The Complete Miss Marple Collection

by Agatha Christie

  “Ah,” said Professor Wanstead. “You have noticed that.”

  He went on. “Well, it was my part, or at any rate to begin with, to observe you, to watch what you were doing, to be near at hand in case there was any possibility of—well, we might call it roughly—dirty work of any kind. But things are slightly altered now. You must make up your mind if I am your enemy or your ally.”

  “Perhaps you are right,” said Miss Marple. “You put it very clearly but you have not given me any information about yourself yet on which to judge. You were a friend, I presume, of the late Mr. Rafiel?”

  “No,” said Professor Wanstead, “I was not a friend of Mr. Rafiel. I had met him once or twice. Once on a committee of a hospital, once at some other public event. I knew about him. He, I gather, also knew about me. If I say to you, Miss Marple, that I am a man of some eminence in my own profession, you may think me a man of bounding conceit.”

  “I don’t think so,” said Miss Marple. “I should say, if you say that about yourself, that you are probably speaking the truth. You are, perhaps, a medical man.”

  “Ah. You are perceptive, Miss Marple. Yes, you are quite perceptive. I have a medical degree, but I have a speciality too. I am a pathologist and psychologist. I don’t carry credentials about with me. You will probably have to take my word up to a certain point, though I can show you letters addressed to me, and possibly official documents that might convince you. I undertake mainly specialist work in connection with medical jurisprudence. To put it in perfectly plain everyday language, I am interested in the different types of criminal brain. That has been a study of mine for many years. I have written books on the subject, some of them violently disputed, some of them which have attracted adherence to my ideas. I do not do very arduous work nowadays, I spend my time mainly writing up my subject, stressing certain points that have appealed to me. From time to time I come across things that strike me as interesting. Things that I want to study more closely. This I am afraid must seem rather tedious to you.”

  “Not at all,” said Miss Marple. “I am hoping perhaps, from what you are saying now, that you will be able to explain to me certain things which Mr. Rafiel did not see fit to explain to me. He asked me to embark upon a certain project but he gave me no useful information on which to work. He left me to accept it and proceed, as it were, completely in the dark. It seemed to me extremely foolish of him to treat the matter in that way.”

  “But you accepted it?”

  “I accepted it. I will be quite honest with you. I had a financial incentive.”

  “Did that weigh with you?”

  Miss Marple was silent for a moment and then she said slowly,

  “You may not believe it, but my answer to that is, ‘Not really.’”

  “I am not surprised. But your interest was aroused. That is what you are trying to tell me.”

  “Yes. My interest was aroused. I had known Mr. Rafiel not well, casually, but for a certain period of time—some weeks in fact—in the West Indies. I see you know about it, more or less.”

  “I know that that was where Mr. Rafiel met you and where—shall I say—you two collaborated.”

  Miss Marple looked at him rather doubtfully. “Oh,” she said, “he said that, did he?” She shook her head.

  “Yes, he did,” said Professor Wanstead. “He said you had a remarkable flair for criminal matters.”

  Miss Marple raised her eyebrows as she looked at him.

  “And I suppose that seems to you most unlikely,” she said. “It surprises you.”

  “I seldom allow myself to be surprised at what happens,” said Professor Wanstead. “Mr. Rafiel was a very shrewd and astute man, a good judge of people. He thought that you, too, were a good judge of people.”

  “I would not set myself up as a good judge of people,” said Miss Marple. “I would only say that certain people remind me of certain other people that I have known, and that therefore I can presuppose a certain likeness between the way they would act. If you think I know all about what I am supposed to be doing here, you are wrong.”

  “By accident more than design,” said Professor Wanstead, “we seem to have settled here in a particularly suitable spot for discussion of certain matters. We do not appear to be overlooked, we cannot easily be overheard, we are not near a window or a door and there is no balcony or window overhead. In fact, we can talk.”

  “I should appreciate that,” said Miss Marple. “I am stressing the fact that I am myself completely in the dark as to what I am doing or supposed to be doing. I don’t know why Mr. Rafiel wanted it that way.”

