A sophisticated tribute that reminds us the most profound truths are often hidden in the mundane details ignored by the arrogant. It proves that true intellectual power lies not in grand gestures, but in the patient, methodical deconstruction of human nature.
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The Quiet Lady Nobody Suspected | A Miss Marple Mystery
Added:Miss Marple and the quiet lady nobody suspected. Hello friends, I'm Edward, your host for this evening. Welcome back to Warm Pages. Before we settle into tonight's story, I'd love to hear what's the weather like in your part of the world today. Tell me in the comments. I read everyone. Now make yourself comfortable and let us begin. Chapter 1.
The line was down at Truiskick. It had been, Miss Marple reflected, a perfectly ordinary sort of journey until the rain began, and then it had become, with a swiftness peculiar to the Cornish coast, a good deal less ordinary than that. She had left St. Mary me intolerable sunshine changed twice without incident and was congratulating herself on a comfortable window seat and a thermos of tea that had not yet gone cold when the train drew to a halt some miles short of truisk and showed no further inclination to proceed.
Word came down the carriages passed from person to person in the manner of all bad news that the embankment beyond the halt had given way in the night. The line was underwater and would very likely remain so for some days.
Equinoxial gales, said the gentleman opposite her, with the satisfaction of a man imparting information he has long been eager to share. You may set your watch by them down here, ma'am. Always the same time of year, and always somebody's harvest or somebody's seaw wall pays the price.
He was a solid, unhurried sort of man with the neat black bag and the slightly worn decency of country solicitors the world over and he introduced himself once the guard had confirmed the worst as Mr. Oel Basano of Basano and Trathan solicitors of Truro. I'm bound for Pentreth Court myself, he said on a matter of business that won't wait for the weather. Mors the pity and you I collect were going further on.
Miss Marple admitted that she had been going to visit an old friend and Mrs. Car Withen at a small hotel beyond Padto, but that under the circumstances she rather thought Mrs. Carw Witheran would have to wait. The in at Trrowissic will be full to the rafters tonight, said Mr. Basano with the gloomy relish of a man who has seen this happen before. Every soul off this train and the branch line besides will be trying to get a bed there, and there are only the four rooms, and old Mrs. Pendine has never in her life turned away a paying guest to make room for a better one. No, if you'll permit me, Mom, I think we had much better go on to Pentre Court together. They will not turn away a stranded traveler, whatever else may be said of that family. And it is, if I may say so, rather more comfortable than you would credit from the outside.
There was, Miss Marple thought, something faintly odd in the way he said whatever else may be said of that family, said lightly, and then, as it were, tucked away again very quickly, as a woman tucks away a letter she had not meant to be seen reading. But she was a great believer in accepting kindness where it was offered, particularly when the alternative was a flooded railway carriage and a thermos with by now very little tea left in it. And so it was that a hired motor deposited them well after dark and in a rain that had settled into a steady, purposeful downpour at the door of Pentreth Court.
It was a lowg gray house built long and comfortably against the weather rather than for any beauty of proportion with a good deal of ivy and one lit window that seemed in all that wet dark remarkably welcoming. The door was opened not by a man's servant but by the master of the house himself, a circumstance which Mr. Basano appeared to find entirely unremarkable, and which told Miss Marple a good deal in a small way before a word had been spoken. But Sananko, thank heaven we'd given you up for lost in the flood, and Moana wouldn't have her dinner till you came. He was a man of perhaps five and 30, with a pleasant, rather anxious face, and the sort of apologetic stoop some tall men develop from a lifetime of ducking through doorways not built to receive them. And I beg your pardon, I had no idea you were bringing a friend, Miss Marple, said Mr. Baseno stranded like the rest of us. I told her you would not turn a Christian soul out into this. Good Lord know. Come in. Come in both of you.
You're wet through. He drew them into a hall smelling agreeably of woodsm smoke and beeswax. Hung about with the sort of dark respectable portraits that come with a house rather than with any particular family and called in the tone of a man perpetually a little surprised by his own household. More winner. We've got Basano after all, and a guest besides.
A dog of uncertain ancestry got up from the hearthrug, sniffed at Miss Marple's wet umbrella with polite disapproval, and lay down again. Somewhere above a door opened and closed, and there came the sound of feet on the stairs, quick, light feet, and then a moment after a second tread, softer and slower, that did not announce itself at all. He was.
It transpired over the business of coats and a tray of hot soup sent for at once.
Mr. Piran Pentreth, master of Pentreth Court these 8 years past, and if there was anything in his manner that did not quite match the comfortable weight of that title. Miss Marple could not that first evening have said precisely what it was. He apologized twice for the state of the hall carpet, twice for the lateness of dinner, and once, quite unnecessarily, for the weather itself, as though Cormal's autumn gales were a personal failing he had not yet succeeded in correcting. Miss Pentreth Morena, a bright dark-haired girl with her fiance's name spoken rather more often than strict economy of conversation required, came down to greet them with real warmth, and pressed Sherry on Miss Marple before the soup, and seemed altogether the sort of sensible, good-natured young woman one is glad to see well settled.
There was also moving about the edges of the hall with the particular quietness of a person who has learned not to be in anyone's way, a thin young woman in gray who saw to the guest rooms and said very little, and was introduced almost as an afterthought as my cousin Miss Kestl.
Demeltsa does keep us all in order, really, whatever more winner may tell you to the contrary, at which Miss Kestl colored very slightly, and murmured something about hot bottles for the beds, and went away up the stairs. Miss Marple, who noticed such things as a matter of long habit rather than any conscious design, thought that Miss Kestle had the look of a woman who had grown accustomed a good while ago to being the afterthought in any introduction, and had made her peace with it, or told herself she had. Dinner when it came was a good plain dinner, the sort no sensible household is ashamed of, and the talk over it turned, as talk in old houses so often will on a wild night, to the house itself and its history, encouraged perhaps by the wind now flinging itself at the windows with considerable enthusiasm.
You'll have heard nothing of us, of course, Miss Marple, coming from foreign parts as you do, said Pyan Pentreth, with the small self-deprecating smile of a man who considers Radfordshire a very great distance indeed.
We're not much of a family for excitement as a rule, except that we had rather more of it than we wanted 15 years back.
My cousin Barnabas, Morwenner explained when Miss Marlep looked politely inquiring. Pyan's cousin, I should say, poor Barnabas, who ought to have had all this. A small gesture that took in the room, the house, the whole comfortable weight of Pentreth Court. If he hadn't gone out in the boat one October evening, and never come back, they never even found. She stopped, glancing at Pyan, and finished more quietly. It was a very great sorrow to the family.
Drowned in the cove, said Piran, turning his wine glass slowly by the stem. The sea takes what it wants down here and gives precious little back. I came out from Rhdesia not 2 years after when the lawyers had done all that had to be done about it. A very distant cousin, you understand, Miss Marple. I'd scarcely so much as corresponded with Barnabas in my life, and never thought to find myself master of the place. It seemed a very great impertinence at first, stepping into a dead man's shoes. I dare say it still does on a night like this one.
You've made an excellent thing of it all the same, said Mr. Boseno comfortably.
Whatever the entail may have thought about the manner of your coming to it.
The entail, said Pyan, with a small laugh that did not entirely reach his eyes. Thought a great deal, and said nothing at all, which is generally the way of entails. It took the lawyers the better part of two years to be satisfied Barnabas was truly gone before they would let the place pass to me. And I am bound to say I never grudged them the caution. One does not care to step too quickly into a drowned man's inheritance.
No indeed, said Miss Marple comfortably, accepting a little more of the excellent Stilton, I have always thought the law very right to be careful in such matters. It must have been a most anxious time for you all, not knowing one way or the other. It was worse for those of us who remembered him, said Moanaly, and for a moment the bright, sensible face looked almost young enough to have been a child of 10 when it happened, which Miss Marple presently worked out from the talk that followed she very nearly had been. Mrs. Chennowith coming in just then to see to the fire allowed herself the small privilege of an old servant and observed that there had never in her time been a finer young gentleman than Mr. Barnabas nor a sadder business than the losing of him a remark to which nobody at the table made any reply at all and the talk moved on as talk does to the state of the roads and the likelihood of the line being cleared by Thursday. It was over the cheese that Piran Pentreth said, in the manner of a man remarking on nothing whatever that he always saw to the boat house himself before turning in of a wild night. Set the clock right by the tide. You know, it's the one thing in this house I trust nobody else to do properly. a small dull domestic fact that Miss Marple filed away with no more particular attention than she gave to the pattern of the tablecloth, and which meant on that first evening precisely nothing at all.
The party had scarcely risen from the table, when there came the sound, faint under the wind, of a motor laboring up the drive, and a little later Mrs. Chennowith the housekeeper, a broad, comfortable woman with the settled authority of one who has run a house a good deal longer than its master has owned it, came in with the evening post, which the carrier had fought the flood to bring, being, as she said, not the sort to let a bit of weather beat him, whatever else may be said of the roads tonight. There was little enough of it.
A bill, a circular from a seedsman, a letter for Mr. Basano in a clark's careful hand and one letter more which Mrs. Chennowith sat down last and looked at rather longer than the others before she brought it in. A plain envelope the direction written in an unfamiliar hand addressed simply to the master of Pentreth Court.
Pier and Pentrath took it up without particular thought, broke the seal and read, and Miss Marple, watching him with the mild, unfocused attention, she generally gave to nothing in particular, saw the color go out of his face as completely as if someone had drawn a blind down over a lit window. He did not speak at once. When he did, his voice was perfectly level, which was in its way the most alarming thing about it.
It's signed, he said. Beep entreath.
The fire settled in the grate with a small, comfortable sound, entirely out of keeping with the silence that had come down over the rest of the room.
Chapter 2. A letter nobody expected.
Nobody at Pentreth Court slept a great deal that night, though nobody said so in the morning. And Miss Marple, waking early from long habit and looking out at a sky still busy tearing itself to rags over the sea, thought that a house could keep its secrets very well indeed, provided everyone in it agreed to be perfectly ordinary at breakfast. They very nearly managed it. There was porridge, and there was a good deal of talk about the weather, and Mr. Basano read aloud with evident relish a paragraph from a 3-day old newspaper concerning a prize marrow.
Morwenna poured the coffee with rather more concentration than the task demanded, and inquired twice whether the bacon was to everyone's liking, though nobody had said a word against it. And it was not until the second pot of coffee, that Piran Pentreth, buttering a piece of toast with more attention than the operation strictly required, said, in a voice pitched to sound very much lighter than it was. I don't mind telling you all. I had a very poor night of it over that wretched letter. You're not to let it worry you, Pyan, said Moana quickly. It's a shameful trick, whoever's behind it, and nothing more.
