“Oh, of course,” said Miss Marple, “there’s noise everywhere, isn’t there? Even in St. Mary Mead. We’re now quite close to an airfield, you know, and really the way those jet planes fly over! Most frightening. Two panes in my little greenhouse broken the other day. Going through the sound barrier, or so I understand, though what it means I never have known.”
“It’s quite simple, really,” said Bryan, approaching amiably. “You see, it’s like this.”
Miss Marple dropped her handbag and Bryan politely picked it up. At the same moment Mrs. McGillicuddy approached Emma and murmured, in an anguished voice—the anguish was quite genuine since Mrs. McGillicuddy deeply disliked the task which she was now performing:
“I wonder—could I go upstairs for a moment?”
“Of course,” said Emma.
“I’ll take you,” said Lucy.
Lucy and Mrs. McGillicuddy left the room together.
“Very cold, driving today,” said Miss Marple in a vaguely explanatory manner.
“About the sound barrier,” said Bryan, “you see it’s like this… Oh, hallo, there’s Quimper.”
The doctor drove up in his car. He came in rubbing his hands and looking very cold.
“Going to snow,” he said, “that’s my guess. Hallo, Emma, how are you? Good lord, what’s all this?”
“We made you a birthday cake,” said Emma. “D’you remember? You told me today was your birthday.”
“I didn’t expect all this,” said Quimper. “You know it’s years—why, it must be—yes sixteen years since anyone’s remembered my birthday.” He looked almost uncomfortably touched.
“Do you know Miss Marple?” Emma introduced him.
“Oh, yes,” said Miss Marple, “I met Dr. Quimper here before and he came and saw me when I had a very nasty chill the other day and he was most kind.”
“All right again now, I hope?” said the doctor.
Miss Marple assured him that she was quite all right now.
“You haven’t been to see me lately, Quimper,” said Mr. Crackenthorpe. “I might be dying for all the notice you take of me!”
“I don’t see you dying yet awhile,” said Dr. Quimper.
“I don’t mean to,” said Mr. Crackenthorpe. “Come on, let’s have tea. What’re we waiting for?”
“Oh, please,” said Miss Marple, “don’t wait for my friend. She would be most upset if you did.”
They sat down and started tea. Miss Marple accepted a piece of bread and butter first, and then went on to a sandwich.
“Are they—?” she hesitated.
“Fish,” said Bryan. “I helped make ’em.”
Mr. Crackenthorpe gave a cackle of laughter.
“Poisoned fishpaste,” he said. “That’s what they are. Eat ’em at your peril.”
“Please, Father!”
“You’ve got to be careful what you eat in this house,” said Mr. Crackenthorpe to Miss Marple. “Two of my sons have been murdered like flies. Who’s doing it—that’s what I want to know.”
“Don’t let him put you off,” said Cedric, handing the plate once more to Miss Marple. “A touch of arsenic improves the complexion, they say, so long as you don’t have too much.”
“Eat one yourself, boy,” said old Mr. Crackenthorpe.
“Want me to be official taster?” said Cedric. “Here goes.”
He took a sandwich and put it whole into his mouth. Miss Marple gave a gentle, ladylike little laugh and took a sandwich. She took a bite, and said:
“I do think it’s so brave of you all to make these jokes. Yes, really, I think it’s very brave indeed. I do admire bravery so much.”
She gave a sudden gasp and began to choke. “A fish bone,” she gasped out, “in my throat.”
Quimper rose quickly. He went across to her, moved her backwards towards the window and told her to open her mouth. He pulled out a case from his pocket, selecting some forceps from it. With quick professional skill he peered down the old lady’s throat. At that moment the door opened and Mrs. McGillicuddy, followed by Lucy, came in. Mrs. McGillicuddy gave a sudden gasp as her eyes fell on the tableau in front of her, Miss Marple leaning back and the doctor holding her throat and tilting up her head.
