In complex mysteries, seemingly insignificant details and intuitive observations often reveal the truth more effectively than official investigations. Miss Marple demonstrates that a frightened person's instincts, when trusted, can lead to correct conclusions even when official evidence points elsewhere. The story shows how Mrs. Nunnley's initial letter, which seemed to describe nothing more than a window left open, actually contained the key to solving the murder, while Inspector Renet's careful but premature conclusions were proven wrong. This illustrates that in detective work, small discrepancies and intuitive hunches can be more valuable than seemingly conclusive official evidence.
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The Window Left Open for the Murderer | A Miss Marple Mystery
Added:Miss Marple, the window left open for the murderer. Hello friends, I'm Edward, your host for this evening. Welcome back to Warm Pages.
Before we settle into tonight's story, I'm curious to know what can you see when you look out of your window right now. Tell me in the comments. I read everyone. Now, make yourself comfortable and let us begin. Chapter 1. A letter from Salifan.
October had come to St. Mary me in its usual manner, which was to say gradually, and then all at once, so that one morning the garden was full of aers, and the next it was full of the memory of them. Miss Marple, standing at her drawing room window, with a cup of tea cooling untouched at her elbow, considered that the Miklm daisies had gone over rather sooner than they ought, and that this was, on the whole, exactly the sort of thing that happened to Michael Daisies. She was not, if the truth be told, thinking very much about the daisies. She was thinking about the post which had not yet come, and about the curious, prickling sensation she had woken with that morning, the sensation, quite without cause, that something somewhere was not as it should be. Miss Marple had learned over a great many years not to dismiss such sensations.
They were generally nothing at all. Very occasionally they were something a good deal worse than nothing, and it was never possible to tell in advance which sort one was having. The post, when it came, was unremarkable. A bill from the fishmonger, a circular about a bizaar in aid of the church roof, and a long envelope addressed in a round, careful hand that Miss Marple did not immediately place, though something about the loop of the capital letters tugged gently at her memory, the way an old tune does before one can name it.
She opened it standing up, which was unlike her, and read it through twice before she sat down.
Dear Miss Marple, it began.
I do hope you will forgive me writing to you after all this time, and I would not do it, only I don't rightly know who else to write to, and you were always so kind to me. And mother always said, "If ever you're in real trouble, Morty, you write to Miss Marple because she sees things other people don't.
Miss Marple reading this permitted herself a small private smile, not without a certain rofal pleasure, the pleasure of an old lady who has spent the better part of her life being underestimated, and does not on the whole mind it.
She remembered Mudy Teet very well now.
A thin, anxious girl of 16, sent up from the village to be trained as a kitchen maid at the old hall 30 years before, and hopelessly homesick and dreadfully afraid she would be turned off for breaking a dish. Miss Marple had spoken a quiet word or two in the right quarter, as she was in the habit of doing, and nothing further had come of it. nothing that was until this letter 30 years on signed Morty Nunley which told Miss Marple before she had read a further word that Morty had married and gone up in the world since housekeepers were not as a rule called by their maiden names.
I am housekeeper now the letter went on at Witchmre House near the village of Salofen on the coast which is a very good place and Mrs. Kovville, a very fair mistress in her way, though sharp tonged. And I would not for the world have you think I am the sort to make trouble where there isn't any. Only Miss Marple, there is something wrong here, and I can't for the life of me say what, and it is making me feel quite ill with worrying over it, and Dr. Scon says there is nothing wrong with my nerves, that a tonic won't cure, but I do not think it is my nerves at all." Miss Marple read on, her tea growing colder still. The particulars, when they came, were maddeningly slight. The sort of particulars, Miss Marple reflected, that any sensible person, any inspector sort of person, would have waved away without a second thought, and that was very often exactly why they mattered.
Mrs. Kovville, it seemed, was a lady much given to what she called the health of an open window, and slept every night of the year, whatever the weather, with her casement fastened back upon its hook. This was well known throughout the household, and had been for years, and nobody thought a thing of it, except that Morty herself had taken this last month, to going up and fastening that same window each night before she went to her own bed, as she had always done, and had found it on no fewer than three mornings, standing open again. Not merely a jar, as Mrs. Culver liked it, but open wide, as though someone had leaned well out of it, or in through it in the night.
I said nothing to the mistress, Morty wrote, because she would only say I'd not fasten it properly to begin with, which I know I did, having done it every night these 5 years, never once forgot.
And there is another thing I hardly like to put down on paper. Only I will, cuz it has been troubling me. I have twice now come upon Mrs. Cheryl out in the garden after dark, walking about under the windows as if she had lost something. And when I asked, "Was anything the matter?" She laughed it off very prettily, as she always does, and said she could not sleep for the moon.
"But it was not a moonlit night," Miss Marple, I looked after particular.
Miss Marple, reading, found herself remembering rather more of Morty Teet than she'd suppose she still carried with her. The child's red chapped hands always scrubbed raw from the scullery sink, the way she had stood that first week at the very edge of any room she was sent into, as though she had not yet been given leave to take up the whole of the space allotted to her. And one particular afternoon, never mentioned since, when Miss Marple had found her crying quietly over a broken willow pattern dish behind the still room door, convinced she would be sent home in disgrace. It had been such a very small kindness on Miss Marple's part to say a word to the housekeeper of the day and see that nothing further was made of it.
She had thought little of it at the time, and had certainly not expected it to be remembered 30 years on in a strange hand from a house she had never seen on the other side of the county.
But that, she reflected, was rather the way of small kindnesses. One never knew when one performed them which of them would still be standing faithfully at the far end of a person's life, waiting to be called upon. There followed a page and a half of apology for the liberty of writing, for taking up Miss Marple's time, for troubling her with what was very likely nothing at all, three unlatched windows and a lady who could not sleep. And the letter ended, as such letters generally do, on a note far more revealing than its writer intended.
I don't know what I'm afraid of, Miss Marple, and that is the worst of it. If I could put a name to it, I dare say I should feel a good deal better. But there is something in this house that is waiting to happen, and I cannot make anyone else see it. And I thought, if anybody would understand, it would be you."
Miss Marple set the letter down upon her knee, and sat for some minutes without moving, looking out at the ruined aers.
She was aware, as she so often was on these occasions, of two quite distinct and contradictory certainties. The first was that nothing whatever had happened at Witchmre House, no crime, no catastrophe, nothing beyond the ordinary small frictions of a household thrown together by circumstance rather than affection, which frayed at the edges as autumn wore on, exactly as households did. Windows blew open in October gales.
Ladies who could not sleep walked in gardens for reasons that had nothing to do with the moon. It would be the easiest thing in the world to write back a kind, sensible letter, recommending the tonic Dr. Sconce had already prescribed, and to think no more about it. The second certainty, which Miss Marple had learned to trust rather more than the first, was that Morty Nunnelly was not a fanciful girl, had never, even at 16 and homesick, been given to imagining things that were not there, and that a woman, who could not say what she was afraid of, was very often afraid of the one thing she had not yet let herself think clearly about at all. a window found open that ought to have been fastened, Miss Marple thought, and found, to her mild irritation, that the thought would not quite leave her alone.
There was something in it, something at the very edge of memory, some other window, some other year, that refused for the present to come any further forward than that. She picked up her knitting, which was a soft, pale, formless thing, intended eventually to be a matinea jacket, and knitted three rows without, in the least attending to what she was doing, which was, in Miss Marple's experience, frequently the best way of attending to something else entirely. By the time she had reached the end of the fourth row, she'd made up her mind, in the quiet, unhurried way she made up her mind about most things, which was to say entirely, and without the smallest intention of being talked out of it. She would go to Salofen. She would not, of course, go as Mort's confidant, still less as anyone's detective, a word Miss Marple had always found faintly embarrassing when applied to herself, conjuring up, as it did, an image of magnifying glasses and deer stalker hats, which bore no relation whatever to knitting in a corner, and listening to what people gave away without meaning to. She would go, she decided, as a lady of a certain age, with an interest, entirely genuine, as it happened, in the birds that came down the Suffuk coast in autumn, on their way to warmer places, and would take room somewhere convenient, and would call, in the natural course of things, upon whatever society there was to be called upon, as one did. It occurred to her, folding the letter carefully back along its original creases, that this was very much the sort of plan Remin would call, with his particular blend of affection and exasperation, one of Aunt Jane's little expeditions, and would want to know at unnecessary length whether she ought to have a companion, or a doctor's certificate, or at the very least a warmer coat. She resolved not to mention it to Raymond until it was a good deal too late for him to arrange any of these things, which was, she reflected, very much the way these matters were generally best managed.
She wrote two letters before the light failed. one to Morty, brief, warm, and giving nothing whatever away, saying only that she found she had long wished to see the autumn migration on the Suffuk coast, and might, if it were not inconvenient, call at Witchmre House when she was settled, and one to a small hotel in Salofan, whose name she recalled, with the faint satisfaction of a mind that let go of very little, from an advertisement in a bird watching periodical some years before. Then she sat a while longer, with her knitting idle in her lap, looking at nothing in particular, while the last of the light went out of the garden, and the first cold edge of the evening came in under the ill- fitting sash of her own window, which she noted with the small automatic thoroughess of long habit, and got up presently to close.
There remained the small delicate matter of the village which Miss Marple approached with the practiced care of a woman who had lived among the same 300 souls for the better part of a lifetime and understood exactly how fast news traveled along a garden wall to announce that she was going away anywhere for any reason was to invite a quantity of interested speculation entirely out of proportion to the facts and to invite Raymon's particular species of concern expressed by letter at some length was worse still. She thought it wisest on the whole to let it be known only that she fancied a little sea air before the winter set in, which had the considerable merit of being perfectly true, and to leave the birds and the rest of it to explain themselves, if anyone troubled to ask, which she rather doubted they would. It was, she told herself, taking up her sewing basket and finding not the wool she wanted, but the letter again, folded now into a shape her fingers seemed to have decided upon without consulting her. It was, she told herself, very likely nothing at all. She did not, even as she thought it, believe a word of it. Chapter 2. Fresh air and old grudges. Salofen, when Miss Marple came to it off the branch line the following Thursday, proved to be a village built, as so many on that coast were built, with its back turned firmly to the land and its face to the water, a huddle of flint and weatherboard houses, a church with a squat Norman tower, and beyond it all the great flat sweep of the marsh running out under a sky so wide and so pale that it made the sky over St. Mary me seem by comparison a small and rather modest affair kept indoors.
She'd taken two rooms at the ferry in which stood at the very edge of the village where the road gave up altogether and became a track and had unpacked her field glasses, a stout pair of galosshes and rather more wool than the length of her intended stay strictly warranted, and had gone out on her first free afternoon to see about the birds.
It was on the seaw wall with the tide a long way out and the mud flats beyond glistening under a thin uncertain sun that she first encountered Mr. Barington.
He was a large weathered man of late middle age with the sort of complexion that comes from a lifetime spent out of doors and a coat that had plainly been chosen for its pockets rather than its cut. and he was lying when Miss Marple came upon him, quite flat upon the top of the wall, with a pair of glasses, trained upon something a long way off, that he did not trouble to identify, before informing her, in a fierce undertone, that she was about to put up every godwit on the estie if she did not keep.
