“There are probably other ways of finding out,” said Miss Marple. “Oh yes, I think with time and patience, we can gather the information we want.”
“Anyway, we’ve got two possibilities,” said Giles.
“We might, I think, infer a third,” said Miss Marple. “It would be, of course, a pure hypothesis, but justified, I think, by the turn of events.”
Gwenda and Giles looked at her in slight surprise.
“It is just an inference,” said Miss Marple, turning a little pink. “Helen Kennedy went out to India to marry young Fane. Admittedly she was not wildly in love with him, but she must have been fond of him, and quite prepared to spend her life with him. Yet as soon as she gets there, she breaks off the engagement and wires her brother to send her money to get home. Now why?”
“Changed her mind, I suppose,” said Giles.
Both Miss Marple and Gwenda looked at him in mild contempt.
“Of course she changed her mind,” said Gwenda. “We know that. What Miss Marple means is—why?”
“I suppose girls do change their minds,” said Giles vaguely.
“Under certain circumstances,” said Miss Marple.
Her words held all the pointed innuendo that elderly ladies are able to achieve with the minimum of actual statement.
“Something he did—” Giles was suggesting vaguely, when Gwenda chipped in sharply.
“Of course,” she said. “Another man!”
She and Miss Marple looked at each other with the assurance of those admitted to a freemasonry from which men were excluded.
Gwenda added with certainty: “On the boat! Going out!”
“Propinquity,” said Miss Marple.
“Moonlight on the boat deck,” said Gwenda. “All that sort of thing. Only—it must have been serious—not just a flirtation.”
“Oh yes,” said Miss Marple, “I think it was serious.”
“If so, why didn’t she marry the chap?” demanded Giles.
“Perhaps he didn’t really care for her,” Gwenda said slowly. Then shook her head. “No, I think in that case she would still have married Walter Fane. Oh, of course, I’m being stupid. Married man.”
She looked triumphantly at Miss Marple.
“Exactly,” said Miss Marple. “That’s how I should reconstruct it. They fell in love, probably desperately in love. But if he was a married man—with children, perhaps—and probably an honourable type—well, that would be the end of it.”
“Only she couldn’t go on and marry Walter Fane,” said Gwenda. “So she wired her brother and went home. Yes, that all fits. And on the boat home, she met my father….”
She paused, thinking it out.
“Not wildly in love,” she said. “But attracted … and then there was me. They were both unhappy … and they consoled each other. My father told her about my mother, and perhaps she told him about the other man … Yes—of course—” She flicked over the pages of the diary.
“I knew there was someone—she said as much to me on the boat—someone she loved and couldn’t marry.
Yes—that’s it. Helen and my father felt they were alike—and there was me to be looked after, and she thought she could make him happy—and she even thought, perhaps, that she’d be quite happy herself in the end.”
She stopped, nodded violently at Miss Marple, and said brightly: “That’s it.”
Giles was looking exasperated.
“Really, Gwenda, you make a whole lot of things up and pretend that they actually happened.”
“They did happen. They must have happened. And that gives us a third person for X.”
“You mean—?”
“The married man. We don’t know what he was like. He mayn’t have been nice at all. He may have been a little mad. He may have followed her here—”
“You’ve just placed him as going out to India.”
“Well, people can come back from India, can’t they? Walter Fane did. It was nearly a year later. I don’t say this man did come back, but I say he’s a possibility. You keep harping on who the men were in her life. Well, we’ve got three of them. Walter Fane, and some young man whose name we don’t know, and a married man—”
“Whom we don’t know exists,” finished Giles.
“We’ll find out,” said Gwenda. “Won’t we, Miss Marple?”
“With time and patience,” said Miss Marple, “we may find out a great deal. Now for my contribution. As a result of a very fortunate little conversation in the draper’s today, I have discovered that Edith Pagett who was cook at St. Catherine’s at the time we are interested in, is still in Dillmouth. Her sister is married to a confectioner here. I think it would be quite natural, Gwenda, for you to want to see her. She may be able to tell us a good deal.”