That's my own opinion, for what it's worth, said Pyan, with the air of a man repeating something he had told himself several times already, and was not yet wholly persuaded by. There have always been rogues glad enough to trade on a family sorrow, and ours has had 15 years to get about the county. Some fellow reads an old newspaper account, learns a name and a date, and fancies he can frighten a comfortable man into paying to be rid of him. I dare say we shall hear a great deal more about it in the way such fellows generally proceed. A little note now, a demand to follow.
You'll not answer it, I hope, said Boseno, setting down his cup. I have half a mind not to answer anything at all, and let him come or not as he pleases. Piran laughed, not very successfully. It's easily done after all. Anyone might learn that Barnabas went out in a boat one October evening and never came home. The county paper made quite a thing of it at the time. Do you remember more WA? All that was wanted was the nerve to sign a name to a sheet of paper and see what came of it.
Miss Marple, who had said very little and eaten a good deal of porridge, remarked mildly that it must all the same be a most uncomfortable thing to receive. a letter signed with the name of someone one had believed dead these many years.
For however certain one is that it can't possibly be true, my dear Mr. Pentreth, there is always, I think, one small unreasonable corner of the mind that goes on wondering quite against one's better judgment.
A piece of plain good sense which nobody at the table cared to contradict, and which was followed, for a moment by rather more silence than the remark seemed to call for.
It was Mrs. Chennowith coming in to clear the porridge plates who broke it in the comfortable unhurried way of a woman who has decided a thing needs saying and means to say it whether it is wanted or not. There are some in the village will tell you it's no trick at all sir if you'll pardon my mentioning it. There's some as never did believe Mr. Barnabas was drowned proper. Not with the body never found, not after all this while. Old Jago Carrick was saying as much only Tuesday over the fish. Jgo Carrick, said Pyan, with the faint, weary patience of a man naming an old grievance. Has never had a good word to say of this family since my cousin's father declined to settle his account for a boat that was returned to him with half its planking stove in. I shouldn't set a great deal by anything, Jgo Carrick cares to say over the fish, Mrs. Chennowith, and neither I think should you. No, sir, said Mrs. Chennowith in the tone of a woman entirely unconvinced, and went out with the plates. She was as good, however, as her word in the way of village housekeepers the world over, for it was JGO Carrick himself, a big weathercoled man with the rolling gate of one more used to a deck than a drive, who brought the fish to the kitchen door that very fornon, and who was persuaded by Mrs. Chennowith's arrangement and Miss Marple's own idle stroll toward the kitchen garden at exactly the useful moment to stand talking a good while by the wall, his basket over his arm, and his opinions entirely his own.
He touched his cap to her civily enough, and remarked that it was a poor sort of morning for a lady to be out walking, and that the garden wall she leaned against wanted pointing before another winter was out, the mortar being gone soft as cheese in places. Observations offered, Miss Marple felt certain, chiefly to establish that he was a man who noticed things, and was not to be thought a fool by anybody, gentry included.
Drowned. Was he? said Jgo Carrick with a short unpleasant laugh when Miss Marple, who had a great gift for seeming to know nothing at all, and for being told a great deal in consequence, professed herself much struck by the sad story she had heard the night before. That's as may be, Mom, I'll say this much. The sea round Pentreth Cove is a queer deceiving thing, and I fished it 40 year and more, and I never yet knew it give a body back so tidy as not to leave so much as a shoe on the rocks. Nor," he added, with evident satisfaction in the grievance.
"Did I ever get so much as a civil word out of that family for the boat they ruined for me the very week before young Mr. Barnabas went out and didn't come back?" I'm not one to say more than I know, Mom, but I've thought a good many things these 15 years, and kept most of them to myself, which is more than some in this house of trouble to do. He would say no more directly, being a man who preferred his grievances general to particular, but the shape of it, an old debt unpaid, a bitterness 15 years in the keeping, a boat gone out on the very tide that took Barnabas Pentreth, was plain enough for Miss Marple to carry back into the house with her, turning it over with the same unhurried attention she generally gave to a dropped stitch.
It was in the hall, coming in out of the wind, that she encountered Miss Kestl, Demellsa, as the household called her, though Miss Marple had not yet been given leave to do so herself, occupied in the entirely unremarkable business of arranging chrosanthemums in a tall jug, and looking, as she had looked the evening before, like a young woman who took up very little room in the world by design rather than by nature. A sad old story for a stranger to hear on her first evening. Miss Marple observed, pausing by the flowers with a comfortable air of one making conversation about nothing in particular. Mr. Barnabas, I mean, it must have been a dreadful thing for you all, and you so young yourself, I dare say, when it happened.
For the smallest fraction of a moment, so brief that a less patient observer might very easily have missed it altogether, Miss Kestl's hands, busy among the chrysanthemums, were perfectly still. Then they moved again, and she said in a voice a shade too even to be entirely careless, that yes, it had been a dreadful thing, and that Mr. Barnabas had been very wellliked and that the flowers, she thought, wanted a little more green in them, and went away up the stairs with the jug. Walking, Miss Marple could not help noticing rather more quickly than the errand required.
It was, of course, nothing at all. A girl remembering an old grief is only being properly sensible of it. and grief," Miss Marple reflected, settling herself by the drawing room fire with her knitting and watching the rain still streaming down the long windows, wears a great many faces, and stillness is very often simply one of them. She had known any number of girls in Saint Mary me, who went white and still at the mention of some old sorrow, and had thought no worse of them for it. Nancy Trotter, for one, who could not hear her drowned brother's name without setting down whatever was in her hand. And there was no earthly reason Miss Kestle should not be exactly such another, and nothing more sinister in it than that. She said as much to herself quite firmly, and went on counting her stitches, and if some small persistent corner of her mind continued to turn the matter over, in the unreasonable way such corners have, she was much too well bred to let it show in her face.
The wind had not lessened by the time Mr. Boseno came to find her before lunchon, looking for a solicitor, rather more trouble than the weather alone accounted for. "A queer business, this letter," he said, drawing a chair close to the fire. "I've known this family 30 years, Miss Marple, in a manner of speaking. My father did their business before me, and I never knew Piran Pentreth anything but a steady, careful sort of man. It's not like him to be so shaken by what's very probably nothing at all. No, said Miss Marple, turning her knitting. I don't suppose it is, though I have generally found, Mr. Baseno, that when a steady, careful man is very much shaken by something he insists is nothing at all, it is worth asking oneself which of the two things he has got wrong." Mr. Baseno looked at her for a moment, as though this observation had not been quite what he expected from an elderly lady with a ball of gray wool, and said only that he hoped, for everybody's sake, the fellow, whoever he was, would think better of coming any nearer than his letter, and that the line would very likely be clear again by the end of the week in any case, so that they need none of them trouble themselves about it very much longer."
He glanced toward the window as he said it, where the rain still ran in sheets down the glass, and added rather more to himself than to her, that he had drawn up a good many wills in his time, and buried a good many clients, and had never once known a dead man troubled to write for his own inheritance, which was, he supposed, one comfort to be got out of the whole wretched business, though it did not seem to comfort him a great deal as he said it. Miss Marple said that she was sure he was quite right and went on knitting. And outside the wind, which had been rising steadily all the fortune, flung a fresh burst of rain against the glass with a sound very like a fist upon a door. Chapter 3. The sea gives back what it took. He came in the end on foot, and in the worst of the weather, so that the first anyone at Pentreth Court knew of his arrival, was a hammering at the side door that brought Mrs. Chinoith out of the kitchen, wiping her hands on her apron, and demanding to know what soul would be abroad on such a night. Miss Marple, who was in the hall at the time helping Moana, sort a tangle of silks that had got itself into a very thorough muddle, heard the housekeeper's voice change, heard it drop quite suddenly from ordinary irritation into something else altogether, and looked up to see Mrs. Chennowith standing quite still in the doorway with a candle shaking a little in her hand, staring at the man who stood dripping on the step. He was tall and gaunt in the way of a man who has not always had enough to eat, with a weathered, sund darkened face that did not belong somehow to an English autumn, and gray come early into hair that had once, one might guess, been dark. He wore no coat to speak of against the rain, only a rough seaman's jacket, and he stood in the doorway as though uncertain whether he had any right to be let in at all. "I'm sorry for the hour," he said. I wrote ahead. I hardly thought that is, I didn't know how else a man was to come home. It was Dla Kestl coming down the stairs with a lamp for the hall table, who saw him first from any distance, and who stopped upon the third step from the bottom as though she had walked into a wall of glass. She did not scream or faint or do any of the things a lesser writer of village gossip might have had her do. She only stood quite white with the lamp held very steadily in both hands and said in a voice that seemed to come from a long way off, "Barnabus."
"Well," he said, and there was something in the single word, some old private inflection, that Miss Marple, watching without appearing to watch, thought told its own story better than any amount of family resemblance could have done.
"Well, de, I hoped you at least would know me." Of course I know you," said Demells a castle, and set the lamp down very carefully on the hall table, as a woman sets down something she does not entirely trust her hands with, and said nothing more at all. It was left to Mwena to give a small cry that was half a laugh and half something a good deal nearer tears, and to Mrs. Chennowith to say, "Well, I never did, not in all my born days." Several times over, before Piran Pentreth came out from the library, where he had been at his letters, and stopped dead in the hall doorway with an expression on his face that Miss Marple found on reflection, a good deal harder to read than anyone else's. "Bnabas," he said, and it was not a question, though a stranger might almost have taken it for one. "Byron!
The newcomer put out a hand roughened and scarred in a way that spoke of years of work Miss Marple did not care to guess at. I'd have written more than the one letter, only I couldn't be sure it would find you, or that you'd believe it if it did. I hardly believe it myself coming up the drive tonight and seeing the old place lit up just as it always was.
You have a scar there still, said to Melza, suddenly, nodding at his left hand, where the lamplight caught an old white seam across the knuckles. From the orchard wall, the summer you were 14. I bandaged it myself, and told you not to tell your mother how you came by it. And never have, said Barnabas, and for the first time something like a smile came and went on the gauntweathered face.
Cook always said I'd broken my wrist, as well as skinned my hand, though I never did more than wrench it.
It was a small enough exchange, but it went through the hall like a current, and Miss Marple, folding her silks with every appearance of complete absorption in the task, thought that here at last was a piece of evidence no lawyers document, and no confidence. Trickster's cunning could have supplied. The plain, unforced recognition of two people who had known each other well a long time ago, and had not forgotten. Piran Pentreth was the last to move, and when he did, it was with the air of a man recollecting his manners after a blow.
"Forgive me," he said. "It's not every day a man's cousin comes back from the dead, coming by the fire, for heaven's sake, your wet through, Mrs. Chennowith, whatever can be found at short notice."
