Nemesis (Miss Marple 12)

Professor Wanstead looked at her for a moment or two.

“You describe it that way?”

“It is how it seems to me,” said Miss Marple. “I don’t like that sort of thing. I never have. If you expect me to feel sympathy, regret, urge an unhappy childhood, blame bad environment; if you expect me in fact to weep over him, this young murderer of yours, I do not feel inclined so to do. I do not like evil beings who do evil things.”

“I am delighted to hear it,” said Professor Wanstead. “What I suffer in the course of my profession from people weeping and gnashing their teeth, and blaming everything on some happening in the past, you would hardly believe. If people knew the bad environments that people have had, the unkindness, the difficulties of their lives and the fact that nevertheless they can come through unscathed, I don’t think they would so often take the opposite point of view. The misfits are to be pitied, yes, they are to be pitied if I may say so for the genes with which they are born and over which they have no control themselves. I pity epileptics in the same way. If you know what genes are—”

“I know, more or less,” said Miss Marple. “It’s common knowledge nowadays, though naturally I have no exact chemical or technical knowledge.”

“The Governor, a man of experience, told me exactly why he was so anxious to have my verdict. He had felt increasingly in his experience of this particular inmate that, in plain words, the boy was not a killer. He didn’t think he was the type of a killer, he was like no killer he had ever seen before, he was of the opinion that the boy was the kind of criminal type who would never go straight no matter what treatment was given to him, would never reform himself; and for whom nothing in one sense of the word could be done, but at the same time he felt increasingly certain that the verdict upon him had been a wrong one. He did not believe that the boy had killed a girl, first strangled her and then disfigured her after rolling her body into a ditch. He just couldn’t bring himself to believe it. He’d looked over the facts of the case, which seemed to be fully proved. This boy had known the girl, he had been seen with her on several different occasions before the crime. They had presumably slept together and there were other points. His car had been seen in the neighbourhood. He himself had been recognized and all the rest of it. A perfectly fair case. But my friend was unhappy about it, he said. He was a man who had a very strong feeling for justice. He wanted a different opinion. He wanted, in fact, not the police side which he knew, he wanted a professional medical view. That was my field, he said. My line of country entirely. He wanted me to see this young man and talk with him, visit him, make a professional appraisal of him and give him my opinion.”

“Very interesting,” said Miss Marple. “Yes, I call that very interesting. After all, your friend—I mean your Governor—was a man of experience, a man who loved justice. He was a man whom you’d be willing to listen to. Presumably then, you did listen to him.”

“Yes,” said Professor Wanstead, “I was deeply interested. I saw the subject, as I will call him, I approached him from several different attitudes. I talked to him, I discussed various changes likely to occur in the law. I told him it might be possible to bring down a lawyer, a Queen’s Counsel, to see what points there might be in his favour, and other things. I approached him as a friend but also as an enemy so that I could see how he responded to different approaches, and I also made a good many physical tests, such as we use very frequently nowadays. I will not go into those with you because they are wholly technical.”

“Then what did you think in the end?”

“I thought,” said Professor Wanstead, “I thought my friend was likely to be right. I did not think that Michael Rafiel was a murderer.”

“What about the earlier case you mentioned?”

“That told against him, of course. Not in the jury’s mind, because of course they did not hear about that until after the judge’s summing up, but certainly in the judge’s mind. It told against him, but I made a few enquiries myself afterwards. He had assaulted a girl. He had conceivably raped her, but he had not attempted to strangle her and in my opinion—I have seen a great many cases which come before the Assizes—it seemed to me highly unlikely that there was a very definite case of rape. Girls, you must remember, are far more ready to be raped nowadays than they used to be. Their mothers insist, very often, that they should call it rape. The girl in question had had several boyfriends who had gone further than friendship. I did not think it counted very greatly as evidence against him. The actual murder case—yes, that was undoubtedly murder—but I continued to feel by all tests, physical tests, mental tests, psychological tests, none of them accorded with this particular crime.”

