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Agatha Christie
4:50 from Paddington
A Miss Marple Mystery
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
About the Author
Other Books by Agatha Christie
Credit
Copyright
About the Publisher
One
Mrs. McGillicuddy panted along the platform in the wake of the porter carrying
her suitcase. Mrs. McGillicuddy was short and stout, the porter was tall and
free-striding. In addition, Mrs. McGillicuddy was burdened with a large
quantity of parcels; the result of a day’s Christmas shopping. The race was,
therefore, an uneven one, and the porter turned the corner at the end of the
platform whilst Mrs. McGillicuddy was still coming up the straight.
No. 1 Platform was not at the moment unduly crowded, since a train had just
gone out, but in the no-man’s-land beyond, a milling crowd was rushing in
several directions at once, to and from undergrounds, left-luggage offices,
tea rooms, inquiry offices, indicator boards, and the two outlets, Arrival and
Departure, to the outside world.
Mrs. McGillicuddy and her parcels were buffeted to and fro, but she arrived
eventually at the entrance to No. 3 Platform, and deposited one parcel at her
feet whilst she searched her bag for the ticket that would enable her to pass
the stern uniformed guardian at the gate.
At that moment, a Voice, raucous yet refined, burst into speech over her head.
“The train standing at Platform 3,” the Voice told her, “is the 4:50 for
Brackhampton, Milchester, Waverton, Carvil Junction, Roxeter and stations to
Chadmouth. Passengers for Brackhampton and Milchester travel at the rear of
the train. Passengers for Vanequay change at Roxeter.” The Voice shut itself
off with a click, and then reopened conversation by announcing the arrival at
Platform 9 of the 4:35 from Birmingham and Wolverhampton.
Mrs. McGillicuddy found her ticket and presented it. The man clipped it,
murmured: “On the right—rear portion.”
Mrs. McGillicuddy padded up the platform and found her porter, looking bored
and staring into space, outside the door of a third-class carriage.
“Here you are, lady.”
“I’m travelling first-class,” said Mrs. McGillicuddy.
“You didn’t say so,” grumbled the porter. His eye swept her masculine-looking
pepper-and-salt tweed coat disparagingly.
Mrs. McGillicuddy, who had said so, did not argue the point. She was sadly out
of breath.
The porter retrieved the suitcase and marched with it to the adjoining coach
where Mrs. McGillicuddy was installed in solitary splendour. The 4:50 was not
much patronized, the first-class clientele preferring either the faster
morning express, or the 6:40 with dining car. Mrs. McGillicuddy handed the
porter his tip which he received with disappointment, clearly considering it
more applicable to third-class than to first-class travel. Mrs. McGillicuddy,
though prepared to spend money on comfortable travel after a night journey
from the North and a day’s feverish shopping, was at no time an extravagant
tipper.
She settled herself back on the plush cushions with a sigh and opened her
magazine. Five minutes later, whistles blew, and the train started. The
magazine slipped from Mrs. McGillicuddy’s hand, her head dropped sideways,
three minutes later she was asleep. She slept for thirty-five minutes and
awoke refreshed. Resettling her hat which had slipped askew she sat up and
looked out of the window at what she could see of the flying countryside. It
was quite dark now, a dreary misty December day—Christmas was only five days
ahead. London had been dark and dreary; the country was no less so, though
occasionally rendered cheerful with its constant clusters of lights as the
train flashed through towns and stations.
“Serving last tea now,” said an attendant, whisking open the corridor door
like a jinn. Mrs. McGillicuddy had already partaken of tea at a large
department store. She was for the moment amply nourished. The attendant went
on down the corridor uttering his monotonous cry. Mrs. McGillicuddy looked up
at the rack where her various parcels reposed, with a pleased expression. The
face towels had been excellent value and just what Margaret wanted, the space
gun for Robby and the rabbit for Jean were highly satisfactory, and that
evening coatee was just the thing she herself needed, warm but dressy. The
pullover for Hector, too…her mind dwelt with approval on the soundness of her
purchases.
Her satisfied gaze returned to the window, a train travelling in the opposite
direction rushed by with a screech, making the windows rattle and causing her
to start. The train clattered over points and passed through a station.
Then it began suddenly to slow down, presumably in obedience to a signal. For
some minutes it crawled along, then stopped, presently it began to move
forward again. Another up-train passed them, though with less vehemence than
the first one. The train gathered speed again. At that moment another train,
also on a down-line, swerved inwards towards them, for a moment with almost
alarming effect. For a time the two trains ran parallel, now one gaining a
little, now the other. Mrs. McGillicuddy looked from her window through the
windows of the parallel carriages. Most of the blinds were down, but
occasionally the occupants of the carriages were visible. The other train was
not very full and there were many empty carriages.
At the moment when the two trains gave the illusion of being stationary, a
blind in one of the carriages flew up with a snap. Mrs. McGillicuddy looked
into the lighted first-class carriage that was only a few feet away.
Then she drew her breath in with a gasp and half-rose to her feet.
Standing with his back to the window and to her was a man. His hands were
round the throat of a woman who faced him, and he was slowly, remorselessly,
strangling her. Her eyes were starting from their sockets, her face was purple
and congested. As Mrs. McGillicuddy watched fascinated, the end came; the body
went limp and crumpled in the man’s hands.
At the same moment, Mrs. McGillicuddy’s train slowed down again and the other
began to gain speed. It passed forward and a moment or two later it had
vanished from sight.
Almost automatically Mrs. McGillicuddy’s hand went up to the communication
cord, then paused, irresolute. After all, what use would it be ringing the
cord of the train in which she was travelling? The horror of what she had seen
at such close quarters, and the unusual circumstances, made her feel
paralysed. Some immediate action was necessary—but what?
The door of her compartment was drawn back and a ticket collector said,
“Ticket, please.”
Mrs. McGillicuddy turned to him with vehemence.
“A woman has been strangled,” she said. “In a train that has just passed. I
saw it.”
The ticket collector looked at her doubtfully.
“I beg your pardon, madam?”
“A man strangled a woman! In a train. I saw it—through there.” She pointed to
the window.
The ticket collector looked extremely doubtful.
“Strangled?” he said disbelievingly.
“Yes, strangled! I saw it, I tell you. You must do something at once!”
The ticket collector coughed apologetically.
“You don’t think, madam, that you may have had a little nap and—er—” he broke
off tactfully.
“I have had a nap, but if you think this was a dream, you’re quite wrong. I
saw it, I tell you.”
The ticket collector’s eyes dropped to the open magazine lying on the seat. On
the exposed page was a girl being strangled whilst a man with a revolver
threatened the pair from an open doorway.
He said persuasively: “Now don’t you think, madam, that you’d been reading an
exciting story, and that you just dropped off, and awaking a little confused—”
Mrs. McGillicuddy interrupted him. | 4-50 from paddington - agatha christie.epub |
McGillicuddy interrupted him.
“I saw it,” she said. “I was as wide awake as you are. And I looked out of the
window into the window of the train alongside, and a man was strangling a
woman. And what I want to know is, what are you going to do about it?”
“Well—madam—”
“You’re going to do something, I suppose?”
The ticket collector sighed reluctantly and glanced at his watch.
“We shall be in Brackhampton in exactly seven minutes. I’ll report what you’ve
told me. In what direction was the train you mention going?”
“This direction, of course. You don’t suppose I’d have been able to see this
if a train had flashed past going in the other direction?”
The ticket collector looked as though he thought Mrs. McGillicuddy was quite
capable of seeing anything anywhere as the fancy took her. But he remained
polite.
“You can rely on me, madam,” he said. “I will report your statement. Perhaps I
might have your name and address—just in case….”
Mrs. McGillicuddy gave him the address where she would be staying for the next
few days and her permanent address in Scotland, and he wrote them down. Then
he withdrew with the air of a man who has done his duty and dealt successfully
with a tiresome member of the travelling public.
Mrs. McGillicuddy remained frowning and vaguely unsatisfied. Would the ticket
collector report her statement? Or had he just been soothing her down? There
were, she supposed vaguely, a lot of elderly women travelling around, fully
convinced that they had unmasked communist plots, were in danger of being
murdered, saw flying saucers and secret space ships, and reported murders that
had never taken place. If the man dismissed her as one of those….
The train was slowing down now, passing over points and running through the
bright lights of a large town.
Mrs. McGillicuddy opened her handbag, pulled out a receipted bill which was
all she could find, wrote a rapid note on the back of it with her ball-pen,
put it into a spare envelope that she fortunately happened to have, stuck the
envelope down and wrote on it.
The train drew slowly into a crowded platform. The usual ubiquitous Voice was
intoning:
“The train now arriving at Platform 1 is the 5:38 for Milchester, Waverton,
Roxeter, and stations to Chadmouth. Passengers for Market Basing take the
train now waiting at No. 3 platform. No. 1 bay for stopping train to Carbury.”
Mrs. McGillicuddy looked anxiously along the platform. So many passengers and
so few porters. Ah, there was one! She hailed him authoritatively.
“Porter! Please take this at once to the Stationmaster’s office.”
She handed him the envelope, and with it a shilling.
Then, with a sigh, she leaned back. Well, she had done what she could. Her
mind lingered with an instant’s regret on the shilling… Sixpence would really
have been enough….
Her mind went back to the scene she had witnessed. Horrible, quite horrible…
She was a strong-nerved woman, but she shivered. What a strange—what a
fantastic thing to happen to her, Elspeth McGillicuddy! If the blind of the
carriage had not happened to fly up… But that, of course, was Providence.
Providence had willed that she, Elspeth McGillicuddy, should be a witness of
the crime. Her lips set grimly.
Voices shouted, whistles blew, doors were banged shut. The 5:38 drew slowly
out of Brackhampton station. An hour and five minutes later it stopped at
Milchester.
Mrs. McGillicuddy collected her parcels and her suitcase and got out. She
peered up and down the platform. Her mind reiterated its former judgment: Not
enough porters. Such porters as there were seemed to be engaged with mail bags
and luggage vans. Passengers nowadays seemed always expected to carry their
own cases. Well, she couldn’t carry her suitcase and her umbrella and all her
parcels. She would have to wait. In due course she secured a porter.
“Taxi?”
“There will be something to meet me, I expect.”
Outside Milchester station, a taxi-driver who had been watching the exit came
forward. He spoke in a soft local voice.
“Is it Mrs. McGillicuddy? For St. Mary Mead?”
Mrs. McGillicuddy acknowledged her identity. The porter was recompensed,
adequately if not handsomely. The car, with Mrs. McGillicuddy, her suitcase,
and her parcels drove off into the night. It was a nine-mile drive. Sitting
bolt upright in the car, Mrs. McGillicuddy was unable to relax. Her feelings
yearned for expression. At last the taxi drove along the familiar village
street and finally drew up at its destination; Mrs. McGillicuddy got out and
walked up the brick path to the door. The driver deposited the cases inside as
the door was opened by an elderly maid. Mrs. McGillicuddy passed straight
through the hall to where, at the open sitting room door, her hostess awaited
her; an elderly frail old lady.
“Elspeth!”
“Jane!”
They kissed and, without preamble or circumlocution, Mrs. McGillicuddy burst
into speech.
“Oh, Jane!” she wailed. “I’ve just seen a murder!”
Two
True to the precepts handed down to her by her mother and grandmother—to wit:
that a true lady can neither be shocked nor surprised—Miss Marple merely
raised her eyebrows and shook her head, as she said:
“Most distressing for you, Elspeth, and surely most unusual. I think you had
better tell me about it at once.”
That was exactly what Mrs. McGillicuddy wanted to do. Allowing her hostess to
draw her nearer to the fire, she sat down, pulled off her gloves and plunged
into a vivid narrative.
Miss Marple listened with close attention. When Mrs. McGillicuddy at last
paused for breath, Miss Marple spoke with decision.
“The best thing, I think, my dear, is for you to go upstairs and take off your
hat and have a wash. Then we will have supper—during which we will not discuss
this at all. After supper we can go into the matter thoroughly and discuss it
from every aspect.”
Mrs. McGillicuddy concurred with this suggestion. The two ladies had supper,
discussing, as they ate, various aspects of life as lived in the village of
St. Mary Mead. Miss Marple commented on the general distrust of the new
organist, related the recent scandal about the chemist’s wife, and touched on
the hostility between the schoolmistress and the village institute. They then
discussed Miss Marple’s and Mrs. McGillicuddy’s gardens.
“Paeonies,” said Miss Marple as she rose from table, “are most unaccountable.
Either they do—or they don’t do. But if they do establish themselves, they are
with you for life, so to speak, and really most beautiful varieties nowadays.”
They settled themselves by the fire again, and Miss Marple brought out two old
Waterford glasses from a corner cupboard, and from another cupboard produced a
bottle.
“No coffee tonight for you, Elspeth,” she said. “You are already overexcited
(and no wonder!) and probably would not sleep. I prescribe a glass of my
cowslip wine, and later, perhaps, a cup of camo-mile tea.”
Mrs. McGillicuddy acquiescing in these arrangements, Miss Marple poured out
the wine.
“Jane,” said Mrs. McGillicuddy, as she took an appreciative sip, “you don’t
think, do you, that I dreamt it, or imagined it?”
“Certainly not,” said Miss Marple with warmth.
Mrs. McGillicuddy heaved a sigh of relief.
“That ticket collector,” she said, “he thought so. Quite polite, but all the
same—”
“I think, Elspeth, that that was quite natural under the circumstances. It
sounded—and indeed was—a most unlikely story. And you were a complete stranger
to him. No, I have no doubt at all that you saw what you’ve told me you saw.
It’s very extraordinary—but not at all impossible. I recollect myself being
interested when a train ran parallel to one on which I was travelling, to
notice what a vivid and intimate picture one got of what was going on in one
or two of the carriages. | 4-50 from paddington - agatha christie.epub |
A little girl, I remember once, playing with a teddy
bear, and suddenly she threw it deliberately at a fat man who was asleep in
the corner and he bounced up and looked most indignant, and the other
passengers looked so amused. I saw them all quite vividly. I could have
described afterwards exactly what they looked like and what they had on.”
Mrs. McGillicuddy nodded gratefully.
“That’s just how it was.”
“The man had his back to you, you say. So you didn’t see his face?”
“No.”
“And the woman, you can describe her? Young, old?”
“Youngish. Between thirty and thirty-five, I should think. I couldn’t say
closer than that.”
“Good-looking?”
“That again, I couldn’t say. Her face, you see, was all contorted and—”
Miss Marple said quickly:
“Yes, yes, I quite understand. How was she dressed?”
“She had on a fur coat of some kind, a palish fur. No hat. Her hair was
blonde.”
“And there was nothing distinctive that you can remember about the man?”
Mrs. McGillicuddy took a little time to think carefully before she replied.
“He was tallish—and dark, I think. He had a heavy coat on so that I couldn’t
judge his build very well.” She added despondently, “It’s not really very much
to go on.”
“It’s something,” said Miss Marple. She paused before saying: “You feel quite
sure, in your own mind, that the girl was—dead?”
“She was dead, I’m sure of it. Her tongue came out and—I’d rather not talk
about it….”
“Of course not. Of course not,” said Miss Marple quickly. “We shall know more,
I expect, in the morning.”
“In the morning?”
“I should imagine it will be in the morning papers. After this man had
attacked and killed her, he would have a body on his hands. What would he do?
Presumably he would leave the train quickly at the first station—by the way,
can you remember if it was a corridor carriage?”
“No, it was not.”
“That seems to point to a train that was not going far afield. It would almost
certainly stop at Brackhampton. Let us say he leaves the train at
Brackhampton, perhaps arranging the body in a corner seat, with her face
hidden by the fur collar to delay discovery. Yes—I think that that is what he
would do. But of course it will be discovered before very long—and I should
imagine that the news of a murdered woman discovered on a train would be
almost certain to be in the morning papers—we shall see.”
II
But it was not in the morning papers.
Miss Marple and Mrs. McGillicuddy, after making sure of this, finished their
breakfast in silence. Both were reflecting.
After breakfast, they took a turn round the garden. But this, usually an
absorbing pastime, was today somewhat halfhearted. Miss Marple did indeed call
attention to some new and rare species she had acquired for her rock-garden
but did so in an almost absentminded manner. And Mrs. McGillicuddy did not, as
was customary, counter-attack with a list of her own recent acquisitions.
“The garden is not looking at all as it should,” said Miss Marple, but still
speaking absentmindedly. “Doctor Haydock has absolutely forbidden me to do any
stooping or kneeling—and really, what can you do if you don’t stoop or kneel?
There’s old Edwards, of course—but so opinionated. And all this jobbing gets
them into bad habits, lots of cups of tea and so much pottering—not any real
work.”
“Oh, I know,” said Mrs. McGillicuddy. “Of course, there’s no question of my
being forbidden to stoop, but really, especially after meals—and having put on
weight”—she looked down at her ample proportions—“it does bring on heartburn.”
There was a silence and then Mrs. McGillicuddy planted her feet sturdily,
stood still, and turned on her friend.
“Well?” she said.
It was a small insignificant word, but it acquired full significance from Mrs.
McGillicuddy’s tone, and Miss Marple understood its meaning perfectly.
“I know,” she said.
The two ladies looked at each other.
“I think,” said Miss Marple, “we might walk down to the police station and
talk to Sergeant Cornish. He’s intelligent and patient, and I know him very
well, and he knows me. I think he’ll listen—and pass the information on to the
proper quarter.”
Accordingly, some three-quarters of an hour later, Miss Marple and Mrs.
McGillicuddy were talking to a fresh-faced grave man between thirty and forty
who listened attentively to what they had to say.
Frank Cornish received Miss Marple with cordiality and even deference. He set
chairs for the two ladies, and said: “Now what can we do for you, Miss
Marple?”
Miss Marple said: “I would like you, please, to listen to my friend Mrs.
McGillicuddy’s story.”
And Sergeant Cornish had listened. At the close of the recital he remained
silent for a moment or two.
Then he said:
“That’s a very extraordinary story.” His eyes, without seeming to do so, had
sized Mrs. McGillicuddy up whilst she was telling it.
On the whole, he was favourably impressed. A sensible woman, able to tell a
story clearly; not, so far as he could judge, an over-imaginative or a
hysterical woman. Moreover, Miss Marple, so it seemed, believed in the
accuracy of her friend’s story and he knew all about Miss Marple. Everybody in
St. Mary Mead knew Miss Marple; fluffy and dithery in appearance, but inwardly
as sharp and as shrewd as they make them.
He cleared his throat and spoke.
“Of course,” he said, “you may have been mistaken—I’m not saying you were,
mind—but you may have been. There’s a lot of horse-play goes on—it mayn’t have
been serious or fatal.”
“I know what I saw,” said Mrs. McGillicuddy grimly.
“And you won’t budge from it,” thought Frank Cornish, “and I’d say that,
likely or unlikely, you may be right.”
Aloud he said: “You reported it to the railway officials, and you’ve come and
reported it to me. That’s the proper procedure and you may rely on me to have
inquiries instituted.”
He stopped. Miss Marple nodded her head gently, satisfied. Mrs. McGillicuddy
was not quite so satisfied, but she did not say anything. Sergeant Cornish
addressed Miss Marple, not so much because he wanted her ideas, as because he
wanted to hear what she would say.
“Granted the facts are as reported,” he said, “what do you think has happened
to the body?”
“There seems to be only two possibilities,” said Miss Marple without
hesitation. “The most likely one, of course, is that the body was left in the
train, but that seems improbable now, for it would have been found some time
last night, by another traveller, or by the railway staff at the train’s
ultimate destination.”
Frank Cornish nodded.
“The only other course open to the murderer would be to push the body out of
the train on to the line. It must, I suppose, be still on the track somewhere
as yet undiscovered—though that does seem a little unlikely. But there would
be, as far as I can see, no other way of dealing with it.”
“You read about bodies being put in trunks,” said Mrs. McGillicuddy, “but no-
one travels with trunks nowadays, only suitcases, and you couldn’t get a body
into a suitcase.”
“Yes,” said Cornish. “I agree with you both. The body, if there is a body,
ought to have been discovered by now, or will be very soon. I’ll let you know
any developments there are—though I dare say you’ll read about them in the
papers. There’s the possibility, of course, that the woman, though savagely
attacked, was not actually dead. She may have been able to leave the train on
her own feet.”
“Hardly without assistance,” said Miss Marple. “And if so, it will have been
noticed. A man, supporting a woman whom he says is ill.”