Miss Marple kept still. The godwits, when they eventually rose, did so in a long gray ribbon against the sky, and Mr. Barington watched them go with an expression of such naked satisfaction that Miss Marple found herself warming to him at once in the particular way she warmed to people who cared quite unself-consciously about something other than themselves.
You'll be stopping at the ferry, he said when the birds had gone, as though this settled the matter of who she was rather more comprehensively than any introduction could have done. I'm at Marsh Cottage along the wall there. Been there 11 years. Best window in the county for a dawn flight, though my sister will have it that I shall die of a chill one of these winters. Sleeping with it open the way I do. He said this with the particular relish of a man repeating a family joke against himself.
I tell her, "A shut window is no window at all. Might as well live in a biscuit tin." Miss Marple, who had come to Salifan with her ears very much open, and had not expected to have anything of interest dropped into them within the first half hour, remarked only with perfect placidity, that she quite agreed about fresh air, and asked whether he had seen much of the migration yet. He had at considerable and cheerful length, and it was some while before Miss Marple was able gently to steer the conversation toward Witchmre House, which she understood, from a friend of a friend, kept rather a good garden for birds. "Colleville's place," said Mr. Barington, with the faint, comfortable disparagement of one landowner for another's habits. "Good garden? Yes, right down to the water. Old Mrs. Kovville's a sharp old party. sleeps with her own window open winter and summer, same as I do, so we've that much in common, though we don't otherwise see eye to eye on much. Companions are Miss Straoud, quiet sort. There's a niece by marriage living there, too. Now, young Mrs. Gerald, very taking, very handsome, always laughing about something, and the nephew, Torrance, who will have the place one day, I dare say, if his aunt doesn't take it into her head to leave it to the birds instead, which wouldn't altogether surprise me. He gathered up his glasses. You'll find plenty in the village, only too glad to tell you the rest, if you mind to hear it. Mrs. Colbrook, now at the shop, she'll tell you the whole history of the parish, asked or not. Miss Marple found Mrs. Colbrook. exactly where he had promised, behind the counter of a small shop that sold, in the manner of such shops everything and nothing in particular, and was within a very few minutes of purchasing a quarter pound of humugs, in possession of a quantity of information she had not directly solicited. "Mrs. Cheryl, now," said Mrs. Colbrook, lowering her voice to the particular register reserved for matters she had no intention of keeping quiet. Such a sweet thing and so cheerful considering widowed young, you know, poor Mr. Cheryl drowned off the point two summers back.
Dreadful thing. But I will say, and I don't say it unkindly, that her dresses come from London, and her allowance, if she has one, can't come from much. Old Mrs. Cville not being one to throw money about. Not that I'd say a word against her. I never gossip. She refolded a length of ribbon with great deliberation.
And young Mr. Torrance, well, the summers have seen him about the dress makers a good deal more than a gentleman generally needs to be about a dress makers, if you follow me, and his aunt not best pleased about it, though what business it is of anyone's but his own, I couldn't say. Miss Marple, who followed her very well indeed, bought a second quarter pound of humbugs, said that people were very unkind to gossip so and went out into the street a good deal better in form than she had been an hour before. It was Mrs. Nunley, in the end, who arranged the introduction, meeting Miss Marple by what she called chance, on the path above the church, and was, in fact, as both women perfectly understood without either saying so, nothing of the kind. She looked older than Miss Marple had pictured her from the round, careful hand of her letters, a broad, sensible woman with the reen knuckles of one who had never in 30 years stopped doing her own scrubbing on principle, and eyes that went every few moments to some point just past Miss Marple's shoulder, as though she expected to be observed, and had long since given up hoping she was wrong.
The mistress said I might ask you to tea if you were interested in the garden.
She said low and quick. On account of the birds, and I said you were, and it wasn't a lie exactly, only she stopped twisting her hands in her apron. I'm that glad you've come, Miss Marple. I don't know what I expect you to do about it. Only I feel better for your being here. Miss Marple pressed her hand and said nothing that could not have been overheard by the whole of Salifan. and at 4:00 that afternoon presented herself a witchmre house. It was a low, comfortable, unpretending sort of house, older than its sash window suggested, with a garden running down in easy stages toward a reed fringed inlet of the estie, and Mrs. Kovville received her in a drawing room a good deal untidier than its handsome proportions deserved being given over almost entirely to bird books, field notes, and the greater part of a stuffed heroin under a glass dome that had plainly seen better days.
Mrs. Kovville herself was a tall, spare old woman with the upright carriage of someone who has never in her life considered the possibility of stooping and a manner of looking at a new acquaintance as though conducting in the space of a single glance a brisk and not unkindly audit of her worth. You'll have heard I'm a great one for open windows, she said almost before the introductions were finished with a particular satisfaction of a woman announcing an eccentricity she considers a virtue.
Every night of the year, rain or shine wide open, and I haven't had so much as a cold in 11 years. Whatever Dr. Sconce says about my chest, people will keep themselves shut up like jam in a pot and wonder why they're never well. Miss Straoud thinks I shall catch my death one of these nights. Don't you, Gwender?
Miss Straoud, who had risen from a chair by the window with a quiet practiced movement of a woman long accustomed to being spoken about rather than two, was a spare, faded person of middle years, with a good, kind face, and the particular stillness of someone who has learned not to take up more of a room than she is given. She said in a mild voice that suggested the argument was an old and comfortable one, that she suppose Mrs. Kovville knew her own constitution best and went to see about the tea. She had scarcely gone when the drawing room door opened again without any great ceremony to admit a young woman whose entrance Miss Marple thought afterward had a curious quality of arranging the whole room around itself, not loudly, not by design exactly, but simply by being in every line of her a person it was very much pleasanter to look at than anything else in it. Aunt Vaden, I've told Simmons about the boat, and oh, I beg your pardon. I didn't know you had a visitor. Mrs. Cheryl turned the whole warmth of a really charming smile upon Miss Marple, quite as though she had been waiting all afternoon for the pleasure of it. You must be the lady staying at the ferry. Mes told us all about you, the birds, and everything.
How marvelous to come all this way just to look at Godwits. I could never manage it myself. I haven't the patience to sit still for anything.
She dropped into a chair with the easy carelessness of someone entirely at home, and Miss Marple, observing the cut of her tweed, and the small gold watch at her wrist, thought that patience was very likely not the only thing Mrs. Cheryl had learned to manage without. It was Denby Torrance who came in last, and briefly, a fair, open-faced young man with mud on his boots, and an air of having come from somewhere he would rather still have been, who greeted Miss Marple pleasantly enough, accepted no tea, and left again within a very few minutes with some excuse about the tide, but not before Miss Marple had observed the particular silence that fell between him and his aunt in the moment before he spoke. the silence, she thought, of two people who have lately quarreled, and have not yet decided whether the quarrel is to be considered over. "He's forever off somewhere these days," said Mrs. Kovville, when the door had shut behind him, in a voice that aimed for lightness, and did not quite arrive there. "One would almost think Witchmare House had grown too small for him."
"Boys will have their own concerns," said Mrs. Cheryl comfortably, reaching for another sandwich, and Miss Marple, watching her over the rim of her teacup, thought that this was said with rather more ease than the moment Strictly called for, and filed the observation away, along with the humugs and the open window, and the mud on Denby Torrance's boots, in the small, orderly compartment of her mind, where such things were kept until they were wanted. The talk turned comfortably enough to birds again and stayed there for the better part of an hour, and if anyone else in the room felt that the afternoon had been, in some small way, a performance given for a stranger's benefit. Nobody troubled to say so aloud. Miss Marple walked back to the ferry in in the last of the light with her knitting bag over her arm and a good deal to think about and reflected not for the first time that a pleasant tea party was very often the most instructive entertainment a village had to offer, provided one attended, as she generally did, rather more closely to what was left unsaid than to what was not. Chapter 3. Could have fallen alone.
The wind got up a little after 10 that night, and by midnight it was blowing hard off the estie, flinging rain in handfuls against the windows of the ferry inn, so that Miss Marple, lying awake and listening to it, thought that anyone with a window open on a night like this one, would have a very poor night of it indeed. She thought, too, once or twice, in the drowsy, disconnected way one thinks just before sleep finally comes, of Mrs. Cville's bright, defiant announcement about fresh air, and of a window somewhere, standing open into the dark, and then thought no more about it until morning, when Mrs. Nunnley came for her before 8:00, white to the lips, and asked her, without any preamble at all, to come at once. It had been, by the inkeeper's account at breakfast, as bad a night as Salifan had seen the autumn. slates off two roofs along the front street, a fishing boat dragged half out of the water at its mooring, and the church clock, which had stood at 204 for as long as anyone could remember, apparently unmoved by any of it. Miss Marple had eaten very little of her breakfast, without quite being able to say why, and had just begun, with some determination, upon a second piece of toast, when Mrs. Nunley's knock came at the door. She would not say what had happened walking up from the inn. could not, it seemed, quite bring herself to put it into words a second time. And it was not until they had come through the garden gate at Witchmre House, past a knot of gardeners and a maid standing about with the particular stricken uselessness of people who have been told to keep back and have nowhere to keep back to that Miss Marple understood from the shape of the thing lying on the flagstones beneath the house wall covered now with a ground sheet that someone had had the presence of mind to fetch exactly what it was that Mrs. Nunnley had not been able to say. It's Miss Straoud," said Mrs. Nunley, in a voice gone flat with the effort of controlling it. Gwenda, she's Miss Marple, she's dead. Fallen from the window in the night, they're saying from the mistress's own window that I fastened myself before I went to bed, same as always. She stopped and looked for one unguarded moment, exactly as frightened as her letter had sounded a fortnight before, only it wasn't the mistress sleeping there last night. It was Gwender, the village constable, a broad young man named Ty, who had plainly never in his career had to deal with anything graver than a poached pheasant or a public house disagreement, was standing a little apart from the body, with the fixed, unhappy expression of a man doing his best to look as though he knew precisely what ought to be done next, and largely succeeding. He had sent, he told Mrs. Kovville, who had come out onto the terrace, wrapped in a dressing gown, and looking for the first time since Miss Marple had met her, genuinely old, for Dr. Sconce, and for the inspector at Frammlingham, and did not think in the meanwhile that anybody ought to go near the window upstairs, or indeed near very much of anything. It was Mrs. Kovville herself, standing very upright with one hand gripping the stone ballastrade as though she required it to remain standing at all, who explained in short, disjointed sentences to nobody in particular how it had come about. I had a chill yesterday evening, nothing to speak of, I told Gwendiso, but she would fuss, and I asked her to sleep in my room last night, so as to be near the medicine cupboard in case I wanted anything in the night. I took the blue room myself along the passage. It seemed the sensible thing. Her voice, which had begun steadily enough, caught suddenly on the last word, and steadied again with a visible effort of will. I never thought. One doesn't think does one of a window. She would have gone to shut it, I suppose, in all that wind. It bangs dreadfully when it isn't properly hooked back. She must have leaned out too far.
