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He remembered the grimness of her lips and the severe frosty light in those usually gentle blue eyes.
Grimness, an inexorable determination … to do what? To go where?
“She was talking to Sergeant Fletcher when I last saw her,” he said. “Just by the gate. And then she went through it and out. I took it she was going straight home to the Vicarage. I would have sent her in the car—but there was so much to attend to, and she slipped away very quietly. Fletcher may know something! Where’s Fletcher?”
But Sergeant Fletcher, it seemed, as Craddock learned when he rang up Boulders, was neither to be found there nor had he left any message where he had gone. There was some idea that he had returned to Milchester for some reason.
The Inspector rang up headquarters in Milchester, but no news of Fletcher was to be found there.
Then Craddock turned to Bunch as he remembered what she had told him over the telephone.
“Where’s that paper? You said she’d been writing something on a bit of paper.”
Bunch brought it to him. He spread it out on the table and looked down on it. Bunch leant over his shoulder and spelled it out as he read. The writing was shaky and not easy to read:
Lamp.
Then came the word “Violets.”
Then after a space:
Where is bottle of aspirin?
The next item in this curious list was more difficult to make out. “Delicious death,” Bunch read. “That’s Mitzi’s cake.”
“Making enquiries,” read Craddock.
“Inquiries? What about, I wonder? What’s this? Severe affliction bravely borne … What on earth—!”
“Iodine,” read the Inspector. “Pearls. Ah, pearls.”
“And then Lotty—no, Letty. Her e’s look like o’s. And then Berne. And what’s this? Old Age Pension. …”
They looked at each other in bewilderment.
Craddock recapitulated swiftly:
“Lamp. Violets. Where is bottle of aspirin? Delicious Death. Making enquiries. Severe affliction bravely borne. Iodine. Pearls. Letty. Berne. Old Age Pension.”
Bunch asked: “Does it mean anything? Anything at all? I can’t see any connection.”
Craddock said slowly: “I’ve just a glimmer—but I don’t see. It’s odd that she should have put down that about pearls.”
“What about pearls? What does it mean?”
“Does Miss Blacklock always wear that three-tier choker of pearls?”
“Yes, she does. We laugh about it sometimes. They’re so dreadfully false-looking, aren’t they? But I suppose she thinks it’s fashionable.”
“There might be another reason,” said Craddock slowly.
“You don’t mean that they’re real. Oh! they couldn’t be!”
“How often have you had an opportunity of seeing real pearls of that size, Mrs. Harmon?”
“But they’re so glassy.”
Craddock shrugged his shoulders.
“Anyway, they don’t matter now. It’s Miss Marple that matters. We’ve got to find her.”
They’d got to find her before it was too late—but perhaps it was already too late? Those pencilled words showed that she was on the track … But that was dangerous—horribly dangerous. And where the hell was Fletcher?
Craddock strode out of the Vicarage to where he’d left his car. Search—that was all he could do—search.
A voice spoke to him out of the dripping laurels.
“Sir!” said Sergeant Fletcher urgently. “Sir. …”
Twenty-one
THREE WOMEN
Dinner was over at Little Paddocks. It had been a silent and uncomfortable meal.
Patrick, uneasily aware of having fallen from grace, only made spasmodic attempts at conversation—and such as he did make were not well received. Phillipa Haymes was sunk in abstraction. Miss Blacklock herself had abandoned the effort to behave with her normal cheerfulness. She had changed for dinner and had come down wearing her necklace of cameos but for the first time fear showed from her darkly circled eyes, and betrayed itself by her twitching hands.
Julia, alone, had maintained her air of cynical detachment throughout the evening.
“I’m sorry, Letty,” she said, “that I can’t pack my bag and go. But I presume the police wouldn’t allow it. I don’t suppose I’ll darken your roof—or whatever the expression is—for long. I should imagine that Inspector Craddock will be round with a warrant and the handcuffs any moment. In fact I can’t imagine why something of the kind hasn’t happened already.”
“He’s looking for the old lady—for Miss Marple,” said Miss Blacklock.
“Do you think she’s been murdered, too?” Patrick asked with scientific curiosity. “But why? What could she know?”
“I don’t know,” said Miss Blacklock dully. “Perhaps Miss Murgatroyd told her something.”
“If she’s been murdered too,” said Patrick, “there seems to be logically only one person who could have done it.”