And then, turning to Barnabas with a smile that did not, Miss Marple privately thought, sit quite easily on his face. There'll be a great deal to talk over, you and I, before we trouble the ladies with it. Come into the library a moment before dinner. There are matters a man had better settle quietly between the two of us before the whole house is asking questions.
Barnabas Pentre said that he suppose there were, and went with him, and the library door closed upon the two of them for the better part of 20 minutes, while Moana sent to have a roommade ready, and Mrs. Chennowith bustle between kitchen and hall in a state of high disorganized joy and DLestl stood by the cold hearth in the drawing room quite alone until Miss Marple came in with her knitting and asked in the mildest voice imaginable whether she ought to sit down my dear for she had gone rather pale "It's the shock I expect," said Demelza, sitting because she was told to in the way of a woman a good deal more used to doing as she was bid than to being asked.
One doesn't look for the dead to come walking up the drive of a wet evening. I don't suppose one ever quite gets over the surprise of it, however glad one is.
No, said Miss Marple, counting her stitches. I don't suppose one does.
Dinner, when it came was a strange, bright, over loud affair. The whole house keyed up to a pitch of feeling that expressed itself in a great deal of talk and not very much eating. Piran was, if anything, the most talkative of the party, filling glasses and proposing that they drink to Barnabas's health, and his own very great thankfulness, in a manner Miss Marple found almost too hearty to be entirely comfortable, as a coat is sometimes too well brushed to look as though it were worn everyday.
Barnabas himself said little of where he had been these 15 years, only that it was a long story, and not, he thought, one for a first evening home. and ate.
Miss Marple noticed, like a man not perfectly easy with a full table set before him. It was Mr. Basano, practical to the last, who observed that there would be a very great deal of business to settle in the morning, the entail, the estate, matters no one cared to name outright at a dinner table, but which sat there all the same, as real as the candlesticks. and Pyan agreed rather too readily that indeed there would and that they had better all get an early night of it. The morning would want clear heads. Miss Marple, who had been placed by the accident of hospitality, rather near the head of the table, thought it interesting that a man restored so miraculously to his own house, should sit so quietly through such talk, saying nothing of what he meant to claim or when, as though the matter of the entail were a good deal less pressing to him than the matter of simply being believed. Barnabas rose from the table sooner than the rest, pleading the long day's walking, and said at the door that he thought he would step down and look at the cove before he turned in, "I have a fancy to see it again in the dark with the tide coming. It's a fool's notion, I dare say, but I've thought of the water a good many nights these 15 years, and I find I want to look at it before I sleep under this roof again."
You'll take a coat at least, said Moana, half laughing, half anxious, and fetched him one from the hall. His own, as it happened, an old oil skin that had hung there. Nobody quite liked to say since before he was lost, kept perhaps by some sentiment nobody had troubled to examine too closely, and he went out into the wind and the dark with a lantern, and that, until the morning, was the last that any of the household saw of him.
Miss Marple slept badly, which she was inclined to put down to the strangeness of the house and the extraordinary events of the evening, rather than to anything more particular, and came down rather earlier than her habit to find the hall already full of a different, quieter sort of commotion than the night befores. Mrs. Chennowith with her apron twisted in her hands. Moana white and silent by the drawing room door and Piran Pentreth standing at the foot of the stairs giving low careful instructions to a groom about fetching the doctor in the voice of a man holding himself very carefully together. It was young Love Day Rouse, the housemaid, redeyed and clutching a duster she had entirely forgotten she was holding, who told it first and told it worst, in the manner of servants everywhere who find themselves for once at the very center of a drama rather than at its edges. I saw him go down, madam, indeed I did, after dinner was cleared. I was doing the blinds in the blue room and I saw him quite plain in his own coat and hat going down the cove path with the lantern. Must have been gone half 9 by then, for I heard the whole clock not 5 minutes before, and I thought nothing of it, madam, only that it was a wild night for a walk and no business of mine to say so. He had been found it transpired within the hour at the water's edge below the boat house. The lantern smashed on the rocks nearby, and the small boat that was kept there lying half swamped against the jetty, and there was no need for anyone to say in so many words what everybody in the house had understood within moments of Pyan's white face at the foot of the stairs, though it was Dr. Truartha, arriving within the half hour on a borrowed horse, wet through and grave, who said it plainly enough once he had made his examination.
Moana had wanted to go down to the cove herself the moment the alarm was raised and had been gently but firmly prevented by Mrs. Chennowith, who observed with a sturdy tactlessness of long affection, that it was no sight for a young lady, whatever else it might be. And so it was left to the groom and to Piran himself to go down over the wet rocks in the gray early light, and to come back up a good while later, looking, both of them considerably older than they had gone down. drowned," he said, straightening up on the rocks with a particular economy of a man long used to giving bad news. "There's no doubt of that, I'm afraid, whether he slipped in the dark, or the boat came a drift, and he went in after it, that I can't tell you yet, and perhaps never shall in weather such as we had last night," he glanced up at the house, gray and dripping above them, and added more to himself than to anyone, "A cruel enough thing, whichever way it happened. The sea seems to have had a mind to finish this time what it began 15 years ago. Miss Marple, standing a little apart with her shawl drawn close against the wind, said nothing at all.
But she was thinking, with a small, persistent unease she could not yet have put a name to, of a hall clock striking half 9, and of a coat that had hung unworn in that same hall for 15 years until the night before last. Chapter 4.
The police call it an accident.
Inspector Paul Glaze arrived at Pentreth Court a little before noon in a wet Macintosh and a temper he was at some pains to keep to himself, having been obliged to leave his own breakfast halfeaten and come the long way round by the truis road. The coast path being, in his own phrase, no fit going for a Christian, let alone a police motor. He was a big deliberate man with the sort of unhurried Cornish civility that could, Miss Marple suspected, turn very hard indeed if it were crossed, and he had about him the settled, unromantic manner of a man who has seen a good many bodies come out of that particular stretch of water over the years, and does not expect this one to prove very different from the rest.
A bad business, he said, standing at the edge of the drawing room carpet, as though unwilling to bring the wet, Cornish morning any further into the house than he could help. And a sad one, whatever the rights of it turn out to be. I'll want a word with everyone in the house in due course. But there's no call to make more of a misery of the day than it's already made of itself. Dr. Trartha has given me his first view of the matter, and I don't mind saying it's very much the view I'd have come to myself, walking down to that cove on a night such as we had. And what view is that, Inspector? asked Mr. Bano, who had constituted himself in a quiet solicitor's way. Spokesman for the household. Why, that it's a plain enough tragedy, sir, and nonetheless a tragedy for being one nobody could have prevented. A man comes home after 15 years in foreign parts, his head full of the old place and the old grief, and must knees go down in the dark in a gale to look at the very cove that near enough killed him once before. The paths greasy as glass in that weather, the rocks worse, and the tide was making fast that hour of the night. It would want no more than a single wrong step, and I've known better men than a returned wanderer come to grief on that path in daylight, let alone dark and drink taken. "There was no drink taken," said Morwenna quickly, "and colored a little at her own quickness. Barnabas had one glass of wine at dinner, Inspector, and no more. I poured it myself."
Mr. Baseno, standing a little apart by the window with a particular stillness of a professional man not yet called upon to speak, cleared his throat at this, and observed mildly that he could confirm as much himself, having sat directly across the table, and had rather more occasion than most to notice such things, it being his own habit in his profession to notice. I don't doubt it, miss, said Inspector Paul Glaze, with the comfortable patience of a man who has learned not to argue with grieving young ladies over small points.
A man needn't be the worst for drink to lose his footing on a night like that one. I've turned my own ankle on drier ground than Petri Cove and Stone Sober, too. It's a wicked stretch of coast, and always was, long before this family had any particular reason to think so. He went on in this vein to outline what he called, with the satisfaction of a tidy man laying out a tidy explanation the shape of the thing that Barnabas Pentreth, restored so strangely to a house and a life 15 years lost to him, had gone down to the cove alone, as the housemaid's account made plain enough, sometime after 9, that the boat kept in the boat house had for some reason been disturbed, whether by the gale or by his own hand, no one could yet day, and that in going to sea to it, or merely in walking too near the edge in poor light, he'd gone into the water and not come out of it again. "It's my experience," said the inspector, with the air of a man delivering a verdict rather than an opinion, that the simplest reading of a thing is generally the true one, in nine cases out of 10. "A man drowned, where a man very nearly drowned before, on a night when any sensible soul would have stayed indoors. I don't say I like it, Mom. This to Mrs. Chennowith, hovering unhappily in the doorway with a tray nobody had asked for. But I don't see as yet I need look further than the sea and the dark for my answer. It was Dr. Truartha coming in a little after the inspector, still in his outdoor coat, and with the look of a man who's been turning something over in his mind the whole way up from the cove, who first suggested mildly enough that the 10th case might on occasion present itself.
"I'll not quarrel with your reading, Paul Glaze. Not yet," he said, setting down his bag. "And I dare say you're right in the main of it. only there's a thing or two I'd have expected to find on a man gone into that water the way the maid describes that I didn't find and a thing or two I found that I hadn't quite expected such as doctor said panentri who had come in behind him and whose voice missple thought held a shade more sharpness than the question strictly required nothing I'd care to swear to before I've looked a good deal more carefully said Dr. author with the caution of a man who has learned over a long country practice not to alarm a household before he is certain of his ground. a bruise here and there that a fall on wet rock would account for easily enough, and yet not, I think, quite in the place a simple fall would generally put it, and his clothing, well, there's a good deal of difference between a man soaked through by rain and a man gone under salt water, and I'd not swear on a first look that the difference was quite what I'd have looked for, given the hour the maid puts him on that path. But it's early days, and I'll say no more of it till I've had proper leisure to examine the matter, for it does no one any good to speak before one's shore." "No," said Inspector Paul Glaze, a shade less comfortably than before. I dare say it doesn't.
But he said it in the tone of a man setting a small, mildly irritating fact carefully to one side, rather than one prepared to let it disturb a perfectly serviceable explanation, and turned a moment later to ask whether he might have the use of the library for the rest of the morning, to take down what statements were wanted before the household was troubled any further.
You'll want to see the boat house itself, I dare say, said Piran, rather more quickly than the remark required. I can take you down myself, Inspector, the moment the rain eases. I know every stick and stone of the place, having seen to it myself these 8 years, and I'd as soon be of use as sit about the house, waiting to be questioned like everyone else. That's kindly meant, sir, and I'll take you up on it presently, said the inspector, though I'll want my own sergeant's eyes on it first, if it's all the same to you. Two pairs of eyes see more than one, in my experience, and a man who knows a place too well sometimes sees only what he expects to see, and nothing besides. He said it pleasantly enough as a piece of general professional wisdom rather than any particular reflection on his host, and Pyan laughed a shade too readily, and said that no doubt the inspector was quite right. Miss Marple, established by the drawing room fire with her knitting, said nothing at all through the whole of this exchange, which was, as it happened, precisely what she had said through most of the morning. But she had counted without any particular effort three small things that did not sit together quite so neatly as the inspector's tidy explanation would have liked. There was the matter of the housemaid's half 9 set against a boat house clock that a punctilious host had told her on her very first evening under this roof he trusted to no hand but his own. There was the coat. Barnabas's own oil skin kept hanging in the hall these 15 years for reasons nobody had trouble to examine worn out into a gale on a night when a man might just as easily have borrowed something drier and nearer to hand.
