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“The young man at the desk here, the one who is supposed to have staged that hold-up and shot himself.”
“He altered a cheque, you say?”
Mi
ss Marple nodded.
“Yes. I have it here.” She extracted it from her bag and laid it on the table. “It came this morning with my others from the Bank. You can see, it was for seven pounds, and he altered it to seventeen. A stroke in front of the 7, and teen added after the word seven with a nice artistic little blot just blurring the whole word. Really very nicely done. A certain amount of practice, I should say. It’s the same ink, because I wrote the cheque actually at the desk. I should think he’d done it quite often before, wouldn’t you?”
“He picked the wrong person to do it to, this time,” remarked Sir Henry.
Miss Marple nodded agreement.
“Yes. I’m afraid he would never have gone very far in crime. I was quite the wrong person. Some busy young married woman, or some girl having a love affair—that’s the kind who write cheques for all sorts of different sums and don’t really look through their passbooks carefully. But an old woman who has to be careful of the pennies, and who has formed habits—that’s quite the wrong person to choose. Seventeen pounds is a sum I never write a cheque for. Twenty pounds, a round sum, for the monthly wages and books. And as for my personal expenditure, I usually cash seven—it used to be five, but everything has gone up so.”
“And perhaps he reminded you of someone?” prompted Sir Henry, mischief in his eye.
Miss Marple smiled and shook her head at him.
“You are very naughty, Sir Henry. As a matter of fact he did. Fred Tyler, at the fish shop. Always slipped an extra 1 in the shillings column. Eating so much fish as we do nowadays, it made a long bill, and lots of people never added it up. Just ten shillings in his pocket every time, not much but enough to get himself a few neckties and take Jessie Spragge (the girl in the draper’s) to the pictures. Cut a splash, that’s what these young fellows want to do. Well, the very first week I was here, there was a mistake in my bill. I pointed it out to the young man and he apologized very nicely and looked very much upset, but I thought to myself then: ‘You’ve got a shifty eye, young man.’
“What I mean by a shifty eye,” continued Miss Marple, “is the kind that looks very straight at you and never looks away or blinks.”
Craddock gave a sudden movement of appreciation. He thought to himself “Jim Kelly to the life,” remembering a notorious swindler he had helped to put behind bars not long ago.
“Rudi Scherz was a thoroughly unsatisfactory character,” said Rydesdale. “He’s got a police record in Switzerland, we find.”
“Made the place too hot for him, I suppose, and came over here with forged papers?” said Miss Marple.
“Exactly,” said Rydesdale.
“He was going about with the little red-haired waitress from the dining room,” said Miss Marple. “Fortunately I don’t think her heart’s affected at all. She just liked to have someone a bit ‘different,’ and he used to give her flowers and chocolates which the English boys don’t do much. Has she told you all she knows?” she asked, turning suddenly to Craddock. “Or not quite all yet?”
“I’m not absolutely sure,” said Craddock cautiously.
“I think there’s a little to come,” said Miss Marple. “She’s looking very worried. Brought me kippers instead of herrings this morning, and forgot the milk jug. Usually she’s an excellent waitress. Yes, she’s worried. Afraid she might have to give evidence or something like that. But I expect”—her candid blue eyes swept over the manly proportions and handsome face of Detective-Inspector Craddock with truly feminine Victorian appreciation—“that you will be able to persuade her to tell you all she knows.”
Detective-Inspector Craddock blushed and Sir Henry chuckled.
“It might be important,” said Miss Marple. “He may have told her who it was.”
Rydesdale stared at her.
“Who what was?”
“I express myself so badly. Who it was who put him up to it, I mean.”
“So you think someone put him up to it?”
Miss Marple’s eyes widened in surprise.
“Oh, but surely—I mean … Here’s a personable young man—who filches a little bit here and a little bit there—alters a small cheque, perhaps helps himself to a small piece of jewellery if it’s left lying around, or takes a little money from the till—all sorts of small petty thefts. Keeps himself going in ready money so that he can dress well, and take a girl about—all that sort of thing. And then suddenly he goes off, with a revolver, and holds up a room full of people, and shoots at someone. He’d never have done a thing like that—not for a moment! He wasn’t that kind of person. It doesn’t make sense.”
Craddock drew in his breath sharply. That was what Letitia Blacklock had said. What the Vicar’s wife had said. What he himself felt with increasing force. It didn’t make sense. And now Sir Henry’s old Pussy was saying it, too, with complete certainty in her fluting old lady’s voice.