  “I think I can guess that. He wanted you to approach a certain set of facts, of happenings, unbiased by what anyone would tell you first.”

  “So you are not going to tell me anything either?” Miss Marple sounded irritated. “Really!” she said, “there are limits.”

  “Yes,” said Professor Wanstead. He smiled suddenly. “I agree with you. We must do away with some of these limits. I am going to tell you certain facts that will make certain things fairly clear to you. You in turn may be able to tell me certain facts.”

  “I rather doubt it,” said Miss Marple. “One or two rather peculiar indications perhaps, but indications are not facts.”

  “Therefore—” said Professor Wanstead, and paused.

  “For goodness’ sake, tell me something,” said Miss Marple.

  Twelve

  A CONSULTATION

  “I’m not going to make a long story of things. I’ll explain quite simply how I came into this matter. I act as confidential adviser from time to time for the Home Office. I am also in touch with certain institutions. There are certain establishments which, in the event of crime, provide board and lodging for certain types of criminal who have been found guilty of certain acts. They remain there at what is termed Her Majesty’s pleasure, sometimes for a definite length of time and in direct association with their age. If they are below a certain age they have to be received in some place of detention specially indicated. You understand that, no doubt.”

  “Yes, I understand quite well what you mean.”

  “Usually I am consulted fairly soon after whatever the—shall we call it—crime has happened, to judge such matters as treatment, possibilities in the case, prognosis favourable or unfavourable, all the various words. They do not mean much and I will not go into them. But occasionally also I am consulted by a responsible Head of such an institution for a particular reason. In this matter I received a communication from a certain Department which was passed to me through the Home Office. I went to visit the Head of this institution. In fact, the Governor responsible for the prisoners or patients or whatever you like to call them. He was by way of being a friend of mine. A friend of fairly long standing though not one with whom I was on terms of great intimacy. I went down to the institution in question and the Governor laid his troubles before me. They referred to one particular inmate. He was not satisfied about this inmate. He had certain doubts. This was the case of a young man or one who had been a young man, in fact little more than a boy, when he came there. That was now several years ago. As time went on, and after the present Governor had taken up his own residence there (he had not been there at the original arrival of this prisoner), he became worried. Not because he himself was a professional man, but because he was a man of experience of criminal patients and prisoners. To put it quite simply, this had been a boy who from his early youth had been completely unsatisfactory. You can call it by what term you like. A young delinquent, a young thug, a bad lot, a person of diminished responsibility. There are many terms. Some of them fit, some of them don’t fit, some of them are merely puzzling. He was a criminal type. That was certain. He had joined gangs, he had beaten up people, he was a thief, he had stolen, he had embezzled, he had taken part in swindles, he had initiated certain frauds. In fact, he was a son who would be any father’s despair.”

  “Oh, I see,” said Miss Marple.

  “And what do you
see, Miss Marple?”

  “Well, what I think I see is that you are talking of Mr. Rafiel’s son.”

  “You are quite right. I am talking of Mr. Rafiel’s son. What do you know about him?”

  “Nothing,” said Miss Marple. “I only heard—and that was yesterday—that Mr. Rafiel had a delinquent, or unsatisfactory, if we like to put it mildly, son. A son with a criminal record. I know very little about him. Was he Mr. Rafiel’s only son?”

  “Yes, he was Mr. Rafiel’s only son. But Mr. Rafiel also had two daughters. One of them died when she was fourteen, the elder daughter married quite happily but had no children.”

  “Very sad for him.”

  “Possibly,” said Professor Wanstead. “One never knows. His wife died young and I think it possible that her death saddened him very much, though he was never willing to show it. How much he cared for his son and daughters I don’t know. He provided for them. He did his best for them. He did his best for his son, but what his feelings were one cannot say. He was not an easy man to read that way. I think his whole life and interest lay in his profession of making money. It was the making of it, like all great financiers, that interested him. Not the actual money which he secured by it. That, as you might say, was sent out like a good servant to earn more money in more interesting and unexpected ways. He enjoyed finance. He loved finance. He thought of very little else.