“Yes, it will have been noticed,” said Cornish. “Or if a woman was found
unconscious or ill in a carriage and was removed to hospital, that, too, will
be on record. I think you may rest assured that you’ll hear about it all in a
very short time.”
But that day passed and the next day. On that evening Miss Marple received a
note from Sergeant Cornish. | 4-50 from paddington - agatha christie.epub |
On that evening Miss Marple received a
note from Sergeant Cornish.
In regard to the matter on which you consulted me, full inquiries have been
made, with no result. No woman’s body has been found. No hospital has
administered treatment to a woman such as you describe, and no case of a woman
suffering from shock or taken ill, or leaving a station supported by a man has
been observed. You may take it that the fullest inquiries have been made. I
suggest that your friend may have witnessed a scene such as she described but
that it was much less serious than she supposed.
Three
“Less serious? Fiddlesticks!” said Mrs. McGillicuddy. “It was murder!”
She looked defiantly at Miss Marple and Miss Marple looked back at her.
“Go on, Jane,” said Mrs. McGillicuddy. “Say it was all a mistake! Say I
imagined the whole thing! That’s what you think now, isn’t it?”
“Anyone can be mistaken,” Miss Marple pointed out gently. “Anybody,
Elspeth—even you. I think we must bear that in mind. But I still think, you
know, that you were most probably not mistaken… You use glasses for reading,
but you’ve got very good far sight—and what you saw impressed you very
powerfully. You were definitely suffering from shock when you arrived here.”
“It’s a thing I shall never forget,” said Mrs. McGillicuddy with a shudder.
“The trouble is, I don’t see what I can do about it!”
“I don’t think,” said Miss Marple thoughtfully, “that there’s anything more
you can do about it.” (If Mrs. McGillicuddy had been alert to the tones of her
friend’s voice, she might have noticed a very faint stress laid on the you.)
“You’ve reported what you saw—to the railway people and to the police. No,
there’s nothing more you can do.”
“That’s a relief, in a way,” said Mrs. McGillicuddy, “because as you know, I’m
going out to Ceylon immediately after Christmas—to stay with Roderick, and I
certainly do not want to put that visit off— I’ve been looking forward to it
so much. Though of course I would put it off if I thought it was my duty,” she
added conscientiously.
“I’m sure you would, Elspeth, but as I say, I consider you’ve done everything
you possibly could do.”
“It’s up to the police,” said Mrs. McGillicuddy. “And if the police choose to
be stupid—”
Miss Marple shook her head decisively.
“Oh, no,” she said, “the police aren’t stupid. And that makes it interesting,
doesn’t it?”
Mrs. McGillicuddy looked at her without comprehension and Miss Marple
reaffirmed her judgment of her friend as a woman of excellent principles and
no imagination.
“One wants to know,” said Miss Marple, “what really happened.”
“She was killed.”
“Yes, but who killed her, and why, and what happened to her body? Where is it
now?”
“That’s the business of the police to find out.”
“Exactly—and they haven’t found out. That means, doesn’t it, that the man was
clever—very clever. I can’t imagine, you know,” said Miss Marple, knitting her
brows, “how he disposed of it… You kill a woman in a fit of passion—it must
have been unpremeditated, you’d never choose to kill a woman in such
circumstances just a few minutes before running into a big station. No, it
must have been a quarrel—jealousy—something of that kind. You strangle her—and
there you are, as I say, with a dead body on your hands and on the point of
running into a station. What could you do except as I said at first, prop the
body up in a corner as though asleep, hiding the face, and then yourself leave
the train as quickly as possible. I don’t see any other possibility—and yet
there must have been one….”
Miss Marple lost herself in thought.
Mrs. McGillicuddy spoke to her twice before Miss Marple answered.
“You’re getting deaf, Jane.”
“Just a little, perhaps. People do not seem to me to enunciate their words as
clearly as they used to do. But it wasn’t that I did not hear you. I’m afraid
I wasn’t paying attention.”
“I just asked about the trains to London tomorrow. Would the afternoon be all
right? I’m going to Margaret’s and she isn’t expecting me before teatime.”
“I wonder, Elspeth, if you would mind going up by the 12:15? We could have an
early lunch.”
“Of course and—” Miss Marple went on, drowning her friend’s words:
“And I wonder, too, if Margaret would mind if you didn’t arrive for tea—if you
arrived about seven, perhaps?”
Mrs. McGillicuddy looked at her friend curiously.
“What’s on your mind, Jane?”
“I suggest, Elspeth, that I should travel up to London with you, and that we
should travel down again as far as Brackhampton in the train you travelled by
the other day. You would then return to London from Brackhampton and I would
come on here as you did. I, of course, would pay the fares,” Miss Marple
stressed this point firmly.
Mrs. McGillicuddy ignored the financial aspect.
“What on earth do you expect, Jane?” she asked. “Another murder?”
“Certainly not,” said Miss Marple shocked. “But I confess I should like to see
for myself, under your guidance, the—the—really it is most difficult to find
the correct term—the terrain of the crime.”
So accordingly on the following day Miss Marple and Mrs. McGillicuddy found
themselves in two opposite corners of a first-class carriage speeding out of
London by the 4:50 from Paddington. Paddington had been even more crowded than
on the preceding Friday—as there were now only two days to go before
Christmas, but the 4:50 was comparatively peaceful—at any rate, in the rear
portion.
On this occasion no train drew level with them, or they with another train. At
intervals trains flashed past them towards London. On two occasions trains
flashed past them the other way going at high speed. At intervals Mrs.
McGillicuddy consulted her watch doubtfully.
“It’s hard to tell just when—we’d passed through a station I know…” But they
were continually passing through stations.
“We’re due in Brackhampton in five minutes,” said Miss Marple.
A ticket collector appeared in the doorway. Miss Marple raised her eyes
interrogatively. Mrs. McGillicuddy shook her head. It was not the same ticket
collector. He clipped their tickets, and passed on staggering just a little as
the train swung round a long curve. It slackened speed as it did so.
“I expect we’re coming into Brackhampton,” said Mrs. McGillicuddy.
“We’re getting into the outskirts, I think,” said Miss Marple.
There were lights flashing past outside, buildings, an occasional glimpse of
streets and trams. Their speed slackened further. They began crossing points.
“We’ll be there in a minute,” said Mrs. McGillicuddy, “and I can’t really see
this journey has been any good at all. Has it suggested anything to you,
Jane?”
“I’m afraid not,” said Miss Marple in a rather doubtful voice.
“A sad waste of good money,” said Mrs. McGillicuddy, but with less disapproval
than she would have used had she been paying for herself. Miss Marple had been
quite adamant on that point.
“All the same,” said Miss Marple, “one likes to see with one’s own eyes where
a thing happened. This train’s just a few minutes late. Was yours on time on
Friday?”
“I think so. I didn’t really notice.”
The train drew slowly into the busy length of Brackhampton station. The
loudspeaker announced hoarsely, doors opened and shut, people got in and out,
milled up and down the platform. It was a busy crowded scene.
Easy, thought Miss Marple, for a murderer to merge into that crowd, to leave
the station in the midst of that pressing mass of people, or even to select
another carriage and go on in the train wherever its ultimate destination
might be. Easy to be one male passenger amongst many. But not so easy to make
a body vanish into thin air. That body must be somewhere.
Mrs. McGillicuddy had descended. She spoke now from the platform, through the
open window.
“Now take care of yourself, Jane,” she said. “Don’t catch a chill. It’s a
nasty treacherous time of year, and you’re not so young as you were.”
“I know,” said Miss Marple. | 4-50 from paddington - agatha christie.epub |
“And don’t let’s worry ourselves anymore over all this. We’ve done what we
could.”
Miss Marple nodded, and said:
“Don’t stand about in the cold, Elspeth. Or you’ll be the one to catch a
chill. Go and get yourself a good hot cup of tea in the Restaurant Room.
You’ve got time, twelve minutes before your train back to town.”
“I think perhaps I will. Good-bye, Jane.”
“Good-bye, Elspeth. A happy Christmas to you. I hope you find Margaret well.
Enjoy yourself in Ceylon, and give my love to dear Roderick—if he remembers me
at all, which I doubt.”
“Of course he remembers you—very well. You helped him in some way when he was
at school—something to do with money that was disappearing from a locker—he’s
never forgotten it.”
“Oh, that!” said Miss Marple.
Mrs. McGillicuddy turned away, a whistle blew, the train began to move. Miss
Marple watched the sturdy thickset body of her friend recede. Elspeth could go
to Ceylon with a clear conscience—she had done her duty and was freed from
further obligation.
Miss Marple did not lean back as the train gathered speed. Instead she sat
upright and devoted herself seriously to thought. Though in speech Miss Marple
was woolly and diffuse, in mind she was clear and sharp. She had a problem to
solve, the problem of her own future conduct; and, perhaps strangely, it
presented itself to her as it had to Mrs. McGillicuddy, as a question of duty.
Mrs. McGillicuddy had said that they had both done all that they could do. It
was true of Mrs. McGillicuddy but about herself Miss Marple did not feel so
sure.
It was a question, sometimes, of using one’s special gifts… But perhaps that
was conceited… After all, what could she do? Her friend’s words came back to
her, “You’re not so young as you were….”
Dispassionately, like a general planning a campaign, or an accountant
assessing a business, Miss Marple weighed up and set down in her mind the
facts of and against further enterprise. On the credit side were the
following:
1\. My long experience of life and human nature.
2\. Sir Henry Clithering and his godson (now at Scotland Yard, I believe), who
was so very nice in the Little Paddocks case.
3\. My nephew Raymond’s second boy, David, who is, I am almost sure, in
British Railways.
4\. Griselda’s boy Leonard who is so very knowledgeable about maps.
Miss Marple reviewed these assets and approved them. They were all very
necessary, to reinforce the weaknesses on the debit side—in particular her own
bodily weakness.
“It is not,” thought Miss Marple, “as though I could go here, there and
everywhere, making inquiries and finding out things.”
Yes, that was the chief objection, her own age and weakness. Although, for her
age, her health was good, yet she was old. And if Dr. Haydock had strictly
forbidden her to do practical gardening he would hardly approve of her
starting out to track down a murderer. For that, in effect, was what she was
planning to do—and it was there that her loophole lay. For if heretofore
murder had, so to speak, been forced upon her, in this case it would be that
she herself set out deliberately to seek it. And she was not sure that she
wanted to do so… She was old—old and tired. She felt at this moment, at the
end of a tiring day, a great reluctance to enter upon any project at all. She
wanted nothing at all but to march home and sit by the fire with a nice tray
of supper, and go to bed, and potter about the next day just snipping off a
few things in the garden, tidying up in a very mild way, without stooping,
without exerting herself….
“I’m too old for anymore adventures,” said Miss Marple to herself, watching
absently out of the window the curving line of an embankment….
A curve….
Very faintly something stirred in her mind… Just after the ticket collector
had clipped their tickets….
It suggested an idea. Only an idea. An entirely different idea….
A little pink flush came into Miss Marple’s face. Suddenly she did not feel
tired at all!
“I’ll write to David tomorrow morning,” she said to herself.
And at the same time another valuable asset flashed through her mind.
“Of course. My faithful Florence!”
II
Miss Marple set about her plan of campaign methodically and making due
allowance for the Christmas season which was a definitely retarding factor.
She wrote to her great-nephew, David West, combining Christmas wishes with an
urgent request for information.
Fortunately she was invited, as on previous years, to the vicarage for
Christmas dinner, and here she was able to tackle young Leonard, home for the
Christmas season, about maps.
Maps of all kinds were Leonard’s passion. The reason for the old lady’s
inquiry about a large-scale map of a particular area did not rouse his
curiosity. He discoursed on maps generally with fluency, and wrote down for
her exactly what would suit her purpose best. In fact, he did better. He
actually found that he had such a map amongst his collection and he lent it to
her, Miss Marple promising to take great care of it and return it in due
course.
III
“Maps,” said his mother, Griselda, who still, although she had a grown-up son,
looked strangely young and blooming to be inhabiting the shabby old vicarage.
“What does she want with maps? I mean, what does she want them for?”
“I don’t know,” said young Leonard, “I don’t think she said exactly.”
“I wonder now…” said Griselda. “It seems very fishy to me… At her age the old
pet ought to give up that sort of thing.”
Leonard asked what sort of thing, and Griselda said elusively:
“Oh, poking her nose into things. Why maps, I wonder?”
In due course Miss Marple received a letter from her great-nephew David West.
It ran affectionately:
Dear Aunt Jane,— Now what are you up to? I’ve got the information you wanted.
There are only two trains that can possibly apply—the 4:33 and the 5 o’clock.
The former is a slow train and stops at Haling Broadway, Barwell Heath,
Brackhampton and then stations to Market Basing. The 5 o’clock is the Welsh
express for Cardiff, Newport and Swansea. The former might be overtaken
somewhere by the 4:50, although it is due in Brackhampton five minutes earlier
and the latter passes the 4:50 just before Brackhampton.
In all this do I smell some village scandal of a fruity character? Did you,
returning from a shopping spree in town by the 4:50, observe in a passing
train the mayor’s wife being embraced by the Sanitary Inspector? But why does
it matter which train it was? A weekend at Porthcawl perhaps? Thank you for
the pullover. Just what I wanted. How’s the garden? Not very active this time
of year, I should imagine.
Yours ever,
David
Miss Marple smiled a little, then considered the information thus presented to
her. Mrs. McGillicuddy had said definitely that the carriage had not been a
corridor one. Therefore—not the Swansea express. The 4:33 was indicated.
Also some more travelling seemed unavoidable. Miss Marple sighed, but made her
plans.
She went up to London as before on the 12:15, but this time returned not by
the 4:50, but by the 4:33 as far as Brackhampton. The journey was uneventful,
but she registered certain details. The train was not crowded—4:33 was before
the evening rush hour. Of the first-class carriages only one had an occupant—a
very old gentleman reading the New Statesman. Miss Marple travelled in an
empty compartment and at the two stops, Haling Broadway and Barwell Heath,
leaned out of the window to observe passengers entering and leaving the train.
A small number of third-class passengers got in at Haling Broadway. At Barwell
Heath several third-class passengers got out. Nobody entered or left a first-
class carriage except the old gentleman carrying his New Statesman.
As the train neared Brackhampton, sweeping around a curve of line, Miss Marple
rose to her feet and stood experimentally with her back to the window over
which she had drawn down the blind. | 4-50 from paddington - agatha christie.epub |
Yes, she decided, the impetus of the sudden curving of the line and the
slackening of speed did throw one off one’s balance back against the window
and the blind might, in consequence, very easily fly up. She peered out into
the night. It was lighter than it had been when Mrs. McGillicuddy had made the
same journey—only just dark, but there was little to see. For observation she
must make a daylight journey.
On the next day she went up by the early morning train, purchased four linen
pillow-cases (tut-tutting at the price!) so as to combine investigation with
the provision of household necessities, and returned by a train leaving
Paddington at twelve fifteen. Again she was alone in a first-class carriage.
“This taxation,” thought Miss Marple, “that’s what it is. No one can afford to
travel first class except business men in the rush hours. I suppose because
they can charge it to expenses.”
About a quarter of an hour before the train was due at Brackhampton, Miss
Marple got out the map with which Leonard had supplied her and began to
observe the country-side. She had studied the map very carefully beforehand,
and after noting the name of a station they passed through, she was soon able
to identify where she was just as the train began to slacken for a curve. It
was a very considerable curve indeed. Miss Marple, her nose glued to the
window, studied the ground beneath her (the train was running on a fairly high
embankment) with close attention. She divided her attention between the
country outside and the map until the train finally ran into Brackhampton.
That night she wrote and posted a letter addressed to Miss Florence Hill, 4
Madison Road, Brackhampton… On the following morning, going to the County
library, she studied a Brackhampton directory and gazetteer, and a County
history.
Nothing so far had contradicted the very faint and sketchy idea that had come
to her. What she had imagined was possible. She would go no further than that.
But the next step involved action—a good deal of action—the kind of action for
which she, herself, was physically unfit. If her theory were to be definitely
proved or disproved, she must at this point have help from some other source.
The question was—who? Miss Marple reviewed various names and possibilities
rejecting them all with a vexed shake of the head. The intelligent people on
whose intelligence she could rely were all far too busy. Not only had they all
got jobs of varying importance, their leisure hours were usually apportioned
long beforehand. The unintelligent who had time on their hands were simply,
Miss Marple decided, no good.
She pondered in growing vexation and perplexity.
Then suddenly her forehead cleared. She ejaculated aloud a name.
“Of course!” said Miss Marple. “Lucy Eyelesbarrow!”
Four
The name of Lucy Eyelesbarrow had already made itself felt in certain circles.
Lucy Eyelesbarrow was thirty-two. She had taken a First in Mathematics at
Oxford, was acknowledged to have a brilliant mind and was confidently expected
to take up a distinguished academic career.
But Lucy Eyelesbarrow, in addition to scholarly brilliance, had a core of good
sound common sense. She could not fail to observe that a life of academic
distinction was singularly ill rewarded. She had no desire whatever to teach
and she took pleasure in contacts with minds much less brilliant than her own.
In short, she had a taste for people, all sorts of people—and not the same
people the whole time. She also, quite frankly, liked money. To gain money one
must exploit shortage.
Lucy Eyelesbarrow hit at once upon a very serious shortage—the shortage of any
kind of skilled domestic labour. To the amazement of her friends and fellow-
scholars, Lucy Eyelesbarrow entered the field of domestic labour.
Her success was immediate and assured. By now, after a lapse of some years,
she was known all over the British Isles. It was quite customary for wives to
say joyfully to husbands, “It will be all right. I can go with you to the
States. I’ve got Lucy Eyelesbarrow!” The point of Lucy Eyelesbarrow was that
once she came into a house, all worry, anxiety and hard work went out of it.
Lucy Eyelesbarrow did everything, saw to everything, arranged everything. She
was unbelievably competent in every conceivable sphere. She looked after
elderly parents, accepted the care of young children, nursed the sickly,
cooked divinely, got on well with any old crusted servants there might happen
to be (there usually weren’t), was tactful with impossible people, soothed
habitual drunkards, was wonderful with dogs. Best of all she never minded what
she did. She scrubbed the kitchen floor, dug in the garden, cleaned up dog
messes, and carried coals!
One of her rules was never to accept an engagement for any long length of
time. A fortnight was her usual period—a month at most under exceptional
circumstances. For that fortnight you had to pay the earth! But, during that
fortnight, your life was heaven. You could relax completely, go abroad, stay
at home, do as you pleased, secure that all was going well on the home front
in Lucy Eyelesbarrow’s capable hands.
Naturally the demand for her services was enormous. She could have booked
herself up if she chose for about three years ahead. She had been offered
enormous sums to go as a permanency. But Lucy had no intention of being a
permanency, nor would she book herself for more than six months ahead. And
within that period, unknown to her clamouring clients, she always kept certain
free periods which enabled her either to take a short luxurious holiday (since
she spent nothing otherwise and was handsomely paid and kept) or to accept any
position at short notice that happened to take her fancy, either by reason of
its character, or because she “liked the people.” Since she was now at liberty
to pick and choose amongst the vociferous claimants for her services, she went
very largely by personal liking. Mere riches would not buy you the services of
Lucy Eyelesbarrow. She could pick and choose and she did pick and choose. She
enjoyed her life very much and found in it a continual source of
entertainment.
Lucy Eyelesbarrow read and reread the letter from Miss Marple. She had made
Miss Marple’s acquaintance two years ago when her services had been retained
by Raymond West, the novelist, to go and look after his old aunt who was
recovering from pneumonia. Lucy had accepted the job and had gone down to St.
Mary Mead. She had liked Miss Marple very much. As for Miss Marple, once she
had caught a glimpse out of her bedroom window of Lucy Eyelesbarrow really
trenching for sweet peas in the proper way, she had leaned back on her pillows
with a sigh of relief, eaten the tempting little meals that Lucy Eyelesbarrow
brought to her, and listened, agreeably surprised, to the tales told by her
elderly irascible maidservant of how “I taught that Miss Eyelesbarrow a
crochet pattern what she’d never heard of! Proper grateful, she was.” And had
surprised her doctor by the rapidity of her convalescence.
Miss Marple wrote asking if Miss Eyelesbarrow could undertake a certain task
for her—rather an unusual one. Perhaps Miss Eyelesbarrow could arrange a
meeting at which they could discuss the matter.
