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The chief constable was rather astonished when Miss Marple’s name was brought to him. She came in with many apologies. ‘So sorry – so very sorry to disturb you. You are so busy, I know, but then you have always been so very kind, Colonel Melchett, and I felt I would rather come to you instead of Inspector Slack. For one thing, you know, I should hate Constable Palk to get into any trouble. Strictly speaking, I suppose he shouldn’t have touched anything at all.’
Colonel Melchett was slightly bewildered. He said, ‘Palk? That’s the St Mary Mead constable, isn’t it? What has he been doing?’
‘He picked up a pin, you know. It was in his tunic. And it occurred to me at the time that it was quite probable he had actually picked it up in Mrs Spenlow’s house.’
‘Quite, quite. But after all, you know, what’s a pin? Matter of fact he did pick the pin up just by Mrs Spenlow’s body. Came and told Slack about it yesterday – you put him up to that, I gather? Oughtn’t to have touched anything, of course, but as I said, what’s a pin? It was only a common pin. Sort of thing any woman might use.’
‘Oh, no, Colonel Melchett, that’s where you’re wrong. To a man’s eye, perhaps, it looked like an ordinary pin, but it wasn’t. It was a special pin, a very thin pin, the kind you buy by the box, the kind used mostly by dressmakers.’
Melchett stared at her, a faint light of comprehension breaking in on him. Miss Marple nodded her head several times, eagerly.
‘Yes, of course. It seems to me so obvious. She was in her kimono because she was going to try on her new dress, and she went into the front room, and Miss Politt just said something about measurements and put the tape measure round her neck – and then all she’d have to do was to cross it and pull – quite easy, so I’ve heard. And then, of course, she’d go outside and pull the door to and stand there knocking as though she’d just arrived. But the pin shows she’d already been in the house.’
‘And it was Miss Politt who telephoned to Spenlow?’
‘Yes. From the post office at two-thirty – just when the bus comes and the post office would be empty.’
Colonel Melchett said, ‘But my dear Miss Marple, why? In heaven’s name, why? You can’t have a murder without a motive.’
‘Well, I think, you know, Colonel Melchett, from all I’ve heard, that the crime dates from a long time back. It reminds me, you know, of my two cousins, Antony and Gordon. Whatever Antony did always went right for him, and with poor Gordon it was just the other way about. Race horses went lame, and stocks went down, and property depreciated. As I see it, the two women were in it together.’
‘In what?’
‘The robbery. Long ago. Very valuable emeralds, so I’ve heard. The lady’s maid and the tweeny. Because one thing hasn’t been explained – how, when the tweeny married the gardener, did they have enough money to set up a flower shop?
‘The answer is, it was her share of the – the swag, I think is the right expression. Everything she did turned out well. Money made money. But the other one, the lady’s maid, must have been unlucky. She came down to being just a village dressmaker. Then they met again. Quite all right at first, I expect, until Mr Ted Gerard came on the scene.
‘Mrs Spenlow, you see, was already suffering from conscience, and was inclined to be emotionally religious. This young man no doubt urged her to “face up” and to “come clean” and I dare say she was strung up to do it. But Miss Politt didn’t see it that way. All she saw was that she might go to prison for a robbery she had committed years ago. So she made up her mind to put a stop to it all. I’m afraid, you know, that she was always rather a wicked woman. I don’t believe she’d have turned a hair if that nice, stupid Mr Spenlow had been hanged.’
Colonel Melchett said slowly, ‘We can – er – verify your theory – up to a point. The identity of the Politt woman with the lady’s maid at the Abercrombies’, but –’
Miss Marple reassured him. ‘It will be all quite easy. She’s the kind of woman who will break down at once when she’s taxed with the truth. And then, you see, I’ve got her tape measure. I – er – abstracted it yesterday when I was trying on. When she misses it and thinks the police have got it – well, she’s quite an ignorant woman and she’ll think it will prove the case against her in some way.’
She smiled at him encouragingly. ‘You’ll have no trouble, I can assure you.’ It was the tone in which his favourite aunt had once assured him that he could not fail to pass his entrance examination into Sandhurst.
And he had passed.
Chapter 51
The Case of the Caretaker
‘The Case of the Caretaker’ was first published in Strand Magazine, January 1942, and then in the USA in Chicago Sunday Tribune, 5 July 1942.
‘Well,’ demanded Doctor Haydock of his patient. ‘And how goes it today?’
