Fourteen

“So you see,” said Mrs. Dane Calthrop, “I was quite right to call in an ex-pert.”

I stared at her. We were all at the vicarage. The rain was pouring downoutside and there was a pleasant log fire, and Mrs. Dane Calthrop had justwandered round, beat up a sofa cushion and put it for some reason of herown on the top of the grand piano.

“But did you?” I said, surprised. “Who was it? What did he do?”

“It wasn’t a he,” said Mrs. Dane Calthrop.

With a sweeping gesture she indicated Miss Marple. Miss Marple hadfinished the fleecy knitting and was now engaged with a crochet hook anda ball of cotton.

“That’s my expert,” said Mrs. Dane Calthrop. “Jane Marple. Look at herwell. I tell you, that woman knows more about the different kinds of hu-man wickedness than anyone I’ve ever known.”

“I don’t think you should put it quite like that, dear,” murmured MissMarple.

“But you do.”

“One sees a good deal of human nature living in a village all the yearround,” said Miss Marple placidly.

Then, seeming to feel it was expected of her, she laid down her crochet,and delivered a gentle old-maidish dissertation on murder.

“The great thing is in these cases to keep an absolutely open mind. Mostcrimes, you see, are so absurdly simple. This one was. Quite sane andstraightforward—and quite understandable—in an unpleasant way, ofcourse.”

“Very unpleasant!”

“The truth was really so very obvious. You saw it, you know, Mr. Bur-ton.”

“Indeed I did not.”

“But you did. You indicated the whole thing to me. You saw perfectly therelationship of one thing to the other, but you just hadn’t enough self-con-fidence to see what those feelings of yours meant. To begin with, that tire-some phrase ‘No smoke without fire.’ It irritated you, but you proceededquite correctly to label it for what it was—a smoke screen. Misdirection,you see—everybody looking at the wrong thing—the anonymous letters,but the whole point was that there weren’t any anonymous letters!”

“But my dear Miss Marple, I can assure you that there were. I had one.”

“Oh yes, but they weren’t real at all. Dear Maud here tumbled to that.

Even in peaceful Lymstock there are plenty of scandals, and I can assureyou any woman living in the place would have known about them andused them. But a man, you see, isn’t interested in gossip in the same way—especially a detached logical man like Mr. Symmington. A genuine womanwriter of those letters would have made her letters much more to thepoint.

“So you see that if you disregard the smoke and come to the fire youknow where you are. You just come down to the actual facts of whathappened. And putting aside the letters, just one thing happened—Mrs.

Symmington died.

“So then, naturally, one thinks of who might have wanted Mrs. Sym-mington to die, and of course the very first person one thinks of in such acase is, I am afraid, the husband. And one asks oneself is there any reason?

—any motive?—for instance, another woman?

“And the very first thing I hear is that there is a very attractive younggoverness in the house. So clear, isn’t it? Mr. Symmington, a rather dryrepressed unemotional man, tied to a querulous and neurotic wife andthen suddenly this radiant young creature comes along.

“I’m afraid, you know, that gentlemen, when they fall in love at a certainage, get the disease very badly. It’s quite a madness. And Mr. Symmington,as far as I can make out, was never actually a good man—he wasn’t verykind or very affectionate or very sympathetic—his qualities were all neg-ative—so he hadn’t really the strength to fight his madness. And in a placelike this, only his wife’s death would solve his problem. He wanted tomarry the girl, you see. She’s very respectable and so is he. And besides,he’s devoted to his children and didn’t want to give them up. He wantedeverything, his home, his children, his respectability and Elsie. And theprice he would have to pay for that was murder.

“He chose, I do think, a very clever way. He knew so well from his ex-perience of criminal cases how soon suspicion falls on the husband if awife dies unexpectedly—and the possibility of exhumation in the case ofpoison. So he created a death which seemed only incidental to somethingelse. He created a non-existent anonymous letter writer. And the cleverthing was that the police were certain to suspect a woman—and they werequite right in a way. All the letters were a woman’s letters; he cribbed themvery cleverly from the letters in the case last year and from a case Dr Grif-fith told him about. I don’t mean that he was so crude as to reproduce anyletter verbatim, but he took phrases and expressions from them andmixed them up, and the net result was that the letters definitely represen-ted a woman’s mind—a half-crazed repressed personality.

