Murder at the Vicarage (Miss Marple 1)

“You won’t tell me where?”

Rather childishly, I wouldn’t.

He had his secrets. Well, I would have mine.

I was a little hurt that he had not confided in me more fully.

Twenty-six

I was in a strange mood when I mounted the pulpit that night.

The church was unusually full. I cannot believe that it was the prospect of Hawes preaching which had attracted so many. Hawes’s sermons are dull and dogmatic. And if the news had got round that I was preaching instead, that would not have attracted them either. For my sermons are dull and scholarly. Neither, I am afraid, can I attribute it to devotion.

Everybody had come, I concluded, to see who else was there, and possibly exchange a little gossip in the church porch afterwards.

Haydock was in church, which is unusual, and also Lawrence Redding. And to my surprise, beside Lawrence I saw the white strained face of Hawes. Anne Protheroe was there, but she usually attends Evensong on Sundays, though I had hardly thought she would today. I was far more surprised to see Lettice. Churchgoing was compulsory on Sunday morning—Colonel Protheroe was adamant on that point, but I had never seen Lettice at evening service before.

Gladys Cram was there, looking rather blatantly young and healthy against a background of wizened spinsters, and I fancied that a dim figure at the end of the church who had slipped in late, was Mrs. Lestrange.

I need hardly say that Mrs. Price Ridley, Miss Hartnell, Miss Wetherby, and Miss Marple were there in full force. All the village people were there, with hardly a single exception. I don’t know when we have had such a crowded congregation.

Crowds are queer things. There was a magnetic atmosphere that night, and the first person to feel its influence was myself.

As a rule, I prepare my sermons beforehand. I am careful and conscientious over them, but no one is better aware than myself of their deficiencies.

Tonight I was of necessity preaching extempore, and as I looked down on the sea of upturned faces, a sudden madness entered my brain. I ceased to be in any sense a Minister of God. I became an actor. I had an audience before me and I wanted to move that audience—and more, I felt the power to move it.

I am not proud of what I did that night. I am an utter disbeliever in the emotional Revivalist spirit. Yet that night I acted the part of a raving, ranting evangelist.

I gave out my text slowly.

I came not to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.

I repeated it twice, and I heard my own voice, a resonant, ringing voice unlike the voice of the everyday Leonard Clement.

I saw Griselda from her front pew look up in surprise and Dennis follow her example.

I held my breath for a moment or two, and then I let myself rip.

The congregation in that church were in a state of pent-up emotion, ripe to be played upon. I played upon them. I exhorted sinners to repentance. I lashed myself into a kind of emotional frenzy. Again and again I threw out a denouncing hand and reiterated the phrase.

“I am speaking to you.…”

And each time, from different parts of the church, a kind of sighing gasp went up.

Mass emotion is a strange and terrible thing.

I finished up with those beautiful and poignant words—perhaps the most poignant words in the whole Bible:

“This night thy soul shall be required of thee….”

It was a strange, brief possession. When I got back to the Vicarage I was my usual faded, indeterminate self. I found Griselda rather pale. She slipped her arm through mine.

“Len,” she said, “you were rather terrible tonight. I—I didn’t like it. I’ve never heard you preach like that before.”

“I don’t suppose you ever will again,” I said, sinking down wearily on the sofa. I was tired.

“What made you do it?”

“A sudden madness came over me.”

“Oh! It—it wasn’t something special?”

“What do you mean—something special?”

“I wondered—that was all. You’re very unexpected, Len. I never feel I really know you.”

We sat down to cold supper, Mary being out.

“There’s a note for you in the hall,” said Griselda. “Get it, will you, Dennis?”

Dennis, who had been very silent, obeyed.

I took it and groaned. Across the top left-hand corner was written: By hand—Urgent.

“This,” I said, “must be from Miss Marple. There’s no one else left.”

I had been perfectly correct in my assumption.

“Dear Mr. Clement,—I should so much like to have a little chat with you about one or two things that have occurred to me. I feel we should all try and help in elucidating this sad mystery. I will come over about half past nine if I may, and tap on your study window. Perhaps dear Griselda would be so very kind as to run over here and cheer up my nephew. And Mr. Dennis too, of course, if he cares to come. If I do not hear, I will expect them and will come over myself at the time I have stated.

