Gladdie paused out of breath, and Lawrence tried tactfully to get back to where the conversation had started.
“Did you hear anything else?”
“Well, it’s difficult to remember exactly, sir. It was all much the same. He said once or twice, ‘I don’t believe it.’ Just like that. ‘Whatever Haydock says, I don’t believe it.’”
“He said that, did he? ‘Whatever Haydock says?’”
“Yes. And he said it was all a plot.”
“You didn’t hear the lady speak at all?”
“Only just at the end. She must have got up to go and come nearer the window. And I heard what she said. Made my blood run cold, it did. I’ll never forget it. ‘By this time tomorrow night, you may be dead,’ she said. Wicked the way she said it. As soon as I heard the news, ‘There,’ I said to Rose. ‘There!’”
Lawrence wondered. Principally he wondered how much of Gladys’s story was to be depended upon. True in the main, he suspected that it had been embellished and polished since the murder. In especial he doubted the accuracy of the last remark. He thought it highly possible that it owed its being to the fact of the murder.
He thanked Gladys, rewarded her suitably, reassured her as to her misdoings being made known to Mrs. Pratt, and left Old Hall with a good deal to think over.
One thing was clear, Mrs. Lestrange’s interview with Colonel Protheroe had certainly not been a peaceful one, and it was one which he was anxious to keep from the knowledge of his wife.
I thought of Miss Marple’s churchwarden with his separate establishment. Was this a case resembling that?
I wondered more than ever where Haydock came in. He had saved Mrs. Lestrange from having to give evidence at the inquest. He had done his best to protect her from the police.
How far would he carry that protection?
Supposing he suspected her of crime—would he still try and shield her?
She was a curious woman—a woman of very strong magnetic charm. I myself hated the thought of connecting her with the crime in any way.
Something in me said, “It can’t be her!” Why?
And an imp in my brain replied: “Because she’s a very beautiful and attractive woman. That’s why.”
There is, as Miss Marple would say, a lot of human nature in all of us.
Twenty
When I got back to the Vicarage I found that we were in the middle of a domestic crisis.
Griselda met me in the hall and with tears in her eyes dragged me into the drawing room. “She’s going.”
“Who’s going?”
“Mary. She’s given notice.”
I really could not take the announcement in a tragic spirit.
“Well,” I said, “we’ll have to get another servant.”
It seemed to me a perfectly reasonable thing to say. When one servant goes, you get another. I was at a loss to understand Griselda’s look of reproach.
“Len—you are absolutely heartless. You don’t care.”
I didn’t. In fact, I felt almost lighthearted at the prospect of no more burnt puddings and undercooked vegetables.
“I’ll have to look for a girl, and find one, and train her,” continued Griselda in a voice of acute self-pity.
“Is Mary trained?” I said.
“Of course she is.”
“I suppose,” I said, “that someone has heard her address us as sir or ma’am and has immediately wrested her from us as a paragon. All I can say is, they’ll be disappointed.”
“It isn’t that,” said Griselda. “Nobody else wants her. I don’t see how they could. It’s her feelings. They’re upset because Lettice Protheroe said she didn’t dust properly.”
Griselda often comes out with surprising statements, but this seemed to me so surprising that I questioned it. It seemed to me the most unlikely thing in the world that Lettice Protheroe should go out of her way to interfere in our domestic affairs and reprove our maid for slovenly housework. It was so completely unLettice-like, and I said so.
“I don’t see,” I said, “what our dust has to do with Lettice Protheroe.”
“Nothing at all,” said my wife. “That’s why it’s so unreasonable. I wish you’d go and talk to Mary yourself. She’s in the kitchen.”
I had no wish to talk to Mary on the subject, but Griselda, who is very energetic and quick, fairly pushed me through the baize door into the kitchen before I had time to rebel.
Mary was peeling potatoes at the sink.
“Er—good afternoon,” I said nervously.
Mary looked up and snorted, but made no other response.
“Mrs. Clement tells me that you wish to leave us,” I said.
Mary condescended to reply to this.
“There’s some things,” she said darkly, “as no girl can be asked to put up with.”
“Will you tell me exactly what it is that has upset you?”