  “I think he did all that was possible for his son. He got him out of scrapes at school, he employed good lawyers to get him released from Court proceedings whenever possible, but the final blow came, perhaps presaged by some early happenings. The boy was taken to Court on a charge of assault against a young girl. It was said to be assault and rape and he suffered a term of imprisonment for it, with some leniency shown because of his youth. But later, a second and really serious charge was brought against him.”

  “He killed a girl,” said Miss Marple. “Is that right? That’s what I heard.”

  “He lured a girl away from her home. It was some time before her body was found. She had been strangled. And afterwards her face and head had been disfigured by some heavy stones or rocks, presumably to prevent her identity being made known.”

  “Not a very nice business,” said Miss Marple, in her most old-ladylike tone.

  Professor Wanstead looked at her for a moment or two.

  “You describe it that way?”

  “It is how it seems to me,” said Miss Marple. “I don’t like that sort of thing. I never have. If you expect me to feel sympathy, regret, urge an unhappy childhood, blame bad environment; if you expect me in fact to weep over him, this young murderer of yours, I do not feel inclined so to do. I do not like evil beings who do evil things.”

  “I am delighted to hear it,” said Professor Wanstead. “What I suffer in the course of my profession from people weeping and gnashing their teeth, and blaming everything on some happening in the past, you would hardly believe. If people knew the bad environments that people have had, the unkindness, the difficulties of their lives and the fact that nevertheless they can come through unscathed, I don’t think they would so often take the opposite point of view. The misfits are to be pitied, yes, they are to be pitied if I may say so for the genes with which they are born and over which they have no control themselves. I pity epileptics in the same way. If you know what genes are—”

  “I know, more or less,” said Miss Marple. “It’s common knowledge nowadays, though naturally I have no exact chemical or technical knowledge.”

  “The Governor, a man of experience, told me exactly why he was so anxious to have my verdict. He had felt increasingly in his experience of this particular inmate that, in plain words, the boy was not a killer. He didn’t think he was the type of a killer, he was like no killer he had ever seen before, he was of the opinion that the boy was the kind of criminal type who would never go straight no matter what treatment was given to him, would never reform himself; and for whom nothing in one sense of the word could be done, but at the same time he felt increasingly certain that the verdict upon him had been a wrong one. He did not believe that the boy had killed a girl, first strangled her and then disfigured her after rolling her body into a ditch. He just couldn’t bring himself to believe it. He’d looked over the facts of the case, which seemed to be fully proved. This boy had known the girl, he had been seen with her on several different occasions before the crime. They had presumably slept together and there were other points. His car had been seen in the neighbourhood. He himself had been recognized and all the rest of it. A perfectly fair case. But my friend was unhappy about it, he said. He was a man who had a very strong feeling for justice. He wanted a different opinion. He wanted, in fact, not the police side which he knew, he wanted a professional medical view. That was my field, he said. My line of country entirely. He wanted me to see this young man and talk with him, visit him, make a professional appraisal of him and give him my opinion.”

  “Very interesting,” said Miss Marple. “Yes, I call that very interesting. After all, your friend—I mean your Governor—was a man of experience, a man who loved justice. He was a man whom you’d be willing to listen to. Presumably then, you did listen to him.”

  “Yes,” said Professor Wanstead, “I was deeply interested. I saw the subject, as I will call him, I approached him from several different attitudes. I talked to him, I discussed various changes likely to occur in the law. I told him it might be possible to bring down a lawyer, a Queen’s Counsel, to see what points there might be in his favour, and other things. I approached him as a friend but also as an enemy so that I could see how he responded to different approaches, and I also made a good many physical tests, such as we use very frequently nowadays. I will not go into those with you because they are wholly technical.”

  “Then what did you think in the end?”

  “I thought,” said Professor Wanstead, “I thought my friend was likely to be right. I did not think that Michael Rafiel was a murderer.”

  “What about the earlier case you mentioned?”

