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‘But all the same it’s a catch, Mr Petherick,’ she said. ‘Just like a lawyer.’
Chapter 6
The Thumb Mark of St Peter
‘And now, Aunt Jane, it is up to you,’ said Raymond West.
‘Yes, Aunt Jane, we are expecting something really spicy,’ chimed in Joyce Lemprière.
‘Now, you are laughing at me, my dears,’ said Miss Marple placidly. ‘You think that because I have lived in this out-of-the-way spot all my life I am not likely to have had any very interesting experiences.’
‘God forbid that I should ever regard village life as peaceful and uneventful,’ said Raymond with fervour. ‘Not after the horrible revelations we have heard from you! The cosmopolitan world seems a mild and peaceful place compared with St Mary Mead.’
‘Well, my dear,’ said Miss Marple, ‘human nature is much the same everywhere, and, of course, one has opportunities of observing it at close quarters in a village.’
‘You really are unique, Aunt Jane,’ cried Joyce. ‘I hope you don’t mind me calling you Aunt Jane?’ she added. ‘I don’t know why I do it.’
‘Don’t you, my dear?’ said Miss Marple.
She looked up for a moment or two with something quizzical in her glance, which made the blood flame to the girl’s cheeks. Raymond West fidgeted and cleared his throat in a somewhat embarrassed manner.
Miss Marple looked at them both and smiled again, and bent her attention once more to her knitting.
‘It is true, of course, that I have lived what is called a very uneventful life, but I have had a lot of experience in solving different little problems that have arisen. Some of them have been really quite ingenious, but it would be no good telling them to you, because they are about such unimportant things that you would not be interested—just things like: Who cut the meshes of Mrs Jones’s string bag? and why Mrs Sims only wore her new fur coat once. Very interesting things, really, to any student of human nature. No, the only experience I can remember that would be of interest to you is the one about my poor niece Mabel’s husband.
‘It is about ten or fifteen years ago now, and happily it is all over and done with, and everyone has forgotten about it. People’s memories are very short—a lucky thing, I always think.’
Miss Marple paused and murmured to herself:
‘I must just count this row. The decreasing is a little awkward. One, two, three, four, five, and then three purl; that is right. Now, what was I saying? Oh, yes, about poor Mabel.
‘Mabel was my niece. A nice girl, really a very nice girl, but just a trifle what one might call silly. Rather fond of being melodramatic and of saying a great deal more than she meant whenever she was upset. She married a Mr Denman when she was twenty-two, and I am afraid it was not a very happy marriage. I had hoped very much that the attachment would not come to anything, for Mr Denman was a man of very violent temper—not the kind of man who would be patient with Mabel’s foibles—and I also learned that there was insanity in his family. However, girls were just as obstinate then as they are now, and as they always will be. And Mabel married him.
‘I didn’t see very much of her after her marriage. She came to stay with me once or twice, and they asked me there several times, but, as a matter of fact, I am not very fond of staying in other people’s houses, and I always managed to make some excuse. They had been married ten years when Mr Denman died suddenly. There were no children, and he left all his money to Mabel. I wrote, of course, and offered to come to Mabel if she wanted me; but she wrote back a very sensible letter, and I gathered that she was not altogether overwhelmed by grief. I thought that was only natural, because I knew they had not been getting on together for some time. It was not until about three months afterwards that I got a most hysterical letter from Mabel, begging me to come to her, and saying that things were going from bad to worse, and she couldn’t stand it much longer.
‘So, of course,’ continued Miss Marple, ‘I put Clara on board wages and sent the plate and the King Charles tankard to the bank, and I went off at once. I found Mabel in a very nervous state. The house, Myrtle Dene, was a fairly large one, very comfortably furnished. There was a cook and a house-parlourmaid as well as a nurse-attendant to look after old Mr Denman, Mabel’s husband’s father, who was what is called “not quite right in the head”. Quite peaceful and well behaved, but distinctly odd at times. As I say, there was insanity in the family.
‘I was really shocked to see the change in Mabel. She was a mass of nerves, twitching all over, yet I had the greatest difficulty in making her tell me what the trouble was. I got at it, as one always does get at these things, indirectly. I asked her about some friends of hers she was always mentioning in her letters, the Gallaghers. She said, to my surprise, that she hardly ever saw them nowadays. Other friends whom I mentioned elicited the same remark. I spoke to her then of the folly of shutting herself up and brooding, and especially of the silliness of cutting herself adrift from her friends. Then she came bursting out with the truth.
‘ “It is not my doing, it is theirs. There is not a soul in the place who will speak to me now. When I go down the High Street they all get out of the way so that they shan’t have to meet me or speak to me. I am like a kind of leper. It is awful, and I can’t bear it any longer. I shall have to sell the house and go abroad. Yet why should I be driven away from a home like this? I have done nothing.”
‘I was more disturbed than I can tell you. I was knitting a comforter for old Mrs Hay at the time, and in my perturbation I dropped two stitches and never discovered it until long after.
‘ “My dear Mabel,” I said, “you amaze me. But what is the cause of all this?”
‘Even as a child Mabel was always difficult. I had the greatest difficulty in getting her to give me a straightforward answer to my question. She would only say vague things about wicked talk and idle people who had nothing better to do than gossip, and people who put ideas into other people’s heads.
‘ “That is all quite clear to me,” I said. “There is evidently some story being circulated about you. But what that story is you must know as well as anyone. And you are going to tell me.”
‘ “It is so wicked,” moaned Mabel.
‘ “Of course it is wicked,” I said briskly. “There is nothing that you can tell me about people’s minds that would astonish or surprise me. Now, Mabel, will you tell me in plain English what people are saying about you?”
‘Then it all came out.
‘It seemed that Geoffrey Denman’s death, being quite sudden and unexpected, gave rise to various rumours. In fact—and in plain English as I had put it to her—people were saying that she had poisoned her husband.
‘Now, as I expect you know, there is nothing more cruel than talk, and there is nothing more difficult to combat. When people say things behind your back there i
s nothing you can refute or deny, and the rumours go on growing and growing, and no one can stop them. I was quite certain of one thing: Mabel was quite incapable of poisoning anyone. And I didn’t see why life should be ruined for her and her home made unbearable just because in all probability she had been doing something silly and foolish.
‘ “There is no smoke without fire,” I said. “Now, Mabel, you have got to tell me what started people off on this tack. There must have been something.”
‘Mabel was very incoherent, and declared there was nothing—nothing at all, except, of course, that Geoffrey’s death had been very sudden. He had seemed quite well at supper that evening, and had taken violently ill in the night. The doctor had been sent for, but the poor man had died a few minutes after the doctor’s arrival. Death had been thought to be the result of eating poisoned mushrooms.
‘ “Well,” I said, “I suppose a sudden death of that kind might start tongues wagging, but surely not without some additional facts. Did you have a quarrel with Geoffrey or anything of that kind?”
‘She admitted that she had had a quarrel with him on the preceding morning at breakfast time.
‘ “And the servants heard it, I suppose?” I asked.
‘ “They weren’t in the room.”
‘ “No, my dear,” I said, “but they probably were fairly near the door outside.”
‘I knew the carrying power of Mabel’s high-pitched hysterical voice only too well. Geoffrey Denman, too, was a man given to raising his voice loudly when angry.
‘ “What did you quarrel about?” I asked.
‘ “Oh, the usual things. It was always the same things over and over again. Some little thing would start us off, and then Geoffrey became impossible and said abominable things, and I told him what I thought of him.”
‘ “There had been a lot of quarrelling, then?” I asked.