“But that’s him,” cried Mrs. McGillicuddy. “That’s the man in the train….”
With incredible swiftness Miss Marple slipped from the doctor’s grasp and came towards her friend.
“I thought you’d recognize him, Elspeth!” she said. “No. Don’t say another word.” She turned triumphantly round to Dr. Quimper. “You didn’t know, did you, Doctor, when you strangled that woman in the train, that somebody actually saw you do it? It was my friend here. Mrs. McGillicuddy. She saw you. Do you understand? Saw you with her own eyes. She was in another train that was running parallel with yours.”
“What the hell?” Dr. Quimper made a quick step towards Mrs. McGillicuddy but again, swiftly, Miss Marple was between him and her.
“Yes,” said Miss Marple. “She saw you, and she recognizes you, and she’ll swear to it in court. It’s not often, I believe,” went on Miss Marple in her gentle plaintive voice, “that anyone actually sees a murder committed. It’s usually circumstantial evidence of course. But in this case the conditions were very unusual. There was actually an eyewitness to murder.”
“You devilish old hag,” said Dr. Quimper. He lunged forward at Miss Marple but this time it was Cedric who caught him by the shoulder.
“So you’re the murdering devil, are you?” said Cedric as he swung him round. “I never liked you and I always thought you were a wrong ’un, but lord knows, I never suspected you.”
Bryan Eastley came quickly to Cedric’s assistance. Inspector Craddock and Inspector Bacon entered the room from the farther door.
“Dr. Quimper,” said Bacon, “I must caution you that….”
“You can take your caution to hell,” said Dr. Quimper. “Do you think anyone’s going to believe what a couple of old women say? Who’s ever heard of all this rigmarole about a train!”
Miss Marple said: “Elspeth McGillicuddy reported the murder to the police at once on the 20th December and gave a description of the man.”
Dr. Quimper gave a sudden heave of the shoulders. “If ever a man had the devil’s own luck,” said Dr. Quimper.
“But—” said Mrs. McGillicuddy.
“Be quiet, Elspeth,” said Miss Marple.
“Why should I want to murder a perfectly strange woman?” said Dr. Quimper.
“She wasn’t a strange woman,” said Inspector Craddock. “She was your wife.”
Twenty-seven
“So you see,” said Miss Marple, “it really turned out to be, as I began to suspect, very, very simple. The simplest kind of crime. So many men seem to murder their wives.”
Mrs. McGillicuddy looked at Miss Marple and Inspector Craddock. “I’d be obliged,” she said, “if you’d put me a little more up to date.”
“He saw a chance, you see,” said Miss Marple, “of marrying a rich wife, Emma Crackenthorpe. Only he couldn’t marry her because he had a wife already. They’d been separated for years but she wouldn’t divorce him. That fitted in very well with what Inspector Craddock told me of this girl who called herself Anna Stravinska. She had an English husband, so she told one of her friends, and it was also said she was a very devout Catholic. Dr. Quimper couldn’t risk marrying Emma bigamously, so he decided, being a very ruthless and cold-blooded man, that he would get rid of his wife. The idea of murdering her in the train and later putting her body in the sarcophagus in the barn was really rather a clever one. He meant it to tie up, you see, with the Crackenthorpe family. Before that he’d written a letter to Emma which purported to be from the girl Martine whom Edmund Crackenthorpe had talked of marrying. Emma had told Dr. Quimper all about her brother, you see. Then, when the moment arose he encouraged her to go to the police with her story. He wanted the dead woman identified as Martine. I think he may have heard that inquiries were be
ing made by the Paris police about Anna Stravinska, and so he arranged to have a postcard come from her from Jamaica.
