4:50 From Paddington (Miss Marple 8)

Miss Marple dropped her handbag and Bryan politely picked it up. At the same moment Mrs. McGillicuddy approached Emma and murmured, in an anguished voice—the anguish was quite genuine since Mrs. McGillicuddy deeply disliked the task which she was now performing:

“I wonder—could I go upstairs for a moment?”

“Of course,” said Emma.

“I’ll take you,” said Lucy.

Lucy and Mrs. McGillicuddy left the room together.

“Very cold, driving today,” said Miss Marple in a vaguely explanatory manner.

“About the sound barrier,” said Bryan, “you see it’s like this… Oh, hallo, there’s Quimper.”

The doctor drove up in his car. He came in rubbing his hands and looking very cold.

“Going to snow,” he said, “that’s my guess. Hallo, Emma, how are you? Good lord, what’s all this?”

“We made you a birthday cake,” said Emma. “D’you remember? You told me today was your birthday.”

“I didn’t expect all this,” said Quimper. “You know it’s years—why, it must be—yes sixteen years since anyone’s remembered my birthday.” He looked almost uncomfortably touched.

“Do you know Miss Marple?” Emma introduced him.

“Oh, yes,” said Miss Marple, “I met Dr. Quimper here before and he came and saw me when I had a very nasty chill the other day and he was most kind.”

“All right again now, I hope?” said the doctor.

Miss Marple assured him that she was quite all right now.

“You haven’t been to see me lately, Quimper,” said Mr. Crackenthorpe. “I might be dying for all the notice you take of me!”

“I don’t see you dying yet awhile,” said Dr. Quimper.

“I don’t mean to,” said Mr. Crackenthorpe. “Come on, let’s have tea. What’re we waiting for?”

“Oh, please,” said Miss Marple, “don’t wait for my friend. She would be most upset if you did.”

They sat down and started tea. Miss Marple accepted a piece of bread and butter first, and then went on to a sandwich.

“Are they—?” she hesitated.

“Fish,” said Bryan. “I helped make ’em.”

Mr. Crackenthorpe gave a cackle of laughter.

“Poisoned fishpaste,” he said. “That’s what they are. Eat ’em at your peril.”

“Please, Father!”

“You’ve got to be careful what you eat in this house,” said Mr. Crackenthorpe to Miss Marple. “Two of my sons have been murdered like flies. Who’s doing it—that’s what I want to know.”

“Don’t let him put you off,” said Cedric, handing the plate once more to Miss Marple. “A touch of arsenic improves the complexion, they say, so long as you don’t have too much.”

“Eat one yourself, boy,” said old Mr. Crackenthorpe.

“Want me to be official taster?” said Cedric. “Here goes.”

He took a sandwich and put it whole into his mouth. Miss Marple gave a gentle, ladylike little laugh and took a sandwich. She took a bite, and said:

“I do think it’s so brave of you all to make these jokes. Yes, really, I think it’s very brave indeed. I do admire bravery so much.”

She gave a sudden gasp and began to choke. “A fish bone,” she gasped out, “in my throat.”

Quimper rose quickly. He went across to her, moved her backwards towards the window and told her to open her mouth. He pulled out a case from his pocket, selecting some forceps from it. With quick professional skill he peered down the old lady’s throat. At that moment the door opened and Mrs. McGillicuddy, followed by Lucy, came in. Mrs. McGillicuddy gave a sudden gasp as her eyes fell on the tableau in front of her, Miss Marple leaning back and the doctor holding her throat and tilting up her head.

“But that’s him,” cried Mrs. McGillicuddy. “That’s the man in the train….”

With incredible swiftness Miss Marple slipped from the doctor’s grasp and came towards her friend.

“I thought you’d recognize him, Elspeth!” she said. “No. Don’t say another word.” She turned triumphantly round to Dr. Quimper. “You didn’t know, did you, Doctor, when you strangled that woman in the train, that somebody actually saw you do it? It was my friend here. Mrs. McGillicuddy. She saw you. Do you understand? Saw you with her own eyes. She was in another train that was running parallel with yours.”

“What the hell?” Dr. Quimper made a quick step towards Mrs. McGillicuddy but again, swiftly, Miss Marple was between him and her.

“Yes,” said Miss Marple. “She saw you, and she recognizes you, and she’ll swear to it in court. It’s not often, I believe,” went on Miss Marple in her gentle plaintive voice, “that anyone actually sees a murder committed. It’s usually circumstantial evidence of course. But in this case the conditions were very unusual. There was actually an eyewitness to murder.”

“You devilish old hag,” said Dr. Quimper. He lunged forward at Miss Marple but this time it was Cedric who caught him by the shoulder.

“So you’re the murdering devil, are you?” said Cedric as he swung him round. “I never liked you and I always thought you were a wrong ’un, but lord knows, I never suspected you.”

Bryan Eastley came quickly to Cedric’s assistance. Inspector Craddock and Inspector Bacon entered the room from the farther door.

“Dr. Quimper,” said Bacon, “I must caution you that….”

“You can take your caution to hell,” said Dr. Quimper. “Do you think anyone’s going to believe what a couple of old women say? Who’s ever heard of all this rigmarole about a train!”

Miss Marple said: “Elspeth McGillicuddy reported the murder to the police at once on the 20th December and gave a description of the man.”