And there was Dr. Trartha's small honest hesitation offered and then very properly withdrawn which interested Miss Marple rather more than a great deal of confident certainty would have done.
holding as it did the seed of a doubt too new yet to have found its proper shape. She was not, she told herself, in any position to make anything of these things, a stranded traveler, a guest of one night's proper standing and 3 days improper duration, with no claim whatever to an opinion on a Cornish inspector's reading of a Cornish tragedy.
And yet she went on quite privately, turning the matter over as she turned her needles, in the comfortable, unhurried way she had long ago found answered best, for she had observed over a good many years, and in a good many villages, that the things a whole room full of sensible people agreed not to trouble themselves about, were very often exactly the things most worth a little quiet trouble. It was, she thought, rather, like a piece of knitting taken up wrong at the outset.
The whole of it might look tidy enough to a careless eye. And yet somewhere near the beginning a stitch had been dropped, and everything worked upon it since only carried the fault further down the row. Demells aestl, when the inspector came at last to ask his few careful questions of her, answered them in a voice so perfectly level, that Miss Marple, listening from her corner with every appearance of complete absorption in a dropped stitch, found herself wondering, apologetically, and only to herself, whether so much composure or not, in its own way, quite as curious a thing as any amount of visible distress might have been.
You knew Mr. Barnabas well, I understand, Miss Kestle, said the inspector, not unkindly. In the old days, we grew up very nearly together, said Melza. He was like, she paused so briefly that a less patient listener might have missed it altogether, like a brother to me, Inspector, in a house that hadn't a great many young people in it. And last night, you'd no particular conversation with him beyond the general talk at dinner. None beyond the general talk, said Demells, and looked for the first time since the inspector had begun. Very steadily indeed, at her own folded hands. And Miss Marple, watching the small, precise steadiness of that look, thought that it told her a good deal less than the inspector supposed, and rather more than Miss Kestl perhaps intended.
The inspector, for his part, appeared to find nothing in the answer beyond what it plainly offered, thanked her, and turned to his notebook with a satisfied air of a man ticking off one more small item in an already very nearly completed account, and the rain, which had eased a little toward midday, began again, without any particular ceremony to fall.
Miss Marple, gathering up her wool a little later, thought that a great many people that morning had told the inspector precisely the truth, and precisely nothing more than the truth required them to tell, which was, she reflected, not at all the same thing as telling him everything they knew.
Chapter 5. Whom did the tide betray? Dr. Traatha came back to Pentreth Court the following afternoon with the settled careful look of a man who has slept very little and thought a great deal and asked with more formality than he had troubled to use the day before whether he might have a private word with the inspector before either of them said anything further to the household.
They were closeted together in the library the better part of an hour, and when they came out, it was Inspector Paul Glaz's face rather than the doctors that told the household most of what it wanted and least of what it hoped to know. For the comfortable, unhurried civility of the day before had gone out of it entirely, and what was left was the look of a methodical man obliged, against his own preference, to put away a tidy answer, and begin again from the beginning.
I'll ask you all to sit down, he said in the drawing room in a voice that had lost its earlier readiness to oblige, for there's matter here I'd sooner give you sitting than standing. He did not, in the end, trouble to soften it a great deal. Dr. Trarthaura, called on to confirm what the inspector was not himself qualified to swear to, said it plainly enough, that Mr. Pentrie's clothing, examined properly by daylight, showed patches under the collar along one shoulder that had stayed dry through a soaking that ought by any reasonable account to have gone through to the skin, and that a man does not go dry shouldered into a Cornish gale by accident, but only if the coat is put upon him, or arranged about him, after the rain has already done its worst elsewhere.
And the boat, said Inspector Paul Glaze, taking up the tail with a flat, careful delivery of a man reading from his own notes, was not, as I first supposed merely worked loose by the weather. The mooring line was examined this morning by my own sergeant in good light, and I'll tell you plainly what he found. A rope frayed a little here and there, as any rope left out in weather will fray, and one clean cut through the thick of it, that no gale ever made in this world or the next.
There was a silence in the room of the particular listening kind that comes when a whole company understands in the same instant that a very great deal has just changed and that none of the ordinary things one might say will quite do to fill it. Mrs. Chennowith, standing just inside the door with a tray she'd brought in, and now seemed entirely to have forgotten, set it down upon the nearest table with a small, unhappy clatter, and said to no one in particular that she had known she had known from the very first morning that no honest sea had done such a thing to a pentreath twice over in one lifetime. A remark nobody troubled to answer, though nobody, Miss Marple noticed, troubled to contradict it either. It was Moana who broke it in a voice not perfectly steady. You're telling us he was murdered.
I'm telling you, miss, said the inspector, not unkindly, but without softening the words either, that I can no longer call it an accident, and that I'd be failing in my duty if I let anyone in this house go on believing it was one, whether it's murder in the fullest sense the law means by the word.
Well, a man doesn't generally cut a mooring line and dampen a coat by pure misch. And I don't propose to insult anybody's understanding by pretending he might have. Piran Pentreth, who had said very little through the whole of this, sat with his hands pressed flat against his knees, and when he did speak, it was in the low, careful voice of a man testing each word before he lets it out.
Then someone under this roof or someone who came onto this land that night at all events did this to Barnabas. I can hardly credit it, Inspector. I can hardly credit any of it. No more can I, sir, and that's honest, said Inspector Paul Glaze, which is why I'll be asking a good many questions in the next day or two that I'd very much rather not have to ask of people I'd very much rather not have to ask them of. I'll begin, if it's agreeable, with anyone who can account for their movements after dinner was cleared, and anyone who cannot. It was here that the shape of the thing began, in the way such things always begin, to draw itself unevenly around the room, falling more heavily, as such shadows generally do, upon those least equipped by temperament or position to bear it easily.
Jgo Carrick, sent for and questioned before the day was out, was found on the inspector's own inquiry, to have been abroad on the cliff path that very night. In fact, he did not trouble to deny, being, as Miss Marple had already had occasion to observe, a man who preferred his grievances spoken aloud to any amount of comfortable silence.
I'll not pretend I wasn't down that way, he said, standing in the hall with his cap in his hand and his old grievance plainly written all over his weathered face, for I was checking a lobster pot I'd mind might have shifted in the blow.
I'll not pretend neither that I was sorry to hear a pentreath had come to grief on that water, seeing what one of them did to me and mine, debt unpaid these 15 years, and never so much as an apology to go with it. But I never laid a hand on the man, inspector, nor on his boat, nor on his rope. And you may search my own boat stem to stern, if you have a mind to, and find nothing there but fish," the inspector said with a dryness Miss Marple rather approved of, that he had every intention of doing precisely that, and it was plain enough, by the set of his shoulders, as Carrick went out, that here was a man he meant to look at a good deal more closely before he was done. an old grudge, a man abroad on the cliff at the very hour required, and nothing beyond his own word to answer for the rest of it. Miss Marple, who had listened to the whole exchange with her needles going quietly and her eyes on nothing in particular, reflected that a man so ready to confess the worst of himself in one direction, was not necessarily a man with nothing worse still to hide in another. But she reflected it only to herself, and offered the inspector no observation upon the subject whatever, it being no part of her habit to instruct a policeman in his own business, until she was very much more certain of her ground than she was as yet. Delicest's turn came a little later and went less easily still. Asked gently enough at first to account for the hour after dinner had been cleared, she said only that she had gone up to her room directly and had not come down again until the alarm was raised in the morning, an answer the inspector received with every appearance of accepting, until Mrs. Chennowith, questioned in her turn, and anxious in her honest way to be of use, mentioned that she had herself gone up shortly before 10 with a hot bottle for Miss Kestl's bed, and found the room empty, the bed not yet turned down, and no sign of Miss Kestl anywhere to be found until a good deal later. asked again, and more particularly, Dela Castell went very white, and said that she had gone out for a little air, finding the house close, and her head aching, and had walked a while in the garden, and had not thought it worth the mentioning.
In a gale, Miss Kestl, said the inspector, not unkindly, but with the patient persistence of a man who heard a good many small untruths in his time, and knows how to wait one out. It's a queer sort of headache that sends a lady out into weather such as we had that night, rather than to her own bed.
I've always found the air does me good, whatever the weather, said to Melza, in a voice gone very careful indeed, and would say no more of it, however the inspector pressed her. And Miss Marple, watching from her corner with her knitting quite still in her lap for once, thought that here was a young woman defending something with all her strength, and thought, too, though she was much too fair-minded to let the thought harden into certainty before its time, that fear of being thought a murderous, and fear of some quite different exposure can look to an inspector in a hurry exactly alike.
Morwena, sitting near enough to overhear it, looked across at her cousin with an expression Miss Marple could not quite read, not suspicion exactly, nor yet quite its opposite, and said nothing at all, which was in its own quiet way almost as interesting as anything that had been said aloud.
Pyron Pentrie's own evening, by contrast, unraveled itself before the inspector with the smooth, comfortable ease of a length of good cloth. Mr. Basano confirmed that he had sat with him over a night cap and estate papers until well past 11. Morena confirmed the same, having come in twice to say good night, and found them still at it. And Mrs. Chennowith, whatever her private opinions of the family's affairs, could not but confirm that she had herself brought in fresh candles to the library at 10, and found the master of the house exactly where everyone said he had been.
A man with half a dozen witnesses to swear to his whereabouts, the inspector observed to Miss Marple afterward, with the satisfaction of a man crossing off at last one name he was glad to be rid of, is a man I need trouble myself with a good deal less than one with none at all. Whatever grief Mr. Pentreth is carrying, ma'am, and it's plain enough to see he's carrying a great deal of it, I don't think we need to look to him for our answer. He said it standing in the hall with his notebook shut and his coat already half on. A man glad enough of one comfortable certainty in a day that had given him precious few, and there was nothing in his manner to suggest he expected or would have welcomed any contradiction.
