4:50 From Paddington (Miss Marple 8)

“Poisoned tablets,” said Miss Marple thoughtfully.

“Yes. Devilishly cunning, really. They looked just like the tablets that he’d been having. There was a printed slip sent in with them ‘by Doctor Quimper’s instructions.’ Well, Quimper never ordered them. There were chemist’s labels used. The chemist knew nothing about it, either. No. That box of tablets came from Rutherford Hall.”

“Do you actually know it came from Rutherford Hall?”

“Yes. We’ve had a thorough check up. Actually, it’s the box that held the sedative tablets prescribed for Emma.”

“Oh, I see. For Emma….”

“Yes. It’s got her fingerprints on it and the fingerprints of both the nurses and the fingerprint of the chemist who made it up. Nobody else’s, naturally. The person who sent them was careful.”

“And the sedative tablets were removed and something else substituted?”

“Yes. That of course is the devil with tablets. One tablet looks exactly like another.”

“You are so right,” agreed Miss Marple. “I remember so very well in my young days, the black mixture and the brown mixture (the cough mixture that was) and the white mixture, and Doctor So-and- So’s pink mixture. People didn’t mix those up nearly as much. In fact, you know, in my village of St. Mary Mead we still like that kind of medicine. It’s a bottle they always want, not tablets. What were the tablets?” she asked.

“Aconite. They were the kind of tablets that are usually kept in a poison bottle, diluted one in a hundred for outside application.”

“And so Harold took them, and died,” Miss Marple said thoughtfully. Dermot Craddock uttered something like a groan.

“You mustn’t mind my letting off steam to you,” he said. “Tell it all to Aunt Jane; that’s how I feel!”

“That’s very, very nice of you,” said Miss Marple, “and I do appreciate it. I feel towards you, as Sir Henry’s godson, quite differently from the way I feel to any ordinary detective-inspector.”

Dermot Craddock gave her a fleeting grin. “But the fact remains that I’ve made the most ghastly mess of things all along the line,” he said. “The Chief Constable down here calls in Scotland Yard, and what do they get? They get me making a prize ass of myself!”

“No, no,” said Miss Marple.

“Yes, yes. I don’t know who poisoned Alfred, I don’t know who poisoned Harold, and, to cap it all, I haven’t the least idea who the original murdered woman was! This Martine business seemed a perfectly safe bet. The whole thing seemed to tie up. And now what happens? The real Martine shows up and turns out, most improbably, to be the wife of Sir Robert Stoddart-West. So, who’s the woman in the barn now? Goodness knows. First I go all out on the idea she’s Anna Stravinska, and then she’s out of it—”

He was arrested by Miss Marple giving one of her small peculiarly significant coughs.

“But is she?” she murmured.

Craddock stared at her. “Well, that postcard from Jamaica—”

“Yes,” said Miss Marple; “but that isn’t really evidence, is it? I mean, anyone can get a postcard sent from almost anywhere, I suppose. I remember Mrs. Brierly, such a very bad nervous breakdown. Finally, they said she ought to go to the mental hospital for observation, and she was so worried about the children knowing about it and so she wrote fourteen postcards and arranged that they should be posted from different places abroad, and told them that Mummy was going abroad on a holiday.” She added, looking at Dermot Craddock, “You see what I mean.”

“Yes, of course,” said Craddock, staring at her. “Naturally we’d have checked that postcard if it hadn’t been for the Martine business fitting the bill so well.”

“So convenient,” murmured Miss Marple.

“It tied up,” said Craddock. “After all, there’s the letter Emma received signed Martine Crackenthorpe. Lady Stoddart-West didn’t send that, but somebody did. Somebody who was going to pretend to be Martine, and who was going to cash in, if possible, on being Martine. You can’t deny that.”

“No, no.”

“And then, the envelope of the letter Emma wrote to her with the London address on it. Found at Rutherford Hall, showing she’d actually been there.”

