Nemesis (Miss Marple 12)

There was by now no one else in the shop. Miss Marple looked with distaste at the jacket of the book, a naked girl with blood-stained markings on her face and a sinister-looking killer bending over her with a blood-stained knife in his hand.

“Really,” she said, “I don’t like these horrors nowadays.”

“Gone a bit too far with some of their jackets, haven’t they,” said Mrs. Vinegar. “Not everyone as likes them. Too fond of violence in every way, I’d say nowadays.”

Miss Marple detached a second book. “Whatever Happened to Baby Jane,” she read. “Oh dear, it’s a sad world one lives in.”

“Oh yes, I know. Saw in yesterday’s paper, I did, some woman left her baby outside a supermarket and then someone else comes along and wheels it away. And all for no reason as far as one can see. The police found her all right. They all seem to say the same things, whether they steal from a supermarket or take away a baby. Don’t know what came over them, they say.”

“Perhaps they really don’t,” suggested Miss Marple.

Mrs. Vinegar looked even more like vinegar.

“Take me a lot to believe that, it would.”

Miss Marple looked round—the post office was still empty. She advanced to the window.

“If you are not too busy, I wonder if you could answer a question of mine,” said Miss Marple. “I have done something extremely stupid. Of late years I make so many mistakes. This was a parcel addressed to a charity. I send them clothes—pullovers and children’s woollies, and I did it up and addressed it and it was sent off—and only this morning it came to me suddenly that I’d made a mistake and written the wrong address. I don’t suppose any list is kept of the address of parcels—but I thought someone might have just happened to remember it. The address I meant to put was The Dockyard and Thames Side Welfare Association.”

Mrs. Vinegar was looking quite kindly now, touched by Miss Marple’s patent incapacity and general state of senility and dither.

“Did you bring it yourself?”

“No, I didn’t—I’m staying at The Old Manor House—and one of them, Mrs. Glynne, I think—said she or her sister would post it. Very kind of her—”

“Let me see now. It would have been on Tuesday, would it? It wasn’t Mrs. Glynne who brought it in, it was the youngest one, Miss Anthea.”

“Yes, yes, I think that was the day—”

“I remember it quite well. In a good sized dress box—and moderately heavy, I think. But not what you said, Dockyard Association—I can’t recall anything like that. It was the Reverend Matthews—The East Ham Women and Children’s Woollen Clothing Appeal.”

“Oh yes.” Miss Marple clasped her hands in an ecstasy of relief. “How clever of you—I see now how I came to do it. At Christmas I did send things to the East Ham Society in answer to a special appeal for knitted things, so I must have copied down the wrong address. Can you just repeat it?” She entered it carefully in a small notebook.

“I’m afraid the parcel’s gone off, though—”

“Oh yes, but I can write, explaining the mistake and ask them to forward the parcel to the Dockyard Association instead. Thank you so much.”

Miss Marple trotted out.

Mrs. Vinegar produced stamps for her next customer, remarking in an aside to a colleague—“Scatty as they make them, poor old creature. Expect she’s always doing that sort of thing.”

Miss Marple went out of the post office and ran into Emlyn Price and Joanna Crawford.

Joanna, she noticed, was very pale and looked upset.

“I’ve got to give evidence,” she said. “I don’t know—what will they ask me? I’m so afraid. I—I don’t like it. I told the police sergeant, I told him what I thought we saw.”

“Don’t you worry, Joanna,” said Emlyn Price. “This is just a coroner’s inquest, you know. He’s a nice man, a doctor, I believe. He’ll just ask you a few questions and you’ll say what you saw.”

“You saw it too,” said Joanna.

“Yes, I did,” said Emlyn. “At least I saw there was someone up there. Near the boulders and things. Now come on, Joanna.”

“They came and searched our rooms in the hotel,” said Joanna. “They asked our permission but they had a search warrant. They looked in our rooms and among the things in our luggage.”

“I think they wanted to find that check pullover you described. Anyway, there’s nothing for you to worry about. If you’d had a black and scarlet pullover yourself you wouldn’t have talked about it, would you. It was black and scarlet, wasn’t it?”