"No," said Miss Marple, taking up her stitches again with every appearance of placid agreement. I don't suppose on the face of it that you need look to him at all, but she said it privately in the tone of a woman who has noticed that the man least suspected in any village tragedy is very often the man who has taken the greatest care to be seen by the greatest number of people at the most useful possible hour. and she went on knitting and said nothing further, while the rain came on again outside, steady and without malice, indifferent to the small, frightened silences it left behind it in every room of Pentreth Court. Chapter 6. What Miss Kestle would not say. It was Love Day Rouse again, who let the next thing fall, not out of any malice, for she was a good-hearted girl, and grew quite pink with distress at the trouble her tongue had already caused, but out of that same helpless, garilous honesty that had put Barnabas on the cove path in the first place. "I never meant to say anything more, madam," she told Miss Marple, having been discovered in the linen room in a state of some agitation, and gently persuaded to unbburden herself. Only the inspector did ask so very particular whether anyone had seen Miss Kestle that first evening before dinner. And I couldn't rightly say no, not when I'd seen her myself coming out of the little morning room not 10 minutes after Mr. Barnabas went in there with the master, and looking madam as though she had seen a ghost twice over, which I suppose, in a manner of speaking she very nearly had. It transpired on the inspector's rather more formal inquiry that this was substantially true. DLest had, it seemed, slipped away from the general commotion of that first extraordinary evening. While Moana soured the guest room, and Mrs. Chennowith bustled between kitchen and hall, and had gone, by whatever private means women in large houses discover for such things, to speak with Barnabas alone for some few minutes before he and Piran had shut themselves into the library. She had said nothing of this to the inspector when first questioned, had said indeed rather less than nothing, allowing the general impression to stand that she had not spoken with the returned man privately at all. "You'll appreciate, Miss Kestl," said Inspector Paul, when she was brought to answer for it, in a voice that had lost the last of its earlier patience. that a lady who conceals one meeting with a murdered man is a lady I'm bound to wonder what else she may have concealed along with it.
Tel Astel stood very straight by the cold drawing room great, her hands folded before her in the attitude of a woman determined to give nothing more away than she had already unwillingly given. "I didn't think it mattered," she said. "It was 10 minutes, Inspector, no more. We had known each other as children. I wished to speak to him alone once before the whole house had its say over him. Is that so very strange a thing to want? It's not strange at all, miss. Taken by itself, said the inspector. It's the not telling of it that once explaining when I asked you direct not two days since whether you'd had any particular conversation with him, and you told me no. I misunderstood the question," said Demelza, in a voice gone perfectly flat, and would not be moved from it. However, the inspector turned the matter over and over, and it was left to Mrs. Chennowith, questioned as to the ordinary business of the household to complete what DLA herself would not. Piran standing near the window with the look of a man who would rather have been anywhere else in England, put in that surely a private word between two old friends on such an evening, wanted no more explaining than that, a remark the inspector received politely enough, and set just as politely to one side, as a man sets aside a chair not wanted at his table.
"I'll not say I meant to pry, inspector," said Mrs. Chennith, with the particular discomfort of an honest woman obliged to report a thing she would very much rather not have noticed, but turning out Miss Kestle's room this morning to change the linen, as is my custom of a Friday. There was a little packet of letters tied with ribbon at the back of the drawer, and old by the look of the paper, older than anything a young lady generally keeps by her. I didn't read them, sir. whatever else you may think of me, but I saw enough of the hand they were written in to know I'd seen it somewhere very lately, and I didn't like the not telling you once I'd thought it over.
the letters produced at the inspector's insistence and read. Miss Marple gathered from the set of Demells's face as she watched them handled with an unwillingness that no amount of official authority could quite dissolve into calm, proved to be some dozen in number, all in the same hand and all by their dates, a good deal older than 15 years.
I'll ask you plainly, Miss Kestl, said the inspector when he'd glanced through enough of them to satisfy himself of their general character. Who wrote you these? You know quite well who wrote them, said Dza, since you have his name at the foot of everyone? And she said nothing further, though her hands, folded so carefully before her, had begun very slightly to shake. The inspector, for all his patience, was not a cruel man, and something in the sight of those shaking hands seemed to give even him a moment's pause. He closed the packet, tied the ribbon again himself, with a carefulness Miss Marple thought rather to his credit, and said only that he would want to keep them a while, and that Miss Castell had better think before he came to her again, whether there was anything further she wished to tell him of her own accord, rather than have it dragged from her by inches through Mrs. Chennowith's honest housekeeping. It did not want a great deal more after that for the shape of the household's private opinion to settle where the inspector's official one had not yet quite ventured to go.
Moana, coming to Miss Marple that evening with a face a good deal troubled, said what everyone else, in one fashion or another had begun to think. I don't like to say it, Miss Marple, of anyone under this roof, least of all Melza, who has lived with us so many years and been so little trouble to anybody. But if she loved him once, and it seems very plain now that she did, and if Barnabas's return meant Pyan must lose the estate, and Melza with him whatever small provision Pyan has always made for her comfort, she stopped, unable or unwilling, to finish the thought aloud.
You're wondering, said Miss Marple gently, whether a woman who once loved a man might come upon his sudden and inconvenient return to wish him gone again rather more permanently than the sea first arranged it. I hate myself for wondering it, said Moana. She has always been so quiet, so easily overlooked. One forgets, I think, that a quiet person may feel a thing every bit as strongly as a loud one. only she has had a great deal more practice at hiding it. That, said Miss Mel, is very true, my dear, and very well observed. It is indeed one of the things people most persistently forget, in my experience, that the persons least inclined to make a noise about their feelings are very often the ones feeling the most acutely.
It is why quiet people are so often suspected of everything. Once suspicion has anywhere to fall, and so rarely credited with anything at all when it does not. She thought, though she did not say so to Morena, of a Miss Tubshaw in St. Mary me, who had gone 30 years without a single unkind word said of her, and been the first name on everyone's lips the single time the church collection went astray, simply because she was quiet, and had no husband to speak up for her, and quiet unmarried women make such convenient vessels for a village's suspicion, being unable, as a rule, to make a satisfactory noise in their own defense.
She said this with her usual placid mildness, and went on with her knitting.
But she was thinking, as she said it, of a particular quality in Dlaestl's fear that troubled her a good deal more than the letters, or the lie about the meeting had troubled the inspector, for it seemed to Miss Marple turning the matter over with the patient thoroughess she generally gave to a difficult pattern, that there are a great many different kinds of fear in the world, and that they do not, upon close acquaintance, look at all alike. A woman who has done murder and fears discovery generally betrays it. Miss Marple had observed this in St. Mary me on more than one regrettable occasion. By a certain steadiness that is not quite steadiness at all, but it studied imitation, by an anxiety to explain more than has been asked, or to account too carefully for hours nobody has yet questioned.
Delicest fear had a different color to it altogether. She volunteered nothing.
She explained nothing beyond the bare minimum the inspector's questions dragged from her, and what fear she showed seemed fixed entirely and rather touchingly upon the letters themselves, and not at all upon the death that had made them evidence. "It is," Miss Marple said to Mr. Baseno later over a game of PK got up chiefly to give the evening some appearance of ordinary life. Very like watching a woman terrified of being seen to cry at the wrong funeral rather than a woman terrified of being hanged.
They are not, you know, at all the same fear, however easily they may be mistaken for one another by a gentleman in a hurry to close his case. "You think her innocent, then?" said Mr. Basano laying down a card with the air of a man glad of any opinion but his own. I think said Miss Marple that I do not yet know what I think Mr. Baseno beyond this, that a woman guarding an old love affair from a houseful of curious eyes behaves in a very particular way, and a woman guarding a murder behaves in quite another, and that Miss Kestl's behavior has, from the very first, belonged rather more to the first sort than the second. But I have been wrong before, and I dare say the inspector has a great deal of excellent evidence on his side, that I have not troubled weigh so carefully as he has." She said no more of it that evening, and the household by the following morning had very largely made up its mind for her, for it is the way of frightened people everywhere, Miss Marple reflected, watching the small, weary distances that had opened up between Dla Castell and the rest of the household at breakfast. to close ranks gladly around any explanation that permits them to stop suspecting one another, and to fix with something very like relief upon whichever unfortunate soul the evidence seems most conveniently to point toward. Even Mrs. Chennowith, who had known Dlaestl the whole of her life and loved her in her own undemonstrative way quite as well as she loved Morena, found herself passing the toast rather than the marmalade, and addressing her remarks a shade more often to the table at large than to Miss Kestl in particular. Small things, none of them unkind in themselves, and all of them taken together, a good deal cruer than any one of them alone. Chapter 7.
gone before morning.
The house had gone to bed early that night, worn out, Miss Marple thought, by three days of grief dressed up as hospitality, and hospitality dressed up as grief, and by the particular exhaustion that comes of being watched, and of watching in a house too small to hide either activity from the other.
It was Mrs. Chennowith up before 6, as was her invariable custom, who first found the door of Miss Kestle's room standing open. The bed slept in, but not by the disorder of it. Slept in long, and no sign anywhere of the small gray traveling coat that generally hung behind the door. "She's not in the house, madam," said Mrs. Chennith, arriving at Miss Marple's door in a state very far removed from her usual comfortable authority, her hair not properly put up, and a candle shaking a little in its stick. I've been through every room that's hers to go through, and the kitchen besides, and Betsy in the scullery says she never heard so much as a footstep in the night, though Betsy sleeps like the dead, and always did.
The alarm once raised went through Pentreth Court with the particular swiftness of a household already primed by 3 days dread to expect the worst of any silence. Pier and Pentreth, roused and dressing hurriedly, said at once that they must send to the village and to the cliff path and to the station besides, in case she'd thought to take an early train, though the line, as everyone in the house knew perfectly well, remained washed out beyond Truisick, and would remain so for some days yet. A fact Miss Marple noted privately, as one small piece of practical knowledge DLest could hardly have failed to share. She's run, said Inspector Paul Glaze, arriving within the hour and hearing the matter out with the settled, unsurprised air of a man to whom this particular development came as very little shock. I'll not pretend I'm astonished, ma'am, whatever else I may be. A woman with a guilty conscience and a packet of old letters newly taken from her does not, as a rule, sleep easy of a night. And I'm afraid this rather answers the question I'd not quite brought myself to ask outright.
You believe she has run because she is guilty, said Miss Marple, in the mild apologetic tone she generally used when she meant to be taken a good deal more seriously than her manner suggested. And not perhaps because she is frightened. I wonder, Inspector, whether those two things are quite so easily told apart as they generally are supposed to be. They come to very much the same thing, in my experience, mom, when the frightened party takes to the cliff path in the small hours rather than her own bed, said the inspector, not unkindly, but with the settled patience of a man who has made up his mind, and does not intend to be argued out of it by an elderly lady's fine distinctions.
I'll have my men out along the coast path directly, for there's precious little shelter along that stretch, and a woman on foot in this weather, however good her reasons, is a woman in a deal more danger than she perhaps stopped to consider. They found her in the event a little after 10:00 some 3 m along the cliff path toward Truissic, huddled into the lee of a gorsecovered bank where the path dropped low enough to offer some small mercy from the wind, soaked through, and so cold and stiff that the constable who found her had at first, by his own later account, taken her for something other than living.