Denby Torrance came around the side of the house while she was still speaking in his shirt sleeves hatless with the look of a man who has run some distance and arrived to find the thing he ran to prevent already irrevocably done. He said nothing at all for a moment, only stood looking at the shape under the ground sheet and then said in a voice quite unlike the pleasant, easy tone Miss Marple had heard from him the day before, "But that's absurd. Gwenders fastened that window a h 100 times. She wasn't a fool about wind and windows, whatever else. He stopped himself and pressed the back of his hand hard against his mouth, and Mrs. Kovville put out an arm toward him that he did not in that moment seem to see. It was Mrs. Cheryl, who came last of all, and who came, Miss Marple could not help noticing, dressed with rather more completeness than the hour and the circumstances strictly required, not disheveled, not in a dressing gown, as Mrs. Kovville was, but in a neat, dark, morning frock, as though she had already, in the short time since the alarm was raised, found the leisure to consider what was suitable. She stood beside Denby Torrance, and said in a low voice, that it was too dreadful, too dreadful for words, and took his arm, and he let her, though he did not, Miss Marple thought, appear greatly to notice that either.
She was the sort, Mrs. Cheryl said to the group in general, in the particular tone of one offering comfort by way of explanation, "Who never would leave a thing half done? If that window was banging in the night, she'd have got up to see to it rather than lie there listening to it, whatever the hour. It's exactly the sort of thing Gwenda would do." She shook her head, and there was in the gesture exactly the right measure of sorrow, exactly the right catch in the voice, and Miss Marple, standing a little apart with her hands folded over the handle of her umbrella, found herself thinking, quite without wishing to, that it was a very tidy little epitap to have ready at 8:00 in the morning, for a woman who had been alive and pouring out tea only the afternoon before. She was ashamed of the thought almost as soon as she had it, in the way one is ashamed of thinking anything at all unkind of a person in the middle of a genuine grief, and told herself with some firmness that grief took people very differently, and that composure was no more a sign of guilt than tears were a sign of innocence, and that she of all people ought to know better than to build a case upon the shape of a sentence spoken in shock. And yet the thought once had would not entirely be put away. Dr. Sconce arrived a little before 9, a brisk spare man with the impatient manner of someone perpetually a quarter of an hour behind his own schedule, and went up at once to examine what there was to examine, and came down again some while later, looking, Miss Marple thought, rather more thoughtful than the simple word accident. already going around the household like a coin passed from hand to hand would seem to warrant.
He said very little to anyone beyond confirming in the flattest possible terms that the poor woman was dead and had been dead some hours and that he would want to speak to the inspector before he committed himself to anything further, which struck Miss Marple, who noticed such things as being in its very reticence rather more than it appeared to be. The morning wore itself out in the particular gray suspended fashion that follows a sudden death in a house too small to absorb it. Constables coming and going, a photographer sent for from Ipsswitch. Mrs. Kovville persuaded at last indoors and given something warm to drink that she did not touch. Mrs. Nunnly moving from room to room, performing small, useless, necessary tasks with the mechanical steadiness of a woman who dared not stop. Miss Marple, who had no official standing whatever, and was perfectly aware of it, made herself quietly useful in the way she had made herself, quietly useful in a great many houses over a great many years, fetching a shawl, seeing that the kettle was kept filled, sitting for a while with her knitting in the small parlor where nobody else particularly wished to sit, and being in general so entirely unremarkable a presence that she was very soon spoken in front of quite as though she were another piece of the furniture. It was in this manner that she heard twice over from two different and unrelated members of the household the same small fact repeated that nobody outside Witchmare House had known the night before that Gwender Straoud was to sleep in her mistress's room rather than her own.
that the arrangement had been made quietly over the supper table, and mentioned to nobody beyond the four walls of the house itself. She turned this fact over a good many times before the day was done. In the unhurrieded, thorough way she turned over most things that struck her as significant, and found that it would not lie comfortably beside the word accident. However often the village, in its kindness, chose to use it. A window left open, a room exchanged quietly between supper and bed, a woman dead beneath it by morning, who had not been the woman meant to sleep there at all, though nobody as yet had put it quite so boldly, and Miss Marple, walking back to the ferry in as the light failed for the second evening running, did not put it so boldly herself, even in the privacy of her own thoughts, for there is a considerable and important difference, as she well knew, between suspecting the shape of a thing and being willing to name it. She thought too of poor Gwender Straoud herself, who had sat pouring tea only the day before with the quiet, unregarded competence of a woman who had spent 3 years making herself useful, and had, by all accounts, succeeded so thoroughly at it that nobody had troubled to notice her particularly at all until now, when it was too late for noticing to do her the smallest good. It seemed to Miss Marple, turning the thought over as she climbed the stairs, one of the saddest features of the whole sad business, that a woman might live so quietly and so conscientiously in a house for 3 years and die in it, and be mourned quite sincerely by people who could not, if pressed, have said very much at all about who she had actually been.
She knitted a great deal that evening and slept very little and woke twice in the night at the sound of the wind, listening for a window she could not from the fairy in possibly have heard.
Chapter 4. A bruise the doctor could not explain. Inspector Renet arrived from Frammlingham a little before 11 the next morning in a police car that took the last h 100red yards of the witch drive rather faster than the gravel strictly approved of. And Miss Marple, watching from the window of the small parlor, where she had once again made herself so entirely part of the furniture that nobody had yet thought to ask her to leave, formed the impression of a man who intended to have the whole unfortunate business tidied away by lunchon, and very nearly succeeded in doing so. He was youngish for an inspector, sandyhaired, with the brisk, unhurrieded thoroughess of a man who had learned his trade by doing everything twice, and had come, as a result, to consider himself very rarely in need of doing it a third time. Competent, Miss Marple thought, watching him set up a table in the morning room with a notebook, a fountain pen, and an air of a man arranging his instruments before an operation he did not expect to find difficult, and not at all a fool. which made him, in her private estimation, rather more dangerous than a fool would have been. A fool could sometimes be led gently round to the truth by the sheer awkwardness of the facts, refusing to fit his theory. A competent man had a way of making the facts fit, whether they wish to or not. She noted too that he had arrived already half persuaded of his conclusion in the manner of a man who has heard the shape of a case summarized to him on the telephone and has without quite meaning to begun building his notes around it before he has so much as looked at the ground beneath the window. It was not carelessness precisely. It was only that a wild night, a well-known window, and a companion known for fussing over drafts made, taken altogether, so very reasonable, and so very convenient an explanation, that a busy man with a great many other calls upon his time, could hardly be blamed for wishing it to be the true one. He took Mrs. Kovville first with a courtesy that had underneath it the faint and not unkindly impatients of a man who's heard a great many berieved households tell him a great many things that were not in the end greatly to the point. She told her story again, the chill, the swapped rooms, the medicine cupboard, in almost exactly the words she had used the morning before, which struck Miss Marple, listening from her chair by the empty grate with her knitting, held up rather closer to her eyes than the light strictly required. not as suspicious in itself, but as the particular careful sness of a story that a person has gone over and over in her own mind until it has worn a groove. And you heard nothing in the night, Mrs. Kleville. No cry, no sound of the window going. Nothing at all, Inspector. I sleep very soundly once I'm off, whatever else people may say of me, and the blue room is at the far end of the passage. I might have slept through a great deal more than a window banging," she paused and added, with the particular bleakness of an old woman confronting, for the first time in words the plain arithmetic of the thing.
"If I had been in my own bed, as I generally am, I dare say it would be me lying in the morttery this morning instead of poor Gwender." The inspector made a note of this. Miss Marple could not see what he wrote, but she saw that he wrote something and passed on with a smooth economy of a man working through a list to Mrs. Cheryl.
Mrs. Cheryl gave her account with the same easy, sorrowful composure she had shown the morning before, sitting very straight in the good chair by the window, with her hands folded in her lap and her eyes from time to time, going with becoming gravity toward the middle distance. She had gone up early, she said, a little after 9, she thought, or perhaps a/4 to 10. She was never very exact about time in the evenings. She was afraid, and had read for a while, and had heard the wind get up, and had thought nothing of it beyond hoping the roses wouldn't be too dreadfully knocked about, and had fallen asleep, she supposeded some while before 11, and had heard nothing whatever, until Mrs. Nunnley's dreadful news in the morning.
You didn't see Miss Straoud again then after supper only to say good night in the hall inspector at about 9 just as I was going up myself. She seemed perfectly ordinary tired perhaps as one does at the end of the day but perfectly ordinary. Her voice caught prettily on the word ordinary, as though the very unremarkableness of that last exchange was somehow the crulest part of the whole business, and the inspector, writing, murmured something sympathetic, and moved on. It was left to Mrs. Nunnly called in some while later, and plainly wretched at being made to say it, to remark in the flat, apologetic tone of a woman correcting her betters, and hating every word of it, that she believed she had seen a light still burning under Mrs. Cheryl's door when she came up to bolt the side passage door, which she generally did at 11, or a very few minutes before it. "I don't say it means anything, Inspector," she added hastily, twisting her apron in the old familiar gesture. Miss Marple had come to recognize. Ladies read late. I only mention it because you asked, "Was there anything at all out of the way, and I did notice it, that's all, because it's not usual. Mrs. Cheryl generally puts her light out early." The inspector wrote this down, too, without any particular emphasis, and asked whether Mrs. Nunley was quite certain of the time, and she said she thought so, though she couldn't swear to 5 minutes either way. And the small discrepancy, a light burning at 11 that its owner had placed in her own account sometime before, was folded away into the general untidiness of a household's recollection of an ordinary evening that had turned out only afterward to matter, and nobody in the room but Miss Marple appeared to give it a second thought. Miss Marple gave it a good many. It was not, she reflected, knitting steadily on, and appearing to attend to nothing but her wool, that a lighted candle proved anything whatever against anybody.
People forgot the time. People read later than they meant to, and later than they afterward like to admit, out of a vague and entirely human wish to appear, in retrospect, more sensible and more sleepy than they had actually been. It was the smallest possible discrepancy, and Miss Marple was very well aware that a case could not be built upon the difference between 10 and 11:00 in anybody's recollection of a night 3 days gone. But she had learned over a great many years of watching people account for themselves, that it was very often the smallest discrepancies, the ones too slight to be worth a deliberate lie, that told one the most, precisely because nobody troubled to manufacture them. Dr. sconce, when his turn came to speak with the inspector, did so a little apart from the others, by the window, in the lowered voice of professional men discussing professional matters that are not, in their view, for the general drawing room, though the room was not so very large, and Miss Marple's hearing, whatever the village might suppose of a lady of her years, remained a good deal better than anyone generally gave her credit for.
There's one thing Dr. Sconce was saying in the brisk, unornamented manner Miss Marple had already come to associate with him. A man who dealt in fact and had no patience for dressing them up.
That I'd like on the record, though I don't say it amounts to anything.
There's a bruise at the base of the skull here, he indicated the place on his own head briefly without ceremony.
That I'd expect to see from a blow rather than a fall. It's possible, mind, that she struck the sill going over, or a stone edge on the way down. The ground's uneven just there, and a fall of the height can do all manner of things to a body that don't bear tidy explaining afterward. I'm not saying it's not consistent with the fall. I'm saying it's not on its own quite where I'd expect a simple overbalancing to leave its mark, and I'd rather say so now than have it raised against me later if it should turn out to matter. But in your opinion, doctor, in my opinion, inspector, a woman got up on a wild night to shut a banging window in an unfamiliar room in the dark and leaned out further than was wise and fell.
