"Natural affection is one thing," said Miss Ramsbottom, "and I hope I've got as much of it as anyone. But I won't stand for wickedness. Wickedness has to be destroyed."
II
"Went off without a word to me," said Mrs Crump, raising her red, wrathful face from the pastry she was now rolling out on the board. "Slipped out without a word to anybody. Sly, that's what it is. Sly! Afraid she'd be stopped and I would have stopped her if I'd caught her! The idea! There's the master dead, Mr Lance coming home that hasn't been home for years and I said to Crump, I said, 'Day out or no day out, I know my duty. There's not going to be cold supper tonight as is usual on a Thursday, but a proper dinner. A gentleman coming home from abroad with his wife, what was formerly married in the aristocracy, things must be properly done.' You know me, miss, you know I take a pride in my work."
Mary Dove, the recipient of these confidences, nodded her head gently.
"And what does Crump say?" Mrs Crump's voice rose angrily. "'It's my day off and I'm goin' off,' that's what he says. 'And a fig for the aristocracy,' he says. No pride in his work. Crump hasn't. So off he goes and I tell Gladys she'll have to manage alone tonight. She just says. 'Alright, Mrs Crump,' then, when my back's turned out she sneaks. It wasn't her day out, anyway. Friday's her day. How we're going to manage now, I don't know! Thank goodness, Mr Lance hasn't brought his wife here with him today."
"We shall manage, Mrs Crump," Mary's voice was both soothing and authoritative, "if we just simplify the menu a little." She outlined a few suggestions. Mrs Crump nodded unwilling acquiescence. "I shall be able to serve that quite easily," Mary concluded.
"You mean you'll wait at table yourself, Miss?" Mrs Crump sounded doubtful.
"If Gladys doesn't come back in time."
"She won't come back," said Mrs Crump. "Gallivanting off, wasting her money somewhere in the shops. She's got a young man, you know, miss, though you wouldn't think it to look at her. Albert his name is. Going to get married next spring, so she tells me. Don't know what the married state's like, these girls don't. What I've been through with Crump." She sighed, then said in an ordinary voice, "What about tea, miss. Who's going to clear it away and wash it up?"
"I'll do that," said Mary. "I'll go and do it now."
The lights had not been turned on in the drawing-room though Adele Fortescue was still sitting on the sofa behind the tea tray.
"Shall I switch the lights on, Mrs Fortescue?" Mary asked. Adele did not answer.
Mary switched on the lights and went across to the window where she pulled the curtains across. It was only then that she turned her head and saw the face of the woman who had sagged back against the cushions. A half eaten scone spread with honey was beside her and her tea cup was still half full. Death had come to Adele Fortescue suddenly and swiftly.
III
"Well?" demanded Inspector Neele impatiently.
The doctor said promptly:
"Cyanide – potassium cyanide probably – in the tea."
"Cyanide," muttered Neele.
The doctor looked at him with slight curiosity.
"You're taking this hard – any special reason –"
"She was cast as a murderess," said Neele.
"And she turns out to be a victim. Hm. You'll have to think again, won't you?"
Neele nodded. His face was bitter and his jaw was grimly set.
Poisoned! Right under his nose. Taxine in Rex Fortescue's breakfast coffee, cyanide in Adele Fortescue's tea. Still an intimate family affair. Or so it seemed.
Adele Fortescue, Jennifer Fortescue, Elaine Fortescue and the newly arrived Lance Fortescue had had tea together in the library. Lance had gone up to see Miss Ramsbottom, Jennifer had gone to her own sitting-room to write letters, Elaine had been the last to leave the library. According to her Adele had then been in perfect health and had just been pouring herself out a last cup of tea.
A last cup of tea! Yes, it had indeed been her last cup of tea.
And after that a blank twenty minutes, perhaps, until Mary Dove had come into the room and discovered the body.
And during that twenty minutes –
Inspector Neele swore to himself and went out into the kitchen.
Sitting in a chair by the kitchen table, the vast figure of Mrs Crump, her belligerence pricked like a balloon, hardly stirred as he came in.
"Where's that girl? Has she come back yet?"