The search itself had occupied the better part of the morning, and had drawn out, in the way such things do, a good deal more of the household than had any proper business along that path.
Piran going out with the first search party, despite Morena's protests, that he had had no sleep and no breakfast either, and Mr. Baso, no great walker by his own cheerful admission, following along a good half mile behind and arriving by his own account, considerably more blown than useful, she was brought back to Pentreth Court, wrapped in a borrowed great coat, and barely able to stand, and put to bed at once under Dr. Trartha's strict instruction that she was to be questioned by nobody, inspector included, until he himself pronounced her fit for it. an instruction the inspector received with visible reluctance, tempered only by the plain evidence once he'd looked at her himself, that a woman in that condition was hardly likely to attempt a second flight before nightfall.
"She'll keep till morning," he said to Miss Marple, standing in the passage outside the sick room with the grim satisfaction of a man who believes his case, whatever the delay is now very largely made. A woman doesn't take to a cliff path in a gale at that hour for no reason at all. And I don't think when she's fit to answer for herself, we shall find the reason so very far from the one we've already supposed.
Miss Marple said nothing to this beyond a small non-committal murmur that might have meant a great deal or nothing whatever and asked instead with every appearance of simple neighborly concern whether she herself might be permitted to sit with Miss Kestl a while once the doctor allowed it for a young woman recovering from such an ordeal is generally the better for a little quiet company inspector whatever else may be wanted of her presently and I promise you I shall ask her nothing you would not wish asked.
The inspector, who had by now formed a certain respect for Miss Marple's harmlessness, that fell a good deal short of any particular respect for her judgment, saw no objection to this, and it was thus that Miss Marple came to sit that evening. By Dlaestl's bed, with her knitting in her lap, and the fire built up high against the chill, the girl had not yet fully shaken off. Moana had wished to sit with her cousin herself, and had been gently but firmly dissuaded by Dr. Trrowtha, who observed, with the particular tact of a country doctor long practiced in managing households as well as bodies, that Miss Kestl would very likely rest easier for a face that asked nothing of her at all, however kindly meant the asking might be. Dlza lay very still for a long while, her eyes on the ceiling, and it was not until Miss Marple had counted a good many rows in silence that she spoke at all. "You will think, like all the rest of them, that I ran because I killed him. I think, said Miss Marple, not looking up from her needles, that a great many people run from a great many things besides murder, my dear, and that a cliff path in a gale is a very poor place to look for a guilty conscience, when a frightened heart will serve every bit as well to send a woman out into it.
There was a long silence broken only by the small orderly click of Miss Marple's needles and the settling of the fire.
And then, in a voice gone very low and very tired, Dla Kestl began at last to say the thing she'd been so determined for three whole days not to say to anyone at all. We were to have been married, she said, Barnabas and I, 16 years ago before before all of it. It was to have been kept quiet a little while on account of his father, who had other ideas for him entirely, and grander ones, and would not have thought a poor relation kept in the house on charity, at all a suitable match for his only son. We were neither of us brave enough, I think, to face him with it outright. We were very young and very much afraid of being parted, and it seemed easier at the time to wait a little, and hope his father might come round or die, or simply grow tired of objecting.
And then he was drowned, said Miss Marple gently, before either of those things could happen. And then he was drowned, Dzer agreed. Or so we all believed, for 15 years. And I had no engagement to grief openly, you understand, Miss Marple. No ring, no bands called, nothing at all but a handful of letters and a promise nobody living but myself could swear had ever been made. I could not even be a proper widow. I was only a poor relation who had lost in the general wreck of that dreadful autumn, rather more than anyone troubled to notice she had lost at all.
And when he came back, said Miss Marple, up the drive in the rain, calling you D, as though 16 years were nothing at all, I thought my heart would stop, said to Melza. And there were tears now, quiet and entirely without theater, sliding down into the pillow. I went to him that first evening before Pyan could take him off to the library because I had to know had to ask him before anyone else in the world had the chance whether he still whether any of it. She stopped and pressed the back of her hand hard against her mouth and went on when she could. He said he had thought of nothing else the whole 15 years. He said we might yet be married. Now his father was long dead, and nothing stood in the way of it, and that he meant to tell the whole house so at breakfast, once he had settled the tiresome business of the estate with Piran.
I went up to my room that night, the happiest woman in Cornwall, Miss Marple, and came down the next morning to find him dead on the rocks below the boat house, and I have not, from that day to this, been able to think of one single thing beyond the fact that I let him go down to that cove alone, and said nothing to stop him, because I was too full of my own foolish happiness to think there was any reason I should. And the letters, said Miss Marple, that Mrs. Chennowith found. Those were his from before. All that I had left of him, said Demells, for 16 years. I could not burn them, and I could not bear anyone to see them. And when the inspector asked me so directly whether I had spoken with Barnabas alone, I lied because I could not bear that either. could not bear that the last private thing between us, the last hour I ever had of him living, should be picked over by a policeman and gossiped over by the whole county as though it were nothing but a motive for murder. I ran last night because I could not face another day of Morena looking at me as though she wondered, and the inspector looking at me as though he had already decided, and everyone in this house that I've lived in and loved for 16 years, believing that I could have done that. to him of all people in this world.
She wept for some little while after that, quietly and without the least attempt to stop herself, and Miss Marple sat on beside her, saying very little, but saying it when she did say anything, with a particular gentleness she reserved for grief she believed entirely genuine.
I do not think, she said at last, when the worst of it had spent itself, that you have done anything at all, my dear, beyond loving a man a great deal longer and a great deal more faithfully than anyone in this house had trouble to notice.
I'm very much more interested, if you will forgive my saying so, in who else in this house had reason to fear that wedding you speak of being announced at breakfast? For a marriage settled and made public is a very different thing, is it not from an estate merely inherited? And I find myself wondering quite idly, what became, in the eyes of the law, of Mr. Pentreth's own claim to Pentreth Court, the very moment his cousin came home alive to marry and to father heirs of his own. Demells a castle, worn out with weeping and with 15 years of silence besides, had no answer to give this beyond a long exhausted look. But Miss Marple, gathering up her wool as the fire burned low, thought that she had at last been asking herself very nearly the right question, and that it wanted only a very little more patience now to arrive at the right answer along with it. Chapter 8. A word he should not have known. The household, in the days that followed, settled into that particular kind of uneasy calm that comes when a great many frightened people have agreed, without ever quite saying so aloud, to believe the worst is over. DLest, still weak from her night on the cliff path, kept to her room. The inspector, having taken her statement at last, and found in it evidently a good deal less to build a case upon than he had hoped, had grown noticeably less certain in his manner, though no less determined to go on questioning. And the rest of the household, Piran Pentreth, foremost among them, had begun to behave with the particular brittle cheerfulness of people anxious to persuade themselves that the worst of a bad business is safely behind them. It was over the tea tray on the third evening after Demells's return that the thing was said which Miss Marple was to turn over in her mind off and on for the better part of the night that followed. They had fallen, as the household so often did now, into talk of Barnabas, for grief, once it has been permitted to speak at all, generally goes on speaking whether anyone quite wishes it to or not. And Moana, pouring out the tea with rather more care than the operation required, had said gently, that it seemed a hard thing Delza should have carried so heavy a secret so long alone, and harder still that nobody in the house had ever guessed at it. I might have guessed, I think, if I had thought at all, said Piran, taking his cup and stirring it slowly. For Barnabas was always the sort of boy people fell in love with, rather against their own better judgment. I remember him at 14 coming off the top of the orchard wall in the most spectacular manner imaginable, and poor Cook standing underneath, ringing her apron, and scolding him for a young fool the whole time she was setting his wrist.
And Delza, I remember it now, hovering at the edge of the whole business, looking as though her own arm had been broken along with his. One saw it even then, I dare say, if one had thought to look. He said it easily, comfortably, with a small, fond smile of a man recalling a scene he had watched with his own eyes. And Moana, hearing it, smiled too, and said what a dear, wild boy Barnabas must have been, and how she wished she had known him then. And the talk moved on, as talk does, to some other small matter of the evening, and nobody in the room appeared to find anything whatever in it worth a second thought. Mr. Baseno, helping himself to another slice of seedcake, remarked comfortably that boys were always coming off walls and being scolded for it in his experience, and that it was a wonder any of them survived to be men at all.
And this small, unremarkable observation was received with the general murmur of agreement. Such small, unremarkable observations generally receive, and the moment, to every eye but one in the room, passed as lightly as it had come.
Miss Marple, however, sat very still over her own cup for a moment longer than the conversation strictly required, and said nothing at all. She said nothing of it indeed for the rest of the evening, being a woman who had long ago learned the value of turning a thing over privately before permitting herself to speak of it aloud. But when she'd gone up to her own room and had her fire built up, and her knitting settled comfortably in her lap, she gave the matter the whole of her unhurried attention, in the manner of a woman examining a piece of work for a dropped stitch she suspects, but has not yet located, for it was to Melza, who had told the story of the orchard wall first. On that very first stormy evening in the hall, with the lamp still trembling a little in her hands, she had said, "You have a scar there still from the orchard wall the summer you were 14.
I bandaged it myself and told you not to tell your mother how you came by it."
And Barnabas had answered that Cook always said he had broken his wrist as well as skinned his hand, though he had never done more than wrench it. It was, in other words, a story belonging entirely to Dla and to Barnabas, the two of them alone, and a scolding cook besides a small private piece of two children's history from a Cornish summer long before any cousin from Rhdesia had ever set foot in the county. And yet, Piran Pentreth, this very evening over the tea tray, had spoken of it exactly as a man speaks who was there. I remember him at 14 coming off the top of the orchard wall. Not, Barnabas told me once. Not, I have heard it said, but I remember, and one saw it even then, as though he himself had stood beside Cook in that long ago orchard, and watched the whole small drama unfold with his own eyes. Miss Marple sat with her needles quite still for a considerable time, turning this over with the patient thoroughess she generally reserved for a pattern that would not quite come right, no matter how carefully she followed the printed instructions. It reminded her, and here her mind went, as it so often did quietly and almost apologetically to St. Mary me of a young man who had come to the village a good many years before now a colorless perfectly pleasant sort of clark claiming to be nephew to old Mrs. Travelion after her death and had charmed the whole village for the better part of a season with the warmest, most particular little memories of his aunt.