Lucy Eyelesbarrow frowned for a moment or two as she considered. She was in
reality fully booked up. But the word unusual, and her recollection of Miss
Marple’s personality, carried the day and she rang up Miss Marple straight
away explaining that she could not come down to St. Mary Mead as she was at
the moment working, but that she was free from 2 to 4 on the following
afternoon and could meet Miss Marple anywhere in London. She suggested her own
club, a rather nondescript establishment which had the advantage of having
several small dark writing rooms which were usually empty.
Miss Marple accepted the suggestion and on the following day the meeting took
place.
Greetings were exchanged; Lucy Eyelesbarrow led her guest to the gloomiest of
the writing rooms, and said: “I’m afraid I’m rather booked up just at present,
but perhaps you’ll tell me what it is you want me to undertake?”
“It’s very simple, really,” said Miss Marple. “Unusual, but simple. I want you
to find a body.”
For a moment the suspicion crossed Lucy’s mind that Miss Marple was mentally
unhinged, but she rejected the idea. Miss Marple was eminently sane. | 4-50 from paddington - agatha christie.epub |
Miss Marple was eminently sane. She meant
exactly what she had said.
“What kind of a body?” asked Lucy Eyelesbarrow with admirable composure.
“A woman’s body,” said Miss Marple. “The body of a woman who was
murdered—strangled actually—in a train.”
Lucy’s eyebrows rose slightly.
“Well, that’s certainly unusual. Tell me about it.”
Miss Marple told her. Lucy Eyelesbarrow listened attentively, without
interrupting. At the end she said:
“It all depends on what your friend saw—or thought she saw—?”
She left the sentence unfinished with a question in it.
“Elspeth McGillicuddy doesn’t imagine things,” said Miss Marple. “That’s why
I’m relying on what she said. If it had been Dorothy Cartwright, now—it would
have been quite a different matter. Dorothy always has a good story, and quite
often believes it herself, and there is usually a kind of basis of truth but
certainly no more. But Elspeth is the kind of woman who finds it very hard to
make herself believe that anything at all extraordinary or out of the way
could happen. She’s almost unsuggestible, rather like granite.”
“I see,” said Lucy thoughtfully. “Well, let’s accept it all. Where do I come
in?”
“I was very much impressed by you,” said Miss Marple, “and you see, I haven’t
got the physical strength nowadays to get about and do things.”
“You want me to make inquiries? That sort of thing? But won’t the police have
done all that? Or do you think they have been just slack?”
“Oh, no,” said Miss Marple. “They haven’t been slack. It’s just that I’ve got
a theory about the woman’s body. It’s got to be somewhere. If it wasn’t found
in the train, then it must have been pushed or thrown out of the train—but it
hasn’t been discovered anywhere on the line. So I travelled down the same way
to see if there was anywhere where the body could have been thrown off the
train and yet wouldn’t have been found on the line—and there was. The railway
line makes a big curve before getting into Brackhampton, on the edge of a high
embankment. If a body were thrown out there, when the train was leaning at an
angle, I think it would pitch right down the embankment.”
“But surely it would still be found—even there?”
“Oh, yes. It would have to be taken away… But we’ll come to that presently.
Here’s the place—on this map?”
Lucy bent to study where Miss Marple’s finger pointed.
“It is right in the outskirts of Brackhampton now,” said Miss Marple, “but
originally it was a country house with extensive park and grounds and it’s
still there, untouched—ringed round with building estates and small suburban
houses. It’s called Rutherford Hall. It was built by a man called
Crackenthorpe, a very rich manufacturer, in 1884. The original Crackenthorpe’s
son, an elderly man, is living there still with, I understand, a daughter. The
railway encircles quite half of the property.”
“And you want me to do—what?”
Miss Marple replied promptly.
“I want you to get a post there. Everyone is crying out for efficient domestic
help— I should not imagine it would be difficult.”
“No, I don’t suppose it would be difficult.”
“I understand that Mr. Crackenthorpe is said locally to be somewhat of a
miser. If you accept a low salary, I will make it up to the proper figure
which should, I think, be rather more than the current rate.”
“Because of the difficulty?”
“Not the difficulty so much as the danger. It might, you know, be dangerous.
It’s only right to warn you of that.”
“I don’t know,” said Lucy pensively, “that the idea of danger would deter me.”
“I didn’t think it would,” said Miss Marple. “You’re not that kind of person.”
“I dare say you thought it might even attract me? I’ve encountered very little
danger in my life. But do you really believe it might be dangerous?”
“Somebody,” Miss Marple pointed out, “has committed a very successful crime.
There has been no hue-and-cry, no real suspicion. Two elderly ladies have told
a rather improbable story, the police have investigated it and found nothing
in it. So everything is nice and quiet. I don’t think that this somebody,
whoever he may be, will care about the matter being raked up—especially if you
are successful.”
“What do I look for exactly?”
“Any signs along the embankment, a scrap of clothing, broken bushes—that kind
of thing.”
Lucy nodded.
“And then?”
“I shall be quite close at hand,” said Miss Marple. “An old maidservant of
mine, my faithful Florence, lives in Brackhampton. She has looked after her
old parents for years. They are now both dead, and she takes in lodgers—all
most respectable people. She has arranged for me to have rooms with her. She
will look after me most devotedly, and I feel I should like to be close at
hand. I would suggest that you mention you have an elderly aunt living in the
neighbourhood, and that you want a post within easy distance of her, and also
that you stipulate for a reasonable amount of spare time so that you can go
and see her often.”
Again Lucy nodded.
“I was going to Taormina the day after tomorrow,” she said. “The holiday can
wait. But I can only promise three weeks. After that, I am booked up.”
“Three weeks should be ample,” said Miss Marple. “If we can’t find out
anything in three weeks, we might as well give up the whole thing as a mare’s
nest.”
Miss Marple departed, and Lucy, after a moment’s reflection, rang up a
Registry Office in Brackhampton, the manageress of which she knew very well.
She explained her desire for a post in the neighbourhood so as to be near her
“aunt.” After turning down, with a little difficulty and a good deal of
ingenuity, several more desirable places, Rutherford Hall was mentioned.
“That sounds exactly what I want,” said Lucy firmly.
The Registry Office rang up Miss Crackenthorpe, Miss Crackenthorpe rang up
Lucy.
Two days later Lucy left London en route for Rutherford Hall.
II
Driving her own small car, Lucy Eyelesbarrow drove through an imposing pair of
vast iron gates. Just inside them was what had originally been a small lodge
which now seemed completely derelict, whether through war damage, or merely
through neglect, it was difficult to be sure. A long winding drive led through
large gloomy clumps of rhododendrons up to the house. Lucy caught her breath
in a slight gasp when she saw the house which was a kind of miniature Windsor
Castle. The stone steps in front of the door could have done with attention
and the gravel sweep was green with neglected weeds.
She pulled an old-fashioned wrought-iron bell, and its clamour sounded echoing
away inside. A slatternly woman, wiping her hands on her apron, opened the
door and looked at her suspiciously.
“Expected, aren’t you?” she said. “Miss Somethingbarrow, she told me.”
“Quite right,” said Lucy.
The house was desperately cold inside. Her guide led her along a dark hall and
opened a door on the right. Rather to Lucy’s surprise, it was quite a pleasant
sitting room, with books and chintz-covered chairs.
“I’ll tell her,” said the woman, and went away shutting the door after having
given Lucy a look of profound disfavour.
After a few minutes the door opened again. From the first moment Lucy decided
that she liked Emma Crackenthorpe.
She was a middle-aged woman with no very outstanding characteristics, neither
good-looking nor plain, sensibly dressed in tweeds and pullover, with dark
hair swept back from her forehead, steady hazel eyes and a very pleasant
voice.
She said: “Miss Eyelesbarrow?” and held out her hand.
Then she looked doubtful.
“I wonder,” she said, “if this post is really what you’re looking for? I don’t
want a housekeeper, you know, to supervise things. I want someone to do the
work.”
Lucy said that that was what most people needed.
Emma Crackenthorpe said apologetically:
“So many people, you know, seem to think that just a little light dusting will
answer the case—but I can do all the light dusting myself.”
“I quite understand,” said Lucy. “You want cooking and washing-up, and
housework and stoking the boiler. That’s all right. That’s what I do. I’m not
at all afraid of work.”
“It’s a big house, I’m afraid, and inconvenient. | 4-50 from paddington - agatha christie.epub |
Of course we only live in a
portion of it—my father and myself, that is. He is rather an invalid. We live
quite quietly, and there is an Aga stove. I have several brothers, but they
are not here very often. Two women come in, a Mrs. Kidder in the morning, and
Mrs. Hart three days a week to do brasses and things like that. You have your
own car?”
“Yes. It can stand out in the open if there’s nowhere to put it. It’s used to
it.”
“Oh, there are any amount of old stables. There’s no trouble about that.” She
frowned a moment, then said, “Eyelesbarrow—rather an unusual name. Some
friends of mine were telling me about a Lucy Eyelesbarrow—the Kennedys?”
“Yes. I was with them in North Devon when Mrs. Kennedy was having a baby.”
Emma Crackenthorpe smiled.
“I know they said they’d never had such a wonderful time as when you were
there seeing to everything. But I had the idea that you were terribly
expensive. The sum I mentioned—”
“That’s quite all right,” said Lucy. “I want particularly, you see, to be near
Brackhampton. I have an elderly aunt in a critical state of health and I want
to be within easy distance of her. That’s why the salary is a secondary
consideration. I can’t afford to do nothing. If I could be sure of having some
time off most days?”
“Oh, of course. Every afternoon, till six, if you like?”
“That seems perfect.”
Miss Crackenthorpe hesitated a moment before saying: “My father is elderly and
a little—difficult sometimes. He is very keen on economy, and he says things
sometimes that upset people. I wouldn’t like—”
Lucy broke in quickly:
“I’m quite used to elderly people, of all kinds,” she said. “I always manage
to get on well with them.” Emma Crackenthorpe looked relieved.
“Trouble with father!” diagnosed Lucy. “I bet he’s an old tartar.”
She was apportioned a large gloomy bedroom which a small electric heater did
its inadequate best to warm, and was shown round the house, a vast
uncomfortable mansion. As they passed a door in the hall a voice roared out:
“That you, Emma? Got the new girl there? Bring her in. I want to look at her.”
Emma flushed, glanced at Lucy apologetically.
The two women entered the room. It was richly upholstered in dark velvet, the
narrow windows let in very little light, and it was full of heavy mahogany
Victorian furniture.
Old Mr. Crackenthorpe was stretched out in an invalid chair, a silver-headed
stick by his side.
He was a big gaunt man, his flesh hanging in loose folds. He had a face rather
like a bulldog, with a pugnacious chin. He had thick dark hair flecked with
grey, and small suspicious eyes.
“Let’s have a look at you, young lady.”
Lucy advanced, composed and smiling.
“There’s just one thing you’d better understand straight away. Just because we
live in a big house doesn’t mean we’re rich. We’re not rich. We live simply—do
you hear?—simply! No good coming here with a lot of high-falutin ideas. Cod’s
as good a fish as turbot any day, and don’t you forget it. I don’t stand for
waste. I live here because my father built the house and I like it. After I’m
dead they can sell it up if they want to—and I expect they will want to. No
sense of family. This house is well built—it’s solid, and we’ve got our own
land around us. Keeps us private. It would bring in a lot if sold for building
land but not while I’m alive. You won’t get me out of here until you take me
out feet first.”
He glared at Lucy.
“Your home is your castle,” said Lucy.
“Laughing at me?”
“Of course not. I think it’s very exciting to have a real country place all
surrounded by town.”
“Quite so. Can’t see another house from here, can you? Fields with cows in
them—right in the middle of Brackhampton. You hear the traffic a bit when the
wind’s that way—but otherwise it’s still country.”
He added, without pause or change of tone, to his daughter:
“Ring up that damn’ fool of a doctor. Tell him that last medicine’s no good at
all.”
Lucy and Emma retired. He shouted after them:
“And don’t let that damned woman who sniffs dust in here. She’s disarranged
all my books.”
Lucy asked:
“Has Mr. Crackenthorpe been an invalid long?”
Emma said, rather evasively:
“Oh, for years now… This is the kitchen.”
The kitchen was enormous. A vast kitchen range stood cold and neglected. An
Aga stood demurely beside it.
Lucy asked times of meals and inspected the larder. Then she said cheerfully
to Emma Crackenthorpe:
“I know everything now. Don’t bother. Leave it all to me.”
Emma Crackenthorpe heaved a sigh of relief as she went up to bed that night.
“The Kennedys were quite right,” she said. “She’s wonderful.”
Lucy rose at six the next morning. She did the house, prepared vegetables,
assembled, cooked and served breakfast. With Mrs. Kidder she made the beds and
at eleven o’clock they sat down to strong tea and biscuits in the kitchen.
Mollified by the fact that Lucy “had no airs about her,” and also by the
strength and sweetness of the tea, Mrs. Kidder relaxed into gossip. She was a
small spare woman with a sharp eye and tight lips.
“Regular old skinflint he is. What she has to put up with! All the same, she’s
not what I call down-trodden. Can hold her own all right when she has to. When
the gentlemen come down she sees to it there’s something decent to eat.”
“The gentlemen?”
“Yes. Big family it was. The eldest, Mr. Edmund, he was killed in the war.
Then there’s Mr. Cedric, he lives abroad somewhere. He’s not married. Paints
pictures in foreign parts. Mr. Harold’s in the City, lives in London—married
an earl’s daughter. Then there’s Mr. Alfred, he’s got a nice way with him, but
he’s a bit of a black-sheep, been in trouble once or twice—and there’s Miss
Edith’s husband, Mr. Bryan, ever so nice, he is—she died some years ago, but
he’s always stayed one of the family, and there’s Master Alexander, Miss
Edith’s little boy. He’s at school, comes here for part of the holidays
always; Miss Emma’s terribly set on him.”
Lucy digested all this information, continuing to press tea on her informant.
Finally, reluctantly, Mrs. Kidder rose to her feet.
“Seem to have got along a treat, we do, this morning,” she said wonderingly.
“Want me to give you a hand with the potatoes, dear?”
“They’re all done ready.”
“Well, you are a one for getting on with things! I might as well be getting
along myself as there doesn’t seem anything else to do.”
Mrs. Kidder departed and Lucy, with time on her hands, scrubbed the kitchen
table which she had been longing to do, but which she had put off so as not to
offend Mrs. Kidder whose job it properly was. Then she cleaned the silver till
it shone radiantly. She cooked lunch, cleared it away, washed it up, and at
two-thirty was ready to start exploration. She had set out the tea things
ready on a tray, with sandwiches and bread and butter covered with a damp
napkin to keep them moist.
She strolled round the gardens which would be the normal thing to do. The
kitchen garden was sketchily cultivated with a few vegetables. The hot-houses
were in ruins. The paths everywhere were overgrown with weeds. A herbaceous
border near the house was the only thing that showed free of weeds and in good
condition and Lucy suspected that that had been Emma’s hand. The gardener was
a very old man, somewhat deaf, who was only making a show of working. Lucy
spoke to him pleasantly. He lived in a cottage adjacent to the big stableyard.
Leading out of the stableyard a back drive led through the park which was
fenced off on either side of it, and under a railway arch into a small back
lane. | 4-50 from paddington - agatha christie.epub |
Every few minutes a train thundered along the main line over the railway arch.
Lucy watched the trains as they slackened speed going round the sharp curve
that encircled the Crackenthorpe property. She passed under the railway arch
and out into the lane. It seemed a little-used track. On the one side was the
railway embankment, on the other was a high wall which enclosed some tall
factory buildings. Lucy followed the lane until it came out into a street of
small houses. She could hear a short distance away the busy hum of main road
traffic. She glanced at her watch. A woman came out of a house nearby and Lucy
stopped her.
“Excuse me, can you tell me if there is a public telephone near here?”
“Post office just at the corner of the road.”
Lucy thanked her and walked along until she came to the Post Office which was
a combination shop and post office. There was a telephone box at one side.
Lucy went into it and made a call. She asked to speak to Miss Marple. A
woman’s voice spoke in a sharp bark.
“She’s resting. And I’m not going to disturb her!! She needs her rest—she’s an
old lady. Who shall I say called?”
“Miss Eyelesbarrow. There’s no need to disturb her. Just tell her that I’ve
arrived and everything is going on well and that I’ll let her know when I’ve
any news.”
She replaced the receiver and made her way back to Rutherford Hall.
Five
“I suppose it will be all right if I just practise a few iron shots in the
park?” asked Lucy.
“Oh, yes, certainly. Are you fond of golf?”
“I’m not much good, but I like to keep in practice. It’s a more agreeable form
of exercise than just going for a walk.”
“Nowhere to walk outside this place,” growled Mr. Crackenthorpe. “Nothing but
pavements and miserable little band boxes of houses. Like to get hold of my
land and build more of them. But they won’t until I’m dead. And I’m not going
to die to oblige anybody. I can tell you that! Not to oblige anybody!”
Emma Crackenthorpe said mildly:
“Now, Father.”
“I know what they think—and what they’re waiting for. All of ’em. Cedric, and
that sly fox Harold with his smug face. As for Alfred, I wonder he hasn’t had
a shot at bumping me off himself. Not sure he didn’t, at Christmas-time. That
was a very odd turn I had. Puzzled old Quimper. He asked me a lot of discreet
questions.”
“Everyone gets these digestive upsets now and again, Father.”
“All right, all right, say straight out that I ate too much! That’s what you
mean. And why did I eat too much? Because there was too much food on the
table, far too much. Wasteful and extravagant. And that reminds me—you, young
woman. Five potatoes you sent in for lunch—good-sized ones too. Two potatoes
are enough for anybody. So don’t send in more than four in future. The extra
one was wasted today.”
“It wasn’t wasted, Mr. Crackenthorpe. I’ve planned to use it in a Spanish
omelette tonight.”
“Urgh!” As Lucy went out of the room carrying the coffee tray she heard him
say, “Slick young woman, that, always got all the answers. Cooks well,
though—and she’s a handsome kind of girl.”
Lucy Eyelesbarrow took a light iron out of the set of golf clubs she had had
the forethought to bring with her, and strolled out into the park, climbing
over the fence.
She began playing a series of shots. After five minutes or so, a ball,
apparently sliced, pitched on the side of the railway embankment. Lucy went up
and began to hunt about for it. She looked back towards the house. It was a
long way away and nobody was in the least interested in what she was doing.
She continued to hunt for the ball. Now and then she played shots from the
embankment down into the grass. During the afternoon she searched about a
third of the embankment. Nothing. She played her ball back towards the house.
Then, on the next day, she came upon something. A thorn bush growing about
halfway up the bank had been snapped off. Bits of it lay scattered about. Lucy
examined the tree itself. Impaled on one of the thorns was a torn scrap of
fur. It was almost the same colour as the wood, a pale brownish colour. Lucy
looked at it for a moment, then she took a pair of scissors out of her pocket
and snipped it carefully in half. The half she had snipped off she put in an
envelope which she had in her pocket. She came down the steep slope searching
about for anything else. She looked carefully at the rough grass of the field.
She thought she could distinguish a kind of track which someone had made
walking through the long grass. But it was very faint—not nearly so clear as
her own tracks were. It must have been made some time ago and it was too
sketchy for her to be sure that it was not merely imagination on her part.
She began to hunt carefully down in the grass at the foot of the embankment
just below the broken thorn bush. Presently her search was rewarded. She found
a powder compact, a small cheap enamelled affair. She wrapped it in her
handkerchief and put it in her pocket. She searched on but did not find
anything more.
On the following afternoon, she got into her car and went to see her invalid
aunt. Emma Crackenthorpe said kindly, “Don’t hurry back. We shan’t want you
until dinner-time.”
“Thank you, but I shall be back by six at the latest.”
No. 4 Madison Road was a small drab house in a small drab street. It had very
clean Nottingham lace curtains, a shining white doorstep and a well-polished
brass door handle. The door was opened by a tall, grim-looking woman, dressed
in black with a large knob of iron-grey hair.
She eyed Lucy in suspicious appraisal as she showed her in to Miss Marple.
Miss Marple was occupying the back sitting room which looked out on to a small
tidy square of garden. It was aggressively clean with a lot of mats and
doilies, a great many china ornaments, a rather big Jacobean suite and two
ferns in pots. Miss Marple was sitting in a big chair by the fire busily
engaged in crocheting.
Lucy came in and shut the door. She sat down in the chair facing Miss Marple.
