A Caribbean Mystery (Miss Marple 15)

‘But who – why?’

‘As to who – well, if they are playing A Kiss for Cinderella, a policeman is the principal character. Nat Fletcher would only have to help himself to the costume he wears on the stage. He’d ask his way at a garage being careful to call attention to the time – twelve twenty-five, then drive on quickly, leave his car round a corner, slip on his police uniform and do his “act”.’

‘But why? – why?’

‘Someone had to lock the housekeeper’s door on the outside, and someone had to drive the arrow through Miss Greenshaw’s throat. You can stab anyone with an arrow just as well as by shooting it – but it needs force.’

‘You mean they were both in it?’

‘Oh yes, I think so. Mother and son as likely as not.’

‘But Miss Greenshaw’s sister died long ago.’

‘Yes, but I’ve no doubt Mr Fletcher married again. He sounds the sort of man who would, and I think it possible that the child died too, and that this so-called nephew was the second wife’s child, and not really a relation at all. The woman got a post as housekeeper and spied out the land. Then he wrote as her nephew and proposed to call upon her – he may have made some joking reference to coming in his policeman’s uniform – or asked her over to see the play. But I think she suspected the truth and refused to see him. He would have been her heir if she had died without making a will – but of course once she had made a will in the housekeeper’s favour (as they thought) then it was clear sailing.’

‘But why use an arrow?’ objected Joan. ‘So very far fetched.’

‘Not far fetched at all, dear. Alfred belonged to an archery club – Alfred was meant to take the blame. The fact that he was in the pub as early as twelve twenty was most unfortunate from their point of view. He always left a little before his proper time and that would have been just right –’ she shook her head. ‘It really seems all wrong – morally, I mean, that Alfred’s laziness should have saved his life.’

The inspector cleared his throat.

‘Well, madam, these suggestions of yours are very interesting. I shall have, of course, to investigate –’

Miss Marple and Raymond West stood by the rockery and looked down at that gardening basket full of dying vegetation.

Miss Marple murmured: ‘Alyssum, saxifrage, cytisus, thimble campanula . . . Yes, that’s all the proof I need. Whoever was weeding here yesterday morning was no gardener – she pulled up plants as well as weeds. So now I know I’m right. Thank you, dear Raymond, for bringing me here. I wanted to see the place for myself.’

She and Raymond both looked up at the outrageous pile of Green-shaw’s Folly.

A cough made them turn. A handsome young man was also looking at the house.

‘Plaguey big place,’ he said. ‘Too big for nowadays – or so they say. I dunno about that. If I won a football pool and made a lot of money, that’s the kind of house I’d like to build.’

He smiled bashfully at them. ‘Reckon I can say so now – that there house was built by my great-grandfather,’ said Alfred Pollock. ‘And a fine house it is, for all they call it Greenshaw’s Folly!’

Chapter 55

The Dressmaker’s Doll

‘The Dressmaker’s Doll’ was first published in Woman’s Journal, December 1958.

The doll lay in the big velvet-covered chair. There was not much light in the room; the London skies were dark. In the gentle, greyish-green gloom, the sage-green coverings and the curtains and the rugs all blended with each other. The doll blended, too. She lay long and limp and sprawled in her green-velvet clothes and her velvet cap and the painted mask of her face. She was the Puppet Doll, the whim of Rich Women, the doll who lolls beside the telephone, or among the cushions of the divan. She sprawled there, eternally limp and yet strangely alive. She looked a decadent product of the twentieth century.

Sybil Fox, hurrying in with some patterns and a sketch, looked at the doll with a faint feeling of surprise and bewilderment. She wondered – but whatever she wondered did not get to the front of her mind. Instead, she thought to herself, ‘Now, what’s happened to the pattern of the blue velvet? Wherever have I put it? I’m sure I had it here just now.’ She went out on the landing and called up to the workroom.

‘Elspeth, Elspeth, have you the blue pattern up there? Mrs Fellows-Brown will be here any minute now.’

She went in again, switching on the lights. Again she glanced at the doll. ‘Now where on earth – ah, there it is.’ She picked the pattern up from where it had fallen from her hand. There was the usual creak outside on the landing as the elevator came to a halt and in a minute or two Mrs Fellows-Brown, accompanied by her Pekinese, came puffing into the room rather like a fussy local train arriving at a wayside station.

‘It’s going to pour,’ she said, ‘simply pour!’

She threw off her gloves and a fur. Alicia Coombe came in. She didn’t always come in nowadays, only when special customers arrived, and Mrs Fellows-Brown was such a customer.

Elspeth, the forewoman of the workroom, came down with the frock and Sybil pulled it over Mrs Fellows-Brown’s head.