Dr. Quimper gave a sudden heave of the shoulders. “If ever a man had the devil’s own luck,” said Dr. Quimper.

“But—” said Mrs. McGillicuddy.

“Be quiet, Elspeth,” said Miss Marple.

“Why should I want to murder a perfectly strange woman?” said Dr. Quimper.

“She wasn’t a strange woman,” said Inspector Craddock. “She was your wife.”

Twenty-seven

“So you see,” said Miss Marple, “it really turned out to be, as I began to suspect, very, very simple. The simplest kind of crime. So many men seem to murder their wives.”

Mrs. McGillicuddy looked at Miss Marple and Inspector Craddock. “I’d be obliged,” she said, “if you’d put me a little more up to date.”

“He saw a chance, you see,” said Miss Marple, “of marrying a rich wife, Emma Crackenthorpe. Only he couldn’t marry her because he had a wife already. They’d been separated for years but she wouldn’t divorce him. That fitted in very well with what Inspector Craddock told me of this girl who called herself Anna Stravinska. She had an English husband, so she told one of her friends, and it was also said she was a very devout Catholic. Dr. Quimper couldn’t risk marrying Emma bigamously, so he decided, being a very ruthless and cold-blooded man, that he would get rid of his wife. The idea of murdering her in the train and later putting her body in the sarcophagus in the barn was really rather a clever one. He meant it to tie up, you see, with the Crackenthorpe family. Before that he’d written a letter to Emma which purported to be from the girl Martine whom Edmund Crackenthorpe had talked of marrying. Emma had told Dr. Quimper all about her brother, you see. Then, when the moment arose he encouraged her to go to the police with her story. He wanted the dead woman identified as Martine. I think he may have heard that inquiries were being made by the Paris police about Anna Stravinska, and so he arranged to have a postcard come from her from Jamaica.

“It was easy for him to arrange to meet his wife in London, to tell her that he hoped to be reconciled with her and that he would like her to come down and ‘meet his family.’ We won’t talk about the next part of it, which is very unpleasant to think about. Of course he was a greedy man. When he thought about taxation, and how much it cuts into income, he began thinki

ng that it would be nice to have a good deal more capital. Perhaps he’d already thought of that before he decided to murder his wife. Anyway, he started spreading rumours that someone was trying to poison old Mr. Crackenthorpe so as to get the ground prepared, and then he ended by administering arsenic to the family. Not too much, of course, for he didn’t want old Mr. Crackenthorpe to die.”

“But I still don’t see how he managed,” said Craddock. “He wasn’t in the house when the curry was being prepared.”

“Oh, but there wasn’t any arsenic in the curry then,” said Miss Marple. “He added it to the curry afterwards when he took it away to be tested. He probably put the arsenic in the cocktail jug earlier. Then, of course, it was quite easy for him, in his role of medical attendant, to poison off Alfred Crackenthorpe and also to send the tablets to Harold in London, having safeguarded himself by telling Harold that he wouldn’t need anymore tablets. Everything he did was bold and audacious and cruel and greedy, and I am really very, very sorry,” finished Miss Marple, looking as fierce as a fluffy old lady can look, “that they have abolished capital punishment because I do feel that if there is anyone who ought to hang, it’s Dr. Quimper.”

“Hear, hear,” said Inspector Craddock.

“It occurred to me, you know,” continued Miss Marple, “that even if you only see anybody from the back view, so to speak, nevertheless a back view is characteristic. I thought that if Elspeth were to see Dr. Quimper in exactly the same position as she’d seen him in the train in, that is, with his back to her, bent over a woman whom he was holding by the throat, then I was almost sure she would recognize him, or would make some kind of startled exclamation. That is why I had to lay my little plan with Lucy’s kind assistance.”

“I must say,” said Mrs. McGillicuddy, “it gave me quite a turn. I said, ‘That’s him’ before I could stop myself. And yet, you know, I hadn’t actually seen the man’s face and—”

“I was terribly afraid that you were going to say so, Elspeth,” said Miss Marple.

“I was,” said Mrs. McGillicuddy. “I was going to say that of course I hadn’t seen his face.”

“That,” said Miss Marple, “would have been quite fatal. You see, dear, he thought you really did recognize him. I mean, he couldn’t know that you hadn’t seen his face.”

“A good thing I held my tongue then,” said Mrs. McGillicuddy.

“I wasn’t going to let you say another word,” said Miss Marple.

Craddock laughed suddenly. “You two!” he said. “You’re a marvellous pair. What next, Miss Marple? What’s the happy ending? What happens to poor Emma Crackenthorpe, for instance?”

“She’ll get over the doctor, of course,” said Miss Marple, “and I dare say if her father were to die—and I don’t think he’s quite so robust as he thinks he is—that she’d go on a cruise or perhaps to stay abroad like Geraldine Webb, and I dare say something might come of it. A nicer man than Dr. Quimper, I hope.”

“What about Lucy Eyelesbarrow? Wedding bells there too?”

“Perhaps,” said Miss Marple, “I shouldn’t wonder.”

“Which of ’em is she going to choose?” said Dermot Craddock.

“Don’t you know?” said Miss Marple.

“No, I don’t,” said Craddock. “Do you?”

“Oh, yes, I think so,” said Miss Marple.

And she twinkled at him.

* * *