“It was easy for him to arrange to meet his wife in London, to tell her that he hoped to be reconciled with her and that he would like her to come down and ‘meet his family.’ We won’t talk about the next part of it, which is very unpleasant to think about. Of course he was a greedy man. When he thought about taxation, and how much it cuts into income, he began thinking that it would be nice to have a good deal more capital. Perhaps he’d already thought of that before he decided to murder his wife. Anyway, he started spreading rumours that someone was trying to poison old Mr. Crackenthorpe so as to get the ground prepared, and then he ended by administering arsenic to the family. Not too much, of course, for he didn’t want old Mr. Crackenthorpe to die.”
“But I still don’t see how he managed,” said Craddock. “He wasn’t in the house when the curry was being prepared.”
“Oh, but there wasn’t any arsenic in the curry then,” said Miss Marple. “He added it to the curry afterwards when he took it away to be tested. He probably put the arsenic in the cocktail jug earlier. Then, of course, it was quite easy for him, in his role of medical attendant, to poison off Alfred Crackenthorpe and also to send the tablets to Harold in London, having safeguarded himself by telling Harold that he wouldn’t need anymore tablets. Everything he did was bold and audacious and cruel and greedy, and I am really very, very sorry,” finished Miss Marple, looking as fierce as a fluffy old lady can look, “that they have abolished capital punishment because I do feel that if there is anyone who ought to hang, it’s Dr. Quimper.”
“Hear, hear,” said Inspector Craddock.
“It occurred to me, you know,” continued Miss Marple, “that even if you only see anybody from the back view, so to speak, nevertheless a back view is characteristic. I thought that if Elspeth were to see Dr. Quimper in exactly the same position as she’d seen him in the train in, that is, with his back to her, bent over a woman whom he was holding by the throat, then I was almost sure she would recognize him, or would make some kind of startled exclamation. That is why I had to lay my little plan with Lucy’s kind assistance.”
“I must say,” said Mrs. McGillicuddy, “it gave me quite a turn. I said, ‘That’s him’ before I could stop myself. And yet, you know, I hadn’t actually seen the man’s face and—”
“I was terribly afraid that you were going to say so, Elspeth,” said Miss Marple.
“I was,” said Mrs. McGillicuddy. “I was going to say that of course I hadn’t seen his face.”
“That,” said Miss Marple, “would have been quite fatal. You see, dear, he thought you really did recognize him. I mean, he couldn’t know that you hadn’t seen his face.”
“A good thing I held my tongue then,” said Mrs. McGillicuddy.
“I wasn’t going to let you say another word,” said Miss Marple.
Craddock laughed suddenly. “You two!” he said. “You’re a marvellous pair. What next, Miss Marple? What’s the happy ending? What happens to poor Emma Crackenthorpe, for instance?”
“She’ll get over the doctor, of course,” said Miss Marple, “and I dare say if her father were to die—and I don’t think he’s quite so robust as he thinks he is—that she’d go on a cruise or perhaps to stay abroad like Geraldine Webb, and I dare say something might come of it. A nicer man than Dr. Quimper, I hope.”
“What about Lucy Eyelesbarrow? Wedding bells there too?”
“Perhaps,” said Miss Marple, “I shouldn’t wonder.”
“Which of ’em is she going to choose?” said Dermot Craddock.
“Don’t you know?” said Miss Marple.
“No, I don’t,” said Craddock. “Do you?”
“Oh, yes, I think so,” said Miss Marple.
And she twinkled at him.
Credits
Cover illustration and design by Sara Wood
Agatha Christie
The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side
A Miss Marple Mystery
To
Margaret Rutherford in admiration
Contents
Dedication
Epigraph
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-two
Chapter Twenty-three
Out flew the web and floated wide;
The mirror crack’d from side to side;
“The curse is come upon me,” cried
The Lady of Shalott
Alfred Tennyson
One
I
Miss Jane Marple was sitting by her window. The window looked over her garden, once a source of pride to her. That was no longer so. Nowadays she looked out of the window and winced. Active gardening had been forbidden her for some time now. No stooping, no digging, no planting—at most a little light pruning. Old Laycock who came three times a week, did his best, no doubt. But his best, such as it was (which was not much) was only the best according to his lights, and not according to those of his employer. Miss Marple knew exactly what she wanted done, and when she wanted it done, and instructed him duly. Old Laycock then displayed his particular genius which was that of enthusiastic agreement and subsequent lack of performance.
