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“Well,” Jason Rudd stalled, uncertain what to say, then he accepted the position, “and what do you want me to do for you, Miss Marple?” he asked.
“I want, if I may, to stand on the stairs at the spot where you and your wife received guests on the day of the fête.”
He shot a quick doubtful glance at her. Was this, after all, just another sensation-seeker? But Miss Marple’s face was grave and composed.
“Why certainly,” he said, “if you want to do so. Come with me.”
He led her to the staircase head and paused in the hollowed-out bay at the top of it.
“You’ve made a good many changes in the house since the Bantrys were here,” said Miss Marple. “I like this. Now, let me see. The tables would be about here, I suppose, and you and your wife would be standing—”
“My wife stood here.” Jason showed her the place. “People came up the stairs, she shook hands with them and passed them on to me.”
“She stood here,” said Miss Marple.
She moved over and took her place where Marina Gregg had stood. She remained there quite quietly without moving. Jason Rudd watched her. He was perplexed but interested. She raised her right hand slightly as though shaking, looked down the stairs as though to see people coming up it. Then she looked straight ahead of her. On the wall halfway up the stairs was a large picture, a copy of an Italian Old Master. On either side of it were narrow windows, one giving out on the garden and the other giving on to the end of the stables and the weathercock. But Miss
Marple looked at neither of these. Her eyes were fixed on the picture itself.
“Of course you always hear a thing right the first time,” she said. “Mrs. Bantry told me that your wife stared at the picture and her face ‘froze,’ as she put it.” She looked at the rich red and blue robes of the Madonna, a Madonna with her head slightly back, laughing up at the Holy Child that she was holding up in her arms. “Giacomo Bellini’s ‘Laughing Madonna,’” she said. “A religious picture, but also a painting of a happy mother with her child. Isn’t that so Mr. Rudd?”
“I would say so, yes.”
“I understand now,” said Miss Marple. “I understand quite well. The whole thing is really very simple, isn’t it?” She looked at Jason Rudd.
“Simple?”
“I think you know how simple it is,” said Miss Marple. There was a peal on the bell below.
“I don’t think,” said Jason Rudd, “I quite understand.” He looked down the stairway. There was a sound of voices.
“I know that voice,” said Miss Marple. “It’s Inspector Craddock’s voice, isn’t it?”
“Yes, it seems to be Inspector Craddock.”
“He wants to see you, too. Would you mind very much if he joined us?”
“Not at all as far as I am concerned. Whether he will agree—”
“I think he will agree,” said Miss Marple. “There’s really not much time now to be lost is there? We’ve got to the moment when we’ve got to understand just how everything happened.”
“I thought you said it was simple,” said Jason Rudd.
“It was so simple,” said Miss Marple, “that one just couldn’t see it.”
The decayed butler arrived at this moment up the stairs.
“Inspector Craddock is here, sir,” he said.
“Ask him to join us here, please,” said Jason Rudd.
The butler disappeared again and a moment or two later Dermot Craddock came up the stairs.
“You!” he said to Miss Marple, “how did you get here?”
“I came in Inch,” said Miss Marple, producing the usual confused effect that that remark always caused.
From slightly behind her Jason Rudd rapped his forehead interrogatively. Dermot Craddock shook his head.
“I was saying to Mr. Rudd,” said Miss Marple, “—has the butler gone away—”
Dermot Craddock cast a look down the stairs.
“Oh, yes,” he said, “he’s not listening. Sergeant Tiddler will see to that.”
“Then that is all right,” said Miss Marple. “We could of course have gone into a room to talk, but I prefer it like this. Here we are on the spot where the thing happened, which makes it so much easier to understand.”
“You are talking,” said Jason Rudd, “of the day of the fête here, the day when Heather Badcock was poisoned.”
“Yes,” said Miss Marple, “and I’m saying that it is all very simple if one only looks at it in the proper way. It all began, you see, with Heather Badcock being the kind of person she was. It was inevitable, really, that something of that kind should happen some day to Heather.”
“I don’t understand what you mean,” said Jason Rudd. “I don’t understand at all.”
“No, it has to be explained a little. You see, when my friend, Mrs. Bantry who was here, described the scene to me, she quoted a poem that was a great favourite in my youth, a poem of dear Lord Tennyson’s. ‘The Lady of Shalott.’” She raised her voice a little.
“The mirror crack’d from side to side;
‘The Curse is come upon me,’ cried
The Lady of Shalott.
That’s what Mrs. Bantry saw, or thought she saw, though actually she misquoted and said doom instead of curse—perhaps a better word in the circumstances. She saw your wife speaking to Heather Badcock and heard Heather Badcock speaking to your wife and she saw this look of doom on your wife’s face.”
“Haven’t we been over that a great many times?” said Jason Rudd.
“Yes, but we shall have to go over it once more,” said Miss Marple. “There was that expression on your wife’s face and she was looking not at Heather Badcock but at that picture. At a picture of a laughing, happy mother holding up a happy child. The mistake was that though there was doom foreshadowed in Marina Gregg’s face, it was not on her the doom would come. The doom was to come upon Heather. Heather was doomed from the first moment that she began talking and boasting of an incident in the past.”
“Could you make yourself a little clearer?” said Dermot Craddock.
Miss Marple turned to him.
“Of course I will. This is something that you know nothing about. You couldn’t know about it, because nobody has told you what it was Heather Badcock actually said.”
“But they have,” protested Dermot. “They’ve told me over and over again. Several people have told me.”
“Yes,” said Miss Marple, “but you don’t know because, you see, Heather Badcock didn’t tell it to you.”
“She hardly could tell it to me seeing she was dead when I arrived here,” said Dermot.
