Collected Short Fiction of Ngaio Marsh

by Ngaio Marsh

  Lord John’s guest looked into his tired amused old face and smiled faintly.

  “Is that all?” she asked.

  “No. When I next watched the party at that table a waiter had brought their coffee. The doctor feller emptied the powder from the packet into the aunt’s cup. She drank it and made a great fuss about the taste. It looked as though we were in for another scene when she fell sound asleep.”

  “What!” exclaimed the guest.

  “She fell into a deep sleep,” said Lord John. “And died.”

  The lady with the nervous hands rose from her table and walked slowly past them out of the dining-room.

  “Not immediately,” continued Lord John, “but about two hours later in her room upstairs. Three waiters carried her out of the dining-room. Her mouth was open, I remember, and her face was puffy and had reddish-violet spots on it.”

  “What killed her?”

  “The medical gentleman explained at the inquest that her heart had always been weak.”

  “But — you didn’t believe that? You think, don’t you, that the doctor poisoned her coffee?”

  “Oh, no. In his own interest he asked that the coffee and the remaining powder in the paper should be analysed. They were found to contain nothing more dangerous than a very mild bromide.”

  “Then—? You suspected something I am sure. Was it the niece? The champagne—?”

  “The doctor was between them. No. I remembered, however, the luncheon incident. The sleeping tablets rolling under the table.”

  “And the girl picked them up?”

  “Assisted by Benito. During the dispute at dinner over the champagne, Benito filled the glasses. His napkin hid the aunt’s glass from her eyes. Not from mine, however. You see, I saw his hand reflected from above in the little cupid mirror.”

  There was a long silence.

  “Exasperation,” said Lord John, “may be the motive of many unsolved crimes. By the way I was reminded of this story by the lady with the nervous hands. She has changed a good deal of course, but she still has that trick of crumbling her bread with her fingers.”

  The guest stared at him.

  “Have we finished?” asked Lord John. “Shall we go?” They rose. Benito, bowing, held open the dining-room door.

  “Good evening, Benito,” said Lord John.

  “Good evening, my lord,” said Benito.

  A Fool About Money

  “Where money is concerned,” Harold Hancock told his audience at the enormous cocktail party, “my poor Hersey — and she won’t mind my saying so, will you, darling? — is the original dumbbell. Did I ever tell you about her trip to Dunedin?”

  Did he ever tell them? Hersey thought. Wherever two or three were gathered did he ever fail to tell them? The predictable laugh, the lovingly coddled pause, and the punchline led into and delivered like an act of God—did he, for pity’s sake, ever tell them!

  Away he went, mock-serious, empurpled, expansive, and Hersey put on the comic baby face he expected of her. Poor Hersey, they would say, such a goose about money. It’s a shame to laugh.

  “It was like this—” Harold began…

  It had happened twelve years ago when they were first in New Zealand. Harold was occupied with a conference in Christchurch and Hersey was to stay with a friend in Dunedin. He had arranged that she would draw on his firm’s Dunedin branch for money and take in her handbag no more than what she needed for the journey. “You know how you are,” Harold said.

  He arranged for her taxi, made her check that she had her ticket and reservation for the train, and reminded her that if on the journey she wanted cups of tea or synthetic coffee or a cooked lunch, she would have to take to her heels at the appropriate stations and vie with the competitive male. At this point her taxi was announced and Harold was summoned to a long-distance call from London.

  “You push off,” he said. “Don’t forget that fiver on the dressing table. You won’t need it but you’d better have it. Keep your wits about you. ’Bye, dear.”

  He was still shouting into the telephone when she left.

  She had enjoyed the adventurous feeling of being on her own. Although Harold had said you didn’t in New Zealand, she tipped the taxi driver and he carried her suitcase to the train and found her seat, a single one just inside the door of a Pullman car.

  A lady was occupying the seat facing hers and next to the window.

  She was well-dressed, middle-aged and of a sandy complexion with noticeably light eyes. She had put a snakeskin dressing case on the empty seat beside her.

  “It doesn’t seem to be taken,” she said, smiling at Hersey.

