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“And he spoke of the murderer as a man?”
“Yes.”
“Right. That cuts out Evelyn Hillingdon, Lucky and Esther Walters. So your murderer, allowing that all this far-fetched nonsense is true, your murderer is Dyson, Hillingdon or my smooth-tongued Jackson.”
“Or yourself,” said Miss Marple.
Mr. Rafiel ignored this last point.
“Don’t say things to irritate me,” he said. “I’ll tell you the first thing that strikes me, and which you don’t seem to have thought of. If it’s one of those three, why the devil didn’t old Palgrave recognize him before? Dash it all, they’ve all been sitting round looking at each other for the last two weeks. That doesn’t seem to make sense.”
“I think it could,” said Miss Marple.
“Well, tell me how.”
“You see, in Major Palgrave’s story he hadn’t seen this man himself at any time. It was a story told to him by a doctor. The doctor gave him the snapshot as a curiosity. Major Palgrave may have looked at the snapshot fairly closely at the time but after that he’d just stack it away in his wallet and keep it as a souvenir. Occasionally, perhaps, he’d take it out and show it to someone he was telling the story to. And another thing, Mr. Rafiel, we don’t know how long ago this happened. He didn’t give me any indication of that when he was telling the story. I mean this may have been a story he’s been telling to people for years. Five years—ten years—longer still perhaps. Some of his tiger stories go back about twenty years.”
“They would!” said Mr. Rafiel.
“So I don’t suppose for a moment that Major Palgrave would recognize the face in the snapshot if he came across the man casually. What I think happened, what I’m almost sure must have happened, is that as he told his story he fumbled for the snapshot, took it out, looked down at it studying the face and then looked up to see the same face, or one with a strong resemblance, coming towards him from a distance of about ten or twelve feet away.”
“Yes,” said Mr. Rafiel consideringly, “yes, that’s possible.”
“He was taken aback,” said Miss Marple, “and he shoved it back in his wallet and began to talk loudly about something else.”
“He couldn’t have been sure,” said Mr. Rafiel, shrewdly.
“No,” said Miss Marple, “he couldn’t have been sure. But of course afterwards he would have studied the snapshot very carefully and would have looked at the man and tried to make up his mind whether it was just a likeness or whether it could actually be the same person.”
Mr. Rafiel reflected a moment or two, then he shook his head.
“There’s something wrong here. The motive’s inadequate. Absolutely inadequate. He was speaking to you loudly, was he?”
“Yes,” said Miss Marple, “quite loudly. He always did.”
“True enough. Yes, he did shout. So whoever was approaching would hear what he said?”
“I should imagine you could hear it for quite a good radius round.”
Mr. Rafiel shook his head again. He said, “It’s fantastic, too fantastic. Anybody would laugh at such a story. Here’s an old booby telling a story about another story somebody told him, and showing a snapshot, and all of it centring round a murder which had taken place years ago! Or at any rate, a year or two. How on earth can that worry the man in question? No evidence, just a bit of hearsay, a story at third hand. He could even admit a likeness, he could say: ‘Yes, I do look rather like that fellow, don’t I! Ha, ha!’ Nobody’s going to take old Palgrave’s identification seriously. Don’t tell me so, because I won’t believe it. No, the chap, if it was the chap, had nothing to fear—nothing whatever. It’s the kind of accusation he can just laugh off. Why on earth should he proceed to murder old Palgrave? It’s absolutely unnecessary. You must see that.”
“Oh I do see that,” said Miss Marple. “I couldn’t agree with you more. That’s what makes me uneasy. So very uneasy that I really couldn’t sleep last night.”
Mr. Rafiel stared at her. “Let’s hear what’s on your mind,” he said quietly.
“I may be entirely wrong,” said Miss Marple hesitantly.
“Probably you are,” said Mr. Rafiel with his usual lack of courtesy, “but at any rate let’s hear what you’ve thought up in the small hours.”
“There could be a very powerful motive if—”
“If what?”
“If there was going to be—quite soon—another murder.”
Mr. Rafiel stared at her. He tried to pull himself up a little in his chair.
“Let’s get this clear,” he said.
“I am so bad at explaining.” Miss Marple spoke rapidly and rather incoherently. A pink flush rose to her cheeks. “Supposing there was a murder planned. If you remember, the story Major Palgrave told me concerned a man whose wife died under suspicious circumstances. Then, after a certain lapse of time, there was another murder under exactly the same circumstances. A man of a different name had a wife who died in much the same way and the doctor who was telling it recognized him as the same man, although he’d changed his name. Well, it does look, doesn’t it, as though this murderer might be the kind of murderer who made a habit of the thing?”