“Then what did you do?”

“I communicated with Mr. Rafiel. I told him that I would like an interview with him on a certain matter concerning his son. I went to him. I told him what I thought, what the Governor thought, that we had no evidence, that there were no grounds of appeal, at present, but that we both believed that a miscarriage of justice had been committed. I said I thought possibly an enquiry might be held, it might be an expensive business, it might bring out certain facts that could be laid before the Home Office, it might be successful, it might not. There might be something there, some evidence if you looked for it. I said it would be expensive to look for it but I presumed that would make no difference to anyone in his position. I had realized by that time that he was a sick man, a very ill man. He told me so himself. He told me that he had been in expectation of an early death, that he’d been warned two years ago that death could not be delayed for what they first thought was about a year, but later they realized that he would last rather longer because of his unusual physical strength. I asked him what he felt about his son.”

“And what did he feel about his son?” said Miss Marple.

“Ah, you want to know that. So did I. He was, I think, extremely honest with me even if—”

“—even if rather ruthless?” said Miss Marple.

“Yes, Miss Marple. You are using the right word. He was a ruthless man, but he was a just man and an honest man. He said, ‘I’ve known what my son was like for many years. I have not tried to change him because I don’t believe that anyone could change him. He is made a certain way. He is crooked. He’s a bad lot. He’ll always be in trouble. He’s dishonest. Nobody, nothing could make him go straight. I am well assured of that. I have in a sense washed my hands of him. Though not legally or outwardly; he has always had money if he required it. Help legal or otherwise if he gets into trouble. I have done always what I could do. Well, let us say if I had a son who was a spastic who was sick, who was epileptic, I would do what I could for him. If you have a son who is sick morally, shall we say, and for whom there is no cure, I have done what I could also. No more and no less. What can I do for him now?’ I told him that it depended what he wanted to do. ‘There’s no difficulty about that,’ he said. ‘I am handicapped but I can see quite clearly what I want to do. I want to get him vindicated. I want to get him released from confinement. I want to get him free to continue to lead his own life as best he can lead it. If he must lead it in further dishonesties, then he must lead it that way. I will leave provision for him, to do for him everything that can be done. I don’t want him suffering, imprisoned, cut off from his life because of a perfectly natural and unfortunate mistake. If somebody else, some other man killed that girl, I want the fact brought to light and recognized. I want justice for Michael. But I am handicapped. I am a very ill man. My time is measured now not in years or months but in weeks.’

“Lawyers, I suggested—I know a firm—He cut me short. ‘Your lawyers will be useless. You can employ them but they will be useless. I must arrange what I can arrange in such a limited time.’ He offered me a large fee to undertake the search for the truth and to undertake everything possible with no expense spared. ‘I can do next to nothing myself. Death may come at any moment. I empower you as my chief help, and to assist you at my request I will try to f

ind a certain person.’ He wrote down a name for me. Miss Jane Marple. He said ‘I don’t want to give you her address. I want you to meet her in surroundings of my own choosing,’ and he then told me of this tour, this charming, harmless, innocent tour of historic houses, castles and gardens. He would provide me with a reservation on it ahead for a certain date. ‘Miss Jane Marple,’ he said, ‘will also be on that tour. You will meet her there, you will encounter her casually, and thus it will be seen clearly to be a casual meeting.’

“I was to choose my own time and moment to make myself known to you if I thought that that would be the better way. You have already asked me if I or my friend, the Governor, had any reason to suspect or know of any other person who might have been guilty of the murder. My friend the Governor certainly suggested nothing of the kind, and he had already taken up the matter with the police officer who had been in charge of the case. A most reliable detective-superintendent with very good experience in these matters.”

“No other man was suggested? No other friend of the girl’s? No other former friend who might have been supplanted?”

