Agatha Christie - Sleeping Murder

‘Do you think I’m like that?’ Gwenda asked apprehensively.

And the Inspector had smiled and said: ‘I think you’re a very truthful witness, Mrs Reed.’

‘And you think I’m right about who murdered her?’

The Inspector sighed and said: ‘It’s not a question of thinking-not with us. It’s a question of checking up. Where everybody was, what account everybody gives of their movements. We know accurately enough, to within ten minutes or so, when Lily Kimble was killed. Between two-twenty and two-forty-five. Anyone could have killed her and then come on here yesterday afternoon. I don’t see, myself, any reason for those telephone calls. It doesn’t give either of the people you mention an alibi for the time of the murder.’

‘But you will find out, won’t you, what they were doing at the time? Between two-twenty and two-forty-five. You will ask them.’

Inspector Primer smiled.

‘We shall ask all the questions necessary, Mrs Reed, you may be sure of that. All in good time. There’s no good in rushing things. You’ve got to see your way ahead.’

Gwenda had a sudden vision of patience and quiet unsensational work. Unhurried, remorseless…

She said: ‘I see…yes. Because you’re professional. And Giles and I are just amateurs. We might make a lucky hit-but we wouldn’t really know how to follow it up.’

‘Something of the kind, Mrs Reed.’

The Inspector smiled again. He got up and unfastened the french windows. Then, just as he was about to step through them, he stopped. Rather, Gwenda thought, like a pointing dog.

‘Excuse me, Mrs Reed. That lady wouldn’t be a Miss Jane Marple, would she?’

Gwenda had come to stand beside him. At the bottom of the garden Miss Marple was still waging a losing war with bindweed.

‘Yes, that’s Miss Marple. She’s awfully kind in helping us with the garden.’

‘Miss Marple,’ said the Inspector. ‘I see.’

And as Gwenda looked at him enquiringly and said, ‘She’s rather a dear,’ he replied:

‘She’s a very celebrated lady, is Miss Marple. Got the Chief Constables of at least three counties in her pocket. She’s not got my Chief yet, but I dare say that will come. So Miss Marple’s got her finger in this pie.’

‘She’s made an awful lot of helpful suggestions,’ said Gwenda.

‘I bet she has,’ said the Inspector. ‘Was it her suggestion where to look for the deceased Mrs Halliday?’

‘She said that Giles and I ought to know quite well where to look,’ said Gwenda. ‘And it did seem stupid of us not to have thought of it before.’

The Inspector gave a soft little laugh, and went down to stand by Miss Marple. He said: ‘I don’t think we’ve been introduced, Miss Marple. But you were pointed out to me once by Colonel Melrose.’

Miss Marple stood up, flushed and grasping a handful of clinging green.

‘Oh yes. Dear Colonel Melrose. He has always beenmost kind. Ever since-’

‘Ever since a churchwarden was shot in the Vicar’s study. Quite a while ago. But you’ve had other successes since then. A little poison pen trouble down near Lymstock.’

‘You seem to know quite a lot about me, Inspector-’

‘Primer, my name is. And you’ve been busy here, I expect.’

‘Well, I try to do what I can in the garden. Sadly neglected. This bindweed, for instance, such nasty stuff. Its roots,’ said Miss Marple, looking very earnestly at the Inspector, ‘go down underground a long way. A very long way-they run along underneath the soil.’

‘I think you’re right about that,’ said the Inspector. ‘A long way down. A long way back…this murder, I mean. Eighteen years.’

‘And perhaps before that,’ said Miss Marple. ‘Running underground…And terribly harmful, Inspector, squeezing the life out of the pretty growing flowers…’

One of the police constables came along the path. He was perspiring and had a smudge of earth on his forehead.

‘We’ve come to-something, sir. Looks as though it’s her all right.’

And it was then, Gwenda reflected, that the nightmarish quality of the day had begun. Giles coming in, his face rather pale, saying: ‘It’s-she’s there all right, Gwenda.’

Then one of the constables had telephoned and the police surgeon, a short, bustling man, had arrived.

And it was then that Mrs Cocker, the calm and imperturbable Mrs Cocker, had gone out into the garden-not led, as might have been expected, by ghoulish curiosity, but solely in the quest of culinary herbs for the dish she was preparing for lunch. And Mrs Cocker, whose reaction to the news of a murder on the preceding day had been shocked censure and an anxiety for the effect upon Gwenda’s health (for Mrs Cocker had made up her mind that the nursery upstairs was to be tenanted after the due number of months), had walked straight in upon the gruesome discovery, and had been immediately ‘taken queer’ to an alarming extent.

‘Too horrible, madam. Bones is a thing I never could abide. Not skeleton bones, as one might say. And here in the garden, just by the mint and all. And my heart’s beating at such a rate-palpitations-I can hardly get my breath. And if I might make so bold, just a thimbleful of brandy…’

Alarmed by Mrs Cocker’s gasps and her ashy colour, Gwenda had rushed to the sideboard, poured out some brandy and brought it to Mrs Cocker to sip.

And Mrs Cocker had said: ‘That’s just what I needed, madam-’ when, quite suddenly, her voice had failed, and she had looked so alarming, that Gwenda had screamed for Giles, and Giles had yelled to the police surgeon.

‘And it’s fortunate I was on the spot,’ the latter said afterwards. ‘It was touch and go anyway. Without a doctor, that woman would have died then and there.’

And then Inspector Primer had taken the brandy decanter, and then he and the doctor had gone into a huddle over it, and Inspector Primer had asked Gwenda when she and Giles had last had any brandy out of it.

Gwenda said she thought not for some days. They’d been away-up North, and the last few times they’d had a drink, they’d had gin. ‘But I nearly had some brandy yesterday,’ said Gwenda. ‘Only it makes me think of Channel steamers, so Giles opened a new bottle of whisky.’

‘That was very lucky for you, Mrs Reed. If you’d drunk brandy yesterday, I doubt if you would be alive today.’

‘Giles nearly drank some-but in the end he had whisky with me.’

Gwenda shivered.

Even now, alone in the house, with the police gone and Giles gone with them after a hasty lunch scratched up out of tins (since Mrs Cocker had been removed to hospital), Gwenda could hardly believe in the morning turmoil of events.

One thing stood out clearly: the presence in the house yesterday of Jackie Afflick and Walter Fane. Either of them could have tampered with the brandy, and what was the purpose of the telephone calls unless it was to afford one or other of them the opportunity to poison the brandy decanter? Gwenda and Giles had been getting too near the truth. Or had a third person come in from outside, through the open dining-room window perhaps, whilst she and Giles had been sitting in Dr Kennedy’s house waiting for Lily Kimble to keep her appointment? A third person who had engineered the telephone calls to steer suspicion on the other two?

But a third person, Gwenda thought, didn’t make sense. For a third person, surely, would have telephoned to only one of the two men. A third person would have wanted one suspect, not two. And anyway, who could the third person be? Erskine had definitely been in Northumberland. No, either Walter Fane had telephoned to Afflick and had pretended to be telephoned to himself. Or else Afflick had telephoned Fane, and had made the same pretence of receiving a summons. One of those two, and the police, who were cleverer and had more resources than she and Giles had, would find out which. And in the meantime both of those men would be watched. They wouldn’t be able to-to try again.