in the face. None of my sons are any good. Crowd of vultures, waiting for me to die, that's their real occupation in life.' He chuckled. 'And they can wait. I won't die to oblige them! Well, if that's all I can do for you… I'm tired. Got to rest.'
He shuffled out again.
'Alfred's bit of skirt?' said Bacon questioningly. 'In my opinion the old man just made that up.' He paused, hesitated.
'I think, personally, Alfred's quite all right – perhaps a shifty customer in some ways – but not our present cup of tea. Mind you – I did just wonder about that Air Force chap.'
'Bryan Eastley?'
'Yes. I've run into one or two of his type. They're what you might call adrift in the world – had danger and death and excitement too early in life. Now they find life tame. Tame and unsatisfactory. In a way, we've given them a raw deal. Though I don't really know what we could do about it. But there they are, all past and no future, so to speak. And they're the kind that don't mind taking chances – the ordinary fellow plays safe by instinct, it's not so much morality as prudence. But these fellows aren't afraid – playing safe isn't really in their vocabulary. If Eastley were mixed up with a woman and wanted to kill her…'
He stopped, threw out a hand hopelessly. 'But why should he want to kill her? And if you do kill a woman, why plant her in your father-in-law's sarcophagus? No, if you ask me, none of this lot had anything to do with the murder. If they had, they would have gone to all the trouble of planting the body on their own back door step, so to speak.'
Craddock agreed that that hardly made sense.
'Anything more you want to do here?'
Craddock said there wasn't.
Bacon suggested coming back to Brackhampton and having a cup of tea – but Inspector Craddock said that he was going to call on an old acquaintance.
Chapter 10
I
Miss Marple, sitting erect against a background of china dogs and presents from Margate , smiled approvingly at Inspector Dermot Craddock.
'I'm so glad,' she said, 'that you have been assigned to the case. I hoped you would be.'
'When I got your letter,' said Craddock, 'I took it straight to the A.C. As it happened he had just heard from the Brackhampton people calling us in. They seemed to think it wasn't a local crime. The A.C. was very interested in what I had to tell him about you. He'd heard about you, I gather, from my godfather.'
'Dear Sir Henry,' murmured Miss Marple affectionately.
'He got me to tell him all about the Little Paddocks business. Do you want to hear what he said next?'
'Please tell me if it is not a breach of confidence.'
'He said, 'Well, as this seems a completely cockeyed business, all thought up by a couple of old ladies who've turned out, against all probability, to the right, and since you already know one of these old ladies, I'm sending you down on the case.' So here I am! And now, my dear Miss Marple, where do we go from here? This is not, as you probably appreciate, an official visit. I haven't got my henchmen with me. I thought you and I might take down our back hair together first.'
Miss Marple smiled at him.
'I'm sure,' she said, 'that no one who only knows you officially would ever guess that you could be so human, and better-looking than ever – don't blush… Now, what, exactly, have you been told so far?'
'I've got everything, I think. Your friend, Mrs. McGillicuddy's original statement to the police at St. Mary Mead, confirmation of her statement by the ticket collector, and also the note to the station master at Brackhampton. I may say that all the proper inquiries were made by the people concerned – the railway people and the police. But there's no doubt that you outsmarted them all by a most fantastic process of guesswork.'
'Not guesswork,' said Miss Marple.
'And I had a great advantage. I knew Elspeth McGillicuddy. Nobody else did. There was no obvious confirmation of her story, and if there was no question of any woman being reported missing, then quite naturally they would think it was just an elderly lady imagining things – as elderly ladies often do – but not Elspeth McGillicuddy.'
'Not Elspeth McGillicuddy,' agreed the Inspector. 'I'm looking forward to meeting her, you know. I wish she hadn't gone to Ceylon . We're arranging for her to be interviewed there, by the way.'
'My own process of reasoning was not really original,' said Miss Marple. 'It's all in Mark Twain. The boy who found the horse. He just imagined where he would go if he were a horse and he went there and there was the horse.'
'You imagined what you'd do if you were a cruel and cold-blooded murderer?' said Craddock looking thoughtfully at Miss Marple's pink and white elderly fragility. 'Really, your mind –'
'Like a sink, my nephew Raymond used to say,' Miss Marple agreed, nodding her head briskly. 'But as I always told him, sinks are necessary domestic equipment and actually very hygienic.'
'Can you go a little further still, put yourself in the murderer's place, and tell me just where he is now?'
Miss Marple sighed.
'I wish I could. I've no idea – no idea at all. But he must be someone who has lived in, or knows all about, Rutherford Hall.'
'I agree. But that opens up a very wide field. Quite a succession of daily women have worked there. There's the Women's Institute – and the A.R.P. Wardens before them. They all know the Long Barn and the sarcophagus and where the key was kept. The whole set up there is widely known locally. Anybody living round about might hit on it as a good spot for his purpose.'
'Yes, indeed. I quite understand your difficulties.'
Craddock said: 'We'll never get anywhere until we identify the body.'
'And that, too, may be difficult?'
'Oh, we'll get there – in the end. We're checking up on all the reported disappearances of a woman of that age and appearance. There's no one outstanding who fits the bill. The M.O. puts her down as about thirty-five, healthy, probably a married woman, has had at least one child. Her fur coat is a cheap one purchased at a London store. Hundreds of such coats were sold in the last three months, about sixty per cent of them to blonde women. No sales girl can recognise the photograph of the dead woman, or is likely to if the purchase were made just before Christmas. Her other clothes seem mainly of foreign manufacture, mostly purchased in Paris . There are no English laundry marks. We've communicated with Paris and they are checking up there for us. Sooner or later, of course, someone will come forward with a missing relative or lodger. It's just a matter of time.'
'The compact wasn't any help?'
'Unfortunately, no. It's a type sold by the hundred in the Rue de Rivoli, quite cheap. By the way, you ought to have turned that over to the police at once, you know – or rather Miss Eyelesbarrow should have done so.'
Miss Marple shook her head.
'But at that moment there wasn't any question of a crime having been committed,' she pointed out. 'If a young lady, practising golf shots, picks up an old compact of no particular value in the long grass, surely she doesn't rush straight off to the police with it?'
Miss Marple paused, and then added firmly: 'I thought it much wiser to find the body first.'
Inspector Craddock was tickled.
'You don't seem ever to have had any doubts but that it would be found?'
'I was sure it would. Lucy Eyelesbarrow is a most efficient and intelligent person.'