“Who?”
“Hinchcliffe, of course,” said Patrick triumphantly. “That’s where she was last seen alive—at Boulders. My solution would be that she never left Boulders.”
“My head aches,” said Miss Blacklock in a dull voice. She pressed her fingers to her forehead. “Why should Hinch murder Miss Marple? It doesn’t make sense.”
“It would if Hinch had really murdered Murgatroyd,” said Patrick triumphantly.
Phillipa came out of her apathy to say:
“Hinch wouldn’t murder Murgatroyd.”
“She might have if Murgatroyd had blundered on something to show that she—Hinch—was the criminal.”
“Anyway, Hinch was at the station when Murgatroyd was killed.”
“She could have murdered Murgatroyd before she left.”
Startling them all, Letitia Blacklock suddenly screamed out:
“Murder, murder, murder—! Can’t you talk of anything else? I’m frightened, don’t you understand? I’m frightened. I wasn’t before. I thought I could take care of myself … But what can you do against a murderer who’s waiting—and watching—and biding his time! Oh, God!”
She dropped her head forward on her hands. A moment later she looked up and apologized stiffly.
“I’m sorry. I—I lost control.”
“That’s all right, Aunt Letty,” said Patrick affectionately. “I’ll look after you.”
“You?” was all Letitia Blacklock said, but the disillusionment behind the word was almost an accusation.
That had been shortly before dinner, and Mitzi had then created a diversion by coming and declaring that she was not going to cook the dinner.
“I do not do anything more in this house. I go to my room. I lock myself in. I stay there until it is daylight. I am afraid—people are being killed—that Miss Murgatroyd with her stupid English face—who would want to kill her? Only a maniac! Then it is a maniac that is about! And a maniac does not care who he kills. But me, I do not want to be killed. There are shadows in the kitchen—and I hear noises—I think there is someone out in the yard and then I think I see a shadow by the larder door and then it is footsteps I hear. So I go now to my room and I lock the door and perhaps even I put the chest of drawers against it. And in the morning I tell that cruel hard policeman that I go away from here. And if he will not let me I say: ‘I scream and I scream and I scream until you have to let me go!’”
Everybody, with a vivid recollection of what Mitzi could do in the screaming line, shuddered at the threat.
“So I go to my room,” said Mitzi, repeating the statement once more to make her intentions quite clear. With a symbolic action she cast off the cretonne apron she had been wearing. “Good night, Miss Blacklock. Perhaps in the morning, you may not be alive. So in case that is so, I say good-bye.”
She depa
rted abruptly and the door, with its usual gentle little whine, closed softly after her.
Julia got up.
“I’ll see to dinner,” she said in a matter-of-fact way. “Rather a good arrangement—less embarrassing for you all than having me sit down at table with you. Patrick (since he’s constituted himself your protector, Aunt Letty) had better taste every dish first. I don’t want to be accused of poisoning you on top of everything else.”
So Julia had cooked and served a really excellent meal.
Phillipa had come out to the kitchen with an offer of assistance but Julia had said firmly that she didn’t want any help.
“Julia, there’s something I want to say—”
“This is no time for girlish confidences,” said Julia firmly. “Go on back in the dining room, Phillipa.”
Now dinner was over and they were in the drawing room with coffee on the small table by the fire—and nobody seemed to have anything to say. They were waiting—that was all.
At 8:30 Inspector Craddock rang up.
“I shall be with you in about a quarter of an hour’s time,” he announced. “I’m bringing Colonel and Mrs. Easterbrook and Mrs. Swettenham and her son with me.”
“But really, Inspector … I can’t cope with people tonight—”
Miss Blacklock’s voice sounded as though she were at the end of her tether.
“I know how you feel, Miss Blacklock. I’m sorry. But this is urgent.”
“Have you—found Miss Marple?”
“No,” said the Inspector, and rang off.
Julia took the coffee tray out to the kitchen where, to her surprise, she found Mitzi contemplating the piled-up dishes and plates by the sink.
Mitzi burst into a torrent of words.
“See what you do in my so nice kitchen! That frying pan—only, only for omelettes do I use it! And you, what have you used it for?”
“Frying onions.”
“Ruined—ruined. It will have now to be washed and never—never—do I wash my omelette pan. I rub it carefully over with a greasy newspaper, that is all. And this saucepan here that you have used—that one, I use him only for milk—”