“Perhaps you’ll tell us, Miss Marple,” he said, and his voice was suddenly aggressive, “what did happen, then?”
She turned on him in surprise.
“But how should I know what happened? There was an account in the paper—but it says so little. One can make conjectures, of course, but one has no accurate information.”
“George,” said Sir Henry, “would it be very unorthodox if Miss Marple were allowed to read the notes of the interviews Craddock had with these people at Chipping Cleghorn?”
“It may be unorthodox,” said Rydesdale, “but I’ve not got where I am by being orthodox. She can read them. I’d be curious to hear what she has to say.”
Miss Marple was all embarrassment.
“I’m afraid you’ve been listening to Sir Henry. Sir Henry is always too kind. He thinks too much of any little observations I may have made in the past. Really, I have no gifts—no gifts at all—except perhaps a certain knowledge of human nature. People, I find, are apt to be far too trustful. I’m afraid that I have a tendency always to believe the worst. Not a nice trait. But so often justified by subsequent events.”
“Read these,” said Rydesdale, thrusting the typewritten sheets upon her. “They won’t take you long. After all, these people are your kind—you must know a lot of people like them. You may be able to spot something that we haven’t. The case is just going to be closed. Let’s have an amateur’s opinion on it before we shut up the files. I don’t mind telling you that Craddock here isn’t satisfied. He says, like you, that it doesn’t make sense.”
There was silence whilst Miss Marple read. She put the typewritten sheets down at last.
“It’s very interesting,” she said with a sigh. “All the different things that people say—and think. The things they see—or think that they see. And all so complex, nearly all so trivial and if one thing isn’t trivial, it’s so hard to spot which one—like a needle in a haystack.”
Craddock felt a twinge of disappointment. Just for a moment or two, he wondered if Sir Henry might be right about this funny old lady. She might have put her finger on something—old people were often very sharp. He’d never, for instance, been able to conceal anything from his own great aunt Emma. She had finally told him that his nose twitched when he was about to tell a lie.
But just a few fluffy generalities, that was all that Sir Henry’s famous Miss Marple could produce. He felt annoyed with her and said rather curtly:
“The truth of the matter is that the facts are indisputable. Whatever conflicting details these people give, they all saw one thing. They saw a masked man with a revolver and a torch open the door and hold them up, and whether they think he said ‘Stick ’em up’ or ‘Your money or your life,’ or whatever phrase is associated with a hold-up in their minds, they saw him.”
“But surely,” said Miss Marple gently. “They couldn’t—actually—have seen anything at all….”
Craddock caught his breath. She’d got it! She was sharp, after all. He was testing her by that speech of his, but she hadn’t fallen for it. It didn’t actually make any difference to the facts, or to what happen
ed, but she’d realized, as he’d realized, that those people who had seen a masked man holding them up couldn’t really have seen him at all.
“If I understand rightly,” Miss Marple had a pink flush on her cheeks, her eyes were bright and pleased as a child’s, “there wasn’t any light in the hall outside—and not on the landing upstairs either?”
“That’s right,” said Craddock.
“And so, if a man stood in the doorway and flashed a powerful torch into the room, nobody could see anything but the torch, could they?”
“No, they couldn’t. I tried it out.”
“And so when some of them say they saw a masked man, etc., they are really, though they don’t realize it, recapitulating from what they saw afterwards—when the lights came on. So it really all fits in very well, doesn’t it, on the assumption that Rudi Scherz was the—I think, ‘fall guy’ is the expression I mean?”
Rydesdale stared at her in such surprise that she grew pinker still. “I may have got the term wrong,” she murmured.
“I am not very clever about Americanisms—and I understand they change very quickly. I got it from one of Mr. Dashiel Hammett’s stories. (I understand from my nephew Raymond that he is considered at the top of the tree in what is called the ‘tough’ style of literature.) A ‘fall guy,’ if I understand it rightly, means someone who will be blamed for a crime really committed by someone else. This Rudi Scherz seems to me exactly the right type for that. Rather stupid really, you know, but full of cupidity and probably extremely credulous.”
Rydesdale said, smiling tolerantly:
“Are you suggesting that he was persuaded by someone to go out and take pot shots at a room full of people? Rather a tall order.”
“I think he was told that it was a joke,” said Miss Marple. “He was paid for doing it, of course. Paid, that is, to put an advertisement in the newspaper, to go out and spy out the household premises, and then, on the night in question, he was to go there, assume a mask and a black cloak and throw open a door, brandishing a torch, and cry ‘Hands up!’”
“And fire off a revolver?”