"Gladys? No – she's not back – Won't be, I suspect, until eleven o'clock."
"She made the tea, you say, and took it in."
"I didn't touch it, sir, as God's my witness. And what's more I don't believe Gladys did anything she shouldn't. She wouldn't do a thing like that – not Gladys. She's a good enough girl, sir – a bit foolish like, that's all – not wicked."
No, Neele did not think that Gladys was wicked. He did not think that Gladys was a poisoner. And in any case the cyanide had not been in the teapot.
"But what made her go off suddenly – like this? It wasn't her day out, you say."
"No, sir, tomorrow's her day out."
"Does Crump –"
Mrs Crump's belligerence suddenly revived. Her voice rose wrathfully.
"Don't you go fastening anything on Crump. Crump's out of it. He went off at three o'clock – and thankful I am now that he did. He's as much out of it as Mr Percival himself."
Percival Fortescue had only just returned from London – to be greeted by the astounding news of this second tragedy.
"I wasn't accusing Crump," said Neele mildly. "I just wondered if he knew anything about Gladys's plans."
"She had her best nylons on," said Mrs Crump. "She was up to something. Don't tell me! Didn't cut any sandwiches for tea, either. Oh yes, she was up to something. I'll give her a piece of my mind when she comes back."
When she comes back –
A faint uneasiness possessed Neele. To shake it off he went upstairs to Adele Fortescue's bedroom. A lavish apartment – all rose brocade hangings and a vast gilt bed. On one side of the room was a door into a mirror lined bathroom with a sunk orchid pink porcelain bath. Beyond the bathroom, reached by a communicating door, was Rex Fortescue's dressing room. Neele went back into Adele's bedroom, and through the door on the farther side of the room into her sitting-room.
The room was furnished in Empire style with a rose pile carpet. Neele only gave it a cursory glance for that particular room had had his close attention on the preceding day – with special attention paid to the small elegant desk.
Now, however, he stiffened to sudden attention. On the centre of the rose pile carpet was a small piece of caked mud.
Neele went over to it and picked it up. The mud was still damp.
He looked round – there were no footprints visible – only this one isolated fragment of wet earth.
IV
Inspector Neele looked round the bedroom that belonged to Gladys Martin. It was past eleven o'clock – Crump had come in half an hour ago – but there was still no sign of Gladys. Inspector Neele looked round him. Whatever Gladys's training had been, her own natural instincts were slovenly. The bed, Inspector Neele judged, was seldom made, the windows seldom opened. Gladys's personal habits, however, were not his immediate concern. Instead, he went carefully through her possessions.
They consisted for the most part of cheap and rather pathetic finery. There was little that was durable or of good quality. The elderly Ellen, whom he had called upon to assist him, had not been helpful. She didn't know what clothes Gladys had or hadn't. She couldn't say what, if anything, was missing. He turned from the clothes and the underclothes to the contents of the chest of drawers. There Gladys kept her treasures. There were picture postcards and newspaper cuttings, knitting patterns, hints on beauty culture, dressmaking and fashion advice.
Inspector Neele sorted them neatly in various categories. The picture postcards consisted mainly of views of various places where he presumed Gladys had spent her holidays. Amongst them were three picture postca
rds signed "Bert." Bert, he took to be the "young man" referred to by Mrs Crump. The first postcard said – in an illiterate hand "All the best. Missing you a lot. Yours ever, Bert." The second said, "Lots of nice looking girls here but not one that's a patch on you. Be seeing you soon. Don't forget our date. And remember after that – it's thumbs up and living happy ever after." The third said merely, "Don't forget. I'm trusting you. Love, B."
Next, Neele looked through the newspaper cuttings and sorted them into three piles. There were the dressmaking and beauty hints, there were items about cinema stars to which Gladys had appeared greatly addicted and she had also, it appeared, been attracted by the latest marvels of science. There were cuttings about flying saucers, about secret weapons, about truth drugs used by Russians, and claims for fantastic drugs discovered by American doctors. All the witchcraft, so Neele thought, of our twentieth century. But in all the contents of the room there was nothing to give him a clue to her disappearance. She had kept no diary, not that he had expected that. It was a remote possibility. There was no unfinished letter, no record at all of anything she might have seen in the house which could have had a bearing on Rex Fortescue's death. Whatever Gladys had seen, whatever Gladys had known, there was no record of it. It would still have to be guesswork why the second tea tray had been left in the hall, and Gladys herself had so suddenly vanished.