Miss Marple smiled at him wanly from pillows. ‘I suppose, really, that I’m better,’ she admitted, ‘but I feel so terribly depressed. I can’t help feeling how much better it would have been if I had died. After all, I’m an old woman. Nobody wants me or cares about me.’
Doctor Haydock interrupted with his usual brusqueness. ‘Yes, yes, typical after-reaction of this type of flu. What you need is something to take you out of yourself. A mental tonic.’
Miss Marple sighed and shook her head. ‘And what’s more,’ continued Doctor Haydock, ‘I’ve brought my medicine with me!’
He tossed a long envelope on to the bed. ‘Just the thing for you. The kind of puzzle that is right up your street.’
‘A puzzle?’ Miss Marple looked interested. ‘Literary effort of mine,’ said the doctor, blushing a little. ‘Tried to make a regular story of it. “He said,” “she said,” “the girl thought,” etc. Facts of the story are true.’
‘But why a puzzle?’ asked Miss Marple.
Doctor Haydock grinned.
‘Because the interpretation is up to you. I want to see if you’re as clever as you always make out.’
With that Parthian shot he departed.
Miss Marple picked up the manuscript and began to read.
‘And where is the bride?’ asked Miss Harmon genially.
The village was all agog to see the rich and beautiful young wife that Harry Laxton had brought back from abroad. There was a general
indulgent feeling that Harry – wicked young scapegrace – had had all the luck. Everyone had always felt indulgent towards Harry. Even the owners of windows that had suffered from his indiscriminate use of a catapult had found their indignation dissipated by young Harry’s abject expression of regret. He had broken windows, robbed orchards, poached rabbits, and later had run into debt, got entangled with the local tobacconist’s daughter – been disentangled and sent off to Africa – and the village as represented by various ageing spinsters had murmured indulgently. ‘Ah, well! Wild oats! He’ll settle down!’
And now, sure enough, the prodigal had returned – not in affliction, but in triumph. Harry Laxton had ‘made good’ as the saying goes. He had pulled himself together, worked hard, and had finally met and successfully wooed a young Anglo-French girl who was the possessor of a considerable fortune.
Harry might have lived in London, or purchased an estate in some fashionable hunting county, but he preferred to come back to the part of the world that was home to him. And there, in the most romantic way, he purchased the derelict estate in the dower house of which he had passed his childhood.
Kingsdean House had been unoccupied for nearly seventy years. It had gradually fallen into decay and abandon. An eld
erly caretaker and his wife lived in the one habitable corner of it. It was a vast, unpre-possessing grandiose mansion, the gardens overgrown with rank vegetation and the trees hemming it in like some gloomy enchanter’s den.
The dower house was a pleasant, unpretentious house and had been let for a long term of years to Major Laxton, Harry’s father. As a boy, Harry had roamed over the Kingsdean estate and knew every inch of the tangled woods, and the old house itself had always fascinated him.
Major Laxton had died some years ago, so it might have been thought that Harry would have had no ties to bring him back – nevertheless it was to the home of his boyhood that Harry brought his bride. The ruined old Kingsdean House was pulled down. An army of builders and contractors swooped down upon the place, and in almost a miraculously short space of time – so marvellously does wealth tell – the new house rose white and gleaming among the trees.
Next came a posse of gardeners and after them a procession of furniture vans.
The house was ready. Servants arrived. Lastly, a costly limousine deposited Harry and Mrs Harry at the front door.
The village rushed to call, and Mrs Price, who owned the largest house, and who considered herself to lead society in the place, sent out cards of invitation for a party ‘to meet the bride’.
It was a great event. Several ladies had new frocks for the occasion. Everyone was excited, curious, anxious to see this fabulous creature. They said it was all so like a fairy story!
Miss Harmon, weather-beaten, hearty spinster, threw out her question as she squeezed her way through the crowded drawing-room door. Little Miss Brent, a thin, acidulated spinster, fluttered out information.
‘Oh, my dear, quite charming. Such pretty manners. And quite young. Really, you know, it makes one feel quite envious to see someone who has everything like that. Good looks and money and breeding – most distinguished, nothing in the least common about her – and dear Harry so devoted!’
‘Ah,’ said Miss Harmon, ‘it’s early days yet!’
Miss Brent’s thin nose quivered appreciatively. ‘Oh, my dear, do you really think –’