That's what the facts as a whole tell me, and I'll say so at the inquest. The bruise is a detail. I mention it because it's my business to mention details, not to explain away the ones that don't fit as neatly as the rest. He said this with the particular firmness of a careful man declining to be hurried into either an overstatement or an unwarranted reassurance, and the inspector, who had plainly hoped for something a good deal more conclusive in one direction or the other, thanked him and let the matter rest.
Miss Marple, in her corner, dropped a stitch, and did not immediately pick it up again. she thought, turning the small, unemphatic fact of the bruise over in her mind, exactly as she had turned over the matter of the lighted candle, that it was precisely the sort of detail a sensible man was right to set aside, and a careful woman was right to remember, not because it proved anything, but because it was one more small piece of the picture that declined, however slightly, to lie flat.
The inspector, for his part, appeared to feel that he had done a thorough morning's work, and had arrived, by the most careful and proper means, at the conclusion the whole village had already reached for itself by breakfast time the day before. He said as much in substance, if not in quite so many words, to Mrs. Kovville before he left.
That it looked on the evidence so far very much like a tragic accident that he would of course await the coroner's findings before saying so officially, but that she should not in the meanwhile distress herself unduly. And Mrs. Kolville, who had plainly wanted very badly to be told exactly that, thanked him with real and touching gratitude, and saw him to his car herself, leaning rather more heavily than usual upon her stick. It was left to Miss Marple, walking back to the ferry in in the pale afternoon light, with her knitting bag over her arm, to reflect that official reassurance and private certainty, were two entirely different articles, and that she had, in the course of one long morning, collected a small quantity of the second, without acquiring so much as an ounce of the first, a lighted candle that had no business burning at 11:00. a bruise that a careful doctor would not quite swear was consistent with a fall, and underneath both of these, a growing and entirely unwelcome conviction that whatever had happened at Witchmre House three nights before, it had not been half so simple, nor half so accidental, as the village, and for the present the inspector, had every reason and every wish to believe. She let herself into the inn, ordered a pot of tea she did not particularly want, and sat for a long while by the window, with her knitting quite still in her lap, looking out at the darkening marsh, and thinking, with the patient, unhurried thoroughess that was in the end very much her own equivalent of Inspector Renett's notebook and fountain pen, that somebody in that quiet, comfortable house had told her, without, in the least meaning to, very much more than they closed. Chapter 5. Debts nobody meant to mention. By the end of the week, the word accident had begun in Salifan. To acquire the particular brittle quality of a word repeated rather more often than it is believed, said firmly and rather too readily by people who had plainly decided among themselves that saying it firmly was the shest way of making it true. Miss Marple, who had spent a good many years of her life listening to villages talk themselves into and out of convictions, recognized the sound of it at once, and was not in the least surprised, walking down toward the shops on a bright, blustery Tuesday morning, to find that the talk had already begun to look about it for somewhere more particular to settle. It settled, as such talk generally does, upon the person who could least easily explain himself. She came upon the beginnings of it quite by accident, or what she privately allowed herself, without undue vanity, to consider not entirely accident at all, since she had made a point of calling in at the small shop over, whose door hung the painted board reading Miss Beharker, dress maker, on the pretext of having a scarf reworked, that did not in truth require reworking in the smallest degree. Miss Harker proved to be a compact, capablelooking young woman with a mouthful of pins and the brisk, unscentimental manner of someone who had built a small, useful business out of very little, and did not intend to let sentiment interfere with the running of it. She took the scarf, turned it over twice with an expression that suggested she saw perfectly well there was nothing wrong with it, and said nothing whatever about that, which Miss Marple thought showed a considerable and rather likable tact. They'd got no further than the matter of a fresh border when the shop bell went and Denby Torrance came in, not with the careless, easy stride Miss Marple had seen him use crossing the lawn at Witchmre House, but quietly, almost fertively, with a glance back through the glass of the door before it had fully shut behind him, and stopped short at the sight of Miss Marple sitting in the customer's chair with a length of scarf across her knee. "Oh, I beg your pardon. I didn't know you had anyone in, Bridey. The name, said so easily, and so entirely without thought, told Miss Marple a good deal more in half a second, than either of the two young people appeared to realize it had told her, and she saw Miss Harker's color rise, and saw Denby Torrrent see it rise, and understood that whatever careful arrangement of secrecy had been maintained until that moment had just, in the smallest, and most human ways come a little undone.
Miss Marple was just leaving, said Miss Harker a shade too quickly, and then catching herself and perhaps deciding Miss Marple thought this entirely to her credit. That there was very little further use in pretending, added, with a kind of resigned cander. No, I don't suppose there's much point going on with it now, is there, Denby? The way things are. Miss Marple's a friend of Mory Nunnaliz, and Morty knows already, and I dare say half the household does by now, if they have any sense at all. She set the scarf down. We're engaged, Miss Marple, Denby, and I, and have been these four months, and his aunt doesn't know or didn't, and would have a great deal to say about it if she did, seeing as I keep a shop for my living, and my father before me kept the harbor stores, which in Mrs. Kovville's eyes is not, I think, quite the sort of connection a Torrance ought to be making.
She's told him as much in so many words, said Denby, with sudden unguarded bitterness. Dropping into the second chair without being asked. Told him he'd not see a penny of witchmre if he married beneath himself was the phrase she used, though I don't imagine she'd use it to bride's face, being too well bred for that, even when she's being perfectly beastly about it privately. We were going to wait and hope she'd come round in time. And now he stopped and pressed his knuckles hard against his mouth in the same gesture Miss Marple had seen him make over Gwender's body 4 days before and did not finish the sentence. "And now," said Miss Harker, steadily finishing it for him, "there's people in this village who've begun putting it about that a man who stood to lose everything for marrying where he liked, might have found it convenient to see his aunt out of the way before she could carry out the threat. Never mind that it wasn't his aunt who died at all, and never mind that Denby was fonder of Gwender Straoud than he ever was of his own comfort. It's a wicked, stupid thing to say, and I'll not have it said in my own shop, but it's being said all the same, and I thought you ought to hear it plainly, Miss Marple, rather than pieced it together from what people are too mely mouthed to say straight out." Miss Marple, folding the scarf she had brought in without the smallest need of mending, said with perfect gentleness that she was very glad to have heard it plainly, and thought privately that a village which had spent 4 days looking for somewhere to rest its unease, had found in young Mr. Torrance's inconvenient engagement, and his aunt's inconvenient temper a motive so tidy and so dramatically satisfying that it would take a good deal more than mere innocence to dislodge it. Now that it had taken hold, she left the two of them together with the small private tact of a woman who understood there were things two young people newly and unhappily public needed to say to each other without an audience, and walked on toward the church, where she encountered coming the other way with a stiff, deliberate gate of a man for whom every errand was also, in some sense, a small ceremony of his own importance. Mr. Gweight. He was a spare, dry old gentleman with a very high collar for the season and the particular manner cultivated over 40 years of family solicitorship of a man who regarded the giving of information as an act requiring considerable justification, even when the information was strictly speaking no great secret at all. Miss Marple, I understand from Mrs. Kovville that you're an acquaintance of some standing with her household. This was not strictly true, but Miss Marple did not trouble to correct it, sensing that Mr. Gweight was a man who preferred his own version of a fact to any amendment offered by another party. A very sad business.
Very sad. I called on Mrs. Kovville not 10 days before it happened. a matter of business, nothing I need trouble you with, and found her in excellent health and spirits. Whatever poor Gwender Straoud's fate has since suggested about the uncertainty of these things. A matter of business, Miss Marple repeated in the mild, encouraging tone of a woman who has found over a great many years, that a sentence left gently open at the end is very often filled in by the person who spoke it, without any further prompting, whatever being required. Her will, as it happens, said Mr. Gweight, with the small, satisfied heir of a man who has decided, after all, that there is no particular harm in telling, and a certain pleasure in being the one to do the telling.
Nothing sinister in that, Miss Marple.
Ladies of Mrs. Kovville's age review these matters from time to time, as they ought. I don't say what she had in mind, since that's her business, and mine, and nobody else's until she chooses to make it otherwise. But I will say she asked me a great many questions about how quickly such a document might be redrawn once she'd made up her mind to it, which is not, in my experience, the sort of question a person asks, unless she has very lately made up her mind to something. He touched his hat. Good day to you, Miss Marple. A very sad business. He went on his stiff, deliberate way, entirely satisfied, Miss Marple thought, with the impression he had left of a man who had said nothing at all, and had in fact said a very great deal, and she stood for a moment on the path, considering how very often it was the people most careful of their own discretion who let fall the most.
She had very nearly reached the church path again, when she came upon Mrs. Cheryl herself, coming out of the milliners with a hatbox under one arm and an expression of such untroubled good humor that it was difficult, looking at her, to believe the same village currently occupied with grim theories about her brother-in-law's nephew was a village she had walked through not 5 minutes before. Miss Marple, how lovely. Have you been admiring Bridey Harker's window? She really is clever with a needle, whatever else one says.
She fell into step beside Miss Marple with the easy confiding manner of a woman glad of company and glanced down with a small rofal laugh at the hatbox on her arm. I oughtn't really one at too many, my aunt would say, if she ever troubled herself over what I spend, which she doesn't, bless her, being far too taken up with her birds to notice anyone else's little extravagances. It's a dreadful habit of mine, buying things I've no business buying. Dembi always says I shall bankrupt the parish single-handed. She laughed again lightly and turned the talk with a deafness Miss Marple did not fail to notice toward the sadder subject occupying everyone. It's wretched all this talk about poor Denby, as if he'd ever have laid a finger on Gwender of all people. He was fonder of her than of almost anyone in the house.
People will say the crulest things given half a reason to. She sighed prettily and pressed Miss Marple's hand in farewell at the corner by the church and went on her way toward Witchmre House with the hatbox swinging cheerfully from her arm. And Miss Marple, watching her go, thought that it was a very charming performance indeed, and wondered not for the first time that morning how much of a performance was required before it ceased in any useful sense to be a performance at all, and became simply the person giving it. It was Mrs. Colbrook encountered a little later at the shop counter in the ordinary course of the day's business, who supplied the one further piece the morning seemed determined to furnish her with, though she supplied it characteristically in the tone of a woman dismissing a subject rather than raising it. "Of course there's talk about young Mr. Torrance, and I dare say there's something in it, though I don't like to say so," she said, wrapping a parcel with considerably more attention than the remark appeared to require. Though I will say, if we're talking about who might want for money in that house, Mrs. Cheryl's dress makaker's bills would surprise you, Miss Marple, and where the money comes from to settle them, I couldn't tell you, seeing as old Mrs. Kovville's not want to be free with an allowance. But there, she's such a sweet, cheerful thing, one can't think ill of her for a moment. whatever her bills come to. And it's not as if she'd anything to gain by poor Gwender's death, being no blood relation at all and not down for a great deal in the will, so far as anybody knows. It's Mr. Torrance that stood to lose everything.