  “That told against him, of course. Not in the jury’s mind, because of course they did not hear about that until after the judge’s summing up, but certainly in the judge’s mind. It told against him, but I made a few enquiries myself afterwards. He had assaulted a girl. He had conceivably raped her, but he had not attempted to strangle her and in my opinion—I have seen a great many cases which come before the Assizes—it seemed to me highly unlikely that there was a very definite case of rape. Girls, you must remember, are far more ready to be raped nowadays than they used to be. Their mothers insist, very often, that they should call it rape. The girl in question had had several boyfriends who had gone further than friendship. I did not think it counted very greatly as evidence against him. The actual murder case—yes, that was undoubtedly murder—but I continued to feel by all tests, physical tests, mental tests, psychological tests, none of them accorded with this particular crime.”

  “Then what did you do?”

  “I communicated with Mr. Rafiel. I told him that I would like an interview with him on a certain matter concerning his son. I went to him. I told him what I thought, what the Governor thought, that we had no evidence, that there were no grounds of appeal, at present, but that we both believed that a miscarriage of justice had been committed. I said I thought possibly an enquiry might be held, it might be an expensive business, it might bring out certain facts that could be laid before the Home Office, it might be successful, it might not. There might be something there, some evidence if you looked for it. I said it would be expensive to look for it but I presumed that would make no difference to anyone in his position. I had realized by that time that he was a sick man, a very ill man. He told me so himself. He told me that he had been in expectation of an early death, that he’d been warned two years ago that death could not be delayed for what they first thought was about a year, but later they realized that he would last rather longer because of his unusual physical strength. I ask
ed him what he felt about his son.”

  “And what did he feel about his son?” said Miss Marple.

  “Ah, you want to know that. So did I. He was, I think, extremely honest with me even if—”

  “—even if rather ruthless?” said Miss Marple.

  “Yes, Miss Marple. You are using the right word. He was a ruthless man, but he was a just man and an honest man. He said, ‘I’ve known what my son was like for many years. I have not tried to change him because I don’t believe that anyone could change him. He is made a certain way. He is crooked. He’s a bad lot. He’ll always be in trouble. He’s dishonest. Nobody, nothing could make him go straight. I am well assured of that. I have in a sense washed my hands of him. Though not legally or outwardly; he has always had money if he required it. Help legal or otherwise if he gets into trouble. I have done always what I could do. Well, let us say if I had a son who was a spastic who was sick, who was epileptic, I would do what I could for him. If you have a son who is sick morally, shall we say, and for whom there is no cure, I have done what I could also. No more and no less. What can I do for him now?’ I told him that it depended what he wanted to do. ‘There’s no difficulty about that,’ he said. ‘I am handicapped but I can see quite clearly what I want to do. I want to get him vindicated. I want to get him released from confinement. I want to get him free to continue to lead his own life as best he can lead it. If he must lead it in further dishonesties, then he must lead it that way. I will leave provision for him, to do for him everything that can be done. I don’t want him suffering, imprisoned, cut off from his life because of a perfectly natural and unfortunate mistake. If somebody else, some other man killed that girl, I want the fact brought to light and recognized. I want justice for Michael. But I am handicapped. I am a very ill man. My time is measured now not in years or months but in weeks.’

  “Lawyers, I suggested—I know a firm—He cut me short. ‘Your lawyers will be useless. You can employ them but they will be useless. I must arrange what I can arrange in such a limited time.’ He offered me a large fee to undertake the search for the truth and to undertake everything possible with no expense spared. ‘I can do next to nothing myself. Death may come at any moment. I empower you as my chief help, and to assist you at my request I will try to find a certain person.’ He wrote down a name for me. Miss Jane Marple. He said ‘I don’t want to give you her address. I want you to meet her in surroundings of my own choosing,’ and he then told me of this tour, this charming, harmless, innocent tour of historic houses, castles and gardens. He would provide me with a reservation on it ahead for a certain date. ‘Miss Jane Marple,’ he said, ‘will also be on that tour. You will meet her there, you will encounter her casually, and thus it will be seen clearly to be a casual meeting.’