Murder Is Announced (Miss Marple 5)

“I think I’d like to get clear first on what really happened,” said Bunch. “Did this Swiss boy recognize her?”

“Yes. He’d worked in—”

She hesitated and looked at Craddock.

“In Dr. Adolf Koch’s clinic in Berne,” said Craddock. “Koch was a world-famous specialist on operations for goitre. Charlotte Blacklock went there to have her goitre removed and Rudi Scherz was one of the orderlies. When he came to England he recognized in the hotel a lady who had been a patient and on the spur of the moment he spoke to her. I dare say he mightn’t have done that if he’d paused to think, because he left the place under a cloud, but that was some time after Charlotte had been there, so she wouldn’t know anything about it.”

“So he never said anything to her about Montreux and his father being a hotel proprietor?”

“Oh, no, she made that up to account for his having spoken to her.”

“It must have been a great shock to her,” said Miss Marple, thoughtfully. “She felt reasonably safe—and then—the almost impossible mischance of somebody turning up who had known her—not as one of the two Miss Blacklocks—she was prepared for that—but definitely as Charlotte Blacklock, a patient who’d been operated on for goitre.

“But you wanted to go through it all from the beginning. Well, the beginning, I think—if Inspector Craddock agrees with me—was when Charlotte Blacklock, a pretty, lighthearted affectionate girl, developed that enlargement of the thryoid gland that’s called a goitre. It ruined her life, because she was a very sensitive girl. A girl, too, who had always set a lot of stress on her personal appearance. And girls just at that age in their teens are particularly sensitive about themselves. If she’d had a mother, or a reasonable father, I don’t think she would have got into the morbid state she undoubtedly did get into. She had no one, you see, to take her out of herself, and force her to see people and lead a normal life and not think too much about her infirmity. And, of course, in a different household, she might have been sent for an operation many years earlier.

“But Dr. Blacklock, I think, was an old-fashioned, narrow-minded, tyrannical and obstinate man. He didn’t believe in these operations. Charlotte must take it from him that nothing could be done—apart from dosage with iodine and other drugs. Charlotte did take it from him, and I think her sister also placed more faith in Dr. Blacklock’s powers as a physician than he deserved.

“Charlotte was devoted to her father in a rather weak and soppy way. She thought, definitely, that her father knew best. But she shut herself up more and more as the goitre became larger and more unsightly, and refused to see people. She was actually a kindly affectionate creature.”

“That’s an odd description of a murderess,” said Edmund.

“I don’t know that it is,” said Miss Marple. “Weak and kindly people are often very tre

acherous. And if they’ve got a grudge against life it saps the little moral strength that they may possess.

“Letitia Blacklock, of course, had quite a different personality. Inspector Craddock told me that Belle Goedler described her as really good—and I think Letitia was good. She was a woman of great integrity who found—as she put it herself—a great difficulty in understanding how people couldn’t see what was dishonest. Letitia Blacklock, however tempted, would never have contemplated any kind of fraud for a moment.

“Letitia was devoted to her sister. She wrote her long accounts of everything that happened in an effort to keep her sister in touch with life. She was worried by the morbid state Charlotte was getting into.

“Finally Dr. Blacklock died. Letitia, without hesitation, threw up her position with Randall Goedler and devoted herself to Charlotte. She took her to Switzerland, to consult authorities there on the possibility of operating. It had been left very late—but as we know the operation was successful. The deformity was gone—and the scar this operation had left was easily hidden by a choker of pearls or beads.

“The war had broken out. A return to England was difficult and the two sisters stayed in Switzerland doing various Red Cross and other work. That’s right, isn’t it, Inspector?”

“Yes, Miss Marple.”

“They got occasional news from England—amongst other things, I expect, they heard that Belle Goedler could not live long. I’m sure it would be only human nature for them both to have planned and talked together of the days ahead when a big fortune would be theirs to spend. One has got to realize, I think, that this prospect meant much more to Charlotte than it did to Letitia. For the first time in her life, Charlotte could go about feeling herself a normal woman, a woman at whom no one looked with either repulsion or pity. She was free at last to enjoy life—and she had a whole lifetime, as it were, to crowd into her remaining years. To travel, to have a house and beautiful grounds—to have clothes and jewels, and go to plays and concerts, to gratify every whim—it was all a kind of fairy tale come true to Charlotte.

“And then Letitia, the strong healthy Letitia, got flu which turned to pneumonia and died within the space of a week! Not only had Charlotte lost her sister, but the whole dream existence she had planned for herself was cancelled. I think, you know, that she may have felt almost resentful towards Letitia. Why need Letitia have died, just then, when they had just had a letter saying Belle Goedler could not last long? Just one more month, perhaps, and the money would have been Letitia’s—and hers when Letitia died….

“Now this is where I think the difference between the two came in. Charlotte didn’t really feel that what she suddenly thought of doing was wrong—not really wrong. The money was meant to come to Letitia—it would have come to Letitia in the course of a few months—and she regarded herself and Letitia as one.

“Perhaps the idea didn’t occur to her until the doctor or someone asked her her sister’s Christian name—and then she realized how to nearly everyone they had appeared as the two Miss Blacklocks—elderly, well-bred Englishwomen, dressed much the same, with a strong family resemblance—(and, as I pointed out to Bunch, one elderly woman is so like another). Why shouldn’t it be Charlotte who had died and Letitia who was alive?