And that's what people are saying. And I don't say they're wrong to say it, only I don't like to be the one repeating it.
She said this, Miss Marple noted, with every appearance of having repeated it several times already that morning, and would very likely repeat it several times more before the day was out, and Miss Marple thanked her, and paid for her humbugs, and walked back to the fairy in turning over, with the same patient thoroughess she brought to everything. The curious and rather uncomfortable fact that an entire village, faced with two people who might plausibly have wanted something badly enough to kill for it, had settled without a moment's real hesitation upon the one who stood on the plain evidence of Mr. Gweight's careful indiscretion, and Mrs. Colbrook's careless one to gain the less certain and the more distant advantage and had passed over almost without noticing it was there to pass over the one who stood very possibly to gain rather more and rather sooner and had dressmakers bills. Besides that somebody was evidently paying chapter 6 too fond of her to have done it. By the Friday Salifan had very largely made up its mind. Miss Marple had heard it settling into shape all through the preceding days in the shop on the seaw wall at the counter of the ferry in itself where the landlord had taken to discussing the matter over the breakfast tray with a confident regretful heir of a man delivering a verdict rather than repeating one. Poor young Mr. Torrance, everyone agreed, badly in debt and forbidden his girl and his aunt's own companion dead in his aunt's own bed on the very night as it happened that his aunt might so easily have been lying there instead. It was, the village told itself, a very sad business, and a very understandable one, and nobody said outright that they believed him guilty, since that would have been unkind, and Salifan prided itself on not being unkind, only that it was, all things considered, a shocking coincidence that things should have fallen out as they had, and coincidence, said often enough, and shaken over often enough, has a way of hardening by slow degrees into something a good still more like certainty. Inspector Renette came back to Witchmare House on the Friday with the particular brisk purposefulness of a man who has spent a week gathering small facts about a case and has arrived at last at the comfortable point where the facts have begun of their own accord to arrange themselves into a shape he recognizes. Miss Marple admitted once again to the small parlor on the general understanding that she was Mrs. Kovville's guest and Mrs. Nunley's old friend, and therefore not in any particular sense anybody's business, observed the change in him at once, a certain settled confidence about the shoulders that had not been there on his first visit, when the facts had still been willing to point in more than one direction at a time. "I'll be straight with you, Mrs. Kovville," he said, seating himself without being asked in the chair nearest the window, since I think it's kinder than letting matters drag on unspoken between us. It's come to my attention, and I needn't trouble you with how, though I dare say you can guess, that your nephew has been keeping company this good while, with a young woman in the village you'd expressed yourself firmly against, and that you'd told him, in terms I understand were not gentle, what he might expect to happen to his inheritance if the matter went any further.
I've also learned, and this I had in fairness, from your own solicitor, who felt it his duty to say so, that you had recently taken steps toward revising your will. Now, he said this last word with a particular flat finality of a man laying a card face up upon a table he considers already won. I have a witness, besides, who overheard a quarrel between yourself and Mr. Torrance not 4 days before Miss Straoud's death. a quarrel your own scullery maid describes as bitter enough that she took herself out of the kitchen passage rather than be caught listening to it. I'd like Mr. Torrance's own account of that quarrel if you'd be good enough to send for him.
Mrs. Cville, who had gone very still during this recitation, said in a voice that had lost a good deal of its accustomed brisk authority, that she did not see what an old woman's temper over a matter of family feeling had to do with poor Gwender's death, and that she would thank the inspector not to build some dreadful theory upon a quarrel that had been, after all, nothing more than any aunt and nephew might have over a marriage he considered unsuitable. "I don't build theories on nothing, Mrs. Kovville, said the inspector, not unkindly, but with the immovable patience of a man who has said this same sentence in one form or another to a great many reluctant witnesses before this one. I follow where the facts lead, and I'll own the facts taken together lead somewhere rather particular. Denby Torrance was sent for and came in white about the mouth, with Bridey Harker beside him. She had been in the house already, Miss Marple gathered, the pretense of secrecy, having by now entirely worn away under the pressure of events, and stood close beside him with the particular fierce, unashamed loyalty of a young woman who had decided once and for all that there was no longer any profit in pretending to a discretion nobody believed in any longer.
Yes, we quarreled," Denby said, before the inspector had properly finished his question in the flat, exhausted tone of a man too tired for further evasion. She told me I'd not see a penny of this house if I married Bridey, and I told her I'd rather go without the house than without Bridey, and a good deal else was said on both sides that I'm not proud of and don't intend repeating. That's the whole of it. I don't deny it happened, and I don't deny I was angry, and I don't deny I need money rather badly just at present, since you'll have heard that too, I don't doubt, from somebody only too glad to tell you." His voice rose unsteadily on the last words. "But Gwender wasn't my aunt, Inspector."
Gwender was. He stopped and his hand went in the gesture Miss Marple had by now seen him make three times hard against his mouth and for a moment he did not trust himself to go on at all.
Gwender taught him to sail when he was 8 years old and his own father too busy to trouble said Bridey Harker into the silence with a quiet controlled anger that Miss Marple thought a good deal more telling than any amount of weeping would have been. sat up with him a whole night once when he had the scarlet fever and his aunt was away in Harriut, and nobody else in that great house thought to. He'd no more have laid a hand on her than he'd have laid a hand on his own mother. And if you can't see that, inspector looking at him now, then I don't know what it is you're trained to look for. I'm trained, Miss Harker, to look for motive and opportunity, and I'll not pretend I don't find a good deal of both in this room, said Inspector Renit. Not unkindly, but not moved either, in the manner of a man who had heard passionate defenses offered on behalf of guilty men, often enough in the course of his career to have grown, of necessity, a little proof against them. A young man badly in debt, in love with a woman his aunt forbade him to marry, threatened with disinheritance if the match went ahead, and a death in the very room his aunt ought by rights to have been sleeping in, that removes nobody from his path directly, I grant you, but frightens an old woman badly enough that she might, in her fright, decide, after all that love was worth more than a household's good opinion, and settle a matter in his favor out of simple terror, rather than have him try Again he said this last with the particular grim relish of a man laying out for the first time aloud a theory he's been quietly assembling for some days and watching it even as he spoke it harden a little further in his own estimation.
It's an ugly thing to say Mr. Torrance and I don't say I've proved it. I say it fits and facts that fit are facts I'm bound to follow. And if I tell you, said Denby, very low, that I'd have gone on quarreling with her for 20 years sooner than see a hair of Gwender's head harmed, then I'd say, Mr. Torrance, that it's a very natural thing to tell me, whether it's true or not, and I have no way of weighing it against a bruise on a dead woman's skull, and a will about to be redrawn against your interest."
The inspector rose, gathering his notebook with the brisk finality of a man who considers the interview, if not the case, satisfactorily concluded for the present. I'll ask you not to leave the district, either of you, until this matters settled one way or the other. He took his leave with a courtesy that had underneath it the settled weight of a man who believes himself very nearly at the end of his work, and Mrs. Kville, left alone with her nephew and the girl she had so recently forbidden him to marry, did a thing Miss Marple had not expected of her, and put out both her hands without a word toward the two of them, an old woman's apology, offered too late and too awkwardly for speech, for a threat that had, by the plainest accident of circumstance, come within an inch of costing her nephew everything a threat was never meant to cost. Miss Marple, sitting very quietly in her corner, with her knitting scarcely moving in her lap, watched Denby Torrance's face throughout the whole of this exchange, with the close, patient attention she generally reserved for exactly this sort of moment, the moment when a person, under real pressure, either performs a feeling or simply has one, and the two, however alike they might look to a hurried observer, were never, in Miss Marple's long experience, quite the same thing to look at closely.
What she saw watching him was not the smooth, unbroken composure of a man managing a performance under difficult circumstances, of the kind she had watched Mrs. Cheryl managed so gracefully on the terrace the morning Gwender's body was found. It was something roarer and considerably less tidy. A young man's grief, still entirely unhealed, catching him unaware at the mention of a sailing lesson given 20 years before, so that for one unguarded moment his whole face had gone quite involuntarily, the particular gray color of a person remembering something he would very much rather not have been made to remember in a room full of witnesses. She thought turning her needles over without in the least attending to the stitch, that grief of that particular undignified, unrehearsed kind, was a very difficult thing for even the cleverest murderer to manufacture convincingly on demand, and a very easy thing for an entirely innocent man, cornered and exhausted, and watching the last of his defenses fail to persuade a competent inspector of anything at all, to produce without the smallest effort in the world, It did not prove him innocent. Miss Marple was too old a hand to suppose that any single observation, however telling, ever quite proved anything on its own, but it sat uncomfortably and persistently alongside the tidy, well- constructed case the inspector had just laid out so confidently before them all, and Miss Marple, walking back to the ferry in as the light failed for what felt, by now like the hundth evening running, found that the discomfort would not be knitted away. However many rows she gave it to try. Chapter 7. Mr. Gweight names a culprit. Mrs. Kovville had arranged the gathering herself and had arranged it, Miss Marple thought, with the particular determined cheerfulness of an old woman trying by main force of will, to put a shattered thing back together in front of witnesses before anyone could look too closely at the cracks.
She had asked Mr. Gweight down from Frammlingham to draw up there and then before the whole small family a fresh will settling Witchmere House upon Denby without condition whatever he chose to do about Bridey Harker and had asked Bridey to come and hear it done and had asked Miss Marple too since you've been so very kind through all this wretched business and I should like a friendly face in the room besides my own families and it was Miss Marple reflected taking her seat in the same overfernish drawing room where she had first been given tea beneath the stuffed heron. A genuinely kind and generous impulse, however badly, in the event it was to go astray.
Inspector Renet arrived a little after 6, uninvited, but not unwelcome. He had come, he explained, to tell Mrs. Kovville privately that the coroner's inquest, adjourned once already, was to reopen the following week, and that he thought she ought to hear it from him rather than from the newspapers, and had been persuaded, with some reluctance, to stay for a glass of cherry, while Mr. Gweight finished his papers. It began well enough. Mrs. Kovville, sitting very upright in her usual chair with a rug over her knees, that she did not appear to notice had slipped, made a short, stiff little speech about family feeling mattering a great deal more in the end than the things families quarreled over and took Denby's hand. And then, after a visible effort, bride is, and said she hoped they would both forgive an old woman for very nearly costing them both a great deal of happiness out of pure obstinacy.
Denby plainly moved beyond easy speech said something indistinct and grateful and Manne Cheryl curled gracefully into the window seat with a glass of cherry she was not drinking said how glad she was how truly glad that something good should come out of such a dreadful time and it was into this warm unsteady hopeful little silence that Mr. Gweight, laying out his papers upon the writing table with brisk satisfaction, remarked entirely without malice, that it was a pity the new will could not have been drawn a fortnight sooner, since it would have spared everybody a great deal of trouble. "How do you mean spared everybody trouble?" said Inspector Renit, setting down his glass with a particular quiet attentiveness of a man who has just heard in an idle remark the shape of something he had not quite thought to ask about directly.
