Miss Marple's Final Cases (Miss Marple 14)

‘A fine lot of books,’ said Miss Greenshaw.

Raymond was already looking at the books. From what he could see from a cursory glance there was no book here of any real interest or, indeed, any book which appeared to have been read. They were all superbly bound sets of the classics as supplied ninety years ago for furnishing a gentleman’s library. Some novels of a bygone period were included. But they too showed little signs of having been read.

Miss Greenshaw was fumbling in the drawers of a vast desk. Finally she pulled out a parchment document.

‘My will,’ she explained. ‘Got to leave your money to someone—or so they say. If I died without a will I suppose that son of a horse-coper would get it. Handsome fellow, Harry Fletcher, but a rogue if there ever was one. Don’t see why his son should inherit this place. No,’ she went on, as though answering some unspoken objection, ‘I’ve made up my mind. I’m leaving it to Cresswell.’

‘Your housekeeper?’

‘Yes. I’ve explained it to her. I make a will leaving her all I’ve got and then I don’t need to pay her any wages. Saves me a lot in current expenses, and it keeps her up to the mark. No giving me notice and walking off at any minute. Very la-di-dah and all that, isn’t she? But her father was a working plumber in a very small way. She’s nothing to give herself airs about.’

She had by now unfolded the parchment. Picking up a pen she dipped it in the inkstand and wrote her signature, Katherine Dorothy Greenshaw.

‘That’s right,’ she said. ‘You’ve seen me sign it, and then you two sign it, and that makes it legal.’

She handed the pen to Raymond West. He hesitated a moment, feeling an unexpected repulsion to what he was asked to do. Then he quickly scrawled the well-known signature, for which his morning’s mail usually brought at least six demands a day.

Horace took the pen from him and added his own minute signature.

‘That’s done,’ said Miss Greenshaw.

She moved across to the bookcase and stood looking at them uncertainly, then she opened a glass door, took out a book and slipped the folded parchment inside.

‘I’ve my own places for keeping things,’ she said.

‘Lady Audley’s Secret,’ Raymond West remarked, catching sight of the title as she replaced the book.

Miss Greenshaw gave another cackle of laughter.

‘Best-seller in its day,’ she remarked. ‘Not like your books, eh?’

She gave Raymond a sudden friendly nudge in the ribs. Raymond was rather surprised that she even knew he wrote books. Although Raymond West was quite a name in literature, he could hardly be described as a best-seller. Though softening a little with the advent of middle-age, his books dealt bleakly with the sordid side of life.

‘I wonder,’ Horace demanded breathlessly, ‘if I might just take a photograph of the clock?’

‘By all means,’ said Miss Greenshaw. ‘It came, I believe, from the Paris exhibition.’

‘Very probably,’ said Horace. He took his picture.

‘This room’s not been used much since my grandfather’s time,’ said Miss Greenshaw. ‘This desk’s full of old diaries of his. Interesting, I should think. I haven’t the eyesight to read them myself. I’d like to get them published, but I suppose one would have to work on them a good deal.’

‘You could engage someone to do that,’ said Raymond West.

‘Could I really? It’s an idea, you know. I’ll think about it.’

Raymond West glanced at his watch.

‘We mustn’t trespass on your kindness any longer,’ he said.

‘Pleased to have seen you,’ said Miss Greenshaw graciously. ‘Thought you were the policeman when I heard you coming round the corner of the house.’

‘Why a policeman?’ demanded Horace, who never minded asking questions.

Miss Greenshaw responded unexpectedly.

‘If you want to know the time, ask a policeman,’ she carolled, and with this example of Victorian wit, nudged Horace in the ribs and roared with laughter.

‘It’s been a wonderful afternoon,’ sighed Horace as they walked home. ‘Really, that place has everything. The only thing the library needs is a body. Those old-fashioned detective stories about murder in the library—that’s just the kind of library I’m sure the authors had in mind.’

