should I want to murder?”

  “That would be a very interesting question,” said Miss Marple. “I have not yet had the pleasure of sufficient conversation with you to evolve a theory as to that.”

  Mr. Rafiel’s smile broadened.

  “Conversations with you might be dangerous,” he said.

  “Conversations are always dangerous, if you have something to hide,” said Miss Marple.

  “You may be right. Let’s get on to Jackson. What do you think of Jackson?”

  “It is difficult for me to say. I have not had the opportunity really of any conversation with him.�
��

  “So you’ve no views on the subject?”

  “He reminds me a little,” said Miss Marple reflectively, “of a young man in the Town Clerk’s office near where I live, Jonas Parry.”

  “And?” Mr. Rafiel asked and paused.

  “He was not,” said Miss Marple, “very satisfactory.”

  “Jackson’s not wholly satisfactory either. He suits me all right. He’s first class at his job, and he doesn’t mind being sworn at. He knows he’s damn’ well paid and so he puts up with things. I wouldn’t employ him in a position of trust, but I don’t have to trust him. Maybe his past is blameless, maybe it isn’t. His references were all right but I discern—shall I say—a note of reserve. Fortunately, I’m not a man who has any guilty secrets, so I’m not a subject for blackmail.”

  “No secrets?” said Miss Marple, thoughtfully. “Surely, Mr. Rafiel, you have business secrets?”

  “Not where Jackson can get at them. No. Jackson is a smooth article, one might say, but I really don’t see him as a murderer. I’d say that wasn’t his line at all.”

  He paused a minute and then said suddenly, “Do you know, if one stands back and takes a good look at all this fantastic business, Major Palgrave and his ridiculous stories and all the rest of it, the emphasis is entirely wrong. I’m the person who ought to be murdered.”

  Miss Marple looked at him in some surprise.

  “Proper type casting,” explained Mr. Rafiel. “Who’s the victim in murder stories? Elderly men with lots of money.”

  “And lots of people with a good reason for wishing him out of the way, so as to get that money,” said Miss Marple. “Is that true also?”

  “Well—” Mr. Rafiel considered. “I can count up to five or six men in London who wouldn’t burst into tears if they read my obituary in The Times. But they wouldn’t go so far as to do anything to bring about my demise. After all, why should they? I’m expected to die any day. In fact the bug—blighters are astonished that I’ve lasted so long. The doctors are surprised too.”

  “You have, of course, a great will to live,” said Miss Marple.

  “You think that’s odd, I suppose,” said Mr. Rafiel.