Her love of yellow roses, her dislike of a certain hymn, a joke she had made to him once about the vicar's sermons that had made the whole tea table laugh with recognition, for it was exactly the sort of joke poor Mrs. Trallion would have made. It had all seemed so very natural, so very affectionate, that nobody had troubled to ask how a nephew, who had, by his own frequent account, seen his aunt only twice in 20 years, should carry about him such an intimate store of her small daily humors, until it emerged, a good while later, and to everyone's considerable embarrassment, that every one of those warm little memories had come straight out of Mrs. Trallion's own letters, which the young man had had ample occasion to read, and had simply retold as though he had been there to see them himself, because it is a very easy thing, and a very winning one, to borrow another person's memories, and wear them as one's own, provided nobody troubles to ask too closely where they were come by. People forgive a stranger anything," Miss Marple reflected, setting a stitch with great care, so long as he seems to remember them fondly. "It is the one form of flattery nobody thinks to doubt." She did not, even now permit herself to leap to any very dramatic conclusion. That was never her way, and she had been wrong before, and knew it, and was properly humble about the knowing. But she thought, turning her needles, that there was a very great difference between a man who had once been told a charming story and repeated it as a charming story, and a man who told it as though he had stood in that orchard himself, and she thought, too, that it would want only a very little careful inquiry to establish which sort of man Piran Pentreth actually was. It was Mr. Basano the following morning whom she found alone in the small morning room going over some tiresome point of the estate accounts and to whom she put her few careful questions with all the placid apologetic vagueness of an old lady merely curious about her family's history errano she said settling herself with her knitting as though she meant to stay only a moment exactly how old Mr. Pentreth was when he went out to Rhdesia. One hears these things and forgets them so easily, and I find myself curious, having heard so much of poor Barnabas's boyhood these last few days, whether the two cousins can ever have played together as children at all.
Mr. Baso looked up from his ledger with the faint indulgent surprise of a man interrupted in dull work by a pleasant one and said that as it happened he could tell her a good deal on that particular point, having handled the family's business papers for the better part of 30 years. Piran's branch went out to Rhdesia when he himself was no more than 5 or 6 years old. Miss Marple, his father took up land out there, farming, I believe. And none of that family ever came back to England again, not once in all the years between. I don't believe Piran Pentreth ever set eyes on this county, nor on Barnabas either. from the year he left it as a small child until the year he came back to bury him or to inherit after him, I should more properly say, since there was no body to bury.
"And they never met in all that time," said Miss Marple, counting her stitches with an appearance of only the mildest interest. "Not even a visit home as a young man before the estate came to him." "Never once, so far as any paper I've ever handled records," said Mr. Basano. They corresponded a little, as boys will, a letter now and again in careful blotted schoolroom hands, and less and less of it as they grew older, and had less in common to write about, as is the way of cousins parted young. I don't believe Pan can have had more than a dozen letters from Barnabas in the whole of their lives, nor written many more himself. And I know for a fact old Mr. Pentreth, Barnabas's father, always spoke of the Rhdesian cousin as a name on paper and nothing more, a man he'd not have known if he'd passed him in the Truro market. "How very sad," said Miss Marple, "for two boys who might have been such friends, to grow up such strangers to one another," and she said nothing further on the subject, and asked Mr. Baseno instead, with every appearance of losing interest in the matter as quickly as she had found it, whether the estate accounts were proving very troublesome, and let him talk gratefully of easier things.
But when she'd gone back to her own room, and taken up her knitting once more by the window, she sat a long while looking out at the gray, restless line of the sea beyond the cove, turning over, with the greatest care the small, precise shape of what she now believed she knew.
A man who had never set foot in Cornwall as a boy, who had exchanged perhaps a dozen careful schoolroom letters with a cousin he had not seen since the age of five, had stood over the tea tray the evening before and spoken of that cousin's boyhood mischief as a thing witnessed with his own eyes. I remember him at 14 in a voice that had not faltered, had not qualified itself, had not once betrayed the smallest awareness that it was claiming a memory to which it could have no earthly right at all.
It was, Miss Marple thought, exactly the sort of small human unguarded slip that no amount of careful preparation ever quite manages to guard against. For a man may study every fact of another man's life until he has them all by heart, and never once think to ask himself whether the manner of the telling gives him away as surely as any fact mist could have done. She thought of the boat house clock so carefully kept, of the coat worn out into the rain by a man already dead an hour or more, of Demells's fear, which had never from the very first worn the shape of a murderer's fear at all. and she thought above everything else of a man who called himself Piran Pentreth and who had this very evening remembered a great deal more than any honest stranger to this county had the smallest right to remember. She would want, she thought, laying her knitting down at last as the light began to fail over the water a good deal more than a slip of the tongue before she troubled Inspector Paul Glaze with so grave a suspicion.
But she thought, too, watching the last gray light go out of the sky, that she now knew very well where to look for it.
Chapter nine. The boat house kept its own time.
Miss Marple did not go at once to Inspector Paul Glaze with what she believed she knew, being a great believer in the principle that a suspicion, however strongly felt, is worth a great deal less than a fact quietly confirmed. And so it was that the following morning found her once more in the small morning room with Mr. Basano, this time with the estate's older papers spread out between them on the table, and a request that he look again, and more particularly, at exactly what the original probate had established. You told me yesterday, Mr. Basano, that Mr. Piran Pentreth's branch of the family went out to Rhdesia when he himself was a small child and never once returned," she said, settling her spectacles with the air of a woman merely tidying up a small point of family history. I wonder whether the papers themselves say as much in so many words, or whether it is simply the sort of thing everybody has always understood, and nobody has ever troubled to look up. Mr. Baso, who took a solicitor's proper pride in his own thoroughess, was a little nettled by the implication, and went to some trouble to prove it unjust, turning up within the half hour the correspondence his own father had conducted at the time of the original inheritance, letters to a firm of Ssbury solicitors acting for the Rhdesian branch, sworn affidavit as to identity and descent, and a bundle of the childhood letters themselves, carefully preserved among the family papers as evidence of the claimant's bonafidees.
There, he said, laying a finger on one faded page with some satisfaction.
My own father's note in his own hand made at the time. Claimment confirms he last set foot in England at the age of 5 prior to the family's removal to Rhdesia in 1889, and has had no occasion to return since.
It's all here, Miss Marple, plain as print, and was gone into very thoroughly at the time, I promise you, for an inheritance of this size does not pass without a good deal of careful looking into the claimment's history. And the likeness, said Miss Marple, was there ever a photograph sent at the time, so that the family here might know him for who he said he was. Mr. Basano considered this, and admitted after some searching, that there had not. the affidavit and the old childhood letters had been thought sufficient. There being, after all, no other pentreath left in England at the time, with any personal memory of the small boy who'd gone away 30 years before to compare him against. Nobody living to say yes, that is certainly he, or no, that is certainly not, said Miss Marple thoughtfully.
How very convenient a state of affairs that must have been for anyone in the world who cared to make use of it. Mr. Boseno turning this over admitted that he had never in 30 years of handling the family's business thought to find it strange. A great many old Cornish families had scattered branches abroad, he said, and nobody thought the worse of a man for having no likeness on file, provided his papers were in order, and his manner was easy. One does not generally go looking for an imposter, Miss Marple, in a man who has lived 8 years among one's neighbors without the smallest complaint against him. No, said Miss Marple, that I think is rather the difficulty, one very rarely does.
It was later that same morning, walking down with Dr. Trartha to look once more at the boat house in the cove, a small excursion Miss Marple had proposed with such placid old ladish vagueness about wanting the air that the doctor had seen no reason to refuse her company, that the second piece of the pattern settled itself properly into place.
You told the inspector, doctor, as I recall, that Mr. Barnabas's clothing was drier in places than the rain that night ought to have left it, said Miss Marple, picking her way carefully over the wet rocks with a stick. I wonder whether you formed any opinion at the time as to how many hours he had been dead before he was found.
A good deal more than the household supposed, if you want my honest opinion, said Dr. Trartha, but I've been slow to press the point, not wishing to alarm anyone before I was certain of my ground.
The condition of the body suggested to me a man dead a good while before morning nearer 9:00 than midnight I should say if I impressed to put a figure to it though such things are never so exact as a detective story would have one believe nearer 9:00 Miss Marple repeated and yet the housemaid love day saw him or believed she saw him going down to the boat house a good half hour after that in his own coat and hat with the lantern lit so She says," said Dr. Toworth, and I have no reason to doubt the girl's honesty. Only her opportunity for certainty on a wild night at a distance through rain stre glass. A coat and a hat and a lantern will answer for a man's identity very well indeed, in such conditions, without the man himself needing to be inside them at all. They had reached the boat house itself by now and stood a moment looking at the mooring where the cut rope had been found and at the black restless water beyond it working steadily at the rocks below.
The tide said Miss Marple was making I think you said from about 8 that night.
If a body were put into the water at or near that hour, and the tide already on the turn, might it not be carried a little further out, and brought a little further back, in a manner that would make the hour of death harder to fix precisely, harder, at any rate, than if he had gone in an hour later on a falling tide, as everyone has naturally supposeded.
Dr. Trarthaura looked at her for a long moment with the particular respect a professional man develops for an amateur who has unaccountably arrived very near his own considered opinion by an entirely different road.
You have a very clear head for these matters, Miss Marple, if you don't mind my saying so. That is very nearly my own reading of the tide's effect, though I'll confess I hadn't expected to find anyone else in this house had trouble to work it out.
I have knitted a great many complicated patterns in my time, doctor, said Miss Marple mildly, and one learns over the years that when a row does not come out right, it is very rarely because the wool has behaved strangely. It is very much more often because a stitch was dropped unnoticed a good many rows before, and everything since has only been built upon the fault. She looked out at the darkening water a moment longer. I think, doctor, that the sighting love day gave us was never Mr. Barnabas at all, alive and walking to his own death an hour later than we supposed. I think it was a coat and a hat and a lantern worn and carried by a man already perfectly certain that Barnabas Pentri was dead and very anxious that the household should go on believing for as long as possible that he was not.
They walked back to the house in a silence that was on Dr. Toworth's part at least considerably more thoughtful than it had been on the way down. And it was at the house that the last piece of the pattern was waiting for them in the shape of a letter that had come up with the afternoon post addressed to Miss Marple in a hand she recognized at once and bearing she was interested to note rather more postage than an ordinary letter generally required. She read it standing in the hall and folded it again very deliberately before she said anything to anyone. "An old friend of mine," she said to Mr. for Sananko, who had come out to see what the post had brought, a Sir Henry Clithering, who was for many years commissioner at Scotland Yard, and who has been kind enough once or twice before to look into a small matter for me, when I could not easily look into it myself. I wrote to him some days ago on a point I did not then feel I could properly explain even to you, Mr. Busano and he writes now to tell me that no photograph, no fingerprint record, no likeness of any kind exists in any public or official record in England of the Pyan Pentrif who left this country as a small boy for Odisia 30 odd years ago. For the very simple reason, Sir Henry says, that a man who left England at 5 years old and never returned to it would have had no occasion, in the ordinary course of things ever to be recorded here at all.