Only that Mrs. Kovville had already made up her mind to it, Inspector before ever poor Miss Straoud died. I told Miss Marple as much myself some days ago, and I don't suppose it's any secret now. Mr. Gweight, tidying his papers, appeared entirely unaware for a moment longer of the effect his words were having upon the room. Had she signed a fortnight ago what she's signing tonight, there'd have been no question of disinheritance hanging over Mr. Torrance's head at all, and no motive for anybody to point a finger at him over, well, over anything.
He looked up at last and seemed to become aware all at once of the stillness that had fallen over the room and of Denby Torrance's face which had gone in the space of a sentence entirely white. You mean said Denbby very low that she'd already decided before Gwender died and nobody told me.
I didn't tell you Mr. Torrance said Mr. Gweight with the first faint edge of defensiveness because it was not at that time mine to tell. A solicitor does not discuss his client's intentions with "You let me go on believing for a fortnight that I stood to lose everything," Denby said, his voice rising now, unsteady with something that was not, Miss Marple thought, watching closely. Quite the reaction of an innocent man merely wounded by an old grievance. though it was very near to it, and the distance between the two in that overheated moment was not one that Mr. Gweight, whose temper had been rising visibly to match, showed any sign of troubling to measure. And knowing that you stood to lose everything, Mr. Torrance, said Mr. Gweight, with sudden, startling heat, rising from the writing table with his papers still in his hand. Is it so very extraordinary that a man in your position angry and in debt and forbidden his girl might have taken it into his head that his aunt's death or failing that the removal of anyone standing between himself and the settlement he believed was slipping from him could not come a moment too soon. I have wondered it myself, God forgive me, more than once these last 10 days, and I think it very likely, inspector, that I am not the only person in this room to have wondered it." He said this last directly to Renit, and the room, which had been merely tense a moment before, went suddenly, absolutely silent.
"That is a monstrous thing to say," said Bridey Harker, on her feet before anyone else had properly gathered breath to speak. her voice shaking with a fury that made her, for one striking moment, look considerably less like the composed young woman of the dress maker shop, and a good deal more like a girl fighting with everything she had, for the one thing in the world she could not afford to lose. Denby was in his own bed the night Gwenda died, same as always. And if you can't find it in yourself to believe a word he says, Mr. Gweight.
Then perhaps you'd better ask yourself why you're so very ready to believe the worst of him instead. I am not accusing anyone of anything, Miss Harker. I am merely observing, began Mr. Gweight, with the particular unconvincing dignity of a man who has said a good deal more than he meant to, and is now attempting too late to retreat some part of the way back from it. You have accused him of murder in front of a police officer in his own aunt's drawing room," said Bridey. "And I don't imagine there's a great deal of retreating from that, however you dress it up afterward."
Inspector Renit, who had listened to the whole of this exchange with the stillness of a man carefully not interrupting a witness, who was telling him, quite without meaning to, a very great deal more than he had come there to hear, rose at last, and said, with grave and entirely unhurried courtesy, that in the circumstances, the accusation, having now been made, however informally, and in view of certain other matters he had had occasion to consider over the past several days, days. He thought it best that Mr. Torrance accompany him to Frammlingham that evening to make a fuller statement, and that this need not at present be considered anything more than that. Though he would be obliged if Mr. Torrance would understand it a good deal more gravely than an ordinary formality, Mrs. Kville, who had sat through the hole of this appalling reversal of her own gentle evening, with her hands gripping the arms of her chair and her face gone the color of old paper, said nothing at all, and it was Manne Cheryl, rising quickly from the window seat, who crossed the room and put an arm about her, murmuring something low and comforting, while Bridey Harker walked out to the police car with Denby, with her chin very high and her eyes very bright, and did not so far as Miss Marle observed, permit herself to cry until the car had actually gone from sight down the drive.
It was a wretched, subdued little party that remained at Witchmre House that evening, Mrs. Kovville persuaded at last to her bed with a headache powder she did not want. Mr. Gweight, plainly appalled at the wreckage his own temper had made, of an evening he had come to make peaceful, apologizing at some length to nobody in particular, and accepting Mrs. Cheryl's tired assurance that nobody blamed him. Not really.
These things happened when feelings ran high. Bridey Harker returned from the drive white and dryeyed, refusing point blank to go home to an empty shop and sit alone with her thoughts and settling instead into a chair in the small parlor with the fixed, sleepless patience of a woman keeping a vigil.
Miss Marple, who had no very pressing reason to leave, and a great many private reasons to stay, remained with her, and the two of them sat a long while over a pot of tea that grew cold and was never sent away, saying very little, while the house settled into the particular uneasy quiet of a place where everyone has gone to bed, and nobody has actually gone to sleep. Once, a little before midnight, Mrs. Cheryl looked in on them, still dressed, to ask with real and evident kindness, whether either of them wanted anything, and stood a moment in the doorway, making sympathetic conversation about how dreadful it all was, and how she, for one, didn't think she'd sleep a wink herself, before going up at last with a candle, and Mr. Gweight, some while after, could be heard pacing the length of the library overhead, with the heavy, regular tread of a man too troubled in his own conscience to lie still. It was well past midnight with the house gone quiet at last and only the wind moving in the chimneys when Mary Cheryl's scream came up from the garden below. They found her on the terrace in her dressing gown, one hand pressed hard against her own mouth, pointing quite unable for a moment to speak at all toward the flagstones beneath Mrs. Kovville's bedroom window where the old lady lay exactly dreadfully as Gwender Straoud had lay in a fortnight before beneath a window standing open to the October night.
I couldn't sleep. I came down for a book. I saw the window from the lawn and I thought I don't know what I thought.
only I came round to look and Man's voice broke off entirely, and Bridey Harker, white to the lips but perfectly steady, was already running for the telephone in the hall, while Mr. Gweight came stumbling out in his shirt sleeves, demanding over and over to be told what had happened, as though the telling of it might yet somehow undo it. It was Miss Marple, who thought, standing very still on the cold terrace with the wind pulling at her shawl, to send word not only for Dr. sconce, but for Inspector Renet, and it was some while after, when he arrived, gray, with the lateness of the hour, and a fatigue that had nothing to do with sleep, that the plain and terrible arithmetic of the thing was laid, without anyone needing to say it loud before them all, that Denby Torrance had been sitting at the hour Mrs. Kovville must have died in an interview room at Frammlingham Police Station under the eyes of two constables and Inspector Renet himself a 100 miles in every sense that mattered from any window at Witchmare House at all. Then it was never him, said Bridey Harker, into the appalled silence that followed in a voice gone flat with shock rather than triumph. It was never him, and it was never an accident either, was it, Inspector. Not the first time, and not now.
Inspector Renit, looking down at the shape beneath the ground sheet that his own men had so lately been persuaded, was the whole and settled truth of a very sad accident, said nothing at all for a long moment, and Miss Marple, watching his face in the cold lantern light, saw upon it, for the first time since she had known him, the particular naked expression of a competent man, discovering that the tidy case he had built, stoned by careful stone had just come down entirely and that he would have to begin again from the very beginning with the ground itself this time admitting no comfortable certainty at all chapter 8 sisters long ago Salifan did not talk on the morning after Mrs. Kovville's death in the busy satisfied undertone it had used all the previous fortnight over the matter of poor Gwender Straoud. It was Miss Marple noticed walking down through a village gone strangely muted under a high thin autumn sky. a different quality of silence altogether. The silence of people who have been caught out collectively and rather shamefully in having settled a question too quickly and too comfortably and do not for the present know quite what to say instead.
She found Mrs. Nunnily in the kitchen at Witchmre House, sitting at the great scrub table with her hands folded before her, and an expression of such complete, exhausted stillness that Miss Marple thought, not for the first time, that grief in a servant was very often the least remarked and the most genuine article going in any household. Nobody troubling to manage it for an audience, nobody watching to see how it was born.
I keep thinking I ought to be doing something, Mrs. Nunley said without preamble when Miss Marple had settled herself in the chair opposite. There's the silver to see to and cook wanting to know about dinners, as if anybody in this house is going to want dinner served in the ordinary way again, and I sit here instead, and I can't seem to make myself get up." She looked, for a moment, very much like the frightened housemaid of 30 years before, sent up to a strange house, and not at all sure of her welcome in it. I found her, Miss Marple. Did you know that? I went up early on account of the mistress liking her tea at 7 sharp, and the room was empty, and the window standing open, same as it always was of a morning. And I thought for one moment before I'd properly taken it in, I thought there now she's up before me for once, gone down to look at her birds. And then I looked out the way one does out of nothing but habit, and there she was on the very same stones.
She stopped and pressed the back of her hand hard against her mouth in a gesture that struck Miss Marple with a small cold shock of recognition, as very much the same gesture she had watched Denby Torrance make three times over in three different rooms across the whole wretched course of the fortnight. The particular universal gesture of a person holding a grief physically inside the body because there was for the moment nowhere else for it to go. It's a dreadful thing, Mrs. Nunley went on low, to see two deaths so alike, in the same house, not three weeks apart. I keep seeing them, the one on top of the other in my mind, if you know what I mean.
Poor Gwender on those stones, and now the mistress in very nearly the selfsame spot, lying very much the same way, in very much the same sort of night clothes. so that for one dreadful moment yesterday morning before I'd got close enough to be sure I hardly knew which of them I was looking at all over again.
Miss Marple, who had been sitting very still and attending, as she generally did, a good deal more closely to the shape of what was being said than to its ordinary surface meaning, felt something move quite suddenly at the very back of her mind. the particular sensation familiar to her from a great many years of exactly this kind of listening of a stray fact settling at last into a space that had been waiting for it unrecognized for some while. I hardly knew which of them I was looking at. It was of course precisely the sort of thing anybody might say of two deaths so grimly similar meant as nothing more than a measure of the shock. And yet Miss Marple found herself turning it over and over again with the growing uncomfortable conviction that Mrs. Nunnley had said without in the least intending to something considerably more literal and considerably more important than she knew. Two women alike enough in the halflight of a shocked and hurried glance to be mistaken, however briefly one for the other. two women who had on the night of the first death quite deliberately exchanged the rooms in which they habitually slept.
Miss Marple sat with her hands folded over the handle of her umbrella and let the thought complete itself slowly and entirely in the unhurried way she preferred to let her thoughts complete themselves undisturbed by the temptation to hurry toward a conclusion before she had properly examined every side of it.
And what completed itself in the end was not a new fact at all, but an old memory come up from a very long way back of two sisters she had known as a girl in St. Mary me. The Mrs. talent, who had lived together in the same small cottage for the whole of their unmarried lives, and had grown over the years so alike in figure and habit, and even in the particular arrangement of their shared bedroom, that a caller unfamiliar with the household might very easily, in poor light, have mistaken the one for the other.
There was a young man once, she said aloud gently, more to herself than to Mrs. Nunnly, though the housekeeper looked up, glad perhaps of anything at all to draw her thoughts away from the stones beneath the window. Two sisters I knew as a girl, and a young man who fancied himself very much wronged by the elder of them, jilted, or believed himself jilted, which came in the end very much the same thing in his own mind, and who took it into his head one dark evening, to give her a very great fright indeed, by way of what he called teaching her a lesson. He knew the room.