  They socialized—tentatively at first and, as the journey progressed, more freely. The lady (in his version Harold always called her Mrs. X) confided that she was going all the way to Dunedin to visit her daughter. Hersey offered reciprocative information. In the world outside, plains and mountains performed a grandiose kind of measure and telegraph wires leaped and looped with frantic precision.

  An hour passed. The lady extracted a novel from her dressing case and Hersey, impressed by the handsome appointments and immaculate order, had a good look inside the case.

  The conductor came through the car intoning, “Ten minutes for refreshments at Ashburton.”

  “Shall you join in the onslaught?” asked the lady. “It’s a free-for-all.”

  “Shall you?”

  “Well—I might. When I travel with my daughter we take turns. I get the morning coffee and she gets the afternoon. I’m a bit slow on my pins, actually.”

  She made very free use of the word “actually.”

  Hersey instantly offered to get their coffee at Ashburton and her companion, after a proper show of diffidence, gaily agreed. They explored their handbags for the correct amount. The train uttered a warning scream and everybody crowded into the corridor as it drew up to the platform.

  Hersey left her handbag with the lady (an indiscretion heavily emphasized by Harold) and sprinted to the refreshment counter where she was blocked off by a phalanx of men. Train fever was running high by the time she was served and her return trip with brimming cups was hazardous indeed.

  The lady was holding both their handbags as if she hadn’t stirred an inch.

  Between Ashburton and Oamaru, a long stretch, they developed their acquaintanceship further, discovered many tastes in common, and exchanged confidences and names. The lady was called Mrs. Fortescue. Sometimes they dozed. Together, at Oamaru, they joined in an assault on the dining room and together they returned to the carriage where Hersey scuffled in her stuffed handbag for a powder-compact. As usual it was in a muddle.

  Suddenly a thought struck her like a blow in the wind and a lump of ice ran down her gullet into her stomach. She made an exhaustive search but there was no doubt about it.

  Harold’s fiver was gone.

  Hersey let the handbag fall in her lap, raised her head, and found that her companion was staring at her with a very curious expression on her face. Hersey had been about to confide her awful intelligence but the lump of ice was exchanged for a coal of fire. She was racked by a terrible suspicion.

  “Anything wrong?” asked Mrs. Fortescue in an artificial voice.

  Hersey heard herself say, “No. Why?”

  “Oh, nothing,” she said rather hurriedly. “I thought— perhaps—like me, actually, you have bag trouble.”

  “I do, rather,” Hersey said.

  They laughed uncomfortably.

  The next hour passed in mounting tension. Both ladies affected to read their novels. Occasionally one of them would look up to find the other one staring at her. Hersey’s suspicions increased rampantly.

  “Ten minutes for refreshments at Palmerston South,” said the conductor, lurching through the car.

  Hersey had made up her mind. “Your turn!” she cried brightly.

  “Is it? Oh. Yes.”

  “I think I’ll have tea. The coffee was awful.”

  “So’s the tea ac
tually. Always. Do we,” Mrs. Fortescue swallowed, “do we really want anything?”

  “I do,” said Hersey very firmly and opened her handbag. She fished out her purse and took out the correct amount. “And a bun,” she said. There was no gainsaying her. “I’ve got a headache,” she lied. “I’ll be glad of a cuppa.”

  When they arrived at Palmerston South, Hersey said, “Shall I?” and reached for Mrs. Fortescue’s handbag. But Mrs. Fortescue muttered something about requiring it for change and almost literally bolted. “All that for nothing!” thought Hersey in despair. And then, seeing the elegant dressing case still on the square seat, she suddenly reached out and opened it.

  On top of the neatly arranged contents lay a crumpled five-pound note.

  At the beginning of the journey when Mrs. Fortescue had opened the case, there had, positively, been no fiver stuffed in it. Hersey snatched the banknote, stuffed it into her handbag, shut the dressing case, and leaned back, breathing short with her eyes shut.

  When Mrs. Fortescue returned she was scarlet in the face and trembling. She looked continuously at her dressing case and seemed to be in two minds whether or not to open it. Hersey died a thousand deaths.