“That’s wonderful,” said Gwenda. “I’ve thought of something else,” she added. “I’m going to make a new will. Don’t look so grave, Giles, I shall still leave my money to you. But I shall get Walter Fane to do it for me.”
“Gwenda,” said Giles. “Do be careful.”
“Making a will,” said Gwenda, “is a most natural thing to do. And the line of approach I’ve thought up is quite good. Anyway, I want to see him. I want to see what he’s like, and if I think that possibly—”
She left the sentence unfinished.
“What surprises me,” said Giles, “is that no one else answered that advertisement of ours—this Edith Pagett, for example—”
Miss Marple shook her head.
“People take a long time to make up their minds about a thing like that in these country districts,” she said. “They’re suspicious. They like to think things over.”
Twelve
LILY KIMBLE
Lily Kimble spread a couple of old newspapers on the kitchen table in readiness for draining the chipped potatoes which were hissing in the pan. Humming tunelessly a popular melody of the day she leaned forward aimlessly studying the newsprint spread out before her.
Then suddenly she stopped humming and called: “Jim—Jim. Listen here, will you?”
Jim Kimble, an elderly man of few words, was washing at the scullery sink. To answer his wife, he used his favourite monosyllable.
“Ar?” said Jim Kimble.
“It’s a piece in the paper. Will anyone with any knowledge of Helen Spenlove Halliday, née Kennedy, communicate with Messrs. Reed and Hardy, Southampton Row! Seems to me they might be meaning Mrs. Halliday as I was in service with at St. Catherine’s. Took it from Mrs. Findeyson, they did, she and ’er ’usband. Her name was Helen right enough—Yes, and she was sister to Dr. Kennedy, him as always said I ought to have had my adenoids out.”
There was a momentary pause as Mrs. Kimble adjusted the frying chips with an expert touch. Jim Kimble was snorting into the roller towel as he dried his face.
“Course, it’s an old paper, this,” resumed Mrs. Kimble. She studied its date. “Nigh on a week or more old. Wonder what it’s all about? Think as there’s any money in it, Jim?”
Mr. Kimble said, “Ar,” noncommittally.
“Might be a will or something,” speculated his wife. “Powerful lot of time ago.”
“Ar.”
“Eighteen years or more, I shouldn’t wonder … Wonder what they’re raking it all up for now? You don’t think it could be police, do you, Jim?
“Whatever?” asked Mr. Kimble.
“Well, you know what I always thought,” said Mrs. Kimble mysteriously. “Told you at the time, I did, when we was walking out. Pretending that she’d gone off with a feller. That’s what they say, husbands, when they do their wives in. Depend upon it, it was murder. That’s what I said to you and what I said to Edie, but Edie she wouldn’t have it at any price. Never no imagination, Edie hadn’t. Those clothes she was supposed to have took away with her—well, they weren’t right, if you know what I mean. There was a suitcase gone and a bag, and enough clothes to fill ’em, but they wasn’t right, those clothes. And that’s when I said to Edie, ‘Depend u
pon it,’ I said, ‘the master’s murdered her and put her in the cellar.’ Only not really the cellar, because that Layonee, the Swiss nurse, she saw something. Out of the window. Come to the cinema along of me, she did, though she wasn’t supposed to leave the nursery—but there, I said, the child never wakes up—good as gold she was, always, in her bed at night. ‘And madam never comes up to the nursery in the evening,’ I says. ‘Nobody will know if you slip out with me.’ So she did. And when we got in there was ever such a schemozzle going on. Doctor was there and the master ill and sleeping in the dressing room, and the doctor looking after him, and it was then he asked me about the clothes, and it seemed all right at the time. I thought she’d gone off all right with that fellow she was so keen on—and him a married man, too—and Edie said she did hope and pray we wouldn’t be mixed up in any divorce case. What was his name now? I can’t remember. Began with an M—or was it an R? Bless us, your memory does go.”
Mr. Kimble came in from the scullery and ignoring all matters of lesser moment demanded if his supper was ready.