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THE THUMB MARK OF ST. PETER
“And now, Aunt Jane, it is up to you,” said Raymond West.
“Yes, Aunt Jane, we are expecting something really spicy,” chimed in
Joyce Lemprière.
“Now, you are laughing at me, my dears,” said Miss Marple placidly.
“You think that because I have lived in this out-of-the-way spot all my life I
am not likely to have had any very interesting experiences.”
“God forbid that I should ever regard village life as peaceful and un-
eventful,” said Raymond with fervour. “Not after the horrible revelations
we have heard from you! The cosmopolitan world seems a mild and
peaceful place compared with St. Mary Mead.”
“Well, my dear,” said Miss Marple, “human nature is much the same
everywhere, and, of course, one has opportunities of observing it at close
quarters in a village.”
“You really are unique, Aunt Jane,” cried Joyce. “I hope you don’t mind
me calling you Aunt Jane?” she added. “I don’t know why I do it.”
“Don’t you, my dear?” said Miss Marple.
She looked up for a moment or two with something quizzical in her
glance, which made the blood flame to the girl’s cheeks. Raymond West
fidgeted and cleared his throat in a somewhat embarrassed manner.
Miss Marple looked at them both and smiled again, and bent her atten-
tion once more to her knitting.
“It is true, of course, that I have lived what is called a very uneventful
life, but I have had a lot of experience in solving different little problems
that have arisen. Some of them have been really quite ingenious, but it
would be no good telling them to you, because they are about such unim-
portant things that you would not be interested—just things like: Who cut
the meshes of Mrs. Jones’s string bag? and why Mrs. Sims only wore her
new fur coat once. Very interesting things, really, to any student of human
nature. No, the only experience I can remember that would be of interest
to you is the one about my poor niece Mabel’s husband.
“It is about ten or fifteen years ago now, and happily it is all over and
done with, and everyone has forgotten about it. People’s memories are
very short—a lucky thing, I always think.”
Miss Marple paused and murmured to herself:
“I must just count this row. The decreasing is a little awkward. One, two,
three, four, five, and then three purl; that is right. Now, what was I saying?
Oh, yes, about poor Mabel.
“Mabel was my niece. A nice girl, really a very nice girl, but just a trifle
what one might call silly. Rather fond of being melodramatic and of saying
a great deal more than she meant whenever she was upset. She married a
Mr. Denman when she was twenty-two, and I am afraid it was not a very
happy marriage. I had hoped very much that the attachment would not
come to anything, for Mr. Denman was a man of very violent temper—not
the kind of man who would be patient with Mabel’s foibles—and I also
learned that there was insanity in his family. However, girls were just as
obstinate then as they are now, and as they always will be. And Mabel
married him.
“I didn’t see very much of her after her marriage. She came to stay with
me once or twice, and they asked me there several times, but, as a matter
of fact, I am not very fond of staying in other people’s houses, and I always
managed to make some excuse. They had been married ten years when
Mr. Denman died suddenly. There were no children, and he left all his
money to Mabel. I wrote, of course, and offered to come to Mabel if she
wanted me; but she wrote back a very sensible letter, and I gathered that
she was not altogether overwhelmed by grief. I thought that was only nat-
ural, because I knew they had not been getting on together for some time.
It was not until about three months afterwards that I got a most hysterical
letter from Mabel, begging me to come to her, and saying that things were
going from bad to worse, and she couldn’t stand it much longer.
“So, of course,” continued Miss Marple, “I put Clara on board wages and
sent the plate and the King Charles tankard to the bank, and I went off at
once. I found Mabel in a very nervous state. The house, Myrtle Dene, was
a fairly large one, very comfortably furnished. There was a cook and a
house-parlourmaid as well as a nurse-attendant to look after old Mr. Den-
man, Mabel’s husband’s father, who was what is called ‘not quite right in
the head.’ Quite peaceful and well-behaved, but distinctly odd at times. As
I say, there was insanity in the family.
“I was really shocked to see the change in Mabel. She was a mass of
nerves, twitching all over, yet I had the greatest difficulty in making her
tell me what the trouble was. I got at it, as one always does get at these
things, indirectly. I asked her about some friends of hers she was always
mentioning in her letters, the Gallaghers. She said, to my surprise, that she
hardly ever saw them nowadays. Other friends whom I mentioned elicited
the same remark. I spoke to her then of the folly of shutting herself up and
brooding, and especially of the silliness of cutting herself adrift from her
friends. Then she came bursting out with the truth.
