Sleeping Murder (Miss Marple 13)

On her way to call upon her friends, Colonel and Mrs. Bantry, Miss Marple met Colonel Bantry coming along the drive, his gun in his hand and his spaniel at his heels. He welcomed her cordially.

“Glad to see you back again. How’s London?”

Miss Marple said that London was very well. Her nephew had taken her to several plays.

“Highbrow ones, I bet. Only care for a musical comedy myself.”

Miss Marple said that she had been to a Russian play that was very interesting, though perhaps a little too long.

“Russians!” said Colonel Bantry explosively. He had once been given a novel by Dostoievsky to read in a nursing home.

He added that Miss Marple would find Dolly in the garden.

Mrs. Bantry was almost always to be found in the garden. Gardening was her passion. Her favourite literature was bulb catalogues and her conversation dealt with primulas, bulbs, flowering shrubs and alpine novelties. Miss Marple’s first view of her was a substantial posterior clad in faded tweed.

At the sound of approaching steps, Mrs. Bantry reassumed an erect position with a few creaks and winces, her hobby had made her rheumaticky, wiped her hot brow with an earth-stained hand and welcomed her friend.

“Heard you were back, Jane,” she said. “Aren’t my new delphiniums doing well? Have you seen these new little gentians? I’ve had a bit of trouble with them, but I think they’re all set now. What we need is rain. It’s been terribly dry.” She added, “Esther told me you were ill in bed.” Esther was Mrs. Bantry’s cook and liaison officer with the village. “I’m glad to see it’s not true.”

“Just a little overtired,” said Miss Marple. “Dr. Haydock thinks I need some sea air. I’m rather run-down.”

“Oh, but you couldn’t go away now,” said Mrs. Bantry. “This is absolutely the best time of the year in the garden. Your border must be just coming into flower.”

“Dr. Haydock thinks it would be advisable.”

“Well, Haydock’s not such a fool as some doctors,” admitted Mrs. Bantry grudgingly.

“I was wondering, Dolly, about that cook of yours.”

“Which cook? Do you want a cook? You don’t mean that woman who drank, do you?”

“No, no, no. I mean the one who made such delicious pastry. With a husband who was the butler.”

“Oh, you mean the Mock Turtle,” said Mrs. Bantry with immediate recognition. “Woman with a deep mournful voice who always sounded as though she was going to burst into tears. She was a good cook. Husband was a fat, rather lazy man. Arthur always said he watered the whisky. I don’t know. Pity there’s always one of a couple that’s unsatisfactory. They got left a legacy by some former employer and they went off and opened a boardinghouse on the south coast.”

“That’s just what I thought. Wasn’t it at Dillmouth?”

“That’s right. 14 Sea Parade, Dillmouth.”

“I was thinking that as Dr. Haydock has suggested the seaside I might go to—was their name Saunders?”

“Yes. That’s an excellent idea, Jane. You couldn’t do better. Mrs. Saunders will look after you well, and as it’s out of the season they’ll be glad to get you and won’t charge very much. With good cooking and sea air you’ll soon pick up.”

“Thank you, Dolly,” said Miss Marple, “I expect I shall.”

Six

EXERCISE IN DETECTION

I

“Where do you think the body was? About here?” asked Giles.

He and Gwenda were standing in the front hall of Hillside. They had arrived back the night before, and Giles was now in full cry. He was as pleased as a small boy with his new toy.

“Just about,” said Gwenda. She retreated up the stairs and peered down critically. “Yes—I think that’s about it.”

“Crouch down,” said Giles. “You’re only about three years old, you know.”

Gwenda crouched obligingly.

“You couldn’t actually see the man who said the words?”

“I can’t remember seeing him. He must have been just a bit further back—yes, there. I could only see his paws.”

“Paws.” Giles frowned.

“They were paws. Grey paws—not human.”

“But look here, Gwenda. This isn’t a kind of Murder in the Rue Morgue. A man doesn’t have paws.”

“Well, he had paws.”

Giles looked doubtfully at her.

“You must have imagined that bit afterwards.”