He knew which side of the bed she generally slept on. What he did not trouble to make quite certain of, in his temper and his hurry, was which sister happened to be sleeping there that particular night, the two of them having changed rooms for some perfectly ordinary reason of their own. I forget now what it was, a leaking roof, I believe, or some such thing. And it was the younger sister he very nearly frightened half to death instead. a woman who had never done him the smallest injury in her life.
Miss Marple paused and looked, not at Mrs. Nunley, but at some point a good way beyond her into the middle distance where such memories generally lived. It taught me something that business that I have never quite forgotten. People in a temper or in a hurry or in fear for their own skins very rarely trouble to make quite sure who it is they're actually dealing with. They see what they expect to see in the dark and act upon it and are dreadfully surprised afterward to learn how wrong they were.
Mrs. Nunnily looked at her for a long moment, not quite following. Miss Marple thought the whole of where the story was tending, and said only at last in a small, unhappy voice. You don't think, Miss Marple, you can't mean that somebody meant it for the mistress all along. That poor Gwender died for nothing at all, only because she happened to be sleeping in the wrong bed.
I think, said Miss Marple carefully, that it is a possibility one ought not to dismiss simply because it is a very dreadful one to consider. And if it is a possibility, Mrs. Nunley, then there is a question that matters a very great deal more than it might otherwise seem to. Who, besides the people in this house, could possibly have known on that particular night that it was Gwender sleeping in your mistress's room, and not your mistress herself." Mrs. Nunnley considered this with the slow, careful, thoroughess of a woman turning over every corner of her own memory for something she might have overlooked.
Nobody outside the house, so far as I know, Miss Marple, it was talked of at supper, and after. Cook knew, and the girl who does the boots knew because she was told to leave the extra shawl out for Miss Straoud on account of the chill. And I knew, of course, being the one who fastened the window myself before I went up. But it wasn't a thing anybody had caused a mention beyond these walls. Not that night, not before it happened.
There had been nothing to tell, you see, until there was. It was a small confirmation, and Miss Marple had rather expected it, but she was glad nonetheless to have it stated so plainly, the circle of possible knowledge drawn tight, tighter than the village at large, tighter even than most of the household's own casual acquaintance, to the small number of people who had sat at that supper table, or passed through that kitchen on one particular October evening. She left Mrs. nonely to her silver which the housekeeper had at last with visible effort risen to attend to and walked back through the village in the thin watery sunshine turning the question over and over and it was outside the shop buying a quarter pound of humbug she did not in truth greatly want that she fell in with Mrs. Colbrook, whose appetite for talk had not, Miss Marple was interested to observe, been in the least diminished by the gravity of what there now was to talk about, if anything, quite the reverse. Two of them, Miss Marple, and both from that self-same window. I said to Mr. Colbrook, only this morning, I said, there's something very wrong going on at Witchmre House, and no use anybody telling me different now, whatever the inspector thought he knew a fortnight ago. She lowered her voice to its familiar confiding register, and poor Mr. Torrance cleared of it entirely, their saying, being safe under lock and key at Frammlingham the whole while, which I never did believe of him myself, whatever Mr. Gweight chose to say in his temper. A solicitor losing his head like that in front of a police inspector, too. It's not what I call professional, whatever the provocation.
Miss Marple, turning her humbugs over in their paper twist, asked, in the same mild, unhurried tone she had used with Mrs. Nly an hour before, whether it was generally known in the village before poor Miss Straoud's death that the two ladies had exchanged rooms that particular night, whether anyone outside the house itself might have had word of it, by way of a tradesman's boy, perhaps, or a message carried, or simply talk overheard.
Mrs. Colbrook considered this with the genuine unhurried relish of a woman turning over a question. She had not previously thought to ask herself, and shook her head slowly. "No, now you put it to me straight, Miss Marple. I don't believe it was known outside that house at all. Not till the morning after, when it was too late to matter to anybody but poor Gwender." It wasn't the sort of thing that got about beforehand. Why would it? Ladies swap rooms for a chill often enough, and nobody thinks to send word around the village about it. She looked, for a moment, faintly troubled by the direction of her own answer, without quite being able to say why.
You're not thinking what I think you're thinking, are you, Miss Marple?
I try not to think anything at all, Mrs. Colbrook, said Miss Marple placidly, until I have a good deal more to go on than I have at present. which was, she reflected, walking on toward the ferry in with her humbugs and her private, and now very nearly settled conviction, a good deal less than the whole truth, but was all the same not actually a lie, for she had as yet no name to put to the shape that was forming, with such quiet and unwelcome clarity in her own mind.
She had only the circle drawn tight around a single house, and a story of two sisters 30 years gone, and the growing uncomfortable certainty that whoever had climbed to that window on that wild October night had known the house and its habits and its window, a great deal too well to have been a stranger to any of them. Chapter nine. A room remembered wrong. Miss Marple called at Witchmre House the following afternoon with no very definite plan beyond a general and rather uncomfortable sense, that the time for gentle listening was drawing to a close, and that whatever remained to be learned would have to be gathered in rather faster than her usual unhurried methods generally allowed.
She found the house settling in the particular grim practical way houses do settle after a second death has followed too swiftly upon a first into the small necessary business of grief. Blackedged note paper ordered a firm of undertakers spoken with for the second time in a fortnight. Mrs. Nunnily moving from room to room with the fixed mechanical steadiness Miss Marple had come to recognize as her own particular way of enduring what could not otherwise be endured.
The house itself seemed to have grown in the space of two days a good deal larger and a good deal emptier than Miss Marple remembered it. The sort of hollowess that comes over a place once it is lost in swift succession both the woman who ordered its days and the quiet unremarked companion who had for 3 years done a great deal of the actual ordering. Even the stuffed heron under its glass dome glimpsed through the halfopen drawing room door as she passed, seemed to Miss Marple to wear a slightly more fullon expression than usual, though she was perfectly aware, telling herself so rather firmly that this was nothing more than her own low spirits finding somewhere convenient to settle. It was Mrs. Cheryl, who received her in the small morning room, where the household seemed, by common unspoken consent, to have taken to sitting, since the drawing room with its stuffed heron had become, for the present, a room nobody could quite bear to use. She was dressed very correctly in black, which suited her, Miss Marple thought, in the particular way that black so often does suit a woman with fair coloring and a talent for arranging herself well in any circumstance life happens to hand her.
and she greeted Miss Marple with real warmth and rang for tea and talked, as grieving people so often do, a good deal more than the occasion strictly required, as though the talking itself were a kind of necessary labor. I still can't take it in quite, she said, turning her cup round and round without drinking from it. One knows it's happened, of course. one saw it, which is the dreadful part. And yet, one keeps expecting her to come in at that door and ask why nobody's thought to fill the bird bath. It's the strangest thing, grief. It doesn't arrive all at once, the way one imagines it will. It comes in little pieces at the oddest moments.
She looked up with an expression of genuine and touching sadness that Miss Marple, watching her closely, found herself quite unable even now to read with any real certainty as either wholly true or wholly performed, which was, she reflected, precisely the difficulty with a person who did both so very gracefully. I keep thinking of poor Gwender, too, you know, more than I'd have expected, considering it's Aunt Veedan we've just lost. I suppose it's because her death was the first shock, and one's mind goes back to the first shock rather than the second, however dreadful the second was. It is very natural, said Miss Marple gently, to find one's thoughts returning to the beginning of a thing, when the thing itself has grown so very large. Had you known Miss Straoud a long while, 3 years since I came to live here? longer than I'd known Aunt Vaden herself in any real sense, since one doesn't get to know an aunt by marriage terribly well at a wedding and a Christmas or two. Mrs. Cheryl set down her cup at last and looked for a moment genuinely and unguardedly sad in a way that Miss Marple thought was very probably real.
Whatever else about the moment was not.
I keep picturing her that last night, you know, in Auntie Van's room instead of her own. poor thing. On Auntie Van's own side of the bed, too, nearest the window, just as if it were still Auntie Van lying there with that dreadful shawl of hers, half slipping off onto the floor where she'd have kicked it in her sleep, being restless the way she was when she had one of her turns coming on.
I can't think why it should be that particular picture that stays with me out of everything. But it does. One's mind does the strangest things. Miss Marple, who had been holding her teacup very still throughout the whole of this small, sad speech, set it down now with the same careful, unhurried movement she brought to most things, and said, in a voice that gave away nothing whatever of what had just quite suddenly gone very cold and very clear at the center of her own thoughts. How dreadfully vivid you make it, Mrs. Cheryl. One would almost think you had seen it for yourself. Oh, one imagines these things, doesn't one, when a person once's fond of has died in a particular place. I don't know that I could tell you where the picture comes from exactly. Morty mentioned the shawl, I think, and the rest, I suppose, I've simply filled in.
Mrs. Cheryl said this lightly, easily, with no apparent consciousness of having said anything at all remarkable, and reached for another sandwich, and Miss Marple, watching her do it, thought of the small, cold fact sitting now at the very center of her mind, and turned it over with a particular deliberate care she gave to anything she suspected might, in the end, matter a very great deal, for it was not true, and Miss Marple was as nearly certain of this as She permitted herself to be certain of anything not yet directly confirmed, that Morty Nunnelly had ever mentioned which side of the bed poor Gwender had been sleeping on that night, or the particular manner in which the shawl had come to lie where it lay. Mrs. Nonely had spoken that morning in the kitchen of the extra shawl being left out for the chill, a fact known by her own account to Cook and the boot girl herself, spoken of quite openly at supper the night before it happened, but the side of the bed, and the particular fallen, kicked off restless disorder of a woman's last hour of sleep. These were not the sort of details that got into an inquest, or into a housekeeper's account given over a kitchen table, or into the kind of village gossip Mrs. Colbrook had proved, upon direct and careful questioning, entirely unable to supply.
They were, Miss Marple thought, precisely and only the sort of details a person retained who had actually been in that dark room on that wild night, close enough to see them for herself, expecting in the darkness to find one woman, and finding when it was very much too late to matter that she had found quite another instead. she thought, sitting with her hands folded and her face composed into the mild, attentive blankness she had found over a great many years to be the most useful expression a listening woman could wear, of how very small a thing it was, in the end, upon which a whole edifice of grief and charm and easy gliding sympathy had just quietly come apart. Not a confession, not a slip of the tongue in any dramatic sense, nothing that would have struck an inspector's notebook as evidence of anything at all. Only a picture offered too vividly, too exactly by a woman who believed herself safely explaining away her own imagination, and had instead, without the smallest notion of having done so, described a memory rather than invented one. It was, Miss Marple reflected, very much the way these things generally did come apart in her own experience of them, not with a crash, but with one small unguarded sentence, spoken over a teacup by a person who had simply forgotten for one unwary moment to keep watching herself as closely as she watched everybody else. She sat a while longer, talking of nothing in particular, watching Mrs. Cheryl's easy, graceful, entirely convincing grief with an attention that gave nothing whatever of itself away, and left at last with the small, quiet, terrible certainty settled now beyond any further private argument, that she knew, not merely suspected, but knew in the way one knows a thing, once the very last piece of it has slotted, without possibility of further doubt into its place, precisely who had climbed to that window on that first wild October night, and why, and whom she had meant all along to find there. It remained only to be entirely sure of the why. And this, Mr. Gweight, encountered a little later, going into the church on some errand connected with the funeral arrangements, was able, without, in the least realizing the weight of what he supplied, to confirm.
