Ngaio Marsh - Collected Short Fiction of Ngaio Marsh

He waited. Pilbrow, who had come very close, had his ear cupped in his hand. The rector looked vaguely horrified. Richard De’ath suddenly gulped down his double whiskey. Miss Hart coughed over her lemonade and Mrs. Simpson avidly popped a peppermint cream in her mouth and took a swig of her port-and-raspberry.

Alleyn nodded to Fox, who laid Mr. Bates’s Bible, open at the flyleaf, on the table before him.

“The case,” Alleyn said, “hinges on this book. You have all seen the entries. I remind you of the recorded deaths in 1779 of the three Hadets—Stewart Shakespeare, Naomi Balbus, and Peter Rook. To each of these is attached a biblical text suggesting that they met their death by violence. There have never been any Hadets in this village and the days of the week are wrong for the given dates. They are right, however, for the year 1921 and they fit the deaths , all by falling from a height, of William Wagstaff, Ruth Wall, and Simon Castle.

“By analogy the Christian names agree. William suggests Shakespeare. Naomi—Ruth; Balbus—a wall. Simon —Peter; and a Rook is a Castle in chess. And Hadet,” Alleyn said without emphasis, “is an anagram of Death.”

“Balderdash!” Miss Hart cried out in an unrecognizable voice.

“No, it’s not,” said Mrs. Simpson. “It’s jolly good crossword stuff.”

“Wicked balderdash. Richard!”

De’ath said, “Be quiet. Let him go on.”

“We believe,” Alleyn said, “that these three people met their deaths by one hand. Motive is a secondary consideration, but it is present in several instances, predominantly in one. Who had cause to wish the death of these three people? Someone whom old Wagstaff had bullied and to whom he had left his money and who killed him for it. Someone who was infatuated with Simon Castle and bitterly jealous of Ruth Wall. Someone who hoped, as an heiress, to win Castle for herself and who, failing, was determined nobody else should have him. Wagstaff’s orphaned niece—Fanny Wagstaff.”

There were cries of relief from all but one of his hearers. He went on. “Fanny Wagstaff sold everything, disappeared, and was never heard of again in the village. But twenty-four years later she returned, and has remained here ever since.”

A glass crashed to the floor and a chair overturned as the vast bulk of the postmistress rose to confront him.

“Lies! Lies !” screamed Mrs. Simpson.

“Did you sell everything again, before leaving New Zealand?” he asked as Fox moved forward. “Including the Bible, Miss Wagstaff?”

“But,” Troy said, “how could you be so sure?”

“She was the only one who could leave her place in the church unobserved. She was the only one fat enough to rub her hips against the narrow door jambs. She uses an indelible pencil. We presume she arranged to meet Bates on the balcony, giving a cock-and-bull promise to tell him something nobody else knew about the Hadets. She indicated the text with her pencil, gave the Bible a shove, and, as he leaned out to grab it, tipped him over the edge.

“In talking about 1921 she forgot herself and described the events as if she had been there. She called Bates a typical New Zealander but gave herself out to be a Londoner. She said whitebait are only a quarter of the size of sprats. New Zealand whitebait are—English whitebait are about the same size.

“And as we’ve now discovered, she didn’t send my cables. Of course she thought poor little Bates was hot on her tracks, especially when she learned that he’d come here to see me. She’s got the kind of crossword-puzzle mind that would think up the biblical clues, and would get no end of a kick in writing them in. She’s overwhelmingly conceited and vindictive.”

“Still—”

“I know. Not good enough if we’d played the waiting game. But good enough to try shock tactics. We caught her off her guard and she cracked up.”

“Not,” Mr. Fox said, “a nice type of woman.”

Alleyn strolled to the gate and looked up the lane to the church. The spire shone golden in the evening sun.

“The rector,” Alleyn said, “tells me he’s going to do something about the balcony.”

“Mrs. Simpson, née Wagstaff,” Fox remarked, “suggested wire netting.”

“And she ought to know,” Alleyn said and turned back to the cottage.

Truth may or may not be stranger than fiction. It is certainly less logical. Consider the affair of the severed hand at Christchurch, New Zealand, in 1885. Late in the afternoon of December 16th of that year, the sergeant on duty at the central police station was visited by two brothers and their respective small sons. They crowded into his office and, with an air of self-conscious achievement, slapped down a parcel, wrapped in newspaper, on his desk. Their name, they said, was Godfrey.

The sergeant unwrapped the parcel. He disclosed, nestling unattractively in folds of damp newsprint, a human hand. It was wrinkled and pallid like the hand of a laundress on washing day. On the third finger, left hand, was a gold ring.

The Godfreys, brothers and sons, made a joint announcement. “That’s Howard’s hand,” they said virtually in unison and then added, in explanation, “bit off by a shark.”

They looked significantly at a poster pasted on the wall of the police office. The poster gave a description of one Arthur Howard and offered a reward for information as to his whereabouts. The Godfreys also produced an advertisement in a daily paper of two months earlier:

Fifty Pounds Reward. Arthur Howard, drowned at Sumner on Saturday last Will be given for the recovery of the body or the first portion received thereof recognizable. Apply Times Office.

The Godfreys were ready to make a statement. They had spent the day, it seemed, at Taylor’s Mistake, a lonely bay not far from the seaside resort of Sumner, where Arthur Rannage Howard had been reported drowned on October 10th. At about two o’clock in the afternoon, the Godfreys had seen the hand lying in the sand below high-water mark.

Elisha, the elder brother, begged the sergeant to examine the ring. The sergeant drew it off the cold, wrinkled finger. On the inside were the initials A. H.

The Godfreys were sent away without a reward. From that moment they were kept under constant observation by the police.

A few days later, the sergeant called upon Mrs. Sarah Howard. At sight of the severed hand, she cried out—in tears—that it was her husband’s.

Later, a coroner’s inquest was held on the hand. Three insurance companies were represented. If the hand was Howard’s hand, they were due to pay out, on three life policies, sums amounting to 2,400 pounds. The policies had all been transferred into the name of Sarah Howard.

The circumstances of what the coroner called “the alleged accident” were gone over at the inquest. On October 10, 1885, Arthur Howard, a railway workshop fitter, had walked from Christchurch to Sumner. On his way he fell in with other foot-sloggers who remembered his clothes and his silver watch on a gold chain and that he had said he meant to go for a swim at Sumner where, in those days, the waters were shark infested.

The next morning a small boy had found Howard’s clothes and watch on the end of the pier at Sumner. A few days later insurance had been applied for and refused, the advertisement had been inserted in the paper and, as if in answer to the widow’s prayer, the Godfreys, on December 16th, had discovered the hand.

But there also appeared the report of no less than ten doctors who had examined the hand. The doctors, after the manner of experts, disagreed in detail but, in substance, agreed upon three points.

1) The hand had not lain long in the sea.