Yours very sincerely,

Jane Marple.”

I handed the note to Griselda.

“Oh, we’ll go!” she said cheerfully. “A glass or two of homemade liqueur is just what one needs on Sunday evening. I think it’s Mary’s blancmange that is so frightfully depressing. It’s like something out of a mortuary.”

Dennis seemed less charmed at the prospect.

“It’s all very well for you,” he grumbled. “You can talk all this highbrow stuff about art and books. I always feel a perfect fool sitting and listening to you.”

“That’s good for you,” said Griselda serenely. “It puts you in your place. Anyway, I don’t think Mr. Raymond West is so frightfully clever as he pretends to be.”

“Very few of us are,” I said.

I wondered very much what exactly it was that Miss Marple wished to talk over. Of all the ladies in my congregation, I considered her by far the shrewdest. Not only does she see and hear practically everything that goes on, but she draws amazingly neat and apposite deductions from the facts that come under her notice.

If I were at any time to set out on a career of deceit, it would be of Miss Marple that I should be afraid.

What Griselda called the Nephew Amusing Party started off at a little after nine, and whilst I was waiting for Miss Marple to arrive I amused myself by drawing up a kind of schedule of the facts connected with the crime. I arranged them so far as possible in chronological order. I am not a punctual person, but I am a neat one, and I like things jotted down in a methodical fashion.

At half past nine punctually, there was a little tap on the window, and I rose and admitted Miss Marple.

She had a very fine Shetland shawl thrown over her head and shoulders and was looking rather old and frail. She came in full of little fluttering remarks.

“So good of you to let me come—and so good of dear Griselda—Raymond admires her so much—the perfect Greuze he always calls her … No, I won’t have a footstool.”

I deposited the Shetland shawl on a chair and returned to take a chair facing my guest. We looked at each other, and a little deprecating smile broke out on her face.

“I feel that you must be wondering why—why I am so interested in all this. You may possibly think it’s very unwomanly. No—please—I should like to explain if I may.”

She paused a moment, a pink colour suffusing her cheeks.

“You see,” she began at last, “living alone, as I do, in a rather out-of-the-way part of the world, one has to have a hobby. There is, of course, woolwork, and Guides, and Welfare, and sketching, but my hobby is—and always has been—Human Nature. So varied—and so very fascinating. And, of course, in a small village, with nothing to distract one, one has such ample opportunity for becoming what I might call proficient in one’s study. One begins to class people, quite definitely, just as though they were birds or flowers, group so-and-so, genus this, species that. Sometimes, of course, one makes mista

kes, but less and less as time goes on. And then, too, one tests oneself. One takes a little problem—for instance, the gill of picked shrimps that amused dear Griselda so much—a quite unimportant mystery but absolutely incomprehensible unless one solves it right. And then there was that matter of the changed cough drops, and the butcher’s wife’s umbrella—the last absolutely meaningless unless on the assumption that the greengrocer was not behaving at all nicely with the chemist’s wife—which, of course, turned out to be the case. It is so fascinating, you know, to apply one’s judgment and find that one is right.”

“You usually are, I believe,” I said smiling.

“That, I am afraid, is what has made me a little conceited,” confessed Miss Marple. “But I have always wondered whether, if some day a really big mystery came along, I should be able to do the same thing. I mean—just solve it correctly. Logically, it ought to be exactly the same thing. After all, a tiny working model of a torpedo is just the same as a real torpedo.”

“You mean it’s all a question of relativity,” I said slowly. “It should be—logically, I admit. But I don’t know whether it really is.”

“Surely it must be the same,” said Miss Marple. “The—what one used to call the factors at school—are the same. There’s money, and the mutual attraction people of an—er—opposite sex—and there’s queerness of course—so many people are a little queer, aren’t they?—in fact, most people are when you know them well. And normal people do such astonishing things sometimes, and abnormal people are sometimes so very sane and ordinary. In fact, the only way is to compare people with other people you have known or come across. You’d be surprised if you knew how very few distinct types there are in all.”

“You frighten me,” I said. “I feel I’m being put under the microscope.”