Agatha Christie - They Do It With Mirrors

Carrie Louise said quickly: 'Oh I know. It's a terrible thing. I've never been mixed up in it before. You have, haven't you, Jane?'

'Well - yes - actually I have,' Miss Marple admitted.

'So Ruth told me.'

'Did she tell you that last time she was down here?' asked Miss Marple curiously.

'No, I don't think it was then. I can't really remember.' Carrie Louise spoke vaguely, almost absentmindedly.

'What are you thinking about, Carrie Louise?' Mrs Serrocold smiled and seemed to come back from a long way away.

'I was thinking of Gina,' she said. 'And of what you said about Stephen Restarick. Gina's a dear girl, you know, and she does really love Wally. I'm sure she does.' Miss Marple said nothing.

'Girls like Gina like to kick up their heels a bit.' Mrs Serrocold spoke in an almost pleading voice. 'They're young and they like to feel their power. It's natural, really. I know Wally Hudd isn't the sort of man we imagined Gina marrying. Normally she'd never have met him. But she did meet him, and fell in love with him - and presumably she knows her own business best.'

'Probably she does,' said Miss Marple.

'But it's so very important that Gina should be happy.' Miss Marple looked curiously at her friend.

'It's important, I suppose, that everyone should be happy.'

'Oh yes. But Gina's a very special case. When we took her mother - when we took Pippa - we felt that it was an experiment that had simply got to succeed. You see, Pippa's mother -' Carrie Louise paused.

Miss Marple said: 'Who was Pippa's mother?'

Carrie Louise said: 'Eric and I agreed that we should never tell anybody that. She never knew herself.'

'I'd like to know,' said Miss Marple.

Mrs Serrocold looked at her doubtfully.

'It isn't just curiosity,' said Miss Marple. 'I really well - need to know. I can hold my tongue, you know.'

'You could always keep a secret, Jane,' said Carrie Louise with a reminiscent smile. 'Dr Galbraith - he's the Bishop of Cromer now - he knows. But no one else.

Pippa's mother was Katherine Elsworth.'

'Elsworth? Wasn't that the woman who administered arsenic to her husband? Rather a celebrated case.'

'Yes.'

'She was hanged?'

'Yes. But you know it's not at all sure that she did it.

The husband was an arsenic eater - they didn't understand so much about those things then.'

'She soaked flypapers.'

'The maid's evidence, we always thought, was definitely malicious.'

'And Pippa was her daughter?'

'Yes. Eric and I determined to give the child a fresh start in life - with love and care and all the things a child needs. We succeeded. Pippa was - herself. The sweetest, happiest creature imaginable.' Miss Marple was silent a long time.

Carrie Louise turned away from the dressing table.

'I'm ready now. Perhaps you'll ask the Inspector or whatever he is to come up to my sitting-room. He won't mind, I'm sure.'

Inspector Curry did not mind. In fact he rather welcomed the chance of seeing Mrs Serrocold on her own territory.

As he stood there waiting for her, he looked round him curiously. It was not his idea of what he termed to himself 'a rich woman's boudoir.' It had an old-fashioned couch and some rather uncomfortable looking Victorian chairs with twisted woodwork backs. The chintzes were old and faded but of an attractive pattern displaying the Crystal Palace. It was one of the smaller rooms, though even then it was larger than the drawing-room of most modem houses. But it had a cosy rather crowded appearance with its little tables, its bric-á-brac, and its photographs. Curry looked at an old snapshot of two little girls, one dark and lively, the other plain and staring out sulkily on the world from under a heavy fringe. He had seen that same expression that morning. 'Pippa and Mildred' was written on the photograph. There was a photograph of Eric Gulbrandsen hanging on the wall, with a gold mount and a heavy ebony frame. Curry had just found a photograph of a good-looking man with eyes crinkling with laughter who he presumed was John Restarick when the door opened and Mrs Serrocold came in.

She wore black, a floating and diaphanous black. Her little pink and white face looked unusually small under its crown of silvery hair, and there was a frailness about her that caught sharply at Inspector Curry's heart. He understood at that moment a good deal that had perplexed him earlier in the morning. He understood why people were so anxious to spare Caroline Louise Serrocold everything that could be spared her.

And yet, he thought, she isn't the kind that would ever make a fuss…

She greeted him, asked him to sit down, and took a chair near him. It was less he who put her at her ease than she who put him at his. He started to ask his questions and she answered them readily and without hesitation.

The failure of the lights, the quarrel between Edgar Lawson and her husband, the shot they had heard…

'It did not seem to you that the shot was in the house?'

'No, I thought it came from outside. I thought it might have been the backfire of a car.'

'During the quarrel between your husband and this young fellow Lawson in the study, did you notice anybody leaving the Hall?'

'Wally had already gone to see about the lights. Miss Bellever went out shortly afterwards - to get something, but I can't remember what.'

'Who else left the Hall?'

'Nobody, so far as I know.'

'Would you know, Mrs Serrocold?' She reflected a moment.

'No, I don't think I should.'

'You were completely absorbed in what you could hear going on in the study?'

'Yes.'

'And you were apprehensive as to what might happen there?'

'No - no, I wouldn't say that. I didn't think anything would really happen.'

'But Lawson had a revolver?'

'Yes.'

'And was threatening your husband with it?'

'Yes. But he didn't mean it.'

Inspector Curry felt his usual slight exasperation at this statement. So she was another of them!

'You can't possibly have been sure of that, Mrs Serrocold.'

'Well, but I was sure. In my own mind, I mean. What is it the young people say - putting on an act? That's what I felt it was. Edgar's only a boy. He was being melodramatic and silly and fancying himself as a bold desperate character. Seeing himself as the wronged hero in a romantic story. I was quite sure he would never fire that revolver.'

'But he did fire it, Mrs Serrocold.'

Carrie Louise smiled.

'I expect it went off by accident.'

Again exasperation mounted in Inspector Curry.

'It was not an accident. Lawson fired that revolver twice - and fired it at your husband. The bullets only just missed him.'

Carrie Louise looked startled and then'grave.

'I can't really believe that. Oh yes' - she hurried on to forestall the Inspector's protest - 'of course I have to believe it if you tell me so. But I still feel there must be a simple explanation. Perhaps Dr Maverick can explain it to me.'

'Oh yes, Dr Maverick will explain it all right,' said Curry grimly. 'Dr Maverick can explain anything. I'm sure of that.'

Unexpectedly Mrs Serrocold said:

'I know that a lot of what we do here seems to you foolish and pointless, and psychiatrists can be very irritating sometimes. But we do achieve results, you know. We have our failures, but we have successes too.

And what we try to do is worth doing. And though you probably won't believe it, Edgar is really devoted to my husband. He started this silly business about Lewis's being his father because he wants so much to have a father like Lewis. But what I can't understand is why he should suddenly get violent. He had been so very much better - really practically normal. Indeed he has always seemed normal to me.'

The Inspector did not argue the point.

He said: 'The revolver that Edgar Lawson had was one belonging to your granddaughter's husband. Presumably Lawson took it from Walter Hudd's room. Now tell me, have you ever seen this weapon before?'