“But the murdered woman hadn’t been there!” Miss Marple pointed out. “Not in the sense you mean. She only came to Rutherford Hall after she was dead. Pushed out of a train on to the railway embankment.”

“Oh, yes.”

“What the envelope really proves is that the murderer was there. Presumably he took that envelope off her with her other papers and things, and then dropped it by mistake—or—I wonder now, was it a mistake? Surely Inspector Bacon, and your men too, made a thorough search of the place, didn’t they, and didn’t find it. It only turned up later in the boiler house.”

“That’s understandable,” said Craddock. “The old gardener chap used to spear up any odd stuff that was blowing about and shove it in there.”

“Where it was very convenient for the boys to find,” said Miss Marple thoughtfully.

“You think we were meant to find it?”

“Well, I just wonder. After all, it would be fairly easy to know where the boys were going to look next, or even to suggest to them… Yes, I do wonder. It stopped you thinking about Anna Stravinska anymore, didn’t it?”

Craddock said: “And you think it really may be her all the time?”

“I think someone may have got alarmed when you started making inquiries about her, that’s all… I think somebody didn’t want those inquiries made.”

“Let’s hold on to the basic fact that someone was going to impersonate Martine,” said Craddock. “And then for some reason—didn’t. Why?”

“That’s a very interesting question,” said Miss Marple.

“Somebody sent a note saying Martine was going back to France, then arranged to travel down with the girl and kill her on the way. You agree so far?”

“Not exactly,” said Miss Marple. “I don’t think, really, you’re making it simple enough.”

“Simple!” exclaimed Craddock. “You’re mixing me up,” he complained.

Miss Marple said in a distressed voice that she wouldn’t think of doing anything like that.

“Come, tell me,” said Craddock, “do you or do you not think you know who the murdered woman was?” Miss Marple sighed. “It’s so difficult,” she said, “to put it the right way. I mean, I don’t know who she was, but at the same time I’m fairly sure who she was, if you know what I mean.”

Craddock threw up his head. “Know what you mean? I haven’t the faintest idea.” He looked out through the window. “There’s your Lucy Eyelesbarrow coming to see you,” he said. “Well, I’ll be off. My amour propre is very low this afternoon and having a young woman coming in, radiant with eff

iciency and success, is more than I can bear.”

Twenty-five

“I looked up tontine in the dictionary,” said Lucy.

The first greetings were over and now Lucy was wandering rather aimlessly round the room, touching a china dog here, an antimacassar there, the plastic work-box in the window.

“I thought you probably would,” said Miss Marple equably.

Lucy spoke slowly, quoting the words. “Lorenzo Tonti, Italian banker, originator, 1653, of a form of annuity in which the shares of subscribers who die are added to the profit shares of the survivors.” She paused. “That’s it, isn’t it? That fits well enough, and you were thinking of it even then before the last two deaths.”

She took up once more her restless, almost aimless prowl round the room. Miss Marple sat watching her. This was a very different Lucy Eyelesbarrow from the one she knew.

“I suppose it was asking for it really,” said Lucy. “A will of that kind, ending so that if there was only one survivor left he’d get the lot. And yet—there was quite a lot of money, wasn’t there? You’d think it would be enough shared out…” She paused, the words trailing off.

“The trouble is,” said Miss Marple, “that people are greedy. Some people. That’s so often, you know, how things start. You don’t start with murder, with wanting to do murder, or even thinking of it. You just start by being greedy, by wanting more than you’re going to have.” She laid her knitting down on her knee and stared ahead of her into space. “That’s how I came across Inspector Craddock first, you know. A case in the country. Near Medenham Spa. That began the same way, just a weak amiable character who wanted a great deal of money. Money that that person wasn’t entitled to, but there seemed an easy way to get it. Not murder then. Just something so easy and simple that it hadn’t seemed wrong. That’s how things begin… But it ended with three murders.”