“Well!” she said. “It looks as though you were right.”
She produced her finds and gave details of their finding.
A faint flush of achievement came into Miss Marple’s cheeks.
“Perhaps one ought not to feel so,” she said, “but it is rather gratifying to
form a theory and get proof that it is correct!”
She fingered the small tuft of fur. “Elspeth said the woman was wearing a
light-coloured fur coat. I suppose the compact was in the pocket of the coat
and fell out as the body rolled down the slope. It doesn’t seem distinctive in
any way, but it may help. You didn’t take all the fur?”
“No, I left half of it on the thorn bush.”
Miss Marple nodded approval.
“Quite right. You are very intelligent, my dear. The police will want to check
exactly.”
“You are going to the police—with these things?”
“Well—not quite yet…” Miss Marple considered: “It would be better, I think, to
find the body first. Don’t you?”
“Yes, but isn’t that rather a tall order? I mean, granting that your estimate
is correct. The murderer pushed the body out of the train, then presumably got
out himself at Brackhampton and at some time—probably that same night—came
along and removed the body. But what happened after that? He may have taken it
anywhere.”
“Not anywhere,” said Miss Marple. “I don’t think you’ve followed the thing to
its logical conclusion, my dear Miss Eyelesbarrow.”
“Do call me Lucy. Why not anywhere?”
“Because, if so, he might much more easily have killed the girl in some lonely
spot and driven the body away from there. You haven’t appreciated—”
Lucy interrupted.
“Are you saying—do you mean—that this was a premeditated crime?”
“I didn’t think so at first,” said Miss Marple. “One wouldn’t—naturally. | 4-50 from paddington - agatha christie.epub |
“One wouldn’t—naturally. It
seemed like a quarrel and a man losing control and strangling the girl and
then being faced with the problem which he had to solve within a few minutes.
But it really is too much of a coincidence that he should kill the girl in a
fit of passion, and then look out of the window and find the train was going
round a curve exactly at a spot where he could tip the body out, and where he
could be sure of finding his way later and removing it! If he’d just thrown
her out there by chance, he’d have done no more about it, and the body would,
long before now, have been found.”
She paused. Lucy stared at her.
“You know,” said Miss Marple thoughtfully, “it’s really quite a clever way to
have planned a crime—and I think it was very carefully planned. There’s
something so anonymous about a train. If he’d killed her in the place where
she lived, or was staying, somebody might have noticed him come or go. Or if
he’d driven her out in the country somewhere, someone might have noticed the
car and its number and make. But a train is full of strangers coming and
going. In a non-corridor carriage, alone with her, it was quite
easy—especially if you realize that he knew exactly what he was going to do
next. He knew—he must have known—all about Rutherford Hall—its geographical
position, I mean, its queer isolation—an island bounded by railway lines.”
“It is exactly like that,” said Lucy. “It’s an anachronism out of the past.
Bustling urban life goes on all around it, but doesn’t touch it. The
tradespeople deliver in the mornings and that’s all.”
“So we assume, as you said, that the murderer comes to Rutherford Hall that
night. It is already dark when the body falls and no one is likely to discover
it before the next day.”
“No, indeed.”
“The murderer would come—how? In a car? Which way?”
Lucy considered.
“There’s a rough lane, alongside a factory wall. He’d probably come that way,
turn in under the railway arch and along the back drive. Then he could climb
the fence, go along at the foot of the embankment, find the body, and carry it
back to the car.”
“And then,” continued Miss Marple, “he took it to some place he had already
chosen beforehand. This was all thought out, you know. And I don’t think, as I
say, that he would take it away from Rutherford Hall, or if so, not very far.
The obvious thing, I suppose, would be to bury it somewhere?” She looked
inquiringly at Lucy.
“I suppose so,” said Lucy considering. “But it wouldn’t be quite as easy as it
sounds.”
Miss Marple agreed.
“He couldn’t bury it in the park. Too hard work and very noticeable. Somewhere
where the earth was turned already?”
“The kitchen garden, perhaps, but that’s very close to the gardener’s cottage.
He’s old and deaf—but still it might be risky.”
“Is there a dog?”
“No.”
“Then in a shed, perhaps, or an outhouse?”
“That would be simpler and quicker… There are a lot of unused old buildings;
broken down pigsties, harness rooms, workshops that nobody ever goes near. Or
he might perhaps thrust it into a clump of rhododendrons or shrubs somewhere.”
Miss Marple nodded.
“Yes, I think that’s much more probable.”
There was a knock on the door and the grim Florence came in with a tray.
“Nice for you to have a visitor,” she said to Miss Marple, “I’ve made you my
special scones you used to like.”
“Florence always made the most delicious tea cakes,” said Miss Marple.
Florence, gratified, creased her features into a totally unexpected smile and
left the room.
“I think, my dear,” said Miss Marple, “we won’t talk anymore about murder
during tea. Such an unpleasant subject!”
II
After tea, Lucy rose.
“I’ll be getting back,” she said. “As I’ve already told you, there’s no one
actually living at Rutherford Hall who could be the man we’re looking for.
There’s only an old man and a middle-aged woman, and an old deaf gardener.”
“I didn’t say he was actually living there,” said Miss Marple. “All I mean is,
that he’s someone who knows Rutherford Hall very well. But we can go into that
after you’ve found the body.”
“You seem to assume quite confidently that I shall find it,” said Lucy. “I
don’t feel nearly so optimistic.”
“I’m sure you will succeed, my dear Lucy. You are such an efficient person.”
“In some ways, but I haven’t had any experience in looking for bodies.”
“I’m sure all it needs is a little common sense,” said Miss Marple
encouragingly.
Lucy looked at her, then laughed. Miss Marple smiled back at her.
Lucy set to work systematically the next afternoon.
She poked round outhouses, prodded the briars which wreathed the old pigsties,
and was peering into the boiler room under the greenhouse when she heard a dry
cough and turned to find old Hillman, the gardener, looking at her
disapprovingly.
“You be careful you don’t get a nasty fall, miss,” he warned her. “Them steps
isn’t safe, and you was up in the loft just now and the floor there ain’t safe
neither.”
Lucy was careful to display no embarrassment.
“I expect you think I’m very nosy,” she said cheerfully. “I was just wondering
if something couldn’t be made out of this place—growing mushrooms for the
market, that sort of thing. Everything seems to have been let go terribly.”
“That’s the master, that is. Won’t spend a penny. Ought to have two men and a
boy here, I ought, to keep the place proper, but won’t hear of it, he won’t.
Had all I could do to make him get a motor mower. Wanted me to mow all that
front grass by hand, he did.”
“But if the place could be made to pay—with some repairs?”
“Won’t get a place like this to pay—too far gone. And he wouldn’t care about
that, anyway. Only cares about saving. Knows well enough what’ll happen after
he’s gone—the young gentlemen’ll sell up as fast as they can. Only waiting for
him to pop off, they are. Going to come into a tidy lot of money when he dies,
so I’ve heard.”
“I suppose he’s a very rich man?” said Lucy.
“Crackenthorpe’s Fancies, that’s what they are. The old gentleman started it,
Mr. Crackenthorpe’s father. A sharp one he was, by all accounts. Made his
fortune, and built this place. Hard as nails, they say, and never forgot an
injury. But with all that, he was open-handed. Nothing of the miser about him.
Disappointed in both his sons, so the story goes. Give ’em an education and
brought ’em up to be gentlemen—Oxford and all. But they were too much of
gentlemen to want to go into the business. The younger one married an actress
and then smashed himself up in a car accident when he’d been drinking. The
elder one, our one here, his father never fancied so much. Abroad a lot, he
was, bought a lot of heathen statues and had them sent home. Wasn’t so close
with his money when he was young—come on him more in middle age, it did. No,
they never did hit it off, him and his father, so I’ve heard.”
Lucy digested this information with an air of polite interest. The old man
leant against the wall and prepared to go on with his saga. He much preferred
talking to doing any work.
“Died before the war, the old gentleman did. Terrible temper he had. Didn’t do
to give him any cause, he wouldn’t stand for it.”
“And after he died, this Mr. Crackenthorpe came and lived here?”
“Him and his family, yes. Nigh grown up they was by then.”
“But surely… Oh, I see, you mean the 1914 war.”
“No, I don’t. Died in 1928, that’s what I mean.”
Lucy supposed that 1928 qualified as “before the war” though it was not the
way she would have described it herself.
She said: “Well, I expect you’ll be wanting to go on with your work. You
mustn’t let me keep you.”
“Ar,” said old Hillman without enthusiasm, “not much you can do this time of
day. Light’s too bad.”
Lucy went back to the house, pausing to investigate a likely-looking copse of
birch and azalea on her way. | 4-50 from paddington - agatha christie.epub |
She found Emma Crackenthorpe standing in the hall reading a letter. The
afternoon post had just been delivered.
“My nephew will be here tomorrow—with a school-friend. Alexander’s room is the
one over the porch. The one next to it will do for James Stoddart-West.
They’ll use the bathroom just opposite.”
“Yes, Miss Crackenthorpe. I’ll see the rooms are prepared.”
“They’ll arrive in the morning before lunch.” She hesitated. “I expect they’ll
be hungry.”
“I bet they will,” said Lucy. “Roast beef, do you think? And perhaps treacle
tart?”
“Alexander’s very fond of treacle tart.”
The two boys arrived on the following morning. They both had well-brushed
hair, suspiciously angelic faces, and perfect manners. Alexander Eastley had
fair hair and blue eyes, Stoddart-West was dark and spectacled.
They discoursed gravely during lunch on events in the sporting world, with
occasional references to the latest space fiction. Their manner was that of
elderly professors discussing palaeolithic implements. In comparison with
them, Lucy felt quite young.
The sirloin of beef vanished in no time and every crumb of treacle tart was
consumed.
Mr. Crackenthorpe grumbled: “You two will eat me out of house and home.”
Alexander gave him a blue-eyed reproving glance.
“We’ll have bread and cheese if you can’t afford meat, Grandfather.”
“Afford it? I can afford it. I don’t like waste.”
“We haven’t wasted any, sir,” said Stoddart-West, looking down at his place
which bore clear testimony of that fact.
“You boys both eat twice as much as I do.”
“We’re at the body-building stage,” Alexander explained. “We need a big intake
of proteins.”
The old man grunted.
As the two boys left the table, Lucy heard Alexander say apologetically to his
friend:
“You mustn’t pay any attention to my grandfather. He’s on a diet or something
and that makes him rather peculiar. He’s terribly mean, too. I think it must
be a complex of some kind.”
Stoddart-West said comprehendingly:
“I had an aunt who kept thinking she was going bankrupt. Really, she had
oodles of money. Pathological, the doctor said. Have you got that football,
Alex?”
After she had cleared away and washed up lunch, Lucy went out. She could hear
the boys calling out in the distance on the lawn. She herself went in the
opposite direction, down the front drive and from there she struck across to
some clumped masses of rhododendron bushes. She began to hunt carefully,
holding back the leaves and peering inside. She moved from clump to clump
systematically, and was raking inside with a golf club when the polite voice
of Alexander Eastley made her start.
“Are you looking for something, Miss Eyelesbarrow?”
“A golf ball,” said Lucy promptly. “Several golf balls in fact. I’ve been
practising golf shots most afternoons and I’ve lost quite a lot of balls. I
thought that today I really must find some of them.”
“We’ll help you,” said Alexander obligingly.
“That’s very kind of you. I thought you were playing football.”
“One can’t go on playing footer,” explained Stoddart-West. “One gets too hot.
Do you play a lot of golf?”
“I’m quite fond of it. I don’t get much opportunity.”
“I suppose you don’t. You do the cooking here, don’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Did you cook the lunch today?”
“Yes. Was it all right?”
“Simply wizard,” said Alexander. “We get awful meat at school, all dried up. I
love beef that’s pink and juicy inside. That treacle tart was pretty smashing,
too.”
“You must tell me what things you like best.”
“Could we have apple meringue one day? It’s my favourite thing.”
“Of course.”
Alexander sighed happily.
“There’s a clock golf set under the stairs,” he said. “We could fix it up on
the lawn and do some putting. What about it, Stodders?”
“Good-oh!” said Stoddart-West.
“He isn’t really Australian,” explained Alexander courteously. “But he’s
practising talking that way in case his people take him out to see the Test
Match next year.”
Encouraged by Lucy, they went off to get the clock golf set. Later, as she
returned to the house, she found them setting it out on the lawn and arguing
about the position of the numbers.
“We don’t want it like a clock,” said Stoddart-West. “That’s kid’s stuff. We
want to make a course of it. Long holes and short ones. It’s a pity the
numbers are so rusty. You can hardly see them.”
“They need a lick of white paint,” said Lucy. “You might get some tomorrow and
paint them.”
“Good idea.” Alexander’s face lit up. “I say, I believe there are some old
pots of paint in the Long Barn—left there by the painters last hols. Shall we
see?”
“What’s the Long Barn?” asked Lucy.
Alexander pointed to a long stone building a little way from the house near
the back drive.
“It’s quite old,” he said. “Grandfather calls it a Leak Barn and says its
Elizabethan, but that’s just swank. It belonged to the farm that was here
originally. My great-grandfather pulled it down and built this awful house
instead.”
He added: “A lot of grandfather’s collection is in the barn. Things he had
sent home from abroad when he was a young man. Most of them are pretty awful,
too. The Long Barn is used sometimes for whist drives and things like that.
Women’s Institute stuff. And Conservative Sales of Work. Come and see it.”
Lucy accompanied them willingly.
There was a big nail-studded oak door to the barn. Alexander raised his hand
and detached a key on a nail just under some ivy to the right hand of the top
of the door. He turned it in the lock, pushed the door open and they went in.
At a first glance Lucy felt that she was in a singularly bad museum. The heads
of two Roman emperors in marble glared at her out of bulging eyeballs, there
was a huge sarcophagus of a decadent Greco-Roman period, a simpering Venus
stood on a pedestal clutching her falling draperies. Besides these works of
art, there were a couple of trestle tables, some stacked-up chairs, and sundry
oddments such as a rusted hand mower, two buckets, a couple of motheaten car
seats, and a green painted iron garden seat that had lost a leg.
“I think I saw the paint over here,” said Alexander vaguely. He went to a
corner and pulled aside a tattered curtain that shut it off.
They found a couple of paint pots and brushes, the latter dry and stiff.
“You really need some turps,” said Lucy.
They could not, however, find any turpentine. The boys suggested bicycling off
to get some, and Lucy urged them to do so. Painting the clock golf numbers
would keep them amused for some time, she thought.
The boys went off, leaving her in the barn.
“This really could do with a clear up,” she had murmured.
“I shouldn’t bother,” Alexander advised her. “It gets cleaned up if it’s going
to be used for anything, but it’s practically never used this time of year.”
“Do I hang the key up outside the door again? Is that where it’s kept?”
“Yes. There’s nothing to pinch here, you see. Nobody would want those awful
marble things and, anyway, they weigh a ton.”
Lucy agreed with him. She could hardly admire old Mr. Crackenthorpe’s taste in
art. He seemed to have an unerring instinct for selecting the worst specimen
of any period.
She stood looking round her after the boys had gone. Her eyes came to rest on
the sarcophagus and stayed there.
That sarcophagus….
The air in the barn was faintly musty as though unaired for a long time. She
went over to the sarcophagus. It had a heavy close-fitting lid. Lucy looked at
it speculatively.
Then she left the barn, went to the kitchen, found a heavy crowbar, and
returned.
It was not an easy task, but Lucy toiled doggedly.
Slowly the lid began to rise, prised up by the crowbar.
It rose sufficiently for Lucy to see what was inside….
Six
I
A few minutes later Lucy, rather pale, left the barn, locked the door and put
the key back on the nail.
She went rapidly to the stables, got out her car and drove down the back
drive. She stopped at the post office at the end of the road. | 4-50 from paddington - agatha christie.epub |
She stopped at the post office at the end of the road. She went into
the telephone box, put in the money and dialled.
“I want to speak to Miss Marple.”
“She’s resting, miss. It’s Miss Eyelesbarrow, isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“I’m not going to disturb her and that’s that, miss. She’s an old lady and she
needs her rest.”
“You must disturb her. It’s urgent.”
“I’m not—”
“Please do what I say at once.”
When she chose, Lucy’s voice could be as incisive as steel. Florence knew
authority when she heard it.
Presently Miss Marple’s voice spoke.
“Yes, Lucy?”
Lucy drew a deep breath.
“You were quite right,” she said. “I’ve found it.”
“A woman’s body?”
“Yes. A woman in a fur coat. It’s a stone sarcophagus in a kind of barn-cum-
museum near the house. What do you want me to do? I ought to inform the
police, I think.”
“Yes. You must inform the police. At once.”
“But what about the rest of it? About you? The first thing they’ll want to
know is why I was prying up a lid that weighs tons for apparently no reason.
Do you want me to invent a reason? I can.”
“No. I think, you know,” said Miss Marple in her gentle serious voice, “that
the only thing to do is to tell the exact truth.”
“About you?”
“About everything.”
A sudden grin split the whiteness of Lucy’s face.
“That will be quite simple for me,” she said. “But I imagine they’ll find it
quite hard to believe!”
She rang off, waited a moment, and then rang and got the police station.
“I have just discovered a dead body in a sarcophagus in the Long Barn at
Rutherford Hall.”
“What’s that?”
Lucy repeated her statement and anticipating the next question gave her name.
She drove back, put the car away and entered the house.
She paused in the hall for a moment, thinking.
Then she gave a brief sharp nod of the head and went to the library where Miss
Crackenthorpe was sitting helping her father to do The Times crossword.
“Can I speak to you a moment Miss Crackenthorpe?”
Emma looked up, a shade of apprehension on her face. The apprehension was,
Lucy thought, purely domestic. In such words do useful household staff
announce their imminent departure.
“Well, speak up, girl, speak up,” said old Mr. Crackenthorpe irritably.
Lucy said to Emma:
“I’d like to speak to you alone, please.”
“Nonsense,” said Mr. Crackenthorpe. “You say straight out here what you’ve got
to say.”
“Just a moment, Father.” Emma rose and went towards the door.
“All nonsense. It can wait,” said the old man angrily.
“I’m afraid it can’t wait,” said Lucy.
Mr. Crackenthorpe said, “What impertinence!”
Emma came out into the hall. Lucy followed her and shut the door behind them.
“Yes?” said Emma. “What is it? If you think there’s too much to do with the
boys here, I can help you and—”
“It’s not that at all,” said Lucy. “I didn’t want to speak before your father
because I understand he is an invalid and it might give him a shock. You see,
I’ve just discovered the body of a murdered woman in that big sarcophagus in
the Long Barn.”
Emma Crackenthorpe stared at her.
“In the sarcophagus? A murdered woman? It’s impossible!”
“I’m afraid it’s quite true. I’ve rung up the police. They will be here at any
minute.”
A slight flush came into Emma’s cheeks.
“You should have told me first—before notifying the police.”
“I’m sorry,” said Lucy.
“I didn’t hear you ring up—” Emma’s glance went to the telephone on the hall
table.
“I rang up from the post office just down the road.”
“But how extraordinary. Why not from here?”
Lucy thought quickly.
“I was afraid the boys might be about—might hear—if I rang up from the hall
here.”
“I see… Yes… I see… They are coming—the police, I mean?”
“They’re here now,” said Lucy, as with a squeal of brakes a car drew up at the
front door and the front doorbell pealed through the house.
II
“I’m sorry, very sorry—to have asked this of you,” said Inspector Bacon.
His hand under her arm, he led Emma Crackenthorpe out of the barn. Emma’s face
was very pale, she looked sick, but she walked firmly erect.
“I’m quite sure that I’ve never seen the woman before in my life.”
“We’re very grateful to you, Miss Crackenthorpe. That’s all I wanted to know.
Perhaps you’d like to lie down?”
“I must go to my father. I telephoned Dr. Quimper as soon as I heard about
this and the doctor is with him now.”
Dr. Quimper came out of the library as they crossed the hall. He was a tall
genial man, with a casual offhand cynical manner that his patients found very
stimulating.
He and the inspector nodded to each other.
“Miss Crackenthorpe has performed an unpleasant task very bravely,” said
Bacon.
“Well done, Emma,” said the doctor, patting her on the shoulder. “You can take
things. I’ve always known that. Your father’s all right. Just go in and have a
word with him, and then go into the dining room and get yourself a glass of
brandy. That’s a prescription.”