“Tell you that in two words, I can.” (Here, I may say, she vastly underestimated.) “People coming snooping round here when my back’s turned. Poking round. And what business of hers is it, how often the study is dusted or turned out? If you and the missus don’t complain, it’s nobody else’s business. If I give satisfaction to you that’s all that matters, I say.”
Mary has never given satisfaction to me. I confess that I have a hankering after a room thoroughly dusted and tidied every morning. Mary’s practice of flicking off the more obvious deposit on the surface of low tables is to my thinking grossly inadequate. However, I realized that at the moment it was no good to go into side issues.
“Had to go to that inquest, didn’t I? Standing up before twelve men, a respectable girl like me! And who knows what questions you may be asked. I’ll tell you this. I’ve never before been in a place where they had a murder in the house, and I never want to be again.”
“I hope you won’t,” I said. “On the law of averages, I should say it was very unlikely.”
“I don’t hold with the law. He was a magistrate. Many a poor fellow sent to jail for potting at a rabbit—and him with his pheasants and what not. And then, before he’s so much as decently buried, that daughter of his comes round and says I don’t do my work properly.”
“Do you mean that Miss Protheroe has been here?”
“Found her here when I come back from the Blue Boar. In the study she was. And ‘Oh!’ she says. ‘I’m looking for my little yellow berry—a little yellow hat. I left it here the other day.’ ‘Well,’ I says, ‘I haven’t seen no hat. It wasn’t here when I done the room on Thursday morning,’ I says. And ‘Oh!’ she says, ‘but I dare say you wouldn’t see it. You don’t spend much time doing a room, do you?’ And with that she draws her finger along the mantelshelf and looks at it. As though I had time on a morning like this to take off all them ornaments and put them back, with the police only unlocking the room the night before. ‘If the Vicar and his lady are satisfied that’s all that matters, I think, miss,’ I said. And she laughs and goes out of the windows and says, ‘Oh! but are you sure they are?’”
“I see,” I said.
“And there it is! A girl has her feelings! I’m sure I’d work my fingers to the bone for you and the missus. And if she wants a new-fangled dish tried, I’m always ready to try it.”
“I’m sure you are,” I said soothingly.
“But she must have heard something or she wouldn’t have said what she did. And if I don’t give satisfaction I’d rather go. Not that I take any notice of what Miss Protheroe says. She’s not loved up at the Hall, I can tell you. Never a please or a thank you, and everything scattered right and left. I wouldn’t set any store by Miss Lettice Protheroe myself for all that Mr. Dennis is so set upon her. But she’s the kind that can always twist a young gentleman round her little finger.”
During all this, Mary had been extracting eyes from potatoes with such energy that they had been flying round the kitchen like hailstones. At this moment one hit me in the eye and caused a momentary pause in the conversation.
r /> “Don’t you think,” I said, as I dabbed my eye with my handkerchief, “that you have been rather too inclined to take offence where none is meant? You know, Mary, your mistress will be very sorry to lose you.”
“I’ve nothing against the mistress—or against you, sir, for that matter.”
“Well, then, don’t you think you’re being rather silly?”
Mary sniffed.
“I was a bit upset like—after the inquest and all. And a girl has her feelings. But I wouldn’t like to cause the mistress inconvenience.”
“Then that’s all right,” I said.
I left the kitchen to find Griselda and Dennis waiting for me in the hall. “Well?” exclaimed Griselda.
“She’s staying,” I said, and sighed.
“Len,” said my wife, “you have been clever.”
I felt rather inclined to disagree with her. I did not think I had been clever. It is my firm opinion that no servant could be a worse one than Mary. Any change, I consider, would have been a change for the better.
But I like to please Griselda. I detailed the heads of Mary’s grievance.
“How like Lettice,” said Dennis. “She couldn’t have left that yellow beret of hers here on Wednesday. She was wearing it for tennis on Thursday.”
“That seems to me highly probable,” I said.
“She never knows where she’s left anything,” said Dennis, with a kind of affectionate pride and admiration that I felt was entirely uncalled for. “She loses about a dozen things every day.”
“A remarkably attractive trait,” I observed.
Any sarcasm missed Dennis.
“She is attractive,” he said, with a deep sigh. “People are always proposing to her—she told me so.”
“They must be illicit proposals if they’re made to her down here,” I remarked. “We haven’t got a bachelor in the place.”