“‘It is not my doing, it is theirs. There is not a soul in the place who will
speak to me now. When I go down the High Street they all get out of the
way so that they shan’t have to meet me or speak to me. I am like a kind of
leper. It is awful, and I can’t bear it any longer. I shall have to sell the
house and go abroad. Yet why should I be driven away from a home like
this? I have done nothing.’
“I was more disturbed than I can tell you. I was knitting a comforter for
old Mrs. Hay at the time, and in my perturbation I dropped two stitches
and never discovered it until long after.
“‘My dear Mabel,’ I said, ‘you amaze me. But what is the cause of all
this?’
“Even as a child Mabel was always difficult. I had the greatest difficulty
in getting her to give me a straightforward answer to my question. She
would only say vague things about wicked talk and idle people who had
nothing better to do than gossip, and people who put ideas into other
people’s heads.
“‘That is all quite clear to me,’ I said. ‘There is evidently some story be-
ing circulated about you. But what that story is you must know as well as
anyone. And you are going to tell me.’
“‘It is so wicked,’ moaned Mabel.
“‘Of course it is wicked,’ I said briskly. ‘There is nothing that you can tell
me about people’s minds that would astonish or surprise me. Now, Mabel,
will you tell me in plain English what people are saying about you?’
“Then it all came out.
“It seemed that Geoffrey Denman’s death, being quite sudden and unex-
pected, gave rise to various rumours. In fact—and in plain English as I had
put it to her—people were saying that she had poisoned her husband.
“Now, as I expect you know, there is nothing more cruel than talk, and
there is nothing more difficult to combat. When people say things behind
your back there is nothing you can refute or deny, and the rumours go on
growing and growing, and no one can stop them. I was quite certain of
one thing: Mabel was quite incapable of poisoning anyone. And I didn’t
see why life should be ruined for her and her home made unbearable just
because in all probability she had been doing something silly and foolish.
“‘There is no smoke without fire,’ I said. ‘Now, Mabel, you have got to
tell me what started people off on this tack. There must have been some-
thing.’
“Mabel was very incoherent, and declared there was nothing—nothing
at all, except, of course, that Geoffrey’s death had been very sudden. He
had seemed quite well at supper that evening, and had taken violently ill
in the night. The doctor had been sent for, but the poor man had died a
few minutes after the doctor’s arrival. Death had been thought to be the
result of eating poisoned mushrooms.
“‘Well,’ I said, ‘I suppose a sudden death of that kind might start tongues
wagging, but surely not without some additional facts. Did you have a
quarrel with Geoffrey or anything of that kind?’
“She admitted that she had had a quarrel with him on the preceding
morning at breakfast time.
“‘And the servants heard it, I suppose?’ I asked.
“‘They weren’t in the room.’
“‘No, my dear,’ I said, ‘but they probably were fairly near the door out-
side.’
“I knew the carrying power of Mabel’s high- pitched hysterical voice
only too well. Geoffrey Denman, too, was a man given to raising his voice
loudly when angry.
“‘What did you quarrel about?’ I asked.
“‘Oh, the usual things. It was always the same things over and over
again. Some little thing would start us off, and then Geoffrey became im-
possible and said abominable things, and I told him what I thought of
him.’
“‘There had been a lot of quarrelling, then?’ I asked.
“‘It wasn’t my fault—’
“‘My dear child,’ I said, ‘it doesn’t matter whose fault it was. That is not
what we are discussing. In a place like this everybody’s private affairs are
more or less public property. You and your husband were always quarrel-
ling. You had a particularly bad quarrel one morning, and that night your
husband died suddenly and mysteriously. Is that all, or is there anything
else?’
“‘I don’t know what you mean by anything else,’ said Mabel sullenly.
“‘Just what I say, my dear. If you have done anything silly, don’t for
Heaven’s sake keep it back now. I only want to do what I can to help you.’
“‘Nothing and nobody can help me,’ said Mabel wildly, ‘except death.’
“‘Have a little more faith in Providence, dear,’ I said. ‘Now then, Mabel, I
know perfectly well there is something else that you are keeping back.’
“I always did know, even when she was a child, when she was not
telling me the whole truth. It took a long time, but I got it out at last. She
had gone down to the chemist’s that morning and had bought some ar-
senic. She had had, of course, to sign the book for it. Naturally, the chemist
had talked.
“‘Who is your doctor?’ I asked.
“‘Dr. Rawlinson.’
“I knew him by sight. Mabel had pointed him out to me the other day.