‘There,’ she said, ‘I think it’s good. Yes, it’s definitely a success.’

Mrs Fellows-Brown turned sideways and looked in the mirror. ‘I must say,’ she said, ‘your clothes do do something to my behind.’

‘You’re much thinner than you were three months ago,’ Sybil assured her.

‘I’m really not,’ said Mrs Fellows-Brown, ‘though I must say I look it in this. There’s something about the way you cut, it really does minimize my behind. I almost look as though I hadn’t got one – I mean only the usual kind that most people have.’ She sighed and gingerly smoothed the troublesome portion of her anatomy. ‘It’s always been a bit of a trial to me,’ she said. ‘Of course, for years I could pull it in, you know, by sticking out my front. Well, I can’t do that any longer because I’ve got a stomach now as well as a behind. And I mean – well, you can’t pull it in both ways, can you?’

Alicia Coombe said, ‘You should see some of my customers!’

Mrs Fellows-Brown experimented to and fro. ‘A stomach is worse than a behind,’ she said. ‘It shows more. Or perhaps you think it does, because, I mean, when you’re talking to people you’re facing them and that’s the moment they can’t see your behind but they can notice your stomach. Anyway, I’ve made it a rule to pull in my stomach and let my behind look after itself.’ She craned her neck round still farther, then said suddenly, ‘Oh, that doll of yours! She gives me the creeps. How long have you had her?’

Sybil glanced uncertainly at Alicia Coombe, who looked puzzled but vaguely distressed.

‘I don’t know exactly . . . some time I think – I never can remember things. It’s awful nowadays – I simply cannot remember. Sybil, how long have we had her?’

Sybil said shortly, ‘I don’t know.’

‘Well,’ said Mrs Fellows-Brown, ‘she gives me the creeps. Uncanny! She looks, you know, as though she was watching us all, and perhaps laughing in that velvet sleeve of hers. I’d get rid of her if I were you.’ She gave a little shiver, then she plunged once more into dressmaking details. Should she or should she not have the sleeves an inch shorter? And what about the length? When all these important points were settled satisfactorily, Mrs Fellows-Brown resumed her own garments and prepared to leave. As she passed the doll, she turned her head again.

‘No,’ she said, ‘I don’t like that doll. She looks too much as though she belonged here. It isn’t healthy.’

‘Now what did she mean by that?’ demanded Sybil, as Mrs Fellows-Brown departed down the stairs.

Before Alicia Coombe could answer, Mrs Fellows-Brown returned, poking her head round the door.

‘Good gracious, I forgot all about Fou-Ling. Where are you, ducksie? Well, I never!’

She stared and the other two women stared, too. The Pekinese was sitting by the green-velvet chair, staring up at the limp doll sprawled on it. Th

ere was no expression, either of pleasure or resentment, on his small, pop-eyed face. He was merely looking.

‘Come along, mum’s darling,’ said Mrs Fellows-Brown.

Mum’s darling paid no attention whatever. ‘He gets more disobedient every day,’ said Mrs Fellows-Brown, with the air of one cataloguing a virtue. ‘Come on, Fou-Ling. Dindins. Luffly liver.’

Fou-Ling turned his head about an inch and a half towards his mistress, then with disdain resumed his appraisal of the doll.

‘She’s certainly made an impression on him,’ said Mrs Fellows-Brown. ‘I don’t think he’s ever noticed her before. I haven’t either. Was she here last time I came?’

The other two women looked at each other. Sybil now had a frown on her face, and Alicia Coombe said, wrinkling up her forehead, ‘I told you – I simply can’t remember anything nowadays. How long have we had her, Sybil?’

‘Where did she come from?’ demanded Mrs Fellows-Brown. ‘Did you buy her?’

‘Oh no.’ Somehow Alicia Coombe was shocked at the idea. ‘Oh no. I suppose – I suppose someone gave her to me.’ She shook her head. ‘Maddening!’ she exclaimed. ‘Absolutely maddening, when everything goes out of your head the very moment after it’s happened.’

‘Now don’t be stupid, Fou-Ling,’ said Mrs Fellows-Brown sharply. ‘Come on. I’ll have to pick you up.’

She picked him up. Fou-Ling uttered a short bark of agonized protest. They went out of the room with Fou-Ling’s pop-eyed face turned over his fluffy shoulder, still staring with enormous attention at the doll on the chair . . .

‘That there doll,’ said Mrs Groves, ‘fair gives me the creeps, it does.’ Mrs Groves was the cleaner. She had just finished a crablike progress backwards along the floor. Now she was standing up and working slowly round the room with a duster.