“He knew all the tricks that the police use, handwriting, typewritingtests, etc. He’s been preparing his crime for some time. He typed all the en-velopes before he gave away the typewriter to the Women’s Institute, andhe cut the pages from the book at Little Furze probably quite a long timeago when he was waiting in the drawing room one day. People don’t openbooks of sermons much!

“And finally, having got his false Poison Pen well established, he stagedthe real thing. A fine afternoon when the governess and the boys and hisstepdaughter would be out, and the servants having their regular day out.

He couldn’t foresee that the little maid Agnes would quarrel with her boyand come back to the house.”

Joanna asked:

“But what did she see? Do you know that?”

“I don’t know. I can only guess. My guess would be that she didn’t seeanything.”

“That it was all a mare’s nest?”

“No, no, my dear, I mean that she stood at the pantry window all the af-ternoon waiting for the young man to come and make it up and that—quite literally—she saw nothing. That is, no one came to the house at all,not the postman, nor anybody else.

“It would take her some time, being slow, to realize that that was veryodd—because apparently Mrs. Symmington had received an anonymousletter that afternoon.”

“Didn’t she receive one?” I asked, puzzled.

“But of course not! As I say, this crime is so simple. Her husband just putthe cyanide in the top cachet of the ones she took in the afternoon whenher sciatica came on after lunch. All Symmington had to do was to gethome before, or at the same time as Elsie Holland, call his wife, get no an-swer, go up to her room, drop a spot of cyanide in the plain glass of watershe had used to swallow the cachet, toss the crumpled-up anonymous let-ter into the grate, and put by her hand the scrap of paper with ‘I can’t goon’ written on it.”

Miss Marple turned to me.

“You were quite right about that, too, Mr. Burton. A ‘scrap of paper’ wasall wrong. People don’t leave suicide notes on small torn scraps of paper.

They use a sheet of paper—and very often an envelope too. Yes, the scrapof paper was wrong and you knew it.”

“You are rating me too high,” I said. “I knew nothing.”

“But you did, you really did, Mr. Burton. Otherwise why were you im-mediately impressed by the message your sister left scribbled on the tele-phone pad?”

I repeated slowly, “‘Say that I can’t go on Friday’—I see! I can’t go on?”

Miss Marple beamed on me.

“Exactly. Mr. Symmington came across such a message and saw its pos-sibilities. He tore off the words he wanted for when the time came—a mes-sage genuinely in his wife’s handwriting.”

“Was there any further brilliance on my part?” I asked.

Miss Marple twinkled at me.

“You put me on the track, you know. You assembled those facts togetherfor me—in sequence—and on top of it you told me the most importantthing of all—that Elsie Holland had never received any anonymous let-ters.”

“Do you know,” I said, “last night I thought that she was the letter writerand that that was why there had been no letters written to her?”

“Oh dear, me, no… The person who writes anonymous letters practicallyalways sends them to herself as well. That’s part of the—well, the excite-ment, I suppose. No, no, the fact interested me for quite another reason. Itwas really, you see, Mr. Symmington’s one weakness. He couldn’t bringhimself to write a foul letter to the girl he loved. It’s a very interestingsidelight on human nature—and a credit to him, in a way—but it’s wherehe gave himself away.”

Joanna said:

“And he killed Agnes? But surely that was quite unnecessary?”

“Perhaps it was, but what you don’t realize, my dear (not having killedanyone), is that your judgment is distorted afterwards and everythingseems exaggerated. No doubt he heard the girl telephoning to Partridge,saying she’d been worried ever since Mrs. Symmington’s death, that therewas something she didn’t understand. He can’t take any chances—this stu-pid, foolish girl has seen something, knows something.”