  The remainder of the journey was a nightmare. Both ladies pretended to read and to sleep. If ever Hersey had read guilt in a human countenance it was in Mrs. Fortescue’s.

  “I ought to challenge her,” Hersey thought. “But I won’t. I’m a moral coward and I’ve got back my fiver.”

  The train was already drawing into Dunedin station and Hersey had gathered herself and her belongings when Mrs. Fortescue suddenly opened her dressing case. For a second or two she stared into it. Then she stared at Hersey. She opened and shut her mouth three times. The train jerked to a halt and Hersey fled.

  Her friend greeted her warmly. When they were in the car she said, “Oh, before I forget! There’s a telegram for you.”

  It was from Harold.

  It said:

  YOU FORGOT YOUR FIVER, YOU DUMBBELL. LOVE HAROLD.

  Harold had delivered the punchline. His listeners had broken into predictable guffaws. He had added the customary coda: “And she didn’t know Mrs. X’s address, so she couldn’t do a thing about it. So of course to this day Mrs. X thinks Hersey pinched her fiver.”

  Hersey, inwardly seething, had reacted in the sheepish manner Harold expected of her when from somewhere at the back of the group a wailing broke out.

  A lady erupted as if from a football scrimmage. She looked wildly about her, spotted Hersey, and made for her.

  “At last, at last!” cried the lady. “After all these years!”

  It was Mrs. Fortescue.

  “It was your fiver!” she gabbled. “It happened at Ashburton when I minded your bag. It was, it was!”

  She turned on Harold. “It’s all your fault,” she amazingly announced. “And mine of course.” She returned to Hersey. “I’m dreadfully inquisitive. It’s a compulsion. I—I —couldn’t resist. I looked at your passport. I looked at everything. And my own handbag was open on my lap. And the train gave one of those recoupling jerks and both our handbags were upset. And I could see you,” she chattered breathlessly to Hersey, “coming back with that ghastly coffee.”

  “So I shoveled things back and there was the fiver on the floor. Well, I had one and I thought it was mine and there wasn’t time to put it in my bag, so I slapped it into my dressing case. And then, when I paid my luncheon bill at Oamaru, I found my own fiver in a pocket of my bag.”

  “Oh, my God!” said Hersey.

  “Yes. And I couldn’t bring myself to confess. I thought you might leave your bag with me if you went to the loo and I could put it back. But you didn’t. And then, at Dunedin, I looked in my dressing case and the fiver was gone. So I thought you knew I knew.” She turned on Harold.

  “You must have left two fivers on the dressing table,” she accused.

  “Yes!” Hersey shouted. “You did, you did! There were two. You put a second one out to get change.”

  “Why the hell didn’t you say so!” Harold roared.

  “I’d forgotten. You know yourself,” Hersey said with the glint of victory in her eye, “it’s like you always say, darling, I’m such a fool about money.”

  Morepork

  On the morning before he died, Caley Bridgeman woke to the smell of canvas and the promise of a warm day. Bell-birds had begun to drop their two dawn notes into the cool air and a native wood pigeon flopped onto the ridgepole of his tent. He got up and went outside. Beech bush, emerging from the night, was threaded with mist. The voices of the nearby creek and the more distant Wainui River, in endless colloquy with stones and boulders, filled the intervals between bird song. Down beyond the river he glimpsed, through shadowy trees, the two Land-Rovers and the other tents: his wife’s; his stepson’s; David Wingfield’s, the taxidermist’s. And Solomon Gosse’s. Gosse, with whom he had fallen out.

  If it came to that, he had fallen out, more or less, with all of them, but he attached little importance to the circumstance. His wife he had long ago written off as an unintelligent woman. They had nothing in common. She was not interested in bird song.

  “Tint Ding,” chimed the bellbirds.

  Tonight, if all went well, they would be joined on tape with the little night owl—Ninox novaeseelandiae, the ruru, the morepork.

  He looked across the gully to where, on the lip of a cliff, a black beech rose high against paling stars. His gear was stowed away at its foot, well hidden, ready to be installed, and now, two hours at least before the campers stirred, was the time to do it.