“There was nothing of that kind to find. I asked him to tell me a little about you. He did not however consent to do so. He told me you were elderly. He told me that you were a person who knew about people. He told me one other thing.” He paused.

“What’s the other thing?” said Miss Marple. “I have some natural curiosity, you know. I really can’t think of any other advantage I conceivably could have. I am slightly deaf. My eyesight is not quite as good as it used to be. I cannot really think that I have any advantages beyond the fact that I may, I suppose, seem rather foolish and simple, and am in fact, what used to be called in rather earlier days an ‘old pussy.’ I am an old pussy. Is that the sort of thing he said?”

“No,” said Professor Wanstead. “What he said was he thought you had a very fine sense of evil.”

“Oh,” said Miss Marple. She was taken aback.

Professor Wanstead was watching her.

“Would you say that was true?” he said.

Miss Marple was quiet for quite a long time. At last she said,

“Perhaps it is. Yes, perhaps. I have at several different times in my life been apprehensive, have recognized that there was evil in the neighbourhood, the surroundings, that the environment of someone who was evil was near me, connected with what was happening.”

She looked at him suddenly and smiled.

“It’s rather, you know,” she said, “like being born with a very keen sense of smell. You can smell a leak of gas when other people can’t do so. You can distinguish one perfume from another very easily. I had an aunt once,” continued Miss Marple thoughtfully, “who said she could smell when people told a lie. She said there was quite a distinctive odour came to her. Their noses twitched, she said, and then the smell came. I don’t know if it was true or not, but—well, on several occasions she was quite remarkable. She said to my uncle once, ‘Don’t, Jack, engage that young man you were talking to this morning. He was telling you lies the whole time he was talking.’ That turned out to be quite true.”

“A sense of evil,” said Professor Wanstead. “Well, if you do sense evil, tell me. I shall be glad to know. I don’t think I have a particular sense of evil myself. Ill health, yes, but not—not evil up here.” He tapped his forehead.

“I’d better tell you briefly how I came into things now,” said Miss Marple. “Mr. Rafiel, as you know, died. His lawyers asked me to come and see them, apprised me of his proposition. I received a letter from him which explained nothing. After that I heard nothing more for some little time. Then I got a letter from the company who run these tours saying that Mr. Rafiel before his death had made a reservation for me knowing that I should enjoy a trip very much, and wanting to give it me as a surprise present. I was very astonished but took it as an indication of the first step that I was to undertake. I was to go on this tour and presumably in the course of the tour some other indication or hint or clue or direction would come to me. I think it did. Yesterday, no, the day before, I was received on my arrival here by three ladies who live at an old manor house here and who very kindly extended an invitation to me. They had heard from Mr. Rafiel, they said, who had written some time before his death, saying that a very old friend of his would be coming on this tour and would they be kind enough to put her up for two or three days as he thought she was not fit to attempt the particular ascent of this rather difficult climb up the headland to where there was a memorial tower which was the principal event of yesterday’s tour.”

“And you took that also as an indication of what you were to do?”

“Of course,” said Miss Marple. “There can be no other reason for it. He was not a man to shower benefits for nothing, out of compassion for an old lady who wasn’t good at walking up hills. No. He wanted me to go there.”

“And you went there? And what then?”

“Nothing,” said Miss Marple. “Three sisters.”

“Three weird sisters?”

“They ought to have been,” said Miss Marple, “but I don’t think they were. They didn’t seem to be anyway. I don’t know yet. I suppose they may have been—they may be, I mean. They seem ordinary enough. They didn’t belong to this house. It had belonged to an uncle of theirs and they’d come here to live some years ago. They are in rather poor circumstances, they are amiable, not particularly interesting. All slightly different in type. They do not appear to have been well acquainted with Mr. Rafiel. Any conversation I have had with them appears to yield nothing.”

“So you learnt nothing during your stay?”