Emma smiled at him gratefully and went into the library.
“That woman’s the salt of the earth,” said the doctor, looking after her. “A
thousand pities she’s never married. The penalty of being the only female in a
family of men. The other sister got clear, married at seventeen, I believe.
This one’s quite a handsome woman really. She’d have been a success as a wife
and mother.”
“Too devoted to her father, I suppose,” said Inspector Bacon.
“She’s not really as devoted as all that—but she’s got the instinct some women
have to make their menfolk happy. She sees that her father likes being an
invalid, so she lets him be an invalid. She’s the same with her brothers.
Cedric feels he’s a good painter, what’s his name—Harold—knows how much she
relies on his sound judgment—she lets Alfred shock her with his stories of his
clever deals. Oh, yes, she’s a clever woman—no fool. Well, do you want me for
anything? Want me to have a look at your corpse now Johnstone has done with
it” (Johnstone was the police surgeon) “and see if it happens to be one of my
medical mistakes?”
“I’d like you to have a look, yes, Doctor. We want to get her identified. I
suppose it’s impossible for old Mr. Crackenthorpe? Too much of a strain?”
“Strain? Fiddlesticks. He’d never forgive you or me if you didn’t let him have
a peep. He’s all agog. Most exciting thing that’s happened to him for fifteen
years or so—and it won’t cost him anything!”
“There’s nothing really much wrong with him then?”
“He’s seventy-two,” said the doctor. “That’s all, really, that’s the matter
with him. He has odd rheumatic twinges—who doesn’t? So he calls it arthritis.
He has palpitations after meals—as well he may—he puts them down to ‘heart.’
But he can always do anything he wants to do! I’ve plenty of patients like
that. The ones who are really ill usually insist desperately that they’re
perfectly well. Come on, let’s go and see this body of yours. Unpleasant, I
suppose?”
“Johnstone estimates she’s been dead between a fortnight and three weeks.”
“Quite unpleasant, then.”
The doctor stood by the sarcophagus and looked down with frank curiosity,
professionally unmoved by what he had named the “unpleasantness.”
“Never seen her before. No patient of mine. I don’t remember ever seeing her
about in Brackhampton. She must have been quite good-looking once—hm—somebody
had it in for her all right.”
They went out again into the air. Doctor Quimper glanced up at the building.
“Found in the what—what do they call it?—the Long Barn—in a sarcophagus!
Fantastic! Who found her?”
“Miss Lucy Eyelesbarrow.”
“Oh, the latest lady help? What was she doing, poking about in sarcophagi?”
“That,” said Inspector Bacon grimly, “is just what I am going to ask her. Now,
about Mr. Crackenthorpe. Will you—?”
“I’ll bring him along.”
Mr. | 4-50 from paddington - agatha christie.epub |
Crackenthorpe. Will you—?”
“I’ll bring him along.”
Mr. Crackenthorpe, muffled in scarves, came walking at a brisk pace, the
doctor beside him.
“Disgraceful,” he said. “Absolutely disgraceful! I brought back that
sarcophagus from Florence in—let me see—it must have been in 1908—or was it
1909?”
“Steady now,” the doctor warned him. “This isn’t going to be nice, you know.”
“No matter how ill I am, I’ve got to do my duty, haven’t I?”
A very brief visit inside the Long Barn was, however, quite long enough. Mr.
Crackenthorpe shuffled out into the air again with remarkable speed.
“Never saw her before in my life!” he said. “What’s it mean? Absolutely
disgraceful. It wasn’t Florence—I remember now—it was Naples. A very fine
specimen. And some fool of a woman has to come and get herself killed in it!”
He clutched at the folds of his overcoat on the left side.
“Too much for me… My heart… Where’s Emma? Doctor….”
Doctor Quimper took his arm.
“You’ll be all right,” he said. “I prescribe a little stimulant. Brandy.”
They went back together towards the house.
“Sir. Please, sir.”
Inspector Bacon turned. Two boys had arrived, breathless, on bicycles. Their
faces were full of eager pleading.
“Please, sir, can we see the body?”
“No, you can’t,” said Inspector Bacon.
“Oh, sir, please, sir. You never know. We might know who she was. Oh, please,
sir, do be a sport. It’s not fair. Here’s a murder, right in our own barn.
It’s the sort of chance that might never happen again. Do be a sport, sir.”
“Who are you two?”
“I’m Alexander Eastley, and this is my friend James Stoddart-West.”
“Have you ever seen a blonde woman wearing a light-coloured dyed squirrel coat
anywhere about the place?”
“Well, I can’t remember exactly,” said Alexander astutely. “If I were to have
a look—”
“Take ’em in, Sanders,” said Inspector Bacon to the constable who was standing
by the barn door. “One’s only young once!”
“Oh, sir, thank you, sir.” Both boys were vociferous. “It’s very kind of you,
sir.”
Bacon turned away towards the house.
“And now,” he said to himself grimly, “for Miss Lucy Eyelesbarrow!”
III
After leading the police to the Long Barn, and giving a brief account of her
actions, Lucy had retired into the background, but she was under no illusion
that the police had finished with her.
She had just finished preparing potatoes for chips that evening when word was
brought to her that Inspector Bacon required her presence. Putting aside the
large bowl of cold water and salt in which the chips were reposing, Lucy
followed the policeman to where the inspector awaited her. She sat down and
awaited his questions composedly.
She gave her name—and her address in London, and added of her own accord:
“I will give you some names and addresses of references if you want to know
all about me.”
The names were very good ones. An Admiral of the Fleet, the Provost of an
Oxford College, and a Dame of the British Empire. In spite of himself
Inspector Bacon was impressed.
“Now, Miss Eyelesbarrow, you went into the Long Barn to find some paint. Is
that right? And after having found the paint you got a crowbar, forced up the
lid of this sarcophagus and found the body. What were you looking for in the
sarcophagus?”
“I was looking for a body,” said Lucy.
“You were looking for a body—and you found one! Doesn’t that seem to you a
very extraordinary story?”
“Oh, yes, it is an extraordinary story. Perhaps you will let me explain it to
you.”
“I certainly think you had better do so.”
Lucy gave him a precise recital of the events which had led up to her
sensational discovery.
The inspector summed it up in an outraged voice.
“You were engaged by an elderly lady to obtain a post here and to search the
house and grounds for a dead body? Is that right?”
“Yes.”
“Who is this elderly lady?”
“Miss Jane Marple. She is at present living at 4 Madison Road.”
The inspector wrote it down.
“You expect me to believe this story?”
Lucy said gently:
“Not, perhaps, until after you have interviewed Miss Marple and got her
confirmation of it.”
“I shall interview her all right. She must be cracked.”
Lucy forbore to point out that to be proved right is not really a proof of
mental incapacity. Instead she said:
“What are you proposing to tell Miss Crackenthorpe? About me, I mean?”
“Why do you ask?”
“Well, as far as Miss Marple is concerned I’ve done my job, I’ve found the
body she wanted found. But I’m still engaged by Miss Crackenthorpe, and there
are two hungry boys in the house and probably some more of the family will
soon be coming down after all this upset. She needs domestic help. If you go
and tell her that I only took this post in order to hunt for dead bodies
she’ll probably throw me out. Otherwise I can get on with my job and be
useful.”
The inspector looked hard at her.
“I’m not saying anything to anyone at present,” he said. “I haven’t verified
your statement yet. For all I know you may be making the whole thing up.”
Lucy rose.
“Thank you. Then I’ll go back to the kitchen and get on with things.”
Seven
I
“We’d better have the Yard in on it, is that what you think, Bacon?”
The Chief Constable looked inquiringly at Inspector Bacon. The inspector was a
big stolid man—his expression was that of one utterly disgusted with humanity.
“The woman wasn’t a local, sir,” he said. “There’s some reason to believe—from
her underclothing—that she might have been a foreigner. Of course,” added
Inspector Bacon hastily, “I’m not letting on about that yet awhile. We’re
keeping it up our sleeves until after the inquest.”
The Chief Constable nodded.
“The inquest will be purely formal, I suppose?”
“Yes, sir. I’ve seen the Coroner.”
“And it’s fixed for—when?”
“Tomorrow. I understand the other members of the Crackenthorpe family will be
here for it. There’s just a chance one of them might be able to identify her.
They’ll all be here.”
He consulted a list he held in his hand.
“Harold Crackenthorpe, he’s something in the City—quite an important figure, I
understand. Alfred—don’t quite know what he does. Cedric—that’s the one who
lives abroad. Paints!” The inspector invested the word with its full quota of
sinister significance. The Chief Constable smiled into his moustache.
“No reason, is there, to believe the Crackenthorpe family are connected with
the crime in any way?” he asked.
“Not apart from the fact that the body was found on the premises,” said
Inspector Bacon. “And of course it’s just possible that this artist member of
the family might be able to identify her. What beats me is this extraordinary
rigmarole about the train.”
“Ah, yes. You’ve been to see this old lady, this—er—” (he glanced at the
memorandum lying on his desk) “Miss Marple?”
“Yes, sir. And she’s quite set and definite about the whole thing. Whether
she’s barmy or not, I don’t know, but she sticks to her story—about what her
friend saw and all the rest of it. As far as all that goes, I dare say it’s
just make-believe—sort of thing old ladies do make up, like seeing flying
saucers at the bottom of the garden, and Russian agents in the lending
library. But it seems quite clear that she did engage this young woman, the
lady help, and told her to look for a body—which the girl did.”
“And found one,” observed the Chief Constable. “Well, it’s all a very
remarkable story. Marple, Miss Jane Marple—the name seems familiar somehow…
Anyway, I’ll get on to the Yard. I think you’re right about its not being a
local case—though we won’t advertise the fact just yet. For the moment we’ll
tell the Press as little as possible.”
II
The inquest was a purely formal affair. No one came forward to identify the
dead woman. Lucy was called to give evidence of finding the body and medical
evidence was given as to the cause of death—strangulation. The proceedings
were then adjourned. | 4-50 from paddington - agatha christie.epub |
The proceedings
were then adjourned.
It was a cold blustery day when the Crackenthorpe family came out of the hall
where the inquest had been held. There were five of them all told, Emma,
Cedric, Harold, Alfred, and Bryan Eastley, the husband of the dead daughter
Edith. There was also Mr. Wimborne, the senior partner of the firm of
solicitors who dealt with the Crackenthorpes’ legal affairs. He had come down
specially from London at great inconvenience to attend the inquest. They all
stood for a moment on the pavement, shivering. Quite a crowd had assembled;
the piquant details of the “Body in the Sarcophagus” had been fully reported
in both the London and the local Press.
A murmur went round: “That’s them….”
Emma said sharply: “Let’s get away.”
The big hired Daimler drew up to the kerb. Emma got in and motioned to Lucy.
Mr. Wimborne, Cedric and Harold followed. Bryan Eastley said: “I’ll take
Alfred with me in my little bus.” The chauffeur shut the door and the Daimler
prepared to roll away.
“Oh, stop!” cried Emma. “There are the boys!”
The boys, in spite of aggrieved protests, had been left behind at Rutherford
Hall, but they now appeared grinning from ear to ear.
“We came on our bicycles,” said Stoddart-West. “The policeman was very kind
and let us in at the back of the hall. I hope you don’t mind, Miss
Crackenthorpe,” he added politely.
“She doesn’t mind,” said Cedric, answering for his sister. “You’re only young
once. Your first inquest, I expect?”
“It was rather disappointing,” said Alexander. “All over so soon.”
“We can’t stay here talking,” said Harold irritably. “There’s quite a crowd.
And all those men with cameras.”
At a sign from him, the chauffeur pulled away from the kerb. The boys waved
cheerfully.
“All over so soon!” said Cedric. “That’s what they think, the young innocents!
It’s just beginning.”
“It’s all very unfortunate. Most unfortunate,” said Harold. “I suppose—”
He looked at Mr. Wimborne who compressed his thin lips and shook his head with
distaste.
“I hope,” he said sententiously, “that the whole matter will soon be cleared
up satisfactorily. The police were very efficient. However, the whole thing,
as Harold says, has been most unfortunate.”
He looked, as he spoke, at Lucy, and there was distinct disapproval in his
glance. “If it had not been for this young woman,” his eyes seemed to say,
“poking about where she had no business to be—none of this would have
happened.”
This statement, or one closely resembling it, was voiced by Harold
Crackenthorpe.
“By the way—er—Miss—er—er Eyelesbarrow, just what made you go looking in that
sarcophagus?”
Lucy had already wondered just when this thought would occur to one of the
family. She had known that the police would ask it first thing; what surprised
her was that it seemed to have occurred to no one else until this moment.
Cedric, Emma, Harold and Mr. Wimborne all looked at her.
Her reply, for what it was worth, had naturally been prepared for some time.
“Really,” she said in a hesitating voice. “I hardly know… I did feel that the
whole place needed a thorough clearing out and cleaning. And there was”—she
hesitated—“a very peculiar and disagreeable smell….”
She had counted accurately on the immediate shrinking of everyone from the
unpleasantness of this idea….
Mr. Wimborne murmured: “Yes, yes, of course…about three weeks the police
surgeon said… I think, you know, we must all try and not let our minds dwell
on this thing.” He smiled encouragingly at Emma who had turned very pale.
“Remember,” he said, “this wretched young woman was nothing to do with any of
us.”
“Ah, but you can’t be so sure of that, can you?” said Cedric.
Lucy Eyelesbarrow looked at him with some interest. She had already been
intrigued by the rather startling differences between the three brothers.
Cedric was a big man with a weather-beaten rugged face, unkempt dark hair and
a jocund manner. He had arrived from the airport unshaven, and though he had
shaved in preparation for the inquest, he was still wearing the clothes in
which he had arrived and which seemed to be the only ones he had; old grey
flannel trousers, and a patched and rather threadbare baggy jacket. He looked
the stage Bohemian to the life and proud of it.
His brother Harold, on the contrary, was the perfect picture of a City
gentleman and a director of important companies. He was tall with a neat erect
carriage, had dark hair going slightly bald on the temples, a small black
moustache, and was impeccably dressed in a dark well-cut suit and a pearl-grey
tie. He looked what he was, a shrewd and successful business man.
He now said stiffly:
“Really, Cedric, that seems a most uncalled-for remark.”
“Don’t see why? She was in our barn after all. What did she come there for?”
Mr. Wimborne coughed, and said:
“Possibly some—er—assignation. I understand that it was a matter of local
knowledge that the key was kept outside on a nail.”
His tone indicated outrage at the carelessness of such procedure. So clearly
marked was this that Emma spoke apologetically.
“It started during the war. For the A.R.P. wardens. There was a little spirit
stove and they made themselves hot cocoa. And afterwards, since there was
really nothing there anybody could have wanted to take, we went on leaving the
key hanging up. It was convenient for the Women’s Institute people. If we’d
kept it in the house it might have been awkward—when there was no one at home
to give it them when they wanted it to get the place ready. With only daily
women and no resident servants….”
Her voice trailed away. She had spoken mechanically, giving a wordy
explanation without interest, as though her mind was elsewhere.
Cedric gave her a quick puzzled glance.
“You’re worried, sis. What’s up?”
Harold spoke with exasperation:
“Really, Cedric, can you ask?”
“Yes, I do ask. Granted a strange young woman has got herself killed in the
barn at Rutherford Hall (sounds like a Victorian melodrama) and granted it
gave Emma a shock at the time—but Emma’s always been a sensible girl—I don’t
see why she goes on being worried now. Dash it, one gets used to everything.”
“Murder takes a little more getting used to by some people than it may in your
case,” said Harold acidly. “I dare say murders are two a penny in Majorca
and—”
“Ibiza, not Majorca.”
“It’s the same thing.”
“Not at all—it’s quite a different island.”
Harold went on talking:
“My point is that though murder may be an everyday commonplace to you, living
amongst hot-blooded Latin people, nevertheless in England we take such things
seriously.” He added with increasing irritation, “And really, Cedric, to
appear at a public inquest in those clothes—”
“What’s wrong with my clothes? They’re comfortable.”
“They’re unsuitable.”
“Well, anyway, they’re the only clothes I’ve got with me. I didn’t pack my
wardrobe trunk when I came rushing home to stand in with the family over this
business. I’m a painter and painters like to be comfortable in their clothes.”
“So you’re still trying to paint?”
“Look here, Harold, when you say trying to paint—”
Mr. Wimborne cleared his throat in an authoritative manner.
“This discussion is unprofitable,” he said reprovingly. “I hope, my dear Emma,
that you will tell me if there is any further way in which I can be of service
to you before I return to town?”
The reproof had its effect. Emma Crackenthorpe said quickly:
“It was most kind of you to come down.”
“Not at all. It was advisable that someone should be at the inquest to watch
the proceedings on behalf of the family. I have arranged for an interview with
the inspector at the house. I have no doubt that, distressing as all this has
been, the situation will soon be clarified. In my own mind, there seems little
doubt as to what occurred. As Emma has told us, the key to the Long Barn was
known locally to hang outside the door. | 4-50 from paddington - agatha christie.epub |
It seems highly probable that the
place was used in the winter months as a place of assignation by local
couples. No doubt there was a quarrel and some young man lost control of
himself. Horrified at what he had done, his eye lit on the sarcophagus and he
realized that it would make an excellent place of concealment.”
Lucy thought to herself, “Yes, it sounds most plausible. That’s just what one
might think.”
Cedric said, “You say a local couple—but nobody’s been able to identify the
girl locally.”
“It’s early days yet. No doubt we shall get an identification before long. And
it is possible, of course, that the man in question was a local resident, but
that the girl came from elsewhere, perhaps from some other part of
Brackhampton. Brackhampton’s a big place—it’s grown enormously in the last
twenty years.”
“If I were a girl coming to meet my young man, I’d not stand for being taken
to a freezing cold barn miles from anywhere,” Cedric objected. “I’d stand out
for a nice bit of cuddle in the cinema, wouldn’t you, Miss Eyelesbarrow?”
“Do we need to go into all this?” Harold demanded plaintively.
And with the voicing of the question the car drew up before the front door of
Rutherford Hall and they all got out.
Eight
I
On entering the library Mr. Wimborne blinked a little as his shrewd old eyes
went past Inspector Bacon whom he had already met, to the fair-haired, good-
looking man beyond him.
Inspector Bacon performed introductions.
“This is Detective-Inspector Craddock of New Scotland Yard,” he said.
“New Scotland Yard—hm.” Mr. Wimborne’s eyebrows rose.
Dermot Craddock, who had a pleasant manner, went easily into speech.
“We have been called in on the case, Mr. Wimborne,” he said. “As you are
representing the Crackenthorpe family, I feel it is only fair that we should
give you a little confidential information.”
Nobody could make a better show of presenting a very small portion of the
truth and implying that it was the whole truth than Inspector Craddock.
“Inspector Bacon will agree, I am sure,” he added, glancing at his colleague.
Inspector Bacon agreed with all due solemnity and not at all as though the
whole matter were prearranged.
“It’s like this,” said Craddock. “We have reason to believe, from information
that has come into our possession, that the dead woman is not a native of
these parts, that she travelled down here from London and that she had
recently come from abroad. Probably (though we are not sure of that) from
France.”
Mr. Wimborne again raised his eyebrows.
“Indeed,” he said. “Indeed?”
“That being the case,” explained Inspector Bacon, “the Chief Constable felt
that the Yard was better fitted to investigate the matter.”
“I can only hope,” said Mr. Wimborne, “that the case will be solved quickly.
As you can no doubt appreciate, the whole business has been a source of much
distress to the family. Although not personally concerned in any way, they
are—”
He paused for a bare second, but Inspector Craddock filled the gap quickly.
“It’s not a pleasant thing to find a murdered woman on your property? I
couldn’t agree with you more. Now I should like to have a brief interview with
the various members of the family—”
“I really cannot see—”
“What they can tell me? Probably nothing of interest—but one never knows. I
dare say I can get most of the information I want from you, sir. Information
about this house and the family.”
“And what can that possibly have to do with an unknown young woman coming from
abroad and getting herself killed here?”
“Well, that’s rather the point,” said Craddock. “Why did she come here? Had
she once had some connection with this house? >Had she been, for instance, a
servant here at one time? A lady’s maid, perhaps. Or did she come here to meet
a former occupant of Rutherford Hall?”
Mr. Wimborne said coldly that Rutherford Hall had been occupied by the
Crackenthorpes ever since Josiah Crackenthorpe built it in 1884.