Sighing, Neele left the room, shutting the door behind him.
As he prepared to descend the small winding stairs he heard a noise of running feet coming along the landing below.
The agitated face of Sergeant Hay looked up at him from the bottom of the stairs. Sergeant Hay was panting a little.
"Sir," he said urgently. "Sir! We've found her –"
"Found her?"
"It was the housemaid, sir – Ellen – remembered as she hadn't brought the clothes in from where they were hanging on the line – just round the corner from the back door. So she went out with a torch to take them in and she almost fell over the body – the girl's body – strangled, she was, with a stocking round her throat – been dead for hours, I'd say. And, sir, it's a wicked kind of joke – there was a clothes peg clipped on her nose –"
Chapter 13
An elderly lady travelling by train had bought three morning papers, and each of them as she finished it, folded it and laid it aside, showed the same headline. It was no longer a question now of a small paragraph hidden away in the corner of the papers. There were headlines with flaring announcements of Triple Tragedy at Yewtree Lodge.
The old lady sat very upright, looking out of the window of the train, her lips pursed together, an expression of distress and disapproval on her pink and white wrinkled face. Miss Marple had left St Mary Mead by the early train, changing at the junction and going on to London where she took a Circle train to another London terminus and thence on to Baydon Heath.
At the station she signalled a taxi and asked to be taken to Yewtree Lodge. So charming, so innocent, such a fluffy and pink and white old lady was Miss Marple that she gained admittance to what was now practically a fortress in a state of siege far more easily than could have been believed possible. Though an army of reporters and photographers were being kept at bay by the police, Miss Marple was allowed to drive in without question, so impossible would it have been to believe that she was anyone but an elderly relative of the family.
Miss Marple paid off the taxi in a careful assortment of small change, and rang the front-door bell. Crump opened it and Miss Marple summed him up with an experienced glance. "A shifty eye," she said to herself. "Scared to death, too."
Crump saw a tall, elderly lady wearing an old-fashioned tweed coat and skirt, a couple of scarves and a small felt hat with a bird's wing. The old lady carried a capacious handbag and an aged but good quality suitcase reposed by her feet. Crump recognised a lady when he saw one and said:
"Yes, madam?" in his best and most respectful voice.
"Could I see the mistress of the house, please?" said Miss Marple.
Crump drew back to let her in. He picked up the suitcase and put it carefully down in the hall.
"Well, madam," he said rather dubiously, "I don't know who exactly –"
Miss Marple helped him out.
"I have come," she said, "to speak about the poor girl who was killed. Gladys Martin."
"Oh, I see, madam. Well in that case –" he broke off, and looked towards the library door from which a tall young woman had just emerged. "This is Mrs Lance Fortescue, madam," he said.
Pat came forward and she and Miss Marple looked at each other. Miss Marple was aware of a faint feeling of surprise. She had not expected to see someone like Patricia Fortescue in this particular house. Its interior was much as she had pictured it, but Pat did not somehow match with that interior.
"It's about Gladys, madam," said Crump helpfully.
Pat said rather hesitatingly:
"Will you come in here? We shall be quite alone."
She led the way into the library and Miss Marple followed her.
"There wasn't anyone specially you wanted to see, was there?" said Pat, "because perhaps I shan't be much good. You see my husband and I only came back from Africa a few days ago. We don't really know anything much about the household. But I can fetch my sister-in-law or my brother-in-law's wife."
Miss Marple looked at the girl and liked her. She liked her gravity and her simplicity. For some strange reason she felt sorry for her. A background of shabby chintz and horses and dogs. Miss Marple felt vaguely, would have been much more suitable than this richly furnished interior decor. At the pony show and gymkhanas held locally round St Mary Mead, Miss Marple had met many Pats and knew them well. She felt at home with this rather unhappy looking girl.