To put it in perfectly plain language he was what I would describe as an
old dodderer. I have had too much experience of life to believe in the in-
fallibility of doctors. Some of them are clever men and some of them are
not, and half the time the best of them don’t know what is the matter with
you. I have no truck with doctors and their medicines myself.
“I thought things over, and then I put my bonnet on and went to call on
Dr. Rawlinson. He was just what I had thought him — a nice old man,
kindly, vague, and so shortsighted as to be pitiful, slightly deaf, and,
withal, touchy and sensitive to the last degree. He was on his high horse at
once when I mentioned Geoffrey Denman’s death, talked for a long time
about various kinds of fungi, edible and otherwise. He had questioned the
cook, and she had admitted that one or two of the mushrooms cooked had
been ‘a little queer,’ but as the shop had sent them she thought they must
be all right. The more she had thought about them since, the more she was
convinced that their appearance was unusual.
“‘She would be,’ I said. ‘They would start by being quite like mushrooms
in appearance, and they would end by being orange with purple spots.
There is nothing that class cannot remember if it tries.’
“I gathered that Denman had been past speech when the doctor got to
him. He was incapable of swallowing, and had died within a few minutes.
The doctor seemed perfectly satisfied with the certificate he had given. But
how much of that was obstinacy and how much of it was genuine belief I
could not be sure.
“I went straight home and asked Mabel quite frankly why she had
bought arsenic.
“‘You must have had some idea in your mind,’ I pointed out.
“Mabel burst into tears. ‘I wanted to make away with myself,’ she
moaned. ‘I was too unhappy. I thought I would end it all.’
“‘Have you the arsenic still?’ I asked.
“‘No, I threw it away.’
“I sat there turning things over and over in my mind.
“‘What happened when he was taken ill? Did he call you?’
“‘No.’ She shook her head. ‘He rang the bell violently. He must have
rung several times. At last Dorothy, the house-parlourmaid, heard it, and
she waked the cook up, and they came down. When Dorothy saw him she
was frightened. He was rambling and delirious. She left the cook with him
and came rushing to me. I got up and went to him. Of course I saw at once
he was dreadfully ill. Unfortunately Brewster, who looks after old Mr.
Denman, was away for the night, so there was no one who knew what to
do. I sent Dorothy off for the doctor, and cook and I stayed with him, but
after a few minutes I couldn’t bear it any longer; it was too dreadful. I ran
away back to my room and locked the door.’
“‘Very selfish and unkind of you,’ I said; ‘and no doubt that conduct of
yours has done nothing to help you since, you may be sure of that. Cook
will have repeated it everywhere. Well, well, this is a bad business.’
“Next I spoke to the servants. The cook wanted to tell me about the
mushrooms, but I stopped her. I was tired of these mushrooms. Instead, I
questioned both of them very closely about their master’s condition on
that night. They both agreed that he seemed to be in great agony, that he
was unable to swallow, and he could only speak in a strangled voice, and
when he did speak it was only rambling—nothing sensible.
“‘What did he say when he was rambling?’ I asked curiously.
“‘Something about some fish, wasn’t it?’ turning to the other.
“Dorothy agreed.
“‘A heap of fish,’ she said; ‘some nonsense like that. I could see at once
he wasn’t in his right mind, poor gentleman.’
“There didn’t seem to be any sense to be made out of that. As a last re-
source I went up to see Brewster, who was a gaunt, middle-aged woman of
about fifty.
“‘It is a pity that I wasn’t here that night,’ she said. ‘Nobody seems to
have tried to do anything for him until the doctor came.’
“‘I suppose he was delirious,’ I said doubtfully; ‘but that is not a symp-
tom of ptomaine poisoning, is it?’
“‘It depends,’ said Brewster.
“I asked her how her patient was getting on.
“She shook her head.
“‘He is pretty bad,’ she said.
“‘Weak?’
“‘Oh no, he is strong enough physically—all but his eyesight. That is fail-
ing badly. He may outlive all of us, but his mind is failing very fast now. I
have already told both Mr. and Mrs. Denman that he ought to be in an in-
stitution, but Mrs. Denman wouldn’t hear of it at any price.’
“I will say for Mabel that she always had a kindly heart.
“Well, there the thing was. I thought it over in every aspect, and at last I
decided that there was only one thing to be done. In view of the rumours
that were going about, permission must be applied for to exhume the
body, and a proper postmortem must be made and lying tongues
quietened once and for all. Mabel, of course, made a fuss, mostly on senti-
mental grounds—disturbing the dead man in his peaceful grave, etc., etc.
—but I was firm.