‘If you want to discuss murder,’ said Raymond, ‘you must talk to my Aunt Jane.’

‘Your Aunt Jane? Do you mean Miss Marple?’ He felt a little at a loss.

The charming old-world lady to whom he had been introduced the night before seemed the last person to be mentioned in connection with murder.

‘Oh, yes,’ said Raymond. ‘Murder is a speciality of hers.’

‘But my dear, how intriguing. What do you really mean?’

‘I mean just that,’ said Raymond. He paraphrased: ‘Some commit murder, some get mixed up in murders, others have murder thrust upon them. My Aunt Jane comes into the third category.’

‘You are joking.’

‘Not in the least. I can refer you to the former Commissioner of Scotland Yard, several Chief Constables and one or two hard-working inspectors of the CID.’

Horace said happily that wonders would never cease. Over the tea table they gave Joan West, Raymond’s wife, Lou Oxley her niece, and old Miss Marple, arésumé of the afternoon’s happenings, recounting in detail everything that Miss Greenshaw had said to them.

‘But I do think,’ said Horace, ‘that there is something a little sinister about the whole set-up. That duchess-like creature, the housekeeper—arsenic, perhaps, in the teapot, now that she knows her mistress has made the will in her favour?’

‘Tell us, Aunt Jane,’ said Raymond. ‘Will there be murder or won’t there? What do you think?’

‘I think,’ said Miss Marple, winding up her wool with a rather severe air, ‘that you shouldn’t joke about these things as much as you do, Raymond. Arsenic is, of course, quite a possibility. So easy to obtain. Probably present in the toolshed already in the form of weed killer.’

‘Oh, really, darling,’ said Joan West, affectionately. ‘Wouldn’t that be rather too obvious?’

‘It’s all very well to make a will,’ said Raymond, ‘I don’t suppose really the poor old thing has anything to leave except that awful white elephant of a house, and who would want that?’

‘A film company possibly,’ said Horace, ‘or a hotel or an institution?’

‘They’d expect to buy it for a song,’ said Raymond, but Miss Marple was shaking her head.

‘You know, dear Raymond, I cannot agree with you there. About the money, I mean. The grandfather was evidently one of those lavish spenders who make money easily, but can’t keep it. He may have gone broke, as you say, but hardly bankrupt or else his son would not have had the house. Now the son, as is so often the case, was an entirely different character to his father. A miser. A man who saved every penny. I should say that in the course of his lifetime he probably put by a very good sum. This Miss Greenshaw appears to have taken after him, to dislike spending money, that is. Yes, I should think it quite likely that she had quite a good sum tucked away.’

‘In that case,’ said Joan West, ‘I wonder now—what about Lou?’

They looked at Lou as she sat, silent, by the fire.

Lou was Joan West’s niece. Her marriage had recently, as she herself put it, come unstuck, leaving her with two young children and a bare sufficiency of money to keep them on.

‘I mean,’ said Joan, ‘if this Miss Greenshaw really wants someone to go through diaries and get a book ready for publication…’

‘It’s an idea,’ said Raymond.

Lou said in a low voice:

‘It’s work I could do—and I’d enjoy it.’

‘I’ll write to her,’ said Raymond.

‘I wonder,’ said Miss Marple thoughtfully, ‘what the old lady meant by that remark about a policeman?’

‘Oh, it was just a joke.’

‘It reminded me,’

said Miss Marple, nodding her head vigorously, ‘yes, it reminded me very much of Mr Naysmith.’

‘Who was Mr Naysmith?’ asked Raymond, curiously.

‘He kept bees,’ said Miss Marple, ‘and was very good at doing the acrostics in the Sunday papers. And he liked giving people false impressions just for fun. But sometimes it led to trouble.’

Everybody was silent for a moment, considering Mr Naysmith, but as there did not seem to be any points of resemblance between him and Miss Greenshaw, they decided that dear Aunt Jane was perhaps getting a little bit disconnected in her old age.

II