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“How do you know, Mrs. Harmon?”
“Mrs. Butt told me. She’s my daily. Or rather, my twice weekly. Being a military gentleman, she said, he’d naturally have a revolver and very handy it would be if burglars were to come along.”
“When did she tell you this?”
“Ages ago. About six months ago, I should think.”
“Colonel Easterbrook?” murmured Craddock.
“It’s like those pointer things at fairs, isn’t it?” said Bunch, still speaking through a mouthful of pins. “Go round and round and stop at something different every time.”
“You’re telling me,” said Craddock and groaned.
“Colonel Easterbrook was up at Little Paddocks to leave a book there one day. He could have oiled that door then. He was quite straightforward about being there though. Not like Miss Hinchcliffe.”
Miss Marple coughed gently. “You must make allowances for the times we live in, Inspector,” she said.
Craddock looked at her, uncomprehendingly.
“After all,” said Miss Marple. “you are the Police, aren’t you? People can’t say everything they’d like to say to the Police, can they?”
“I don’t see why not,” said Craddock. “Unless they’ve got some criminal matter to conceal.”
“She means butter,” said Bunch, crawling actively round a table leg to anchor a floating bit of paper. “Butter and corn for hens, and sometimes cream—and sometimes, even, a side of bacon.”
“Show him that note from Miss Blacklock,” said Miss Marple. “It’s some time ago now, but it reads like a first-class mystery story.”
“What have I done with it? Is this the one you mean, Aunt Jane?”
Miss Marple took it and looked at it.
“Yes,” she said with satisfaction. “That’s the one.”
She handed it to the Inspector.
“I have made inquiries—Thursday is the day,” Miss Blacklock had written. “Any time after three. If there is any for me leave it in the usual place.”
Bunch spat out her pins and laughed. Miss Marple was watching the Inspector’s face.
The Vicar’s wife took it upon herself to explain.
“Thursday is the day one of the farms round here makes butter. They let anybody they like have a bit. It’s usually Miss Hinchcliffe who collects it. She’s very much in with all the farmers—because of her pigs, I think. But it’s all a bit hush hush, you know, a kind of local scheme of barter. One person gets butter, and sends along cucumbers, or something like that—and a little something when a pig’s killed. And now and then an animal has an accident and has to be destroyed. Oh, you know the sort of thing. Only one can’t, very well, say it right out to the Police. Because I suppose quite a lot of this barter is illegal—only nobody really knows because it’s all so complicated. But I expect Hinch had slipped into Little Paddocks with a pound of butter or something and had put it in the usual place. That’s a flour bin under the dresser, by the way. It doesn’t have flour in it.”
Craddock sighed.
“I’m glad I came here to you ladies,” he said.
“There used to be clothing coupons, too,” said Bunch. “Not usually bought—that wasn’t considered honest. No money passes. But people like Mrs. Butt or Mrs. Finch or Mrs. Huggins like a nice woollen dress or a winter coat that hasn’t seen too much wear and they pay for it with coupons instead of money.”
“You’d better not tell me any more,” said Craddock. “It’s all against the law.”
“Then there oughtn’t to be such silly laws,” said Bunch, filling her mouth up with pins again. “I don’t do it, of course, because Julian doesn’t like me to, so I don’t. But I know what’s going on, of course.”
A kind of despair was coming over the Inspector.
“It all sounds so pleasant and ordinary,” he said. “Funny and petty and simple. And yet one woman and a man have been killed, and another woman may be killed before I can get anything definite to go on. I’ve left off worrying about Pip and Emma for the moment. I’m concentrating on Sonia. I wish I knew what she looked like. There was a snapshot or two in with these letters, but none of the snaps could have been of her.”
“How do you know it couldn’t have been her? Do you know what she looked like?”
“She was small and dark, Miss Blacklock said.”
“Really,” said Miss Marple, “that’s very interesting.”
“There was one snap that reminded me vaguely of someone. A tall fair girl with her hair all done up on top of her head. I don’t know who she could have been. Anyway, it can’t have been Sonia. Do you think Mrs. Swettenham could have been dark when she was a girl?”
“Not very dark,” said Bunch. “She’s got blue eyes.”
“I hoped there might be a photo of Dmitri Stamfordis—but I suppose that was too much to hope for … Well”—he took up the letter—“I’m sorry this doesn’t suggest anything to you, Miss Marple.”
“Oh! but it does,” said Miss Marple. “It suggests a good deal. Just read it through again, Inspector—especially where it says that Randall Goedler was making inquiries about Dmitri Stamfordis.”
Craddock stared at her.
The telephone rang.
Bunch got up from the floor and went out into the hall where, in accordance with the best Victorian traditions, the telephone had originally been placed and where it still was.
She reentered the room to say to Craddock:
“It’s for you.”
Slightly surprised, the Inspector went out to the instrument—carefully shutting the door of the living room behind him.
“Craddock? Rydesdale here.”
“Yes, sir.”
“I’ve been looking through your report. In the interview you had with Phillipa Haymes I see she states positively that she hasn’t seen her husband since his desertion from the Army?”
“That’s right, sir—she was most emphatic. But in my opinion she wasn’t speaking the truth.”
“I agree with you. Do you remember a case about ten days ago—man run over by a lorry—taken to Milchester General with concussion and a fractured pelvis?”
“The fellow who snatched a child practically from under the wheels of a lorry, and got run down himself?”
“That’s the one. No papers of any kind on him and nobody came forward to identify him. Looked as though he might be on the run. He died last night without regaining consciousness. But he’s been identified—deserter from the Army—Ronald Haymes, ex-Captain in the South Loamshires.”
“Phillipa Haymes’ husband?”
“Yes. He’d got an old Chipping Cleghorn bus ticket on him, by the way—and quite a reasonable amount of money.”
“So he did get money from his wife? I always thought he was the man Mitzi overheard talking to her in the summerhouse. She denied it flatly, of course. But surely, sir, that lorry accident was before—”
Rydesdale took the words out of his mouth.
“Yes, he was taken to Milchester General on the 28th. The hold-up at Little Paddocks was on the 29th. That lets him out of any possible connection with it. But his wife, of course, knew nothing about the accident. She may have been thinking all along that he was concerned in it. She’d hold her tongue—naturally—after all he was her husband.”
“It was a fairly gallant bit of work, wasn’t it, sir?” said Craddock slowly.
“Rescuing that child from the lorry? Yes. Plucky. Don’t suppose it was cowardice that made Haymes desert. Well, all that’s past history. For a man who’d blotted his copybook, it was a good death.”
“I’m glad for her sake,” said the Inspector. “And for that boy of theirs.”
“Yes, he needn’t be too ashamed of his father. And the young woman will be able to marry again now.”
Craddock said slowly:
“I was thinking of that, sir … It opens up—possibilities.”
“You’d better break the news to her as you’re on the spot.”
“
I will, sir. I’ll push along there now. Or perhaps I’d better wait until she’s back at Little Paddocks. It may be rather a shock—and there’s someone else I rather want to have a word with first.”
Nineteen
RECONSTRUCTION OF THE CRIME