“You mean like Smith, Brides in the Bath, that kind of thing. Yes.”
“As far as I can make out,” said Miss Marple, “and from what I have heard and read, a man who does a wicked thing like this and gets away with it the first time, is, alas, encouraged. He thinks it’s easy, he thinks he’s clever. And so he repeats it. And in the end, as you say, like Smith and the Brides in the Bath, it becomes a habit. Each time in a different place and each time the man changes his name. But the crimes themselves are all very much alike. So it seems to me, although I may be quite wrong—”
“But you don’t think you are wrong, do you?” Mr. Rafiel put in shrewdly.
Miss Marple went on without answering. “—that if that were so and if this—this person had got things all lined up for a murder out here, for getting rid of another wife, say, and if this is crime three or four, well then, the Major’s story would matter because the murderer couldn’t afford to have any similarity pointed out. If you remember, that was exactly the way Smith got caught. The circumstances of a crime attracted the attention of somebody who compared it with a newspaper clipping of some other case. So you do see, don’t you, that if this wicked person has got a crime planned, arranged, and shortly about to take place, he couldn’t afford to let Major Palgrave go about telling this story and showing that snapshot.”
She stopped and looked appealingly at Mr. Rafiel.
“So you see he had to do something very quickly, as quickly as possible.”
Mr. Rafiel spoke. “In fact, that very same night, eh?”
“Yes,” said Miss Marple.
“Quick work,” said Mr. Rafiel, “but it could be done. Put the tablets in old Palgrave’s room, spread the blood pressure rumour about and add a little of our fourteen-syllable drug to a Planters Punch. Is that it?”
“Yes—But that’s all over—we needn’t worry about it. It’s the future. It’s now. With Major Palgrave out of the way and the snapshot destroyed, this man will go on with his murder as planned.”
Mr. Rafiel whistled.
“You’ve got it all worked out, haven’t you?”
Miss Marple nodded. She said in a most unaccustomed voice, firm and almost dictatorial, “And we’ve got to stop it. You’ve got to stop it, Mr. Rafiel.”
“Me?” said Mr. Rafiel, astonished, “Why me?”
“Because you’re rich and important,” said Miss Marple, simply. “People will take notice of what you say or suggest. They wouldn’t listen to me for a moment. They would say that I was an old lady imagining things.”
“They might at that,” said Mr. Rafiel. “More fools if they did. I must say, though, that nobody would think you had any brains in your head to hear your usual line of talk. Actually, you’ve got a logical mind. Very few women have.” He shifted himself uncomfortably in his c
hair. “Where the hell’s Esther or Jackson?” he said. “I need resettling. No, it’s no good your doing it. You’re not strong enough. I don’t know what they mean, leaving me alone like this.”
“I’ll go and find them.”
“No, you won’t. You’ll stay here—and thrash this out. Which of them is it? The egregious Greg? The quiet Edward Hillingdon or my fellow Jackson? It’s got to be one of the three, hasn’t it?”
Seventeen
MR. RAFIEL TAKES CHARGE
“I don’t know,” said Miss Marple.
“What do you mean? What have we been talking about for the last twenty minutes?”
“It has occurred to me that I may have been wrong.”
Mr. Rafiel stared at her.
“Scatty after all!” he said disgustedly. “And you sounded so sure of yourself.”
“Oh, I am sure—about the murder. It’s the murderer I’m not sure about. You see I’ve found out that Major Palgrave had more than one murder story—you told me yourself he’d told you one about a kind of Lucrezia Borgia—”
“So he did—at that. But that was quite a different kind of story.”
“I know. And Mrs. Walters said he had one about someone being gassed in a gas oven—”
“But the story he told you—”
Miss Marple allowed herself to interrupt—a thing that did not often happen to Mr. Rafiel.
She spoke with desperate earnestness and only moderate incoherence.
“Don’t you see—it’s so difficult to be sure. The whole point is that—so often—one doesn’t listen. Ask Mrs. Walters—she said the same thing—you listen to begin with—and then your attention flags—your mind wanders—and suddenly you find you’ve missed a bit. I just wonder if possibly there may have been a gap—a very small one—between the story he was telling me—about a man—and the moment when he was getting out his wallet and saying—‘Like to see a picture of a murderer.’”
“But you thought it was a picture of the man he had been talking about?”