Then there is no way, said Mr. Basano slowly, of proving from any English record that the man now living at Pentreth Court is or is not the man he says he is. none whatever from any English record," Miss Marple agreed, which is, I think, precisely why a man who was not that person at all might have found it so very safe a name to take. She said nothing further to Mr. Pano of what she now believed beyond asking him with great gentleness to say nothing of the letter to anyone in the house until she had had a further word with the inspector. and it was to inspect a pole glaze, found at last in the library, going once more through his own notes, with the heir of a man no longer quite so satisfied with them as he had been a week before, that she took the whole of what she had gathered, the probate papers with their conveniently absent likeness, the tide and the surgeon's estimate of the hour, the small, unguarded slip of a memory no honest stranger to the county could have any right to claim. The inspector heard her out in a silence that grew steadily graver as she went on, and at the end of it sat for some while without speaking at all, turning his pencil over and over between his fingers.
It's a great deal to lay at a man's door, Mom, on the strength of an old photograph never taken, and a story told a shade too warmly over the tea tray, he said at last. And yet I'll not pretend it doesn't answer a good deal that's troubled me from the first, that a man with the best alibi in the house should also be the one man in it with everything in the world to lose the moment his cousin came home to marry and get heirs of his own.
I think, said Miss Marple, that it would be worth your while, Inspector, to have everyone gathered together this evening quietly, without any great alarm given beforehand, for I believe that a man who has carried so careful a deception so successfully for 8 years, will not break easily under a policeman's questions alone, however searching, he will want, I think, a rather gentler sort of unraveling than that, the kind that comes from being shown quite plainly that the very thing he has always trusted did most. His own excellent memory of a life that was never truly his is the one thing that has given him away.
Inspector Paul looked at her for a long moment, a big deliberate man visibly recalculating a great deal of settled opinion in a very short space of time, and said at last that he would see to it. And outside the library window the light was already going gray and early over a sea that had Miss Marple reflected kept its own council a good deal longer than it was now going to be permitted to keep it. He asked her gruffly as she rose to go whether she meant to be present herself that evening, and Miss Marple said that she thought she would like to be if it were not thought an impertinence in a stranded traveler with no proper claim on the household's troubles.
And the inspector, looking at her with something that was very nearly, though not quite, a smile, said that he had come to think her claim a good deal better founded than most. Chapter 10.
The confession Pentreath Court kept. It was Miss Marple's own notion and not the inspectors that the thing should be done quietly and in the boat house itself before ever the household was gathered together that evening, for she had said to Inspector Paul Glaze, with the particular gentle firmness she generally reserved for matters she considered settled beyond argument, that a man who has carried a false name successfully for 8 years, is not a man to be broken by a room full of accusing faces, however justly gathered. He would want, she thought, to be met in the one place where the whole deception had begun and ended, and to be met, if it could possibly be managed by no one more alarming than an old lady with her knitting.
The inspector had not liked it above half, and had insisted at the least on a constable within easy call, and his own presence not far off. But he had come in the course of that strange week to trust Miss Marple's judgment in these matters rather more than he trusted his own settled habits. And so it was that Miss Marple walked down alone in the last gray light of a late afternoon to find Piran Pentreth standing at the boat house door exactly where she had known somehow that he would be standing looking out at the water with the particular stillness of a man who has begun to suspect without yet being able to name it that his time is running out.
"You wanted to see me here, Miss Marple," he said without turning.
"Boseno told me you'd asked for it particularly. I confess I couldn't think why an old lady should want a private word with me in a boat house of all the drafty places in the world to hold one.
Because it is here, I think that the truth of the matter properly belongs, said Miss Marple, coming to stand beside him, her shawl drawn close against the wind off the water. It was here that Mr. Barnabas died. And here I believe that he was told by someone he trusted entirely, someone he had no earthly reason to doubt, that there were matters best settled quietly between the two of you before the whole house had its say.
I have thought a great deal these last few days about a good many small things that did not sit quite comfortably together, and I find now that I have set them all out in order that they will not sit any way at all except one. He did not answer this at once, and when he did, it was in the same easy, faintly apologetic voice he had used from her very first evening under his roof. The voice, she thought, of a man who had spent 8 years perfecting exactly this manner, because it had always served him so well before.
"You'll have to be a good deal plainer than that, Miss Marple, if you mean me, to understand you." Very well, said Miss Marple, and her own voice, though still mild, had in it now something that made him turn at last to look at her properly. I think you told me on my very first evening in this house that you trusted nobody but yourself to set the boat house clock right by the tide. A small dull domestic habit, and I thought nothing of it at the time beyond noticing, as one does, that it was the sort of thing a careful man says about a place he means to be believed to know intimately. I think the housemaid saw a coat and a hat and a lantern going down to this cove after dinner that first dreadful night and believed quite reasonably that she had seen Mr. Barnabas alive and walking to his own death an hour later than he actually died. And I think Dr. Trartha will tell anyone who asks him that a man dead since a little after 9 cannot very easily have been seen taking an evening stroll at half. Someone wore that coat down to this water. Mister Pentreth after Barnabas was already lying dead upon these rocks. Someone who needed the household to believe for as long as possible that he had died a good deal later and a good deal more alone than he actually had.
The wind off the water was rising, and for a long moment he said nothing at all, only stood looking at her with an expression she found at last quite easy to read. Not anger, and not even very much surprise, but the particular exhausted stillness of a man who's been waiting for longer than he could perhaps have said to be found out. "And the rest of it," he said at last very quietly.
You'll have the rest of it too, I expect, before you're done. I think, said Miss Marple, that a man who left this county at 5 years old and never once returned to it, and who exchanged perhaps a dozen careful school room letters with a cousin he had not seen since that age, could not possibly stand over a tea tray and speak of that cousin's 14-year-old mischief, with an orchard wall as a thing he'd watched with his own eyes. And yet that is precisely what you did, Mr. Pentry.
three evenings ago, and I do not think until this moment that you have ever once realized you did it. It is a very small thing, a stranger's memory worn a little too comfortably, as though it had always belonged to him, and it is, I find, very often exactly the sort of small thing that undoes a great deal of very careful work. He turned away from her then and looked out at the water for a long while, and when he spoke again, it was in a voice from which every trace of the easy apologetic Pyan Pentreth had gone entirely out of it, leaving something flatter and older and very tired indeed. "My name is Josiah Rdle," he said. I was his man out in Rhdesia, companion, secretary, whatever you care to call it, to the real Piran Pentreth.
these dozen years and more. And I knew every particular of his boyhood better, I dare say, than he knew it himself. For he was a talker, and I was a good listener, and there was little enough to do of an evening out there but talk and listen. When the fever took him, and no one in this world but myself to know it, it seemed, God forgive me, it seemed such a very small step from being the man who knew everything about Pyan Pentreth to being Pyan Pentreth. I had his papers. I had his letters. I had 30 years of a family's absence to hide behind and no living soul in England to say I was not who I claimed to be.
I told myself the whole voyage home that I was taking nothing from anyone that was not already going begging. A dead man's name, an empty inheritance, nothing more.
And then Barnabas came home, said Miss Marple gently, and it was no longer an empty inheritance at all. And then Barnabas came home, he said, very much alive and very much determined to marry Dzer and get heirs of his own upon this estate before the year was out. And whatever he might or might not have suspected of me, it made not the smallest difference, don't you see?
Whether he knew me for an impostor or not, the moment he was found alive, my claim was worth nothing at all. fraud or no fraud, I had eight good years, and a woman who loved me, and a place in this county I had come, God helped me actually to love. And all of it was to be taken from me the moment he stood up at breakfast and told the world he'd come home. I did not plan it, Miss Marple. I want you to believe that, though I don't suppose it matters now. I asked him to walk down here with me only to talk, only to beg some little time, some little kindness, and he was so very sure of himself, so very certain the world owed him back everything the sea had once taken, that something in me simply broke.
He said no more of the act itself, and Miss Marple did not ask it of him, there being some things a decent silence serves better than any amount of plainelling. And when Inspector Pglaze came down a little later with his constable and his notebook, he found the two of them standing quietly together at the boat house door, and the confession, when it came, was written out in the man's own hand under his own true name, before ever a charge was formally laid.
He wrote for the better part of an hour by the light of the very lantern that had been found smashed upon the rocks a week before, and quietly mended since, and Miss Marple sat with him the whole while, not from any morbid wish to watch a man's ruin set down in ink, but because it seemed to her that a soul making so complete and so costly a confession, ought not, after everything, to be made to do it entirely alone. It went hard on the household, as such things do. Moana told the whole of it that same evening, sat a long while, perfectly white and perfectly silent, and said at last, only that she supposed she had never really been engaged to Panentri at all, since no such man had ever existed to be engaged to. A small precise unkindness of fact that Miss Marple thought privately would take her a good deal longer to recover from than the more dramatic grief of losing him outright.
She did not weep that first evening, or not where anyone could see her. She only sat very straight in the drawing room, in the same chair she'd sat in on Miss Marple's very first evening under this roof, and asked once, in a small voice, quite unlike her usual bright one, whether even his fondness for her could have been entirely pretended, a question to which nobody in the room could give her any answer that seemed to help her at all. DL Aesttol's own secret, by contrast, was handled at Miss Marple's quiet urging and the inspector's decent good sense, with as much discretion as the law permitted. Her old letters were returned to her, and the county paper, when it came at last to report the tragedy at Pentreth Court, made no mention whatever of a governness's broken engagement 16 years before. There being no need, as Inspector Pglaze put it, to make a public spectacle of a grief that had done nobody any harm but herself, the gale blew itself out at last 3 days later, in the way of all Cornish gales quite suddenly, as though it had simply grown tired of its own violence, and the line to Truisic mended at last brought word that the trains would run again by the Thursday. Miss Marple took her leave of Pentreth Court on a morning gone strangely mild and still. The sea gone flat and silver beyond the cove as if it had never troubled anyone in its life. And Mr. Baseno saw her to the station himself, rather subdued, and said, as the train came in, that he did not know what the family would have done without her. "You would have done very well, I think, in the end," said Miss Marple, settling herself into her carriage with her thermos and her knitting, "for the truth has a way of coming out, Mr. the Basano.
Whatever trouble is taken to bury it, it generally only wants someone willing to sit quietly and watch and remember that people are very much the same everywhere under whatever name they choose to answer to. and she took up her needles as the train drew out past the gray line of the coast, and thought, not for the first time, that there was a good deal of sadness in a house set right at such a cost, and no great triumph in it at all, only the small, sober comfort of a thing properly finished, which was, she had long ago decided, very often, the best that any of them could hope Four.
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