“We’re at the body-building stage,” Alexander explained. “We need a big intake of proteins.”

The old man grunted.

As the two boys left the table, Lucy heard Alexander say apologetically to his friend:

“You mustn’t pay any attention to my grandfather. He’s on a diet or something and that makes him rather peculiar. He’s terribly mean, too. I think it must be a complex of some kind.”

Stoddart-West said comprehendingly:

“I had an aunt who kept thinking she was going bankrupt. Really, she had oodles of money. Pathological, the doctor said. Have you got that football, Alex?”

After she had cleared away and washed up lunch, Lucy went out. She could hear the boys calling out in the distance on the lawn. She herself went in the opposite direction, down the front drive and from there she struck across to some clumped masses of rhododendron bushes. She began to hunt carefully, holding back the leaves and peering inside. She moved from clump to clump systematically, and was raking inside with a golf club when the polite voice of Alexander Eastley made her start.

“Are you looking for something, Miss Eyelesbarrow?”

“A golf ball,” said Lucy promptly. “Several golf balls in fact. I’ve been practising golf shots most afternoons and I’ve lost quite a lot of balls. I thought that today I really must find some of them.”

“We’ll help you,” said Alexander obligingly.

“That’s very kind of you. I thought you were playing football.”

“One can’t go on playing footer,” explained Stoddart-West. “One gets too hot. Do you play a lot of golf?”

“I’m quite fond of it. I don’t get much opportunity.”

“I suppose you don’t. You do the cooking here, don’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Did you cook the lunch today?”

“Yes. Was it all right?”

“Simply wizard,” said Alexander. “We get awful meat at school, all dried up. I love beef that’s pink and juicy inside. That treacle tart was pretty smashing, too.”

“You must tell me what things you like best.”

“Could we have apple meringue one day? It’s my favourite thing.”

“Of course.”

Alexander sighed happily.

“There’s a clock golf set under the stairs,” he said. “We could fix it up on the lawn and do some putting. What about it, Stodders?”

“Good-oh!” said Stoddart-West.

“He isn’t really Australian,” explained Alexander courteously. “But he’s practising talking that way in case his people take him out to see the Test Match next year.”

Encouraged by Lucy, they went off to get the clock golf set. Later, as she returned to the house, she found them setting it out on the lawn and arguing about the position of the numbers.

“We don’t want it like a clock,” said Stoddart-West. “That’s kid’s stuff. We want to make a course of it. Long holes and short ones. It’s a pity the numbers are so rusty. You can hardly see them.”

“They need a lick of white paint,” said Lucy. “You might get some tomorrow and paint them.”

“Good idea.” Alexander’s face lit up. “I say, I believe there are some old pots of paint in the Long Barn—left there by the painters last hols. Shall we see?”

“What’s the Long Barn?” asked Lucy.

Alexander pointed to a long stone building a little way from the house near the back drive.

“It’s quite old,” he said. “Grandfather calls it a Leak Barn and says its Elizabethan, but that’s just swank. It belonged to the farm that was here originally. My great-grandfather pulled it down and built this awful house instead.”

He added: “A lot of grandfather’s collection is in the barn. Things he had sent home from abroad when he was a young man. Most of them are pretty awful, too. The Long Barn is used sometimes for whist drives and things like that. Women’s Institute stuff. And Conservative Sales of Work. Come and see it.”

Lucy accompanied them willingly.

There was a big nail-studded oak door to the barn. Alexander raised his hand and detached a key on a nail just under some ivy to the right hand of the top of the door. He turned it in the lock, pushed the door open and they went in.

At a first glance Lucy felt that she was in a singularly bad museum. The heads of two Roman emperors in marble glared at her out of bulging eyeballs, there was a huge sarcophagus of a decadent Greco-Roman period, a simpering Venus stood on a pedestal clutching her falling draperies. Besides these works of art, there were a couple of trestle tables, some stacked-up chairs, and sundry oddments such as a rusted hand mower, two buckets, a couple of motheaten car seats, and a green painted iron garden seat that had lost a leg.

“I think I saw the paint over here,” said Alexander vaguely. He went to a corner and pulled aside a tattered curtain that shut it off.

They found a couple of paint pots and brushes, the latter dry and stiff.

“You really need some turps,” said Lucy.

They could not, however, find any turpentine. The boys suggested bicycling off to get some, and Lucy urged them to do so. Painting the clock golf numbers would keep them amused for some time, she thought.

The boys went off, leaving her in the barn.

“This really could do with a clear up,” she had murmured.

“I shouldn’t bother,” Alexander advised her. “It gets cleaned up if it’s going to be used for anything, but it’s practically never used this time of year.”

“Do I hang the key up outside the door again? Is that where it’s kept?”

“Yes. There’s nothing to pinch here, you see. Nobody would want those awful mar

ble things and, anyway, they weigh a ton.”

Lucy agreed with him. She could hardly admire old Mr. Crackenthorpe’s taste in art. He seemed to have an unerring instinct for selecting the worst specimen of any period.

She stood looking round her after the boys had gone. Her eyes came to rest on the sarcophagus and stayed there.

That sarcophagus….

The air in the barn was faintly musty as though unaired for a long time. She went over to the sarcophagus. It had a heavy close-fitting lid. Lucy looked at it speculatively.

Then she left the barn, went to the kitchen, found a heavy crowbar, and returned.

It was not an easy task, but Lucy toiled doggedly.

Slowly the lid began to rise, prised up by the crowbar.

It rose sufficiently for Lucy to see what was inside….

Six

I

A few minutes later Lucy, rather pale, left the barn, locked the door and put the key back on the nail.

She went rapidly to the stables, got out her car and drove down the back drive. She stopped at the post office at the end of the road. She went into the telephone box, put in the money and dialled.

“I want to speak to Miss Marple.”

“She’s resting, miss. It’s Miss Eyelesbarrow, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“I’m not going to disturb her and that’s that, miss. She’s an old lady and she needs her rest.”

“You must disturb her. It’s urgent.”

“I’m not—”

“Please do what I say at once.”

When she chose, Lucy’s voice could be as incisive as steel. Florence knew authority when she heard it.

Presently Miss Marple’s voice spoke.

“Yes, Lucy?”

Lucy drew a deep breath.

“You were quite right,” she said. “I’ve found it.”

“A woman’s body?”

“Yes. A woman in a fur coat. It’s a stone sarcophagus in a kind of barn-cum-museum near the house. What do you want me to do? I ought to inform the police, I think.”

“Yes. You must inform the police. At once.”

“But what about the rest of it? About you? The first thing they’ll want to know is why I was prying up a lid that weighs tons for apparently no reason. Do you want me to invent a reason? I can.”

Tags: Agatha Christie Miss Marple Mystery
Source: readsnovelonline.net