“I don’t know,” said Emlyn Price. “I don’t really know the colours of things very well. I think it was a sort of bright colour. That’s all I know.”

“They didn’t find one,” said Joanna. “After all, none of us have very many things with us. You don’t when you go on a coach travel. There wasn’t anything like that among anybody’s things. I’ve never seen anyone—of our lot, I mean, wearing anything like that. Not so far. Have you?”

“No, I haven’t, but I suppose—I don’t know that I should know if I had seen it,” said Emlyn Price. “I don’t always know red from green.”

“No, you’re a bit colour-blind, aren’t you,” said Joanna. “I noticed that the other day.”

“What do you mean, you noticed it.”

“My red scarf. I asked if you’d seen it. You said you’d seen a green one somewhere and you brought me the red one. I’d left it in the dining room. But you didn’t really know it was red.”

“Well, don’t go about saying I’m colour-blind. I don’t like it. Puts people off in some way.”

“Men are more often colour-blind than women,” said Joanna. “It’s one of those sex-link things,” she added, with an air of erudition. “You know, it passes through the female and comes out in the male.”

“You make it sound as though it was measles,” said Emlyn Price. “Well, here we are.”

“You don’t seem to mind,” said Joanna, as they walked up the steps.

“Well, I don’t really. I’ve never been to an inquest. Things are rather interesting when you do them for the first time.”

II

Dr. Stokes was a middle-aged man with greying hair and spectacles. Police evidence was given first, then the medical evidence with technical details of the concussion injuries which had caused death. Mrs. Sandbourne gave particulars of the coach tour, the expedition as arranged for that particular afternoon, and particulars of how the fatality had occurred. Miss Temple, she said, although not young, was a very brisk walker. The party were going along a well-known footpath which led around the curve of a hill which slowly mounted to the old Moorland Church originally built in Elizabethan times, though repaired and added to later. On an adjoining crest was what was called the Bonaventure Memorial. It was a fairly steep ascent and people usually climbed it at different paces from each other. The younger ones very often ran or walked ahead and reached their destination much earlier than the others. The elderly ones took it slowly. She herself usually kept at the rear of the party so that she could, if necessary, suggest to people who were tired that they could, if they liked, go back. Miss Temple, she said, had been talking to a Mr. and Mrs. Butler. Miss Temple, though she was over sixty, had been slightly impatient at their slow pace and had outdistanced them, had turned a corner and gone on ahead rather rapidly, which she had done often before. She was inclined to get impatient if waiting for people to catch up for too long, and preferred to make her own pace. They had heard a cry ahead, and she and the others had run on, turned a curve of the pathway and had found Miss Temple lying on the ground. A large boulder detached from the hillside above where there were several others of the same kind, must, they had thought, have rolled down the hillside and struck Miss Temple as she was going along the path below. A most unfortunate and tragic accident.

“You had no idea there was anything but an accident?”

“No, indeed. I can hardly see how it could have been anything but an ac

cident.”

“You saw no one above you on the hillside?”

“No. This is the main path round the hill but of course people do wander about over the top. I did not see anyone that particular afternoon.”

Then Joanna Crawford was called. After particulars of her name and age Dr. Stokes asked,

“You were not walking with the remainder of the party?”

“No, we had left the path. We’d gone round the hill a little higher up the slope.”

“You were walking with a companion?”

“Yes. With Mr. Emlyn Price.”

“There was no one else actually walking with you?”

“No. We were talking and we were looking at one or two of the flowers. They seemed of rather an uncommon kind. Emlyn’s interested in botany.”

“Were you out of sight of the rest of the party?”

“Not all the time. They were walking along the main path—some way below us, that is.”

“Did you see Miss Temple?”

“I think so. She was walking ahead of the others, and I think I saw her turn a corner of the path ahead of them after which we didn’t see her because the contour of the hill hid her.”

“Did you see someone walking above you on the hillside?”

“Yes. Up amongst a good many boulders. There’s a sort of great patch of boulders on the side of the hill.”