"It's very simple, really," said Miss Marple, taking off her gloves carefully and smoothing out the fingers of them. "I read in the paper, you see, about Gladys Martin having been killed. And of course I know all about her. She comes from my part of the country. I trained her, in fact, for domestic service. And since this terrible thing has happened to her, I felt – well, I felt that I ought to come and see if there was anything I could do about it."
"Yes," said Pat. "Of course. I see."
And she did see. Miss Marple's action appeared to her natural and inevitable.
"I think it's a very good thing you have come," said Pat. "Nobody seems to know very much about her. I mean relations and all that."
"No," said Miss Marple, "of course not. She hadn't got any relations. She came to me from the orphanage. St Faith's. A very well run place though sadly short of funds. We do our best for the girls there, try to give them a good training and all that. Gladys came to me when she was seventeen and I taught her how to wait at table and keep the silver and everything like that. Of course she didn't stay long. They never do. As soon as she got a little experience, she went and took a job in a cafй. The girls nearly always want to do that. They think it's freer, you know, and a gayer life. Perhaps it may be. I really don't know."
"I never even saw her," said Pat. "Was she a pretty girl?"
"Oh, no," said Miss Marple, "not at all. Adenoids, and a good many spots. She was rather pathetically stupid, too. I don't suppose," went on Miss Marple thoughtfully, "that she ever made many friends anywhere. She was very keen on men, poor girl. But men didn't take much notice of her and other girls rather made use of her."
"It sounds rather cruel," said Pat.
"Yes, my dear," said Miss Marple, "life is cruel, I'm afraid. One doesn't really know what to do with the Gladyses. They enjoy going to the pictures and all that, but they're always thinking of impossible things that can't possibly happen to them. Perhaps that's happiness of a kind. But they get disappointed. I think Gladys was disappointed in cafй and restaurant life. Nothing very glamorous or interesting happened to her and it was just hard on the feet. Probably that's why she came back into private service. Do you know how long she'd been here?"
Pat shook her head.
"Not very long, I should think. Only a month or two." Pat paused and then went on, "It seems so horrible and futile that she should have been caught up in this thing. I suppose she'd seen something or noticed something."
"It was the clothes peg that really worried me," said Miss Marple in her gentle voice.
"The clothes peg?"
"Yes. I read about it in the papers. I suppose it is true? That when she was found there was a clothes peg clipped on to her nose."
Pat nodded. The colour rose to Miss Marple's pink cheeks.
"That's what made me so very angry, if you can understand, my dear. It was such a cruel, contemptuous gesture. It gave me a kind of picture of the murderer. To do a thing like that! It's very wicked, you know, to affront human dignity. Particularly if you've already killed."
Pat said slowly:
"I think I see what you mean." She got up. "I think you'd better come and see Inspector Neele. He's in charge of the case and he's here now. You'll like him, I think. He's a very human person." She gave a sudden, quick shiver. "The whole thing is such a horrible nightmare. Pointless. Mad. Without rhyme or reason in it."
"I wouldn't say that, you know," said Miss Marple. "No, I wouldn't say that."
Inspector Neele was looking tired and haggard. Three deaths and the press of the whole country whooping down the trail. A case that seemed to be shaping in well-known fashion had gone suddenly haywire. Adele Fortescue, that appropriate suspect, was now the second victim of an incomprehensible murder case. At the close of that fatal day the Assistant Commissioner had sent for Neele and the two men had talked far into the night.
In spite of his dismay, or rather behind it, Inspector Neele had felt a faint inward satisfaction. That pattern of the wife and the lover. It had been too slick, too easy. He had always mistrusted it. And now that mistrust of his was justified.
"The whole thing takes on an entirely different aspect," the A.C. had said, striding up and down his room and frowning. "It looks to me, Neele, as though we'd got someone mentally unhinged to deal with. First the husband, then the wife. But the very circumstances of the case seem to show that it's an inside job. It's all there, in the family. Someone who sat down to breakfast with Fortescue put taxine in his coffee or on his food, someone who had tea with the family that day put potassium cyanide in Adele Fortescue's cup of tea. Someone trusted, unnoticed, one of the family. Which of 'em, Neele?"
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