  He slipped down between fern, scrub and thorny undergrowth to where he had laid a rough bridge above a very deep and narrow channel. Through this channel flowed a creek which joined the Wainui below the tents. At that point the campers had dammed it up to make a swimming pool. He had not cared to join in their enterprise.

  The bridge had little more than a four-foot span. It consisted of two beech logs resting on the verges and overlaid by split branches nailed across them. Twenty feet below, the creek glinted and prattled. The others had jumped the gap and goaded him into doing it himself. If they tried, he thought sourly, to do it with twenty-odd pounds of gear on their backs, they’d sing a different song.

  He arrived at the tree. Everything was in order, packed in green waterproof bags and stowed in a hollow under the roots.

  When he climbed the tree to place his parabolic microphone, he found bird droppings, fresh from the night visit of the morepork.

  He set to work.

  At half-past eleven that morning, Bridgeman came down from an exploratory visit to a patch of beech forest at the edge of the Bald Hill. A tui sang the opening phrase of “Home to Our Mountains,” finishing with a consequential splutter and a sound like that made by someone climbing through a wire fence. Close at hand, there was a sudden flutter and a minuscule shriek. Bridgeman moved with the habitual quiet of the bird watcher into a patch of scrub and pulled up short.

  He was on the lip of a bank. Below him was the blond poll of David Wingfield.

  “What have you done?” Bridgeman said.

  The head moved slowly and tilted. They stared at each other. “What have you got in your hands?” Bridgeman said. “Open your hands.”

  The taxidermist’s clever hands opened. A feathered morsel lay in his palm. Legs like twigs stuck up their clenched feet. The head dangled. It was a rifleman, tiniest and friendliest of all New Zealand birds.

  “Plenty more where this came from,” said David Wingfield. “I wanted it to complete a group. No call to look like that.”

  “I’ll report you.”

  “Balls.”

  “Think so? By God, you’re wrong. I’ll ruin you.”

  “Ah, stuff it!” Wingfield got to his feet, a giant of a man.

  For a moment it looked as if Bridgeman would leap down on him.

  “Cut it out,” Wingfield said. “I could do you with one hand.”

  He took a smal
l box from his pocket, put the strangled rifleman in it and closed the lid.

  “Gidday,” he said. He picked up his shotgun and walked away—slowly.

  At noon the campers had lunch, cooked by Susan Bridgeman over the campfire. They had completed the dam, building it up with enormous turfs backed by boulders. Already the creek overflowed above its juncture with the Wainui. They had built up to the top of the banks on either side, because if snow in the back country should melt or torrential rain come over from the west coast, all the creeks and rivers would become torrents and burst through the foothills. “Isn’t he coming in for tucker?” Clive Grey asked his mother. He never used his stepfather’s name if he could avoid it.

  “I imagine not,” she said. “He took enough to last a week.”

  “I saw him,” Wingfield offered.

  “Where?” Solomon Gosse asked.

  “In the bush below the Bald Hill.”

  “Good patch for tuis. Was he putting out his honey pots?”

  “I didn’t ask,” Wingfield said, and laughed shortly.

  Gosse looked curiously at him. “Like that, was it?” he said softly.

  “Very like that,” Wingfield agreed, glancing at Susan. “I imagine he won’t be visiting us today,” he said. “Or tonight, of course.”

  “Good,” said Bridgeman’s stepson loudly.

  “Don’t talk like that, Clive,” said his mother automatically.

  “Why not?” he asked, and glowered at her.

  Solomon Gosse pulled a deprecating grimace. “This is the hottest day we’ve had,” he said. “Shan’t we be pleased with our pool!”

  “I wouldn’t back the weather to last, though,” Wingfield said.

  Solomon speared a sausage and quizzed it thoughtfully. “I hope it lasts,” he said.

  It lasted for the rest of that day and through the following night up to eleven o’clock, when Susan Bridgeman and her lover left their secret meeting place in the bush and returned to the sleeping camp. Before they parted she said, “He wouldn’t divorce me. Not if we yelled it from the mountaintop, he wouldn’t.”