“That’s interesting in itself,” said Craddock. “If you’d just give me a brief
outline of the family history—”
Mr. Wimborne shrugged his shoulders.
“There is very little to tell. Josiah Crackenthorpe was a manufacturer of
sweet and savoury biscuits, relishes, pickles, etc. He accumulated a vast
fortune. He built this house. Luther Crackenthorpe, his eldest son, lives here
now.”
“Any other sons?”
“One other son, Henry, who was killed in a motor accident in 1911.”
“And the present Mr. Crackenthorpe has never thought of selling the house?”
“He is unable to do so,” said the lawyer dryly. “By the terms of his father’s
will.”
“Perhaps you’ll tell me about the will?”
“Why should I?”
Inspector Craddock smiled.
“Because I can look it up myself if I want to, at Somerset House.”
Against his will, Mr. Wimborne gave a crabbed little smile.
“Quite right, Inspector. I was merely protesting that the information you ask
for is quite irrelevant. As to Josiah Crackenthorpe’s will, there is no
mystery about it. He left his very considerable fortune in trust, the income
from it to be paid to his son Luther for life, and after Luther’s death the
capital to be divided equally between Luther’s children, Edmund, Cedric,
Harold, Alfred, Emma and Edith. Edmund was killed in the war, and Edith died
four years ago, so that on Luther Crackenthorpe’s decease the money will be
divided between Cedric, Harold, Alfred, Emma and Edith’s son Alexander
Eastley.”
“And the house?”
“That will go to Luther Crackenthorpe’s eldest surviving son or his issue.”
“Was Edmund Crackenthorpe married?”
“No.”
“So the property will actually go—?”
“To the next son— Cedric.”
“Mr. Luther Crackenthorpe himself cannot dispose of it?”
“No.”
“And he has no control of the capital.”
“No.”
“Isn’t that rather unusual? I suppose,” said Inspector Craddock shrewdly,
“that his father didn’t like him.”
“You suppose correctly,” said Mr. Wimborne. “Old Josiah was disappointed that
his eldest son showed no interest in the family business—or indeed in business
of any kind. Luther spent his time travelling abroad and collecting objets
d’art. Old Josiah was very unsympathetic to that kind of thing. So he left his
money in trust for the next generation.”
“But in the meantime the next generation have no income except what they make
or what their father allows them, and their father has a considerable income
but no power of disposal of the capital.”
“Exactly. And what all this has to do with the murder of an unknown young
woman of foreign origin I cannot imagine!”
“It doesn’t seem to have anything to do with it,” Inspector Craddock agreed
promptly, “I just wanted to ascertain all the facts.”
Mr. Wimborne looked at him sharply, then, seemingly satisfied with the result
of his scrutiny, rose to his feet.
“I am proposing now to return to London,” he said. “Unless there is anything
further you wish to know?”
He looked from one man to the other.
“No, thank you, sir.”
The sound of the gong rose fortissimo from the hall outside.
“Dear me,” said Mr. Wimborne. “One of the boys, I think, must have been
performing.”
Inspector Craddock raised his voice, to be heard above the clamour, as he
said:
“We’ll leave the family to have lunch in peace, but Inspector Bacon and I
would like to return after it—say at two fifteen—and have a short interview
with every member of the family.”
“You think that is necessary?”
“Well…” Craddock shrugged his shoulders. “It’s just an off chance. Somebody
might remember something that would give us a clue to the woman’s identity.”
“I doubt it, Inspector. I doubt it very much. But I wish you good luck. As I
said just now, the sooner this distasteful business is cleared up, the better
for everybody.”
Shaking his head, he went slowly out of the room.
II
Lucy had gone straight to the kitchen on getting back from the inquest, and
was busy with preparations for lunch when Bryan Eastley put his head in.
“Can I give you a hand in any way?” he asked. “I’m handy about the house.”
Lucy gave him a quick, slightly preoccupied glance. Bryan had arrived at the
inquest direct in his small M.G. car, and she had not as yet had much time to
size him up. | 4-50 from paddington - agatha christie.epub |
car, and she had not as yet had much time to
size him up.
What she saw was likeable enough. Eastley was an amiable-looking young man of
thirty-odd with brown hair, rather plaintive blue eyes and an enormous fair
moustache.
“The boys aren’t back yet,” he said, coming in and sitting on the end of the
kitchen table. “It will take ’em another twenty minutes on their bikes.”
Lucy smiled.
“They were certainly determined not to miss anything.”
“Can’t blame them. I mean to say—first inquest in their young lives and right
in the family so to speak.”
“Do you mind getting off the table, Mr. Eastley? I want to put the baking dish
down there.”
Bryan obeyed.
“I say, that fat’s corking hot. What are you going to put in it?”
“Yorkshire pudding.”
“Good old Yorkshire. Roast beef of old England, is that the menu for today?”
“Yes.”
“The funeral baked meats, in fact. Smells good.” He sniffed appreciatively.
“Do you mind my gassing away?”
“If you came in to help I’d rather you helped.” She drew another pan from the
oven. “Here—turn all these potatoes over so that they brown on the other
side….”
Bryan obeyed with alacrity.
“Have all these things been fizzling away in here while we’ve been at the
inquest? Supposing they’d been all burnt up.”
“Most improbable. There’s a regulating number on the oven.”
“Kind of electric brain, eh, what? Is that right?”
Lucy threw a swift look in his direction.
“Quite right. Now put the pan in the oven. Here, take the cloth. On the second
shelf— I want the top for the Yorkshire pudding.”
Bryan obeyed, but not without uttering a shrill yelp.
“Burnt yourself?”
“Just a bit. It doesn’t matter. What a dangerous game cooking is!”
“I suppose you never do your own cooking?”
“As a matter of fact I do—quite often. But not this sort of thing. I can boil
an egg—if I don’t forget to look at the clock. And I can do eggs and bacon.
And I can put a steak under the grill or open a tin of soup. I’ve got one of
those little electric whatnots in my flat.”
“You live in London?”
“If you call it living—yes.”
His tone was despondent. He watched Lucy shoot in the dish with the Yorkshire
pudding mixture.
“This is awfully jolly,” he said and sighed.
Her immediate preoccupations over, Lucy looked at him with more attention.
“What is—this kitchen?”
“Yes. Reminds me of our kitchen at home—when I was a boy.”
It struck Lucy that there was something strangely forlorn about Bryan Eastley.
Looking closely at him, she realized that he was older than she had at first
thought. He must be close on forty. It seemed difficult to think of him as
Alexander’s father. He reminded her of innumerable young pilots she had known
during the war when she had been at the impressionable age of fourteen. She
had gone on and grown up into a post-war world—but she felt as though Bryan
had not gone on, but had been passed by in the passage of years. His next
words confirmed this. He had subsided on to the kitchen table again.
“It’s a difficult sort of world,” he said, “isn’t it? To get your bearings in,
I mean. You see, one hasn’t been trained for it.”
Lucy recalled what she had heard from Emma.
“You were a fighter pilot, weren’t you?” she said. “You’ve got a D.F.C.”
“That’s the sort of thing that puts you wrong. You’ve got a gong and so people
try to make it easy for you. Give you a job and all that. Very decent of them.
But they’re all admin. jobs, and one simply isn’t any good at that sort of
thing. Sitting at a desk getting tangled up in figures. I’ve had ideas of my
own, you know, tried out a wheeze or two. But you can’t get the backing. Can’t
get the chaps to come in and put down the money. If I had a bit of capital—”
He brooded.
“You didn’t know Edie, did you? My wife. No, of course you didn’t. She was
quite different from all this lot. Younger, for one thing. She was in the
W.A.A.F. She always said her old man was crackers. He is, you know. Mean as
hell over money. And it’s not as though he could take it with him. It’s got to
be divided up when he dies. Edie’s share will go to Alexander, of course. He
won’t be able to touch the capital until he’s twenty-one, though.”
“I’m sorry, but will you get off the table again? I want to dish up and make
gravy.”
At that moment Alexander and Stoddart-West arrived with rosy faces and very
much out of breath.
“Hallo, Bryan,” said Alexander kindly to his father. “So this is where you’ve
got to. I say, what a smashing piece of beef. Is there Yorkshire pudding?”
“Yes, there is.”
“We have awful Yorkshire pudding at school—all damp and limp.”
“Get out of my way,” said Lucy. “I want to make the gravy.”
“Make lots of gravy. Can we have two sauce-boats full?”
“Yes.”
“Good-oh!” said Stoddart-West, pronouncing the word carefully.
“I don’t like it pale,” said Alexander anxiously.
“It won’t be pale.”
“She’s a smashing cook,” said Alexander to his father.
Lucy had a momentary impression that their roles were reversed. Alexander
spoke like a kindly father to his son.
“Can we help you, Miss Eyelesbarrow?” asked Stoddart-West politely.
“Yes, you can. Alexander, go and sound the gong. James, will you carry this
tray into the dining room? And will you take the joint in, Mr. Eastley? I’ll
bring the potatoes and the Yorkshire pudding.”
“There’s a Scotland Yard man here,” said Alexander. “Do you think he will have
lunch with us?”
“That depends on what your aunt arranged.”
“I don’t suppose Aunt Emma would mind… She’s very hospitable. But I suppose
Uncle Harold wouldn’t like it. He’s being very sticky over this murder.”
Alexander went out through the door with the tray, adding a little additional
information over his shoulder. “Mr. Wimborne’s in the library with the
Scotland Yard man now. But he isn’t staying to lunch. He said he had to get
back to London. Come on, Stodders. Oh, he’s gone to do the gong.”
At that moment the gong took charge. Stoddart-West was an artist. He gave it
everything he had, and all further conversation was inhibited.
Bryan carried in the joint, Lucy followed with vegetables—returning to the
kitchen to get the two brimming sauce-boats of gravy.
Mr. Wimborne was standing in the hall putting on his gloves as Emma came
quickly down the stairs.
“Are you really sure you won’t stop for lunch, Mr. Wimborne? It’s all ready.”
“No, I’ve an important appointment in London. There is a restaurant car on the
train.”
“It was very good of you to come down,” said Emma gratefully.
The two police officers emerged from the library.
Mr. Wimborne took Emma’s hand in his.
“There’s nothing to worry about, my dear,” he said. “This is Detective-
Inspector Craddock from New Scotland Yard who has come to take charge of the
case. He is coming back at two-fifteen to ask you for any facts that may
assist him in his inquiry. But, as I say, you have nothing to worry about.” He
looked towards Craddock. “I may repeat to Miss Crackenthorpe what you have
told me?”
“Certainly, sir.”
“Inspector Craddock has just told me that this almost certainly was not a
local crime. The murdered woman is thought to have come from London and was
probably a foreigner.”
Emma Crackenthorpe said sharply:
“A foreigner. Was she French?”
Mr. Wimborne had clearly meant his statement to be consoling. He looked
slightly taken aback. Dermot Craddock’s glance went quickly from him to Emma’s
face.
He wondered why she had leaped to the conclusion that the murdered woman was
French, and why that thought disturbed her so much?
Nine
I
The only people who really did justice to Lucy’s excellent lunch were the two
boys and Cedric Crackenthorpe who appeared completely unaffected by the
circumstances which had caused him to return to England. | 4-50 from paddington - agatha christie.epub |
He seemed, indeed, to
regard the whole thing as a rather good joke of a macabre nature.
This attitude, Lucy noted, was most unpalatable to his brother Harold. Harold
seemed to take the murder as a kind of personal insult to the Crackenthorpe
family and so great was his sense of outrage that he ate hardly any lunch.
Emma looked worried and unhappy and also ate very little. Alfred seemed lost
in a train of thought of his own and spoke very little. He was quite a good-
looking man with a thin dark face and eyes set rather too close together.
After lunch the police officers returned and politely asked if they could have
a few words with Mr. Cedric Crackenthorpe.
Inspector Craddock was very pleasant and friendly.
“Sit down, Mr. Crackenthorpe. I understand you have just come back from the
Balearics? You live out there?”
“Have done for the past six years. In Ibiza. Suits me better than this dreary
country.”
“You get a good deal more sunshine than we do, I expect,” said Inspector
Craddock agreeably. “You were home not so very long ago, I understand—for
Christmas, to be exact. What made it necessary for you to come back again so
soon?”
Cedric grinned.
“Got a wire from Emma—my sister. We’ve never had a murder on the premises
before. Didn’t want to miss anything—so along I came.”
“You are interested in criminology?”
“Oh, we needn’t put it in such highbrow terms! I just like murders—Whodunnits
and all that! With a Whodunnit parked right on the family doorstep, it seemed
the chance of a lifetime. Besides, I thought poor Em might need a spot of
help—managing the old man and the police and all the rest of it.”
“I see. It appealed to your sporting instincts and also to your family
feelings. I’ve no doubt your sister will be very grateful to you—although her
two other brothers have also come to be with her.”
“But not to cheer and comfort,” Cedric told him. “Harold is terrifically put
out. It’s not at all the thing for a City magnate to be mixed up with the
murder of a questionable female.”
Craddock’s eyebrows rose gently.
“Was she—a questionable female?”
“Well, you’re the authority on that point. Going by the facts, it seemed to me
likely.”
“I thought perhaps you might have been able to make a guess at who she was?”
“Come now, Inspector, you already know—or your colleagues will tell you, that
I haven’t been able to identify her.”
“I said a guess, Mr. Crackenthorpe. You might never have seen the woman
before—but you might have been able to make a guess at who she was—or who she
might have been?”
Cedric shook his head.
“You’re barking up the wrong tree. I’ve absolutely no idea. You’re suggesting,
I suppose, that she may have come to the Long Barn to keep an assignation with
one of us? But we none of us live here. The only people in the house were a
woman and an old man. You don’t seriously believe that she came here to keep a
date with my revered Pop?”
“Our point is—Inspector Bacon agrees with me—that the woman may once have had
some association with this house. It may have been a considerable number of
years ago. Cast your mind back, Mr. Crackenthorpe.”
Cedric thought a moment or two, then shook his head.
“We’ve had foreign help from time to time, like most people, but I can’t think
of any likely possibility. Better ask the others—they’d know more than I
would.”
“We shall do that, of course.”
Craddock leaned back in his chair and went on:
“As you have heard at the inquest, the medical evidence cannot fix the time of
death very accurately. Longer than two weeks, less than four—which brings it
somewhere around Christmas-time. You have told me you came home for Christmas.
When did you arrive in England and when did you leave?”
Cedric reflected.
“Let me see… I flew. Got here on the Saturday before Christmas—that would be
the 21st.”
“You flew straight from Majorca?”
“Yes. Left at five in the morning and got here midday.”
“And you left?”
“I flew back on the following Friday, the 27th.”
“Thank you.”
Cedric grinned.
“Leaves me well within the limit, unfortunately. But really, Inspector,
strangling young women is not my favourite form of Christmas fun.”
“I hope not, Mr. Crackenthorpe.”
Inspector Bacon merely looked disapproving.
“There would be a remarkable absence of peace and good will about such an
action, don’t you agree?”
Cedric addressed this question to Inspector Bacon who merely grunted.
Inspector Craddock said politely:
“Well, thank you, Mr. Crackenthorpe. That will be all.”
“And what do you think of him?” Craddock asked as Cedric shut the door behind
him.
Bacon grunted again.
“Cocky enough for anything,” he said. “I don’t care for the type myself. A
loose-living lot, these artists, and very likely to be mixed up with a
disreputable class of woman.”
Craddock smiled.
“I don’t like the way he dresses, either,” went on Bacon. “No respect—going to
an inquest like that. Dirtiest pair of trousers I’ve seen in a long while. And
did you see his tie? Looked as though it was made of coloured string. If you
ask me, he’s the kind that would easily strangle a woman and make no bones
about it.”
“Well, he didn’t strangle this one—if he didn’t leave Majorca until the 21st.
And that’s a thing we can verify easily enough.”
Bacon threw him a sharp glance.
“I notice that you’re not tipping your hand yet about the actual date of the
crime.”
“No, we’ll keep that dark for the present. I always like to have something up
my sleeve in the early stages.”
Bacon nodded in full agreement.
“Spring it on ’em when the time comes,” he said. “That’s the best plan.”
“And now,” said Craddock, “we’ll see what our correct City gentleman has to
say about it all.”
Harold Crackenthorpe, thin-lipped, had very little to say about it. It was
most distasteful—a very unfortunate incident. The newspapers, he was afraid…
Reporters, he understood, had already been asking for interviews… All that
sort of thing… Most regrettable….
Harold’s staccato unfinished sentences ended. He leaned back in his chair with
the expression of a man confronted with a very bad smell.
The inspector’s probing produced no result. No, he had no idea who the woman
was or could be. Yes, he had been at Rutherford Hall for Christmas. He had
been unable to come down until Christmas Eve—but had stayed on over the
following weekend.
“That’s that, then,” said Inspector Craddock, without pressing his questions
further. He had already made up his mind that Harold Crackenthorpe was not
going to be helpful.
He passed on to Alfred, who came into the room with a nonchalance that seemed
just a trifle overdone.
Craddock looked at Alfred Crackenthorpe with a faint feeling of recognition.
Surely he had seen this particular member of the family somewhere before? Or
had it been his picture in the paper? There was something discreditable
attached to the memory. He asked Alfred his occupation and Alfred’s answer was
vague.
“I’m in insurance at the moment. Until recently I’ve been interested in
putting a new type of talking machine on the market. Quite revolutionary. I
did very well out of that as a matter of fact.”
Inspector Craddock looked appreciative—and no one could have had the least
idea that he was noticing the superficially smart appearance of Alfred’s suit
and gauging correctly the low price it had cost. Cedric’s clothes had been
disreputable, almost threadbare, but they had been originally of good cut and
excellent material. Here there was a cheap smartness that told its own tale.
Craddock passed pleasantly on to his routine questions. Alfred seemed
interested—even slightly amused.
“It’s quite an idea, that the woman might once have had a job here. Not as a
lady’s maid; I doubt if my sister has ever had such a thing. I don’t think
anyone has nowadays. But, of course, there is a good deal of foreign domestic
labour floating about. We’ve had Poles—and a temperamental German or two. As
Emma definitely didn’t recognize the woman, I think that washes your idea out,
Inspector, Emma’s got a very good memory for a face. | 4-50 from paddington - agatha christie.epub |
No, if the woman came
from London… What gives you the idea she came from London, by the way?”
He slipped the question in quite casually, but his eyes were sharp and
interested.
Inspector Craddock smiled and shook his head.
Alfred looked at him keenly.
“Not telling, eh? Return ticket in her coat pocket, perhaps, is that it?”
“It could be, Mr. Crackenthorpe.”
“Well, granting she came from London, perhaps the chap she came to meet had
the idea that the Long Barn would be a nice place to do a quiet murder. He
knows the setup here, evidently. I should go looking for him if I were you,
Inspector.”
“We are,” said Inspector Craddock, and made the two little words sound quiet
and confident.
He thanked Alfred and dismissed him.
“You know,” he said to Bacon, “I’ve seen that chap somewhere before….”
Inspector Bacon gave his verdict.
“Sharp customer,” he said. “So sharp that he cuts himself sometimes.”
II
“I don’t suppose you want to see me,” said Bryan Eastley apologetically,
coming into the room and hesitating by the door. “I don’t exactly belong to
the family—”
“Let me see, you are Mr. Bryan Eastley, the husband of Miss Edith
Crackenthorpe, who died five years ago?”
“That’s right.”
“Well, it’s very kind of you, Mr. Eastley, especially if you know something
that you think could assist us in some way?”
“But I don’t. Wish I did. Whole thing seems so ruddy peculiar, doesn’t it?
Coming along and meeting some fellow in that draughty old barn, in the middle
of winter. Wouldn’t be my cup of tea!”
“It is certainly very perplexing,” Inspector Craddock agreed.
“Is it true that she was a foreigner? Word seems to have got round to that
effect.”
“Does that fact suggest anything to you?” The inspector looked at him sharply,
but Bryan seemed amiably vacuous.
“No, it doesn’t, as a matter of fact.”
“Maybe she was French,” said Inspector Bacon, with dark suspicion.
Bryan was roused to slight animation. A look of interest came into his blue
eyes, and he tugged at his big fair moustache.
“Really? Gay Paree?” He shook his head. “On the whole it seems to make it even
more unlikely, doesn’t it? Messing about in the barn, I mean. You haven’t had
any other sarcophagus murders, have you? One of these fellows with an urge—or
a complex? Thinks he’s Caligula or someone like that?”
