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2
In her bedroom that night, Miss Marple tried to review the pattern of
Stonygates, but it was as yet too confused. There were currents and cross-
currents here—but whether they could account for Ruth Van Rydock’s un-
easiness it was impossible to tell. It did not seem to Miss Marple that Car-
Stephen was in love with Gina. Gina might or might not be in love with
Stephen. Walter Hudd was clearly not enjoying himself. These were incid-
ents that might and did occur in all places and at most times. There was,
unfortunately, nothing exceptional about them. They ended in the divorce
created. Mildred Strete was clearly jealous of Gina and disliked her. That,
Miss Marple thought, was very natural.
She thought over what Ruth Van Rydock had told her. Carrie Louise’s
then the discovery that, after all, a child was on the way.
“Often happens like that,” Miss Marple’s doctor had told her. “Relief of
tension, maybe, and then Nature can do its work.”
He had added that it was usually hard lines on the adopted child.
But that had not been so in this case. Both Gulbrandsen and his wife had
adored little Pippa. She had made her place too firmly in their hearts to be
lightly set aside. Gulbrandsen was already a father. Paternity meant noth-
ity, did not enjoy her first brush with it.
There remained two little girls growing up, one pretty and amusing, the
other plain and dull. Which again, Miss Marple thought, was quite nat-
ural. For when people adopt a baby girl, they choose a pretty one. And
though Mildred might have been lucky and taken after the Martins who
had produced handsome Ruth and dainty Carrie Louise, Nature elected
uncompromisingly plain.
Moreover Carrie Louise was determined9 that the adopted child should
never feel her position and in making sure of this she was overindulgent
to Pippa and sometimes less than fair to Mildred.
Pippa had married and gone away to Italy, and Mildred, for a time, had
been the only daughter of the house. But then Pippa had died and Carrie
Louise had brought Pippa’s baby back to Stonygates and once more Mil-
dred had been out of it. There had been the new marriage—the Restarick
boys. In 1934 Mildred had married Canon Strete, a scholarly antiquarian
about ten or fifteen years older, and had gone away to live in the south of
England. Presumably she had been happy—but one did not really know.
There had been no children. And now here she was, back again in the
same house where she had been brought up. And once again, Miss Marple
thought, not particularly happy in it.
Gina, Stephen, Wally, Mildred, Miss Bellever who liked an ordered
routine and was unable to enforce it. Lewis Serrocold, who was clearly
blissfully and wholeheartedly happy, an idealist able to translate his ideals
into practical measures. In none of these personalities10 did Miss Marple
find what Ruth’s words had led her to believe she might find. Carrie
Louise seemed secure, remote at the heart of the whirlpool—as she had
been all her life. What then, in that atmosphere, had Ruth felt to be wrong
…? Did she, Jane Marple, feel it also?
What of the outer personalities of the whirlpool—the occupational ther-
apists, the schoolmasters, earnest, harmless young men, confident young
Edgar Lawson….
And here, just before she fell asleep, Miss Marple’s thoughts stopped and
reminded her of someone or something. There was something a little
wrong about Edgar Lawson—perhaps more than a little. Edgar Lawson
was maladjusted—that was the phrase, wasn’t it? But surely that didn’t,
and couldn’t, touch Carrie Louise?
Mentally, Miss Marple shook her head.
What worried her was something more than that.
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