“That’s right, missus. We’ll have them mecosoapies there and the Canterburys along the wall and as you say it ought to be got on with first thing next week.”
Laycock’s excuses were always reasonable, and strongly resembled those of Captain George’s in Three Men in a Boat for avoiding going to sea. In the captain’s case the wind was always wrong, either blowing off shore or in shore, or coming from the unreliable west, or the even more treacherous east. Laycock’s was the weather. Too dry—too wet—waterlogged—a nip of frost in the air. Or else something of great importance had to come first (usually to do with cabbages or brussels sprouts of which he liked to grow inordinate quantities). Laycock’s own principles of gardening were simple and no employer, however knowledgeable, could wean him from them.
They consisted of a great many cups of tea, sweet and strong, as an encouragement to effort, a good deal of sweeping up of leaves in the autumn, and a certain amount of bedding out of his own favourite plants, mainly asters and salvias—to “make a nice show,” as he put it, in summer. He was all in favour of syringeing roses for green-fly, but was slow to get around to it, and a demand for deep trenching for sweet peas was usually countered by the remark that you ought to see his own sweet peas! A proper treat last year, and no fancy stuff done beforehand.
To be fair, he was attached to his employers, humoured their fancies in horticulture (so far as no actual hard work was involved) but vegetables he knew to be the real stuff of life; a nice Savoy, or a bit of curly kale; flowers were fancy stuff such as ladies liked to go in for, having nothing better to do with their time. He showed his affection by producing presents of the aforementioned asters, salvias, lobelia edging, and summer chrysanthemums.
“Been doing some work at them new houses over at the Development. Want their gardens laid out nice, they do. More plants than they needed so I brought along a few, and I’ve put ’em in where them old-fashioned roses ain’t looking so well.”
Thinking of these things, Miss Marple averted her eyes from the garden, and picked up her knitting.
One had to face the fact: St. Mary Mead was not the place it had been. In a sense, of course, nothing was what it h
ad been. You could blame the war (both the wars) or the younger generation, or women going out to work, or the atom bomb, or just the Government—but what one really meant was the simple fact that one was growing old. Miss Marple, who was a very sensible lady, knew that quite well. It was just that, in a queer way, she felt it more in St. Mary Mead, because it had been her home for so long.
St. Mary Mead, the old world core of it, was still there. The Blue Boar was there, and the church and the vicarage and the little nest of Queen Anne and Georgian houses, of which hers was one. Miss Hartnell’s house was still there, and also Miss Hartnell, fighting progress to the last gasp. Miss Wetherby had passed on and her house was now inhabited by the bank manager and his family, having been given a face-lift by the painting of doors and windows a bright royal blue. There were new people in most of the other old houses, but the houses themselves were little changed in appearances since the people who had bought them had done so because they liked what the house agent called “old world charm.” They just added another bathroom, and spent a good deal of money on plumbing, electric cookers, and dishwashers.
But though the houses looked much as before, the same could hardly be said of the village street. When shops changed hands there, it was with a view to immediate and intemperate modernization. The fishmonger was unrecognizable with new super windows behind which the refrigerated fish gleamed. The butcher had remained conservative—good meat is good meat, if you have the money to pay for it. If not, you take the cheaper cuts and the tough joints and like it! Barnes, the grocer, was still there, unchanged, for which Miss Hartnell and Miss Marple and others daily thanked Heaven. So obliging, comfortable chairs to sit in by the counter, and cosy discussions as to cuts of bacon, and varieties of cheese. At the end of the street, however, where Mr. Toms had once had his basket shop stood a glittering new supermarket—anathema to the elderly ladies of St. Mary Mead.
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