“It was an impulse, perhaps, more than a plan. Letitia was buried under Charlotte’s name. ‘Charlotte’ was dead, ‘Letitia’ came to England. All the natural initiative and energy, dormant for so many years, were now in the ascendant. As Charlotte she had played second fiddle. She now assumed the airs of command, the feeling of command that had been Letitia’s. They were not really so unlike in mentality—though there was, I think, a big difference morally.

“Charlotte had, of course, to take one or two obvious precautions. She bought a house in a part of England quite unknown to her. The only people she had to avoid were a few people in her own native town in Cumberland (where in any case she’d lived as a recluse) and, of course, Belle Goedler who had known Letitia so well that any impersonation would have been out of the question. Handwriting difficulties were got over by the arthritic condition of her hands. It was really very easy because so few people had ever really known Charlotte.”

“But supposing she’d met people who’d known Letitia?” asked Bunch. “There must have been plenty of those.”

“They wouldn’t matter in the same way. Someone might say: ‘I came across Letitia Blacklock the other day. She’s changed so much I really wouldn’t have known her.’ But there still wouldn’t be any suspicion in their minds that she wasn’t Letitia. People do change in the course of ten years. Her failure to recognize them could always be put down to her shortsightedness; and you must remember that she knew every detail of Letitia’s life in London—the people she met—the places she went. She’d got Letitia’s letters to refer to, and she could quickly have disarmed any suspicion by mention of some incident, or an inquiry after a mutual friend. No, it was recognition as Charlotte that was the only thing she had to fear.

“She settled down at Little Paddocks, got to know her neighbours and, when she got a letter asking dear Letitia to be kind, she accepted with pleasure the visit of two young cousins she had never seen. Their acceptance of her as Aunt Letty increased her security.

“The whole thing was going splendidly. And then—she made her big mistake. It was a mistake that arose solely from her kindness of heart and her naturally affectionate nature. She got a letter from an old school friend who had fallen on evil days, and she hurried to the rescue. Perhaps it may have been partly because she was, in spite of everything, lonely. Her secret kept her in a way apart from people. And she had been genuinely fond of Dora Bunner and remembered her as a symbol of her own gay carefree days at school. Anyway, on an impulse, she answered Dora’s letter in person. And very surprised Dora must have been! She’d written to Letitia and the sister who turned up in answer to her letter was Charlotte. There was never any question of pretending to be Letitia to Dora. Dora was one of the few old friends who had been admitted to see Charlotte in her lonely and unhappy days.

“And because she knew that Dora would look at the matter in exactly the same way as she did herself, she told Dora what she had done. Dora approved wholeheartedly. In her confused muddle-headed mind it seemed only right that dear Lotty should not be done out of her inheritance by Letty’s untimely death. Lotty deserved a reward for all the patient suffering she had borne so bravely. It would have been most unfair if all that money should have gone to somebody nobody had ever heard of.

“She quite understood that nothing must be allowed to get out. It was like an extra pound of butter. You couldn’t talk about it but there was nothing wrong about having it. So Dora came to Little Paddocks—and very soon Charlotte began to understand that she had made a terrible mistake. It was not merely the fact that Dora Bunner, with her muddles and her mistakes and her bungling, was quite maddening to live with. Charlotte could have put up with that—because she really cared for Dora, and anyway knew from the doctor that Dora hadn’t got a very long time to live. But Dora very soon became a real danger. Though Charlotte and Letitia had called each other by their full names, Dora was the kind of person who always used abbreviations. To her the sisters had always been Letty and Lotty. And though she schooled her tongue resolutely to call her friend Letty—the old name often slipped out. Memories of the past, too, were rather apt to come to her tongue—and Charlotte had constantly to be on the watch to check these forgetful allusions. It began to get on her nerves.

“Still, nobody was likely to pay attention to Dora’s inconsistencies. The real blow to Charlotte’s security came, as I say, when she was recognized and spoken to by Rudi Scherz at the Royal Spa Hotel.

“I think that the money Rudi Scherz used to replace his earlier defalcations at the hotel may have come from Charlotte Blacklock. Inspector Craddock doesn’t believe—and I don’t either—that Rudi Scherz applied to her for money with any idea of blackmail in his head.”

“He

hadn’t the faintest idea he knew anything to blackmail her about,” said Inspector Craddock. “He knew that he was quite a personable young man—and he was aware by experience that personable young men sometimes can get money out of elderly ladies if they tell a hard-luck story convincingly enough.

“But she may have seen it differently. She may have thought that it was a form of insidious blackmail, that perhaps he suspected something—and that later, if there was publicity in the papers as there might be after Belle Goedler’s death, he would realize that in her he had found a gold mine.

“And she was committed to the fraud now. She’d established herself as Letitia Blacklock. With the Bank. With Mrs. Goedler. The only snag was this rather dubious Swiss hotel clerk, an unreliable character, and possibly a blackmailer. If only he were out of the way—she’d be safe.

“Perhaps she made it all up as a kind of fantasy first. She’d been starved of emotion and drama in her life. She pleased herself by working out the details. How would she go about getting rid of him?

“She made her plan. And at last she decided to act on it. She told her story of a sham hold-up at a party to Rudi Scherz, explained that she wanted a stranger to act the part of the ‘gangster,’ and offered him a generous sum for his cooperation.

“And the fact that he agreed without any suspicion is what makes me quite certain that Scherz had no idea that he had any kind of hold over her. To him she was just a rather foolish old woman, very ready to part with money.

“She gave him the advertisement to insert, arranged for him to pay a visit to Little Paddocks to study the geography of the house, and showed him the spot where she would meet him and let him into the house on the night in question. Dora Bunner, of course, knew nothing about all this.

“The day came—” He paused.

Miss Marple took up the tale in her gentle voice.