“I won’t make a long story of this part of it. We got the order and they
did the autopsy, or whatever they call it, but the result was not so satisfact-
ory as it might have been. There was no trace of arsenic—that was all to
the good—but the actual words of the report were that there was nothing to
show by what means deceased had come to his death.
“So, you see, that didn’t lead us out of trouble altogether. People went on
talking—about rare poisons impossible to detect, and rubbish of that sort.
I had seen the pathologist who had done the postmortem, and I had asked
him several questions, though he tried his best to get out of answering
most of them; but I got out of him that he considered it highly unlikely that
the poisoned mushrooms were the cause of death. An idea was simmering
in my mind, and I asked him what poison, if any, could have been em-
ployed to obtain that result. He made a long explanation to me, most of
which, I must admit, I did not follow, but it amounted to this: That death
might have been due to some strong vegetable alkaloid.
“The idea I had was this: Supposing the taint of insanity was in Geoffrey
Denman’s blood also, might he not have made away with himself? He had,
at one period of his life, studied medicine, and he would have a good
knowledge of poisons and their effects.
“I didn’t think it sounded very likely, but it was the only thing I could
think of. And I was nearly at my wits’ end, I can tell you. Now, I dare say
you modern young people will laugh, but when I am in really bad trouble
I always say a little prayer to myself—anywhere, when I am walking along
the street, or at a bazaar. And I always get an answer. It may be some tri-
fling thing, apparently quite unconnected with the subject, but there it is. I
had that text pinned over my bed when I was a little girl: Ask and you shall
receive. On the morning that I am telling you about, I was walking along
the High Street, and I was praying hard. I shut my eyes, and when I
opened them, what do you think was the first thing that I saw?”
Five faces with varying degrees of interest were turned to Miss Marple.
It may be safely assumed, however, that no one would have guessed the
answer to the question right.
“I saw,” said Miss Marple impressively, “the window of the fishmonger’s
shop. There was only one thing in it, a fresh haddock.”
She looked round triumphantly.
“Oh, my God!” said Raymond West. “An answer to prayer—a fresh had-
dock!”
“Yes, Raymond,” said Miss Marple severely, “and there is no need to be
profane about it. The hand of God is everywhere. The first thing I saw
were the black spots—the marks of St. Peter’s thumb. That is the legend,
you know. St. Peter’s thumb. And that brought things home to me. I
needed faith, the ever true faith of St. Peter. I connected the two things to-
gether, faith—and fish.”
Sir Henry blew his nose rather hurriedly. Joyce bit her lip.
“Now what did that bring to my mind? Of course, both the cook and
house-parlourmaid mentioned fish as being one of the things spoken of by
the dying man. I was convinced, absolutely convinced, that there was
some solution of the mystery to be found in these words. I went home de-
termined to get to the bottom of the matter.”
She paused.
“Has it ever occurred to you,” the old lady went on, “how much we go by
what is called, I believe, the context? There is a place on Dartmoor called
Grey Wethers. If you were talking to a farmer there and mentioned Grey
Wethers, he would probably conclude that you were speaking of these
stone circles, yet it is possible that you might be speaking of the atmo-
sphere; and in the same way, if you were meaning the stone circles, an
outsider, hearing a fragment of the conversation, might think you meant
the weather. So when we repeat a conversation, we don’t, as a rule, repeat
the actual words; we put in some other words that seem to us to mean ex-
actly the same thing.
“I saw both the cook and Dorothy separately. I asked the cook if she was
quite sure that her master had really mentioned a heap of fish. She said
she was quite sure.
“‘Were these his exact words,’ I asked, ‘or did he mention some particu-
lar kind of fish?’
“‘That’s it,’ said the cook; ‘it was some particular kind of fish, but I can’t
remember what now. A heap of—now what was it? Not any of the fish you
send to table. Would it be a perch now—or pike? No. It didn’t begin with a
P.’
“Dorothy also recalled that her master had mentioned some special kind
of fish. ‘Some outlandish kind of fish it was,’ she said.
“‘A pile of—now what was it?’
“‘Did he say heap or pile?’ I asked.
“‘I think he said pile. But there, I really can’t be sure—it’s so hard to re-
member the actual words, isn’t it, miss, especially when they don’t seem to
make sense. But now I come to think of it, I am pretty sure that it was a
pile, and the fish began with C; but it wasn’t a cod or a crayfish.’
“The next part is where I am really proud of myself,” said Miss Marple,
“because, of course, I don’t know anything about drugs—nasty, dangerous
things I call them. I have got an old recipe of my grandmother’s for tansy
tea that is worth any amount of your drugs. But I knew that there were
several medical volumes in the house, and in one of them there was an in-
dex of drugs. You see, my idea was that Geoffrey had taken some particu-
lar poison, and was trying to say the name of it.