“I learnt the facts of the case you’ve just told me. Not from them. From an elderly servant, who started her reminiscences dating back to the time of the uncle. She knew of Mr. Rafiel only as a name. But she was eloquent on the theme of the murder: it had all started with the visit here of a son of Mr. Rafiel’s who was a bad lot, of how the girl had fallen in love with him and that he’d strangled the girl, and how sad and tragic and terrible it all was. ‘With bells on,’ as you might say,” said Miss Marple, using a phrase of her youth. “Plenty of exaggeration, but it was a nasty story, and she seemed to believe that the police view was that this hadn’t been his only murder—”

“It didn’t seem to you to connect up with the three weird sisters?”

“No, only that they’d been the guardians of the girl—and had loved her dearly. No more than that.”

“They might know something—something about another man?”

“Yes—that’s what we want, isn’t it? The other man—a man of brutality, who wouldn’t hesitate to bash in a girl’s head after he’d killed her. The kind of man who could be driven frantic with jealousy. There are men like that.”

“No other curious things happened at The Old Manor?”

“Not really. One of the sisters, the youngest I think, kept talking about the garden. She sounded as though she was a very keen gardener, but she couldn’t be because she didn’t know the names of half the things. I laid a trap or two for her, mentioning special rare shrubs and saying did she know it? and yes, she said, wasn’t it a wonderful plant? I said it was not very hardy and she agreed. But she didn’t know anything about plants. That reminds me—”

“Reminds you of what?”

“Well, you’ll think I’m just silly about gardens and plants, but I mean one does know things about them. I mean, I know a few things about birds and I know some things about gardens.”

“And I gather that it’s not birds but gardens that are troubling you.”

“Yes. Have you noticed two middle-aged women on this tour? Miss Barrow and Miss Cooke.”

“Yes. I’ve noticed them. Pair of middle-aged spinsters travelling together.”

“That’s right. Well, I’ve found out something odd about Miss Cooke. That is her name, isn’t it? I mean it’s her name on the tour.”

“Why—has she got another name?”

“I think so.

She’s the same person who visited me—I won’t say visited me exactly, but she was outside my garden fence in St. Mary Mead, the village where I live. She expressed pleasure at my garden and talked about gardening with me. Told me she was living in the village and working in somebody’s garden, who’d moved into a new house there. I rather think,” said Miss Marple, “yes, I rather think that the whole thing was lies. There again, she knew nothing about gardening. She pretended to but it wasn’t true.”

“Why do you think she came there?”

“I’d no idea at the time. She said her name was Bartlett—and the name of the woman she said she was living with began with ‘H,’ though I can’t remember it for the moment. Her hair was not only differently done but it was a different colour and her clothes were of a different style. I didn’t recognize her at first on this trip. Just wondered why her face was vaguely familiar. And then suddenly it came to me. Because of the dyed hair. I said where I had seen her before. She admitted that she’d been there—but pretended that she, too, hadn’t recognized me. All lies.”

“And what’s your opinion about all that?”

“Well, one thing certainly—Miss Cooke (to give her her present name) came to St. Mary Mead just to have a look at me—so that she’d be quite sure to be able to recognize me when we met again—”

“And why was that felt to be necessary?”

“I don’t know. There are two possibilities. I’m not sure that I like one of them very much.”

“I don’t know,” said Professor Wanstead, “that I like it very much either.”

They were both silent for a minute or two, and then Professor Wanstead said—

“I don’t like what happened to Elizabeth Temple. You’ve talked to her during this trip?”

“Yes, I have. When she’s better I’d like to talk to her again—she could tell me—us—things about the girl who was murdered. She spoke to me of this girl—who had been at her school, who had been going to marry Mr. Rafiel’s son—but didn’t marry him. Instead she died. I asked how or why she died—and she answered with the word ‘Love.’ I took it as meaning a suicide—but it was murder. Murder through jealousy would fit. Another man. Some other man we’ve got to find. Miss Temple may be able to tell us who he was.”