Gwenda said slowly, “Don’t you think I may have imagined the whole thing? You know, Giles, I’ve been thinking. It seems to me far more probable that the whole thing was a dream. It might have been. It was the sort of dream a child might have, and be terribly frightened, and go on remembering about. Don’t you think really that’s the proper explanation? Because nobody in Dillmouth seems to have the faintest idea that there was ever a murder, or a sudden death, or a disappearance or anything odd about this house.”

Giles looked like a different kind of little boy—a little boy who has had his nice new toy taken away from him.

“I suppose it might have been a nightmare,” he admitted grudgingly. Then his face cleared suddenly.

“No,” he said. “I don’t believe it. You could have dreamt about monkeys’ paws and someone dead—but I’m damned if you could have dreamt that quotation from The Duchess of Malfi.”

“I could have heard someone say it and then dreamt about it afterwards.”

“I don’t think any child could do that. Not unless you heard it in conditions of great stress—and if that was the case we’re back again where we were—hold on, I’ve got it. It was the paws you dreamt. You saw the body and heard the words and you were scared stiff and then you had a nightmare about it, and there were waving monkeys’ paws too—probably you were frightened of monkeys.”

Gwenda looked slightly dubious—she said slowly: “I suppose that might be it….”

“I wish you could remember a bit more … Come down here in the hall. Shut your eyes. Think … Doesn’t anything more come back to you?”

“No, it doesn’t, Giles … The more I think, the further it all goes away … I mean, I’m beginning to doubt now if I ever really saw anything at all. Perhaps the other night I just had a brainstorm in the theatre.”

“No. There was something. Miss Marple thinks so, too. What about ‘Helen’? Surely you must remember something about Helen?”

“I don’t remember anything at all. It’s just a name.”

“It mightn’t even be the right name.”

“Yes, it was. It was Helen.”

Gwenda looked obstinate and convinced.

“Then if you’re so sure it was Helen, you must know something about her,” said Giles reasonably. ?

??Did you know her well? Was she living here? Or just staying here?”

“I tell you I don’t know.” Gwenda was beginning to look strained and nervy.

Giles tried another tack.

“Who else can you remember? Your father?”

“No. I mean, I can’t tell. There was always his photograph, you see. Aunt Alison used to say: ‘That’s your Daddy.’ I don’t remember him here, in this house….”

“And no servants—nurses—anything like that?”

“No—no. The more I try to remember, the more it’s all a blank. The things I know are all underneath—like walking to that door automatically. I didn’t remember a door there. Perhaps if you wouldn’t worry me so much, Giles, things would come back more. Anyway, trying to find out about it all is hopeless. It’s so long ago.”

“Of course it’s not hopeless—even old Miss Marple admitted that.”

“She didn’t help us with any ideas of how to set about it,” said Gwenda. “And yet I feel, from the glint in her eye, that she had a few. I wonder how she would have gone about it.”

“I don’t suppose she would be likely to think of ways that we wouldn’t,” said Giles positively. “We must stop speculating, Gwenda, and set about things in a systematic way. We’ve made a beginning—I’ve looked through the Parish registers of deaths. There’s no ‘Helen’ of the right age amongst them. In fact there doesn’t seem to be a Helen at all in the period I covered—Ellen Pugg, ninety-four, was the nearest. Now we must think of the next profitable approach. If your father, and presumably your stepmother, lived in this house, they must either have bought it or rented it.”

“According to Foster, the gardener, some people called Elworthy had it before the Hengraves and before them Mrs. Findeyson. Nobody else.”

“Your father might have bought it and lived in it for a very short time—and then sold it again. But I think that it’s much more likely that he rented it—probably rented it furnished. If so, our best bet is to go round the house agents.”

Going round the house agents was not a prolonged labour. There were only two house agents in Dillmouth. Messrs. Wilkinson were a comparatively new arrival. They had only opened their premises eleven years ago. They dealt mostly with the small bungalows and new houses at the far end of the town. The other agents, Messrs. Galbraith and Penderley, were the ones from whom Gwenda had bought the house. Calling upon them, Giles plunged into his story. He and his wife were delighted with Hillside and with Dillmouth generally. Mrs. Reed had only just discovered that she had actually lived in Dillmouth as a small child. She had some very faint memories of the place, and had an idea that Hillside was actually the house in which she had lived but could not be quite certain about it. Had they any record of the house being let to a Major Halliday? It would be about eighteen or nineteen years ago….