“Well, I looked down the list of H’s, beginning He. Nothing there that
sounded likely; then I began on the P’s, and almost at once I came to—
what do you think?”
She looked round, postponing her moment of triumph.
“Pilocarpine. Can’t you understand a man who could hardly speak try-
ing to drag that word out? What would that sound like to a cook who had
never heard the word? Wouldn’t it convey the impression ‘pile of carp?’”
“By Jove!” said Sir Henry.
“I should never have hit upon that,” said Dr. Pender.
“Most interesting,” said Mr. Petherick. “Really most interesting.”
“I turned quickly to the page indicated in the index. I read about pilo-
carpine and its effect on the eyes and other things that didn’t seem to have
any bearing on the case, but at last I came to a most significant phrase:
Has been tried with success as an antidote for atropine poisoning.
“I can’t tell you the light that dawned upon me then. I never had thought
it likely that Geoffrey Denman would commit suicide. No, this new solu-
tion was not only possible, but I was absolutely sure it was the correct one,
because all the pieces fitted in logically.”
“I am not going to try to guess,” said Raymond. “Go on, Aunt Jane, and
tell us what was so startlingly clear to you.”
“I don’t know anything about medicine, of course,” said Miss Marple,
“but I did happen to know this, that when my eyesight was failing, the doc-
tor ordered me drops with atropine sulphate in them. I went straight up-
stairs to old Mr. Denman’s room. I didn’t beat about the bush.
“‘Mr. Denman,’ I said, ‘I know everything. Why did you poison your
son?’
“He looked at me for a minute or two—rather a handsome old man he
was, in his way—and then he burst out laughing. It was one of the most vi-
cious laughs I have ever heard. I can assure you it made my flesh creep. I
had only heard anything like it once before, when poor Mrs. Jones went
off her head.
“‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I got even with Geoffrey. I was too clever for Geoffrey.
He was going to put me away, was he? Have me shut up in an asylum? I
heard them talking about it. Mabel is a good girl—Mabel stuck up for me,
but I knew she wouldn’t be able to stand up against Geoffrey. In the end
he would have his own way; he always did. But I settled him—I settled my
kind, loving son! Ha, ha! I crept down in the night. It was quite easy. Brew-
ster was away. My dear son was asleep; he had a glass of water by the side
of his bed; he always woke up in the middle of the night and drank it off. I
poured it away—ha, ha!—and I emptied the bottle of eyedrops into the
glass. He would wake up and swill it down before he knew what it was.
There was only a tablespoonful of it—quite enough, quite enough. And so
he did! They came to me in the morning and broke it to me very gently.
They were afraid it would upset me. Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha!’
“Well,” said Miss Marple, “that is the end of the story. Of course, the
poor old man was put in an asylum. He wasn’t really responsible for what
he had done, and the truth was known, and everyone was sorry for Mabel
and could not do enough to make up to her for the unjust suspicions they
had had. But if it hadn’t been for Geoffrey realizing what the stuff was he
had swallowed and trying to get everybody to get hold of the antidote
without delay, it might never have been found out. I believe there are very
definite symptoms with atropine—dilated pupils of the eyes, and all that;
but, of course, as I have said, Dr. Rawlinson was very shortsighted, poor
old man. And in the same medical book which I went on reading—and
some of it was most interesting—it gave the symptoms of ptomaine poison-
ing and atropine, and they are not unlike. But I can assure you I have
never seen a pile of fresh haddock without thinking of the thumb mark of
St. Peter.”
There was a very long pause.
“My dear friend,” said Mr. Petherick. “My very dear friend, you really
are amazing.”
“I shall recommend Scotland Yard to come to you for advice,” said Sir
Henry.
“Well, at all events, Aunt Jane,” said Raymond, “there is one thing that
you don’t know.”
“Oh, yes, I do, dear,” said Miss Marple. “It happened just before dinner,
didn’t it? When you took Joyce out to admire the sunset. It is a very fa-
vourite place, that. There by the jasmine hedge. That is where the milk-
man asked Annie if he could put up the banns.”
“Dash it all, Aunt Jane,” said Raymond, “don’t spoil all the romance.
Joyce and I aren’t like the milkman and Annie.”
“That is where you make a mistake, dear,” said Miss Marple. “Everybody
is very much alike, really. But fortunately, perhaps, they don’t realize it.”
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