The Mirror Crack'd From Side to Side (Miss Marple 9)

“I do wish you’d listen when I’m talking,” said Cherry.

“What did you say?”

“Arthur Badcock and Mary Bain.”

“For the Lord’s sake, Cherry, his wife’s only just dead! You women! I’ve heard he’s in a terrible state of nerves still—jumps if you speak to him.”

“I wonder why… I shouldn’t have thought he’d take it that way, would you?”

“Can you clear off this end of the table a bit?” said Jim, relinquishing even a passing interest in the affairs of his neighbours. “Just so that I can spread some of these pieces out a bit.”

Cherry heaved an exasperated sigh.

“To get any attention round here, you have to be a super jet, or a turbo prop,” she said bitterly. “You and your construction models!”

She piled the tray with the remains of supper and carried it over to the sink. She decided not to wash up, a necessity of daily life she always put off as long as possible. Instead, she piled everything into the sink, haphazard, slipped on a corduroy jacket and went out of the house, pausing to call over her shoulder:

“I’m just going to slip along to see Gladys Dixon. I want to borrow one of her Vogue patterns.”

“All right, old girl.” Jim bent over his model.

Casting a venomous look at her next-door neighbour’s front door as she passed, Cherry went round the corner into Blenheim Close and stopped at No. 16. The door was open and Cherry tapped on it and went into the hall calling out:

“Is Gladdy about?”

“Is that you, Cherry?” Mrs. Dixon looked out of the kitchen. “She’s upstairs in her room, dressmaking.”

“Right. I’ll go up.”

Cherry went upstairs to a small bedroom in which Gladys, a plump girl with a plain face, was kneeling on the floor, her cheeks flushed, and several pins in her mouth, tacking up a paper pattern.

“Hallo, Cherry. Look, I got a lovely bit of stuff at Harper’s sale at Much Benham. I’m going to do that crossover pattern with frills again, the one I did in Terylene before.”

“That’ll be nice,” said Cherry.

Gladys rose to her feet, panting a little.

“Got indigestion now,” she said.

“You oughtn’t to do dressmaking right after supper,” said Cherry, “bending over like that.”

“I suppose I ought to slim a bit,” said Gladys. She sat down on the bed.

“Any news from the studios?” asked Cherry, always avid for film news.

“Nothing much. There’s a lot of talk still. Marina Gregg came back on the set yesterday—and she created something frightful.”

“What about?”

“She didn’t like the taste of her coffee. You know, they have coffee in the middle of the morning. She took one sip and said there was something wrong with it. Which was nonsense, of course. There couldn’t have been. It comes in a jug straight from the canteen. Of course I always put hers in a special china cup, rather posh—different from the others—but it’s the same coffee. So there couldn’t have been anything wrong with it, could there?”

“Nerves, I suppose,” said Cherry. “What happened?”

“Oh, nothing. Mr. Rudd just calmed everyone down. He’s wonderful that way. He took the coffee from her and poured it down the sink.”

“That seems to be rather stupid,” said Cherry slowly.

“Why—what do you mean?”

“Well, if there was anything wrong with it—now nobody will ever know.”

“Do you think there really might have been?” asked Gladys looking alarmed.

“Well—” Cherry shrugged her shoulders, “—there was something wrong with her cocktail the day of the fête, wasn’t there, so why not the coffee? If at first you don’t succeed, try, try, try again.”

Gladys shivered.

“I don’t half like it, Cherry,” she said. “Somebody’s got it in for her all right. She’s had more letters, you know, threatening her—and there was that bust business the other day.”

“What bust business?”

“A marble bust. On the set. It’s a corner of a room in some Austrian palace or other. Funny name like Shotbrown. Pictures and china and marble busts. This one was up on a bracket—suppose it hadn’t been pushed back enough. Anway, a heavy lorry went past out in the road and jarred it off—right onto the chair where Marina sits for her big scene with Count Somebody-or-other. Smashed to smithereens! Lucky they weren’t shooting at the time. Mr. Rudd, he said not to say a word to her, and he put another chair there, and when she came yesterday and asked why the chair had been changed, he said the other chair was the wrong period, and this gave a better angle for the camera. But he didn’t half like it—I can tell you that.”

The two girls looked at each other.

“It’s exciting in a way,” said Cherry slowly. “And yet—it isn’t….”

“I think I’m going to give up working in the canteen at the studios,” said Gladys.

“Why? Nobody wants to poison you or drop marble busts on your head!”

“No. But it’s not always the person who’s meant to get done in who gets done in. It may be someone else. Like Heather Badcock that day.”

“True enough,” said Cherry.

“You know,” said Gladys, “I’ve been thinking. I was at the Hall that day, helping. I was quite close to them at the time.”

“When Heather died?”

“No, when she spilt the cocktail. All down her dress. A lovely dress it was, too, royal blue nylon taffeta. She’d got it quite new for the occasion. And it was funny.”

“What was funny?”

“I didn’t think anything of it at the time. But it does seem funny when I think it over.”

Cherry looked at her expectantly. She accepted the adjective “funny” in the sense that it was meant. It was not intended humorously.

“For goodness’ sake, what was funny?” she demanded.

“I’m almost sure she did it on purpose.”

“Spilt the cocktail on purpose?”

“Yes. And I do think that was funny, don’t you?”

“On a brand-new dress? I don’t believe it.”

“I wonder now,” said Gladys, “what Arthur Badcock will do with all Heather’s clothes. That dress would clean all right. Or I could take out half a breadth, it’s a lovely full skirt. Do you think Arthur Badcock would think it very awful of me if I wanted to buy it off him? It would need hardly any alteration—and it’s lovely stuff.”

“You wouldn’t—” Cherry hesitated “—mind?”

“Mind what?”

“Well—having a dress that a woman had died in—I mean died that way….”

Gladys stared at her.

“I hadn’t thought of that,” she admitted. She considered for a moment or two. Then she cheered up.

“I can’t see that it really matters,” she said. “After all, every time you buy something secondhand, somebody’s usually worn it who has died, haven’t they?”

“Yes. But it’s not quite the same.”

“I think you’re being fanciful,” said Gladys. “It’s a lovely bright shade of blue, and really expensive stuff. About that funny business,” she continued thoughtfully, “I think I’ll go up to the hall tomorrow morning on my way to work and have a word with Mr. Giuseppe about it.”

“Is he the Italian butler?”

“Yes. He’s awfully handsome. Flashing eyes. He’s got a terrible temper. When we go and help there, he chivvies us girls something terrible.” She giggled. “But none of us really mind. He can be awfully nice sometimes… Anyway, I might just tell him about it, and ask him what I ought to do.”

“I don’t see that you’ve got anything to tell,” said Cherry.

“Well, it was funny,” said Gladys, defiantly clinging to her favourite adjective.

“I think,” said Cherry, “that you just want an excuse to go and talk to Mr. Giuseppe—and you’d better be careful, my girl. You know what these wops are like!

Affiliation orders all over the place. Hot-blooded and passionate, that’s what these Italians are.”

Gladys sighed ecstatically.

Cherry looked at her friend’s fat slightly spotted face and decided that her warnings were unnecessary. Mr. Giuseppe, she thought, would have better fish to fry elsewhere.

II

“Aha!” said Dr. Haydock, “unravelling, I see.”

He looked from Miss Marple to a pile of fluffy white fleecy wool.

“You advised me to try unravelling if I couldn’t knit,” said Miss Marple.

“You seem to have been very thorough about it.”

“I made a mistake in the pattern right at the beginning. That made the whole thing go out of proportion, so I’ve had to unravel it all. It’s a very elaborate pattern, you see.”