He looked, Miss Marple thought, considerably older than he had appeared even a few days before, the stiffness gone rather out of his collar, and a good deal of the self-importance gone out of his manner along with it, as though the events of the past week had worn away in a very short space of time.
A carropace had taken him 40 years of careful solicitorship to grow. I'll tell you now, Miss Marple, since there's no longer any particular reason for discretion, he said in the stiff, self-important manner she had come to expect of him, though there was this time a genuine gravity underneath it that had not been there before. Mrs. Kovville had instructed me, not 4 days before her death, to have the new will ready for signing within the week.
Everything settled on Mr. Torrance without condition, exactly as we'd have signed that dreadful evening, had matters not gone so disastrously wrong, she was entirely resolved upon it. Had she lived 4 days longer, the whole miserable business of motive and disinheritance that so occupied the inspector's attention would never have existed at all. He shook his head with real and evident sorrow. I've thought a good deal these last two days about the harm my own tongue did in that drawing room, Miss Marple, accusing a man who had in fact nothing whatever left to gain by anybody's death once his aunt had made up her mind as she had. I shall have that to live with whatever else comes of this business." Miss Marple pressed his hand and told him with entire sincerity that grief and shock made poor counselors of the best of men, and that she did not think he ought to reproach himself so very bitterly, and walked on, when he had gone into the church, with the last piece of the pattern, now settled firmly alongside all the others, a fortune about to close its door forever, within a matter of days upon the one person in that house, who had never had any real claim to it at all, and had watched it slipping finally, irrevocably, out of reach.
She found Mrs. Nunnley in the hall folding linen with the same mechanical steadiness as before, and asked her gently whether it might be possible to gather the household together the following evening. Mrs. Cheryl, Mr. Torrance, and Miss Harker, Mr. Gweight and Inspector Renet, too, if he could be persuaded to come, on the pretext, if pretext were needed, of settling what remained to be settled about the will and the sad, unfinished business of the funeral. "I don't rightly know what you're planning, Miss Marple," said Mrs. Nunnley, looking at her with something of the old, frightened uncertainty of her very first letter. "But I'll see it done if you tell me it's needed." I believe it is needed, said Miss Marple very quietly, looking out through the hall window toward the garden and the terrace and the window above it, standing open still from long habit to the cold October air.
I believe, Mrs. Nunley, that it is very much needed indeed, and that it had better be done tomorrow before anyone else in this house is caused to be afraid of anything at all. Chapter 10.
The tide turns at Witchmre House.
They gathered in the drawing room, after all, beneath the stuffed heron under its tired glass dome, which nobody had had the heart to move, and which seemed this last time to preside over the room with a dignity its rather moth eaten condition scarcely warranted. Denby Torrance had come back from Frammlingham that afternoon, released and thoroughly cleared and looking, Miss Marple thought, 10 years older than he had a fortnight before, and had gone straight to Bridey Harker's shop before ever coming near the house, so that the two of them arrived together and sat together in the particular close, unspeaking way of people who have very lately understood how nearly they came to losing everything. Mr. Gweight came in his good black coat, as though the occasion required it, which perhaps it did, and took up a position near the fireplace with the stiff discomfort of a man who suspected, without yet knowing quite why, that he was about to hear something he would very much rather not.
Inspector Renit came last of all, and stood rather than sat near the door, with the careful, unhurried attentiveness of a man who had learned over the past few days not to be quite so certain of his own conclusions as he had once been, and who had come, this time prepared to listen rather than to pronounce. Mrs. Cheryl was the last to take her seat in the window seat she'd made so entirely her own on Miss Marple's very first visit to this room, dressed with her usual careful correctness, and remarked, settling herself, that she couldn't imagine what there was left to discuss. Poor Aunt Vaden's affairs being very largely settled already, but that she supposed Mr. Gweight knew best about these things. It is not, I am afraid, entirely about Mrs. Kovville's affairs," said Miss Marple, from the small upright chair she had chosen for herself near the cold great, and something in the mildness of her voice set against the plainness of what she had just said, brought a stillness over the room that no louder announcement could have achieved half so completely.
It concerns, I am sorry to say, how she came to die at all, and how poor Miss Straoud came to die before her, in a manner that has troubled me from the very first morning I stood upon that terrace and looked at what had happened.
She let this settle for a moment, in the unhurried way she generally allowed her own remarks to settle, and then went on in the same gentle, almost apologetic tone she might have used to describe a minor difficulty with her knitting. I want to tell you about two sisters I knew many years ago in my own village, she said, cuz I believe it is really the whole key to the matter, however little it may seem at first, to have anything to do with Witchmre House. They lived together, these two sisters, in a small cottage, and had grown over many years of sharing a life in a bedroom, so alike in habit and figure that a caller unfamiliar with the household might easily mistake one for the other in poor light. and a young man who believed himself wronged by the elder of them once did exactly that, meaning her a very great fright indeed, and very nearly did the younger, entirely innocent sister a serious harm instead, simply because he knew the room and the bed and the general shape of the woman he expected to find there, and did not trouble, in his hurry and his temper, to make quite certain which sister was actually sleeping in it that particular night. She paused. It taught me that old story. Something I have found true a great many times since. A person acting in the dark in haste and in fear for their own future sees what they expect to see and rarely troubles to look twice.
I don't quite see, began Mrs. Cheryl with a small uncertain laugh. What any of this? I believe, said Miss Marple still very gently, that whoever climbed to Mrs. Cville's window on that first wild October night did not mean to kill Gwender Straoud at all. I believe they meant to kill Mrs. Kolville in her own bed on her own side of the room nearest the window she always insisted upon leaving open and did not know because it had been arranged only over supper that same evening and mentioned to nobody outside these walls that the two ladies had exchanged rooms for the night. And I believe that whoever it was discovered their mistake only afterward, if indeed they discovered it at all that night, and having gone so far, and having so very pressing a reason for wanting Mrs. Kovville dead, tried again successfully this time a fortnight later.
The room had gone entirely silent. Denby Torrance had gone very white. Bridey Harker's hand had found his and gripped it hard. Mr. Gweight sat rigid in his chair with the particular stunned stillness of a man watching a structure he had helped however unwittingly to build come down before his eyes.
The reason, Miss Marple went on, was money and time in equal measure, a fortune about to close its door forever within a matter of days against a person who had lived a good many years in this house on hope of it, and whose debts, I think, had grown rather more pressing than anyone in this room quite realized.
Mr. Gweight can confirm, I believe, that Mrs. Kville had instructed him to prepare a new will, settling everything without condition upon Mr. Torrance within the very week that Gwender Straoud died. A will that would have left one particular member of this household with nothing at all beyond the small annuity she already had and no further hope ever of anything more. You cannot possibly mean Mrs. Cheryl was on her feet now, the easy warmth quite gone out of her voice, replaced by something a good deal harder and considerably less charming. "This is monstrous. I have debts. Yes, everybody has debts. It means nothing whatever. It would mean very little on its own," Miss Marple agreed placidly. "A great many people have debts and love a house they will never own, and feel from time to time that life has been less generous to them than it ought to have been." None of that would signify in the least, Mrs. Cheryl, were it not for one further thing, which I confess I did not expect to hear, and which I have turned over a great many times since, hoping very much to find some innocent explanation for it, that I have not, I am sorry to say, been able to find.
She looked up, and her mild blue eyes, for once, didn't look mild at all. You told me quite unprompted the exact side of the bed on which poor Gwender was lying that night and the particular manner in which her shawl had slipped from her shoulders onto the floor. Mrs. Nunnelly never told you that because Mrs. Nunnley never noticed it in her own shock sufficiently to describe it to anyone. It was never mentioned at the inquest. It was never, so far as I have been able to discover, mentioned by a single living soul within this house or without it, except by you over a teacup, quite as though you had seen it with your own eyes."
She paused very gently. "How did you come to know it, Mrs. Cheryl, if you were not that night in that room?"
For a long moment, nobody in the drawing room moved at all. Mrs. Cheryl stood quite still by the window seat, the last of her color draining slowly from her face, and when she spoke at last it was in a voice entirely stripped of its accustomed warmth, flat and tired and very young all at once, in a way that made her seem, for the first time since Miss Marple had known her, exactly what she was, a frightened woman who had run out finally and completely of anywhere further to run.
I never meant it to be Gwender, she said. I want that understood. Whatever else you think of me, I climbed up the way I'd worked out weeks before, quiet as anything, meaning only Auntie Vadne, who'd had every year of her life, and never once thought what it might be like to watch it all slip away from someone else, through no fault of their own. And it was dark, and I never doubted for a moment. Not until I was all ready. She stopped and pressed her hand hard against her mouth in the old familiar gesture, though there was nothing left now of the performance it had once seemed to be. I told myself afterward it changed nothing, that Aunt Vaden would sign the new will within days regardless, and I couldn't. I simply couldn't let it happen. Not when I'd already she did not finish that sentence either, and did not, in the silence that followed, need to. Inspector Renet came forward from the doorway quietly and said what had to be said in the plain, unadorned words the occasion required, and Manne Cheryl went with him without any further protest at all, her composure gone entirely now, not in tears exactly, but in the flat, exhausted stillness of a woman who had spent a very great deal of energy, for a very long time, holding up a performance that had finally irrevocably come down.
Nobody in the drawing room said very much for some while after the sound of the car had faded from the drive. Bridey Harker sat with her head against Denby's shoulder and did not this time try to keep her eyes dry. Mr. Gweight poured himself a small brandy with a hand that was not quite steady and offered nothing further by way of apology. This time because there was nothing further, Miss Marple thought, that needed to be said.
She herself went out after a little while onto the terrace where it had all begun, and stood looking down at the flag stones, quite empty now, and at the dark water of the estie beyond the garden, where the tide was coming in fast over the mud flats in the last gray light, exactly as it had come in and gone out twice a day, for a great many years before any of this had happened, and would go on doing twice a day, for a great many years, after everyone now living in this house had been forgotten by it entirely.
Mrs. Nunnley came out and stood beside her, wrapping her cardigan closer against the cold, and said, after a while, in a small, unsteady voice, that she suppose she ought to thank her, though she hardly knew how to put it properly into words. "You needn't thank me at all," said Miss Marle gently. "You wrote a very sensible letter, Mrs. Nunnley, to a person you thought might understand, and you were quite right to write it. That is all that happened really when one comes down to it. A frightened woman trusted her own instincts instead of being talked out of them. And this time at least they turned out to have been the right ones all along. Above them on the upper floor someone, Mr. Gweight perhaps, or one of the maids, going about the small necessary business of a house beginning, very slowly to put itself back together, reached up and drew Mrs. Kovville's bedroom window firmly shut and fastened the latch. And Miss Marple, watching the last of the daylight go out over the marsh, thought that it was, on the whole rather a good thing, and stood a while longer in the cold, listening to the tide come in.
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