Inspector Craddock did not even trouble to reject this speculation. Instead he
asked in a casual manner:
“Nobody in the family got any French connections, or—or—relationships that you
know of?”
Bryan said that the Crackenthorpes weren’t a very gay lot.
“Harold’s respectably married,” he said. “Fish-faced woman, some impoverished
peer’s daughter. Don’t think Alfred cares about women much—spends his life
going in for shady deals which usually go wrong in the end. I dare say
Cedric’s got a few Spanish señoritas jumping through hoops for him in Ibiza.
Women rather fall for Cedric. Doesn’t always shave and looks as though he
never washes. Don’t see why that should be attractive to women, but apparently
it is—I say, I’m not being very helpful, am I?”
He grinned at them.
“Better get young Alexander on the job. He and James Stoddart- West are out
hunting for clues in a big way. Bet you they turn up something.”
Inspector Craddock said he hoped they would. Then he thanked Bryan Eastley and
said he would like to speak to Miss Emma Crackenthorpe.
III
Inspector Craddock looked with more attention at Emma Crackenthorpe than he
had done previously. He was still wondering about the expression that he had
surprised on her face before lunch.
A quiet woman. Not stupid. Not brilliant either. One of those comfortable
pleasant women whom men were inclined to take for granted, and who had the art
of making a house into a home, giving it an atmosphere of restfulness and
quiet harmony. Such, he thought, was Emma Crackenthorpe.
Women such as this were often underrated. Behind their quiet exterior they had
force of character, they were to be reckoned with. Perhaps, Craddock thought,
the clue to the mystery of the dead woman in the sarcophagus was hidden away
in the recesses of Emma’s mind.
Whilst these thoughts were passing through his head, Craddock was asking
various unimportant questions.
“I don’t suppose there is much that you haven’t already told Inspector Bacon,”
he said. “So I needn’t worry you with many questions.”
“Please ask me anything you like.”
“As Mr. Wimborne told you, we have reached the conclusion that the dead woman
was not a native of these parts. That may be a relief to you—Mr. Wimborne
seemed to think it would be—but it makes it really more difficult for us.
She’s less easily identified.”
“But didn’t she have anything—a handbag? Papers?”
Craddock shook his head.
“No handbag, nothing in her pockets.”
“You’ve no idea of her name—of where she came from—anything at all?”
Craddock thought to himself: She wants to know—she’s very anxious to know—who
the woman is. Has she felt like that all along, I wonder? Bacon didn’t give me
that impression—and he’s a shrewd man….
“We know nothing about her,” he said. “That’s why we hoped one of you could
help us. Are you sure you can’t? Even if you didn’t recognize her—can you
think of anyone she might be?”
He thought, but perhaps he imagined it, that there was a very slight pause
before she answered.
“I’ve absolutely no idea,” she said.
Imperceptibly, Inspector Craddock’s manner changed. It was hardly noticeable
except as a slight hardness in his voice.
“When Mr. Wimborne told you that the woman was a foreigner, why did you assume
that she was French?”
Emma was not disconcerted. Her eyebrows rose slightly.
“Did I? Yes, I believe I did. I don’t really know why—except that one always
tends to think foreigners are French until one finds out what nationality they
really are. Most foreigners in this country are French, aren’t they?”
“Oh, I really wouldn’t say that was so, Miss Crackenthorpe. Not nowadays. We
have so many nationalities over here, Italians, Germans, Austrians, all the
Scandinavian countries—”
“Yes, I suppose you’re right.”
“You don’t have some special reason for thinking that this woman was likely to
be French?”
She didn’t hurry to deny it. She just thought a moment and then shook her head
almost regretfully.
“No,” she said. “I really don’t think so.”
Her glance met his placidly, without flinching. Craddock looked towards
Inspector Bacon. The latter leaned forward and presented a small enamel powder
compact.
“Do you recognize this, Miss Crackenthorpe?”
She took it and examined it.
“No. It’s certainly not mine.”
“You’ve no idea to whom it belonged?”
“No.”
“Then I don’t think we need worry you anymore—for the present.”
“Thank you.”
She smiled briefly at them, got up, and left the room. Again he may have
imagined it, but Craddock thought she moved rather quickly, as though a
certain relief hurried her.
“Think she knows anything?” asked Bacon.
Inspector Craddock said ruefully:
“At a certain stage one is inclined to think everyone knows a little more than
they are willing to tell you.”
“They usually do, too,” said Bacon out of the depth of his experience. “Only,”
he added, “it quite often isn’t anything to do with the business in hand. It’s
some family peccadillo or some silly scrape that people are afraid is going to
be dragged into the open.”
“Yes, I know. Well, at least—”
But whatever Inspector Craddock had been about to say never got said, for the
door was flung open and old Mr. Crackenthorpe shuffled in in a high state of
indignation.
“A pretty pass, when Scotland Yard comes down and doesn’t have the courtesy to
talk to the head of the family first! Who’s the master of this house, I’d like
to know? Answer me that? Who’s the master here?”
“You are, of course, Mr. Crackenthorpe,” said Craddock soothingly and rising
as he spoke. “But we understood that you had already told Inspector Bacon all
you know, and that, your health not being good, we must not make too many
demands upon it. Dr. Quimper said—”
“I dare say—I dare say. | 4-50 from paddington - agatha christie.epub |
Dr. Quimper said—”
“I dare say—I dare say. I’m not a strong man… As for Dr. Quimper, he’s a
regular old woman—perfectly good doctor, understands my case—but inclined to
wrap me up in cotton-wool. Got a bee in his bonnet about food. Went on at me
Christmas-time when I had a bit of a turn—what did I eat? When? Who cooked it?
Who served it? Fuss, fuss, fuss! But though I may have indifferent health, I’m
well enough to give you all the help that’s in my power. Murder in my own
house—or at any rate in my own barn! Interesting building, that. Elizabethan.
Local architect says not—but fellow doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Not
a day later than 1580—but that’s not what we’re talking about. What do you
want to know? What’s your present theory?”
“It’s a little too early for theories, Mr. Crackenthorpe. We are still trying
to find out who the woman was.”
“Foreigner, you say?”
“We think so.”
“Enemy agent?”
“Unlikely, I should say.”
“You’d say—you’d say! They’re everywhere, these people. Infiltrating! Why the
Home Office lets them in beats me. Spying on industrial secrets, I’d bet.
That’s what she was doing.”
“In Brackhampton?”
“Factories everywhere. One outside my own back gate.”
Craddock shot an inquiring glance at Bacon who responded.
“Metal Boxes.”
“How do you know that’s what they’re really making? Can’t swallow all these
fellows tell you. All right, if she wasn’t a spy, who do you think she was?
Think she was mixed up with one of my precious sons? It would be Alfred, if
so. Not Harold, he’s too careful. And Cedric doesn’t condescend to live in
this country. All right, then, she was Alfred’s bit of skirt. And some violent
fellow followed her down here, thinking she was coming to meet him and did her
in. How’s that?”
Inspector Craddock said diplomatically that it was certainly a theory. But Mr.
Alfred Crackenthorpe, he said, had not reccognized her.
“Pah! Afraid, that’s all! Alfred always was a coward. But he’s a liar,
remember, always was! Lie himself black in the face. None of my sons are any
good. Crowd of vultures, waiting for me to die, that’s their real occupation
in life,” he chuckled. “And they can wait. I won’t die to oblige them! Well,
if that’s all I can do for you… I’m tired. Got to rest.”
He shuffled out again.
“Alfred’s bit of skirt?” said Bacon questioningly. “In my opinion the old man
just made that up,” he paused, hesitated. “I think, personally, Alfred’s quite
all right—perhaps a shifty customer in some ways—but not our present cup of
tea. Mind you—I did just wonder about that Air Force chap.”
“Bryan Eastley?”
“Yes. I’ve run into one or two of his type. They’re what you might call adrift
in the world—had danger and death and excitement too early in life. Now they
find life tame. Tame and unsatisfactory. In a way, we’ve given them a raw
deal. Though I don’t really know what we could do about it. But there they
are, all past and no future, so to speak. And they’re the kind that don’t mind
taking chances—the ordinary fellow plays safe by instinct, it’s not so much
morality as prudence. But these fellows aren’t afraid—playing safe isn’t
really in their vocabulary. If Eastley were mixed up with a woman and wanted
to kill her…” He stopped, threw out a hand hopelessly. “But why should he want
to kill her? And if you do kill a woman, why plant her in your father-in-law’s
sarcophagus? No, if you ask me, none of this lot had anything to do with the
murder. If they had, they wouldn’t have gone to all the trouble of planting
the body on their own back door step, so to speak.”
Craddock agreed that that hardly made sense.
“Anything more you want to do here?”
Craddock said there wasn’t.
Bacon suggested coming back to Brackhampton and having a cup of tea—but
Inspector Craddock said that he was going to call on an old acquaintance.
Ten
I
Miss Marple, sitting erect against a background of china dogs and presents
from Margate, smiled approvingly at Inspector Dermot Craddock.
“I’m so glad,” she said, “that you have been assigned to the case. I hoped you
would be.”
“When I got your letter,” said Craddock, “I took it straight to the A.C. As it
happened he had just heard from the Brackhampton people calling us in. They
seemed to think it wasn’t a local crime. The A.C. was very interested in what
I had to tell him about you. He’d heard about you, I gather, from my
godfather.”
“Dear Sir Henry,” murmured Miss Marple affectionately.
“He got me to tell him all about the Little Paddocks business. Do you want to
hear what he said next?”
“Please tell me if it is not a breach of confidence.”
“He said, ‘Well, as this seems a completely cockeyed business, all thought up
by a couple of old ladies who’ve turned out, against all probability, to be
right, and since you already know one of these old ladies, I’m sending you
down on the case.’ So here I am! And now, my dear Miss Marple, where do we go
from here? This is not, as you probably appreciate, an official visit. I
haven’t got my henchmen with me. I thought you and I might take down our back
hair together first.”
Miss Marple smiled at him.
“I’m sure,” she said, “that no one who only knows you officially would ever
guess that you could be so human, and better-looking than ever—don’t blush…
Now, what, exactly, have you been told so far?”
“I’ve got everything, I think. Your friend, Mrs. McGillicuddy’s original
statement to the police at St. Mary Mead, confirmation of her statement by the
ticket collector, and also the note to the stationmaster at Brackhampton. I
may say that all the proper inquiries were made by the people concerned—the
railway people and the police. But there’s no doubt that you outsmarted them
all by a most fantastic process of guesswork.”
“Not guesswork,” said Miss Marple. “And I had a great advantage. I knew
Elspeth McGillicuddy. Nobody else did. There was no obvious confirmation of
her story, and if there was no question of any woman being reported missing,
then quite naturally they would think it was just an elderly lady imagining
things—as elderly ladies often do—but not Elspeth McGillicuddy.”
“Not Elspeth McGillicuddy,” agreed the inspector. “I’m looking forward to
meeting her, you know. I wish she hadn’t gone to Ceylon. We’re arranging for
her to be interviewed there, by the way.”
“My own process of reasoning was not really original,” said Miss Marple. “It’s
all in Mark Twain. The boy who found the horse. He just imagined where he
would go if he were a horse and he went there and there was the horse.”
“You imagined what you’d do if you were a cruel and cold-blooded murderer?”
said Craddock looking thoughtfully at Miss Marple’s pink and white elderly
fragility. “Really, your mind—”
“Like a sink, my nephew Raymond used to say,” Miss Marple agreed, nodding her
head briskly. “But as I always told him, sinks are necessary domestic
equipment and actually very hygienic.”
“Can you go a little further still, put yourself in the murderer’s place, and
tell me just where he is now?”
Miss Marple sighed.
“I wish I could. I’ve no idea—no idea at all. But he must be someone who has
lived in, or knows all about, Rutherford Hall.”
“I agree. But that opens up a very wide field. Quite a succession of daily
women have worked there. There’s the Women’s Institute—and the A.R.P. Wardens
before them. They all know the Long Barn and the sarcophagus and where the key
was kept. The whole setup there is widely known locally. Anybody living round
about might hit on it as a good spot for his purpose.”
“Yes, indeed. | 4-50 from paddington - agatha christie.epub |
I quite understand your difficulties.”
Craddock said: “We’ll never get anywhere until we identify the body.”
“And that, too, may be difficult?”
“Oh, we’ll get there—in the end. We’re checking up on all the reported
disappearances of a woman of that age and appearance. There’s no one
outstanding who fits the bill. The M.O. puts her down as about thirty-five,
healthy, probably a married woman, has had at least one child. Her fur coat is
a cheap one purchased at a London store. Hundreds of such coats were sold in
the last three months, about sixty per cent of them to blonde women. No sales
girl can recognize the photograph of the dead woman, or is likely to if the
purchase were made just before Christmas. Her other clothes seem mainly of
foreign manufacture mostly purchased in Paris. There are no English laundry
marks. We’ve communicated with Paris and they are checking up there for us.
Sooner or later, of course, someone will come forward with a missing relative
or lodger. It’s just a matter of time.”
“The compact wasn’t any help?”
“Unfortunately, no. It’s a type sold by the hundred in the Rue de Rivoli,
quite cheap. By the way, you ought to have turned that over to the police at
once, you know—or rather Miss Eyelesbarrow should have done so.”
Miss Marple shook her head.
“But at that moment there wasn’t any question of a crime having been
committed,” she pointed out. “If a young lady, practising golf shots, picks up
an old compact of no particular value in the long grass, surely she doesn’t
rush straight off to the police with it?” Miss Marple paused, and then added
firmly: “I thought it much wiser to find the body first.”
Inspector Craddock was tickled.
“You don’t seem ever to have had any doubts but that it would be found?”
“I was sure it would. Lucy Eyelesbarrow is a most efficient and intelligent
person.”
“I’ll say she is! She scares the life out of me, she’s so devastatingly
efficient! No man will ever dare marry that girl.”
“Now you know, I wouldn’t say that… It would have to be a special type of man,
of course.” Miss Marple brooded on this thought a moment. “How is she getting
on at Rutherford Hall?”
“They’re completely dependent on her as far as I can see. Eating out of her
hand—literally as you might say. By the way, they know nothing about her
connection with you. We’ve kept that dark.”
“She has no connection now with me. She has done what I asked her to do.”
“So she could hand in her notice and go if she wanted to?”
“Yes.”
“But she stops on. Why?”
“She has not mentioned her reasons to me. She is a very intelligent girl. I
suspect that she has become interested.”
“In the problem? Or in the family?”
“It may be,” said Miss Marple, “that it is rather difficult to separate the
two.”
Craddock looked hard at her.
“Oh, no—oh, dear me, no.”
“Have you got anything particular in mind?”
“I think you have.”
Miss Marple shook her head.
Dermot Craddock sighed. “So all I can do is to ‘prosecute my inquiries’—to put
it in jargon. A policeman’s life is a dull one!”
“You’ll get results, I’m sure.”
“Any ideas for me? More inspired guesswork?”
“I was thinking of things like theatrical companies,” said Miss Marple rather
vaguely. “Touring from place to place and perhaps not many home ties. One of
those young women would be much less likely to be missed.”
“Yes. Perhaps you’ve got something there. We’ll pay special attention to that
angle.” He added, “What are you smiling about?”
“I was just thinking,” said Miss Marple, “of Elspeth McGillicuddy’s face when
she hears we’ve found the body!”
II
“Well!” said Mrs. McGillicuddy. “Well!”
Words failed her. She looked across at the nicely spoken pleasant young man
who had called upon her with official credentials and then down at the
photograph that he handed her.
“That’s her all right,” she said. “Yes, that’s her. Poor soul. Well, I must
say I’m glad you’ve found her body. Nobody believed a word I said! The police,
or the railway people or anyone else. It’s very galling not to be believed. At
any rate, nobody could say I didn’t do all I possibly could.”
The nice young man made sympathetic and appreciative noises.
“Where did you say the body was found?”
“In a barn at a house called Rutherford Hall, just outside Brackhampton.”
“Never heard of it. How did it get there, I wonder?”
The young man didn’t reply.
“Jane Marple found it, I suppose. Trust Jane.”
“The body,” said the young man, referring to some notes, “was found by a Miss
Lucy Eyelesbarrow.”
“Never heard of her either,” said Mrs. McGillicuddy. “I still think Jane
Marple had something to do with it.”
“Anyway, Mrs. McGillicuddy, you definitely identify this picture as that of
the woman whom you saw in a train?”
“Being strangled by a man. Yes, I do.”
“Now, can you describe this man?”
“He was a tall man,” said Mrs. McGillicuddy.
“Yes?”
“And dark.”
“Yes?”
“That’s all I can tell you,” said Mrs. McGillicuddy. “He had his back to me. I
didn’t see his face.”
“Would you be able to recognize him if you saw him?”
“Of course I shouldn’t! He had his back to me. I never saw his face.”
“You’ve no idea at all as to his age?”
Mrs. McGillicuddy considered.
“No—not really. I mean, I don’t know… He wasn’t, I’m almost sure—very young.
His shoulders looked—well, set, if you know what I mean.” The young man
nodded. “Thirty and upward, I can’t get closer than that. I wasn’t really
looking at him, you see. It was her—with those hands round her throat and her
face—all blue… You know, sometimes I dream of it even now….”
“It must have been a distressing experience,” said the young man
sympathetically.
He closed his notebook and said:
“When are you returning to England?”
“Not for another three weeks. It isn’t necessary, is it, for me?”
He quickly reassured her.
“Oh, no. There’s nothing you could do at present. Of course, if we make an
arrest—”
It was left like that.
The mail brought a letter from Miss Marple to her friend. The writing was
spiky and spidery and heavily underlined. Long practice made it easy for Mrs.
McGillicuddy to decipher. Miss Marple wrote a very full account to her friend
who devoured every word with great satisfaction.
She and Jane had shown them all right!
Eleven
I
“I simply can’t make you out,” said Cedric Crackenthorpe.
He eased himself down on the decaying wall of a long derelict pigsty and
stared at Lucy Eyelesbarrow.
“What can’t you make out?”
“What you’re doing here?”
“I’m earning my living.”
“As a skivvy?” he spoke disparagingly.
“You’re out of date,” said Lucy. “Skivvy, indeed! I’m a Household Help, a
Professional Domestician, or an Answer to Prayer, mainly the latter.”
“You can’t like all the things you have to do—cooking and making beds and
whirring about with a hoopla or whatever you call it, and sinking your arms up
to the elbows in greasy water.”
Lucy laughed.
“Not the details, perhaps, but cooking satisfies my creative instincts, and
there’s something in me that really revels in clearing up mess.”
“I live in a permanent mess,” said Cedric. “I like it,” he added defiantly.
“You look as though you did.”
“My cottage in Ibiza is run on simple straightforward lines. Three plates, two
cups and saucers, a bed, a table and a couple of chairs. There’s dust
everywhere and smears of paint and chips of stone—I sculpt as well as
paint—and nobody’s allowed to touch a thing. I won’t have a woman near the
place.”
“Not in any capacity?”
“What do you mean by that?”
“I was assuming that a man of such artistic tastes presumably had some kind of
love life.”
“My love life, as you call it, is my own business,” said Cedric with dignity.
“What I won’t have is woman in her tidying-up interfering bossing capacity.”
“How I’d love to have a go at your cottage,” said Lucy. | 4-50 from paddington - agatha christie.epub |
“It would be a
challenge!”
“You won’t get the opportunity.”
“I suppose not.”
Some bricks fell out of the pigsty. Cedric turned his head and looked into its
nettle-ridden depths.
“Dear old Madge,” he said. “I remember her well. A sow of most endearing
disposition and prolific mother. Seventeen in the last litter, I remember. We
used to come here on fine afternoons and scratch Madge’s back with a stick.
She loved it.”
“Why has this whole place been allowed to get into the state it’s in? It can’t
only be the war?”
“You’d like to tidy this up, too, I suppose? What an interfering female you
are. I quite see now why you would be the person to discover a body! You
couldn’t even leave a Greco-Roman sarcophagus alone.” He paused and then went
on. “No, it’s not only the war. It’s my father. What do you think of him, by
the way?”
“I haven’t had much time for thinking.”
“Don’t evade the issue. He’s as mean as hell, and in my opinion a bit crazy as
well. Of course he hates all of us—except perhaps Emma. That’s because of my
grandfather’s will.”
Lucy looked inquiring.