“Quite so,” said Miss Marple. “All you know is that she was ill but she got up from bed and came along to a celebration of some kind where she met Marina Gregg and spoke to her and asked for an autograph and was given one.”
“I know,” said Craddock with slight impatience. “I’ve heard all that.”
“But you didn’t hear the one operative phrase, because no one thought it was important,” said Miss Marple. “Heather Badcock was ill in bed—with German measles.”
“German measles? What on earth has that got to do with it?”
“It’s a very slight illness, really,” said Miss Marple. “It hardly makes you feel ill at all. You have a rash which is easy to cover up with powder, and you have a little fever, but not very much. You feel quite well enough to go out and see people if you want to. And of course in repeating all this the fact that it was German measles didn’t strike people particularly. Mrs. Bantry, for instance, just said that Heather had been ill in bed and mentioned chicken pox and nettlerash. Mr. Rudd here said that it was “flu, but of course he did that on purpose. But I think myself that what Heather Badcock said to Marina Gregg was that she had had German measles and got up from bed and went off to meet Marina. And that’s really the answer to the whole thing, because, you see, German measles is extremely infectious. People catch it very easily. And there’s one thing about it which you’ve got to remember. If a woman contracts it in the first four months of—” Miss Marple spoke the next word with a slight Victorian modesty “—of—er—pregnancy, it may have a terribly serious effect. It may cause an unborn child to be born blind or to be born mentally affected.”
She turned to Jason Rudd.
“I think I am correct in saying, Mr. Rudd, that your wife had a child who was born mentally afflicted and that she has never really recovered from the shock. She had always wanted a child and when at last the child came, this was the tragedy that happened. A tragedy she has never forgotten, that she has not allowed herself to forget and which ate into her as a kind of deep sore, an obsession.”
“It’s quite true,” said Jason Rudd. “Marina developed German measles early on in her pregnancy and was told by the doctor that the mental affliction of her child was due to that cause. It was not a case of inherited insanity or anything of that kind. He was trying to be helpful but I don’t think it helped her much. She never knew how, or when or from whom she had contracted the disease.”
“Quite so,” said Miss Marple, “she never knew until one afternoon here when a perfectly strange woman came up those stairs and told her the fact—told her, what was more—with a great deal of pleasure! With an air of being proud of what she’d done! She thought she’d been resourceful and brave and shown a lot of spirit in getting up from her bed, covering her face with makeup, and going along to meet the actress on whom she had such a crush and obtaining her autograph. It’s a thing she has boasted of all through her life. He
ather Badcock meant no harm. She never did mean harm but there is no doubt that people like Heather Badcock (and like my old friend Alison Wilde), are capable of doing a lot of harm because they lack—not kindness, they have kindness—but any real consideration for the way their actions may affect other people. She thought always of what an action meant to her, never sparing a thought to what it might mean to somebody else.”
Miss Marple nodded her head gently.
“So she died, you see, for a simple reason out of her own past. You must imagine what that moment meant to Marina Gregg. I think Mr. Rudd understands it very well. I think she had nursed all those years a kind of hatred for the unknown person who had been the cause of her tragedy. And here suddenly she meets that person face to face. And a person who is gay, jolly and pleased with herself. It was too much for her. If she had had time to think, to calm down, to be persuaded to relax—but she gave herself no time. Here was this woman who had destroyed her happiness and destroyed the sanity and health of her child. She wanted to punish her. She wanted to kill her. And unfortunately the means were to hand. She carried with her that well-known specific, Calmo. A somewhat dangerous drug because you had to be careful of the exact dosage. It was very easy to do. She put the stuff into her own glass. If by any chance anyone noticed what she was doing they were probably so used to her pepping herself up or soothing herself down in any handy liquid that they’d hardly notice it. It’s possible that one person did see her, but I rather doubt it. I think that Miss Zielinsky did no more than guess. Marina Gregg put her glass down on the table and presently she managed to jog Heather Badcock’s arm so that Heather Badcock spilt her own drink all down her new dress. And that’s where the element of puzzle has come into the matter, owing to the fact that people cannot remember to use their pronouns properly.
“It reminds me so much of that parlourmaid I was telling you about,” she added to Dermot. “I only had the account, you see, of what Gladys Dixon said to Cherry which simply was that she was worried about the ruin of Heather Badcock’s dress with the cocktail spilt down it. What seemed so funny, she said, was that she did it on purpose. But the ‘she’ that Gladys referred to was not Heather Badcock, it was Marina Gregg. As Gladys said: She did it on purpose! She jogged Heather’s arm. Not by accident but because she meant to do so. We do know that she must have been standing very close to Heather because we have heard that she mopped up both Heather’s dress and her own before pressing her cocktail on Heather. It was really,” said Miss Marple meditatively, “a very perfect murder; because, you see, it was committed on the spur of the moment without pausing to think or reflect. She wanted Heather Badcock dead and a few minutes later Heather Badcock was dead. She didn’t realize, perhaps, the seriousness of what she’d done and certainly not the danger of it until afterwards. But she realized it then. She was afraid, horribly afraid. Afraid that someone had seen her dope her own glass, that someone had seen her deliberately jog Heather’s elbow, afraid that someone would accuse her of having poisoned Heather. She could see only one way out. To insist that the murder had been aimed at her, that she was the prospective victim. She tried that idea first on her doctor. She refused to let him tell her husband because I think she knew that her husband would not be deceived. She did fantastic things. She wrote notes to herself and arranged to find them in extraordinary places and at extraordinary moments. She doctored her own coffee at the studios one day. She did things that could really have been seen through fairly easily if one had happened to be thinking that way. They were seen through by one person.”