“Yet apparently he was at his office all that afternoon?”

“I should imagine he killed her before he went. Miss Holland was in thedining room and kitchen. He just went out into the hall, opened and shutthe front door as though he had gone out, then slipped into the little cloak-room. When only Agnes was left in the house, he probably rang the frontdoor bell, slipped back into the cloakroom, came out behind her and hither on the head as she was opening the front door, and then after thrust-ing the body into the cupboard, he hurried along to his office, arriving justa little late if anyone had happened to notice it, but they probably didn’t.

You see, no one was suspecting a man.”

“Abominable brute,” said Mrs. Dane Calthrop.

“You’re not sorry for him, Mrs. Dane Calthrop?” I inquired.

“Not in the least. Why?”

“I’m glad to hear it, that’s all.”

Joanna said:

“But why Aimée Griffith? I know that the police have found the pestletaken from Owen’s dispensary—and the skewer too. I suppose it’s not soeasy for a man to return things to kitchen drawers. And guess where theywere? Superintendent Nash only told me just now when I met him on myway here. In one of those musty old deed-boxes in his office. Estate of SirJasper Harrington-West, deceased.”

“Poor Jasper,” said Mrs. Dane Calthrop. “He was a cousin of mine. Sucha correct old boy. He would have had a fit!”

“Wasn’t it madness to keep them?” I asked.

“Probably madder to throw them away,” said Mrs. Dane Calthrop. “Noone had any suspicions about Symmington.”

“He didn’t strike her with the pestle,” said Joanna. “There was a clockweight there too, with hair and blood on it. He pinched the pestle, theythink, on the day Aimée was arrested, and hid the book pages in herhouse. And that brings me back to my original question. What aboutAimée Griffith? The police actually saw her write that letter.”

“Yes, of course,” said Miss Marple. “She did write that letter.”

“But why?”

“Oh, my dear, surely you have realized that Miss Griffith had been inlove with Symmington all her life?”

“Poor thing!” said Mrs. Dane Calthrop mechanically.

“They’d always been good friends, and I dare say she thought, after Mrs.

Symmington’s death, that some day, perhaps — well —” Miss Marplecoughed delicately. “And then the gossip began spreading about Elsie Hol-land and I expect that upset her badly. She thought of the girl as a design-ing minx worming her way into Symmington’s affections and quite un-worthy of him. And so, I think, she succumbed to temptation. Why not addone more anonymous letter, and frighten the girl out of the place? It musthave seemed quite safe to her and she took, as she thought, every precau-tion.”

“Well?” said Joanna. “Finish the story.”

“I should imagine,” said Miss Marple slowly, “that when Miss Hollandshowed that letter to Symmington he realized at once who had written it,and he saw a chance to finish the case once and for all, and make himselfsafe. Not very nice—no, not very nice, but he was frightened, you see. Thepolice wouldn’t be satisfied until they’d got the anonymous letter writer.

When he took the letter down to the police and he found they’d actuallyseen Aimée writing it, he felt he’d got a chance in a thousand of finishingthe whole thing.

“He took the family to tea there that afternoon and as he came from theoffice with his attaché case, he could easily bring the tornout book pagesto hide under the stairs and clinch the case. Hiding them under the stairswas a neat touch. It recalled the disposal of Agnes’s body, and, from thepractical point of view, it was very easy for him. When he followed Aiméeand the police, just a minute or two in the hall passing through would beenough.”

“All the same,” I said, “there’s one thing I can’t forgive you for, MissMarple—roping in Megan.”

Miss Marple put down her crochet which she had resumed. She lookedat me over her spectacles and her eyes were stern.

“My dear young man, something had to be done. There was no evidenceagainst this very clever and unscrupulous man. I needed someone to helpme, someone of high courage and good brains. I found the person Ineeded.”

“It was very dangerous for her.”

“Yes, it was dangerous, but we are not put into this world, Mr. Burton, toavoid danger when an innocent fellow-creature’s life is at stake. You un-derstand me?”

I understood.