“My grandfather was the man who madea-da-monitch. With the Crunchies and the
Cracker Jacks and the Cosy Crisps. All the afternoon tea delicacies and then,
being far-sighted, he switched on very early to Cheesies and Canapés so that
now we cash in on cocktail parties in a big way. Well, the time came when
father intimated that he had a soul above Crunchies. He travelled in Italy and
the Balkans and Greece and dabbled in art. My grandfather was peeved. He
decided my father was no man of business and a rather poor judge of art (quite
right in both cases), so left all his money in trust for his grandchildren.
Father had the income for life, but he couldn’t touch the capital. Do you know
what he did? He stopped spending money. He came here and began to save. I’d
say that by now he’s accumulated nearly as big a fortune as my grandfather
left. And in the meantime all of us, Harold, myself, Alfred and Emma haven’t
got a penny of grandfather’s money. I’m a stony-broke painter. Harold went
into business and is now a prominent man in the City—he’s the one with the
money-making touch, though I’ve heard rumours that he’s in Queer Street
lately. Alfred—well, Alfred is usually known in the privacy of the family as
Flash Alf—”
“Why?”
“What a lot of things you want to know! The answer is that Alf is the black
sheep of the family. He’s not actually been to prison yet, but he’s been very
near it. He was in the Ministry of Supply during the war, but left it rather
abruptly under questionable circumstances. And after that there were some
dubious deals in tinned fruits—and trouble over eggs. Nothing in a big
way—just a few doubtful deals on the side.”
“Isn’t it rather unwise to tell strangers all these things?”
“Why? Are you a police spy?”
“I might be.”
“I don’t think so. You were here slaving away before the police began to take
an interest in us. I should say—”
He broke off as his sister Emma came through the door of the kitchen garden.
“Hallo, Em? You’re looking very perturbed about something?”
“I am. I want to talk to you, Cedric.”
“I must get back to the house,” said Lucy, tactfully.
“Don’t go,” said Cedric. “Murder has made you practically one of the family.”
“I’ve got a lot to do,” said Lucy. “I only came out to get some parsley.”
She beat a rapid retreat to the kitchen garden. Cedric’s eyes followed her.
“Good-looking girl,” he said. “Who is she really?”
“Oh, she’s quite well known,” said Emma. “She’s made a speciality of this kind
of thing. But never mind Lucy Eyelesbarrow, Cedric, I’m terribly worried.
Apparently the police think that the dead woman was a foreigner, perhaps
French. Cedric, you don’t think that she could possibly be— Martine?”
II
For a moment or two Cedric stared at her as though uncomprehending.
“Martine? But who on earth—oh, you mean Martine?”
“Yes. Do you think—”
“Why on earth should it be Martine?”
“Well, her sending that telegram was odd when you come to think of it. It must
have been roughly about the same time… Do you think that she may, after all,
have come down here and—”
“Nonsense. Why should Martine come down here and find her way into the Long
Barn? What for? It seems wildly unlikely to me.”
“You don’t think, perhaps, that I ought to tell Inspector Bacon—or the other
one?”
“Tell him what?”
“Well—about Martine. About her letter.”
“Now don’t you go complicating things, sis, by bringing up a lot of irrelevant
stuff that has nothing to do with all this. I was never very convinced about
that letter from Martine, anyway.”
“I was.”
“You’ve always been good at believing impossible things before breakfast, old
girl. My advice to you is, sit tight, and keep your mouth shut. It’s up to the
police to identify their precious corpse. And I bet Harold would say the
same.”
“Oh, I know Harold would. And Alfred, also. But I’m worried, Cedric, I really
am worried. I don’t know what I ought to do.”
“Nothing,” said Cedric promptly. “You keep your mouth shut, Emma. Never go
halfway to meet trouble, that’s my motto.”
Emma Crackenthorpe sighed. She went slowly back to the house uneasy in her
mind.
As she came into the drive, Doctor Quimper emerged from the house and opened
the door of his battered Austin car. He paused when he saw her, then leaving
the car he came towards her.
“Well, Emma,” he said. “Your father’s in splendid shape. Murder suits him.
It’s given him an interest in life. I must recommend it for more of my
patients.”
Emma smiled mechanically. Dr. Quimper was always quick to notice reactions.
“Anything particular the matter?” he asked.
Emma looked up at him. She had come to rely a lot on the kindness and sympathy
of the doctor. He had become a friend on whom to lean, not only a medical
attendant. His calculated brusqueness did not deceive her—she knew the
kindness that lay behind it.
“I am worried, yes,” she admitted.
“Care to tell me? Don’t if you don’t want to.”
“I’d like to tell you. Some of it you know already. The point is I don’t know
what to do.”
“I should say your judgment was usually most reliable. What’s the trouble?”
“You remember—or perhaps you don’t—what I once told you about my brother—the
one who was killed in the war?”
“You mean about his having married—or wanting to marry—a French girl?
Something of that kind?”
“Yes. Almost immediately after I got that letter, he was killed. We never
heard anything of or about the girl. All we knew, actually, was her christian
name. We always expected her to write or to turn up, but she didn’t. We never
heard anything—until about a month ago, just before Christmas.”
“I remember. You got a letter, didn’t you?”
“Yes. Saying she was in England and would like to come and see us. It was all
arranged and then, at the last minute, she sent a wire that she had to return
unexpectedly to France.”
“Well?”
“The police think that this woman who was killed—was French.”
“They do, do they? She looked more of an English type to me, but one can’t
really judge. What’s worrying you then, is that just possibly the dead woman
might be your brother’s girl?”
“Yes.”
“I think it’s most unlikely,” said Dr. Quimper, adding: “But all the same, I
understand what you feel.”
“I’m wondering if I ought not to tell the police about—about it all. Cedric
and the others say it’s quite unnecessary. What do you think?”
“Hm.” Dr. Quimper pursed his lips. He was silent for a moment or two, deep in
thought. Then he said, almost unwillingly, “It’s much simpler, of course, if
you say nothing. I can understand what your brothers feel about it. | 4-50 from paddington - agatha christie.epub |
I can understand what your brothers feel about it. All the
same—”
“Yes?”
Quimper looked at her. His eyes had an affectionate twinkle in them.
“I’d go ahead and tell ’em,” he said. “You’ll go on worrying if you don’t. I
know you.”
Emma flushed a little.
“Perhaps I’m foolish.”
“You do what you want to do, my dear—and let the rest of the family go hang!
I’d back your judgment against the lot of them any day.”
Twelve
I
“Girl! You, girl! Come in here.”
Lucy turned her head, surprised. Old Mr. Crackenthorpe was beckoning to her
fiercely from just inside a door.
“You want me, Mr. Crackenthorpe?”
“Don’t talk so much. Come in here.”
Lucy obeyed the imperative finger. Old Mr. Crackenthorpe took hold of her arm
and pulled her inside the door and shut it.
“Want to show you something,” he said.
Lucy looked round her. They were in a small room evidently designed to be used
as a study, but equally evidently not used as such for a very long time. There
were piles of dusty papers on the desk and cobwebs festooned from the corners
of the ceiling. The air smelt damp and musty.
“Do you want me to clean this room?” she asked.
Old Mr. Crackenthorpe shook his head fiercely.
“No, you don’t! I keep this room locked up. Emma would like to fiddle about in
here, but I don’t let her. It’s my room. See these stones? They’re geological
specimens.”
Lucy looked at a collection of twelve or fourteen lumps of rock, some polished
and some rough.
“Lovely,” she said kindly. “Most interesting.”
“You’re quite right. They are interesting. You’re an intelligent girl. I don’t
show them to everybody. I’ll show you some more things.”
“It’s very kind of you, but I ought really to get on with what I was doing.
With six people in the house—”
“Eating me out of house and home… That’s all they do when they come down here!
Eat. They don’t offer to pay for what they eat, either. Leeches! All waiting
for me to die. Well, I’m not going to die just yet—I’m not going to die to
please them. I’m a lot stronger than even Emma knows.”
“I’m sure you are.”
“I’m not so old, either. She makes out I’m an old man, treats me as an old
man. You don’t think I’m old, do you?”
“Of course not,” said Lucy.
“Sensible girl. Take a look at this.”
He indicated a large faded chart which hung on the wall. It was, Lucy saw, a
genealogical tree; some of it done so finely that one would have to have a
magnifying glass to read the names. The remote forebears, however, were
written in large proud capitals with crowns over the names.
“Descended from Kings,” said Mr. Crackenthorpe. “My mother’s family tree, that
is—not my father’s. He was a vulgarian! Common old man! Didn’t like me. I was
a cut above him always. Took after my mother’s side. Had a natural feeling for
art and classical sculpture—he couldn’t see anything in it—silly old fool.
Don’t remember my mother—died when I was two. Last of her family. They were
sold up and she married my father. But you look there—Edward the
Confessor—Ethelred the Unready—whole lot of them. And that was before the
Normans came. Before the Normans—that’s something isn’t it?”
“It is indeed.”
“Now I’ll show you something else.” He guided her across the room to an
enormous piece of dark oak furniture. Lucy was rather uneasily conscious of
the strength of the fingers clutching her arm. There certainly seemed nothing
feeble about old Mr. Crackenthorpe today. “See this? Came out of
Lushington—that was my mother’s people’s place. Elizabethan, this is. Takes
four men to move it. You don’t know what I keep inside it, do you? Like me to
show you?”
“Do show me,” said Lucy politely.
“Curious, aren’t you? All women are curious.” He took a key from his pocket
and unlocked the door of the lower cupboard. From this he took out a
surprisingly new-looking cash box. This, again, he unlocked.
“Take a look here, my dear. Know what these are?”
He lifted out a small paper-wrapped cylinder and pulled away the paper from
one end. Gold coins trickled out into his palm.
“Look at these, young lady. Look at ’em, hold ’em, touch ’em. Know what they
are? Bet you don’t! You’re too young. Sovereigns—that’s what they are. Good
golden sovereigns. What we used before all these dirty bits of paper came into
fashion. Worth a lot more than silly pieces of paper. Collected them a long
time back. I’ve got other things in this box, too. Lots of things put away in
here. All ready for the future. Emma doesn’t know—nobody knows. It’s our
secret, see, girl? D’you know why I’m telling you and showing you?”
“Why?”
“Because I don’t want you to think I’m a played-out sick old man. Lots of life
in the old dog yet. My wife’s been dead a long time. Always objecting to
everything, she was. Didn’t like the names I gave the children—good Saxon
names—no interest in that family tree. I never paid any attention to what she
said, though—and she was a poor-spirited creature—always gave in. Now you’re a
spirited filly—a very nice filly indeed. I’ll give you some advice. Don’t
throw yourself away on a young man. Young men are fools! You want to take care
of your future. You wait…” His fingers pressed into Lucy’s arm. He leaned to
her ear. “I don’t say more than that. Wait. Those silly fools think I’m going
to die soon. I’m not. Shouldn’t be surprised if I outlived the lot of them.
And then we’ll see! Oh, yes, then we’ll see. Harold’s got no children. Cedric
and Alfred aren’t married. Emma—Emma will never marry now. She’s a bit sweet
on Quimper—but Quimper will never think of marrying Emma. There’s Alexander,
of course. Yes, there’s Alexander… But, you know, I’m fond of Alexander… Yes,
that’s awkward. I’m fond of Alexander.”
He paused for a moment, frowning, then said:
“Well, girl, what about it? What about it, eh?”
“Miss Eyelesbarrow….”
Emma’s voice came faintly through the closed study door. Lucy seized
gratefully at the opportunity.
“Miss Crackenthorpe’s calling me. I must go. Thank you so much for all you
have shown me….”
“Don’t forget…our secret….”
“I won’t forget,” said Lucy, and hurried out into the hall not quite certain
as to whether she had or had not just received a conditional proposal of
marriage.
II
Dermot Craddock sat at his desk in his room at New Scotland Yard. He was
slumped sideways in an easy attitude, and was talking into the telephone
receiver which he held with one elbow propped up on the table. He was speaking
in French, a language in which he was tolerably proficient.
“It was only an idea, you understand,” he said.
“But decidedly it is an idea,” said the voice at the other end, from the
Prefecture in Paris. “Already I have set inquiries in motion in those circles.
My agent reports that he has two or three promising lines of inquiry. Unless
there is some family life—or a lover, these women drop out of circulation very
easily and no one troubles about them. They have gone on tour, or there is
some new man—it is no one’s business to ask. It is a pity that the photograph
you sent me is so difficult for anyone to recognize. Strangulation it does not
improve the appearance. Still, that cannot be helped. I go now to study the
latest reports of my agents on this matter. There will be, perhaps, something. | 4-50 from paddington - agatha christie.epub |
There will be, perhaps, something.
Au revoir, mon cher.”
As Craddock reiterated the farewell politely, a slip of paper was placed
before him on the desk. It read:
Miss Emma Crackenthorpe.
To see Detective-Inspector Craddock.
Rutherford Hall case.
He replaced the receiver and said to the police constable:
“Bring Miss Crackenthorpe up.”
As he waited, he leaned back in his chair, thinking.
So he had not been mistaken—there was something that Emma Crackenthorpe
knew—not much, perhaps, but something. And she had decided to tell him.
He rose to his feet as she was shown in, shook hands, settled her in a chair
and offered her a cigarette which she refused. Then there was a momentary
pause. She was trying, he decided, to find just the words she wanted. He
leaned forward.
“You have come to tell me something, Miss Crackenthorpe? Can I help you?
You’ve been worried about something, haven’t you? Some little thing, perhaps,
that you feel probably has nothing to do with the case, but on the other hand,
just might be related to it. You’ve come here to tell me about it, haven’t
you? It’s to do, perhaps, with the identity of the dead woman. You think you
know who she was?”
“No, no, not quite that. I think really it’s most unlikely. But—”
“But there is some possibility that worries you. You’d better tell me about
it—because we may be able to set your mind at rest.”
Emma took a moment or two before speaking. Then she said:
“You have seen three of my brothers. I had another brother, Edmund, who was
killed in the war. Shortly before he was killed, he wrote to me from France.”
She opened her handbag and took out a worn and faded letter. She read from it:
“I hope this won’t be a shock to you, Emmie, but I’m getting married—to a
French girl. It’s all been very sudden—but I know you’ll be fond of
Martine—and look after her if anything happens to me. Will write you all the
details in my next—by which time I shall be a married man. Break it gently to
the old man, won’t you? He’ll probably go up in smoke.”
Inspector Craddock held out a hand. Emma hesitated, then put the letter into
it. She went on, speaking rapidly.
“Two days after receiving this letter, we had a telegram saying Edmund was
Missing, believed killed. Later he was definitely reported killed. It was just
before Dunkirk—and a time of great confusion. There was no Army record, as far
as I could find out, of his having been married—but as I say, it was a
confused time. I never heard anything from the girl. I tried, after the war,
to make some inquiries, but I only knew her Christian name and that part of
France had been occupied by the Germans and it was difficult to find out
anything, without knowing the girl’s surname and more about her. In the end I
assumed that the marriage had never taken place and that the girl had probably
married someone else before the end of the war, or might possibly herself have
been killed.”
Inspector Craddock nodded. Emma went on.
“Imagine my surprise to receive a letter just about a month ago, signed
Martine Crackenthorpe.”
“You have it?”
Emma took it from her bag and handed it to him. Craddock read it with
interest. It was written in a slanting French hand—an educated hand.
Dear Mademoiselle,
I hope it will not be a shock to you to get this letter. I do not even know if
your brother Edmund told you that we were married.
He said he was going to do so. He was killed only a few days after
our marriage and at the same time the Germans occupied our village. After the
war ended, I decided that I would not write to you or approach you, though
Edmund had told me to do so. But by then I had made a new life for myself, and
it was not necessary.
But now things have changed. For my son’s sake I write this letter.
He is your brother’s son, you see, and I— I can no longer give him the
advantages he ought to have. I am coming to England early next week. Will you
let me know if I can come and see you? My address for letters is 126 Elvers
Crescent, N.10. I hope again this will not be the great shock to you.
I remain with assurance of my excellent sentiments,
Martine Crackenthorpe
Craddock was silent for a moment or two. He reread the letter carefully before
handing it back.
“What did you do on receipt of this letter, Miss Crackenthorpe?”
“My brother-in-law, Bryan Eastley, happened to be staying with me at the time
and I talked to him about it. Then I rang up my brother Harold in London and
consulted him about it. Harold was rather sceptical about the whole thing and
advised extreme caution. We must, he said, go carefully into this woman’s
credentials.”
Emma paused and then went on:
“That, of course, was only common sense and I quite agreed. But if this
girl—woman—was really the Martine about whom Edmund had written to me, I felt
that we must make her welcome. I wrote to the address she gave in her letters,
inviting her to come down to Rutherford Hall and meet us. A few days later I
received a telegram from London: Very sorry forced to return to France
unexpectedly. Martine. There was no further letter or news of any kind.”
“All this took place—when?”
Emma frowned.
“It was shortly before Christmas. I know, because I wanted to suggest her
spending Christmas with us—but my father would not hear of it—so I suggested
she could come down the weekend after Christmas while the family would still
be there. I think the wire saying she was returning to France came actually a
few days before Christmas.”
“And you believe that this woman whose body was found in the sarcophagus might
be this Martine?”
“No, of course I don’t. But when you said she was probably a foreigner—well, I
couldn’t help wondering…if perhaps….”
Her voice died away.
Craddock spoke quickly and reassuringly.
“You did quite right to tell me about this. We’ll look into it. I should say
there is probably little doubt that the woman who wrote to you actually did go
back to France and is there now alive and well. On the other hand, there is a
certain coincidence of dates, as you yourself have been clever enough to
realize. As you heard at the inquest, the woman’s death according to the
police surgeon’s evidence must have occurred about three to four weeks ago.
Now don’t worry, Miss Crackenthorpe, just leave it to us.” He added casually,
“You consulted Mr. Harold Crackenthorpe. What about your father and your other
brothers?”
“I had to tell my father, of course. He got very worked up,” she smiled
faintly. “He was convinced it was a put up thing to get money out of us. My
father gets very excited about money. He believes, or pretends to believe,
that he is a very poor man, and that he must save every penny he can. I
believe elderly people do get obsessions of that kind sometimes. It’s not
true, of course, he has a very large income and doesn’t actually spend a
quarter of it—or used not to until these days of high income tax. Certainly he
has a large amount of savings put by.” She paused and then went on. “I told my
other two brothers also. Alfred seemed to consider it rather a joke, though
he, too, thought it was almost certainly an imposture. Cedric just wasn’t
interested—he’s inclined to be self-centred. Our idea was that the family
would receive Martine, and that our lawyer, Mr. Wimborne, should also be asked
to be present.”
“What did Mr. Wimborne think about the letter?”
“We hadn’t got as far as discussing the matter with him. We were on the point
of doing so when Martine’s telegram arrived.”
“You have taken no further steps?”
“Yes. I wrote to the address in London with Please forward on the envelope,
but I have had no reply of any kind.”
“Rather a curious business… Hm….”
He looked at her sharply.
“What do you yourself think about it?”
“I don’t know what to think.”
“What were your reactions at the time? Did you think the letter was genuine—or
did you agree with your father and brothers? | 4-50 from paddington - agatha christie.epub |
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Dataset Card for AgathaChristieText
There is a tide in the affairs of men,
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune,
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.
On such a full sea are we now afloat,
And we must take the current when it serves,
Or lose our ventures.
Dataset Summary
The agatha_christie dataset contains the complete works of Agatha Christie, including the novels, short stories, and plays. The dataset is in English and contains 110 works in total. The dataset is intended for text generation tasks, such as language modeling, and can be used to train models to generate text in the style of Agatha Christie.
Supported Tasks and Leaderboards
The dataset can be used for text generation tasks, such as language modeling. The dataset can be used to train models to generate text in the style of Agatha Christie.
Languages
The text in the dataset is in English.
Dataset Structure
Dataset instances
The following is an example sample from the dataset.
{"text":"Mrs. McGillicuddy was short and stout, the porter was tall and free-striding. In addition, Mrs. McGillicuddy was burdened with a large quantity of parcels; the result of a day’s Christmas shopping. The race was, therefore, an uneven one, and the porter turned the corner at the end of the platform whilst Mrs. McGillicuddy was still coming up the straight.", "source": "4-50 from paddington - agatha christie.epub" }
Data Fields
- text: The text of the work chunked into semantic segments by llamaindex SemanticNodeParser.
- source: The source material of the text.
Splits
The dataset is split into tain, test and validation splits.
- train.parquet
- test.parquet
- validation.parquet
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