'No,' said Harold, 'no, it isn't. It was in our barn, as a matter of fact.'
'Really, Harold! A murdered woman in the barn at Rutherford Hall – and you never told me anything about it.'
'Well, there hasn't been much time, really,' said Harold, 'and it was all rather unpleasant. Nothing to do with us, of course. The Press milled round a good deal. Of course we had to deal with the police and all that sort of thing.'
'Very unpleasant,' said Alice . 'Did they find out who did it?' she added, with rather perfunctory interest.
'Not yet,' said Harold.
'What sort of a woman was she?'
'Nobody knows. French apparently.'
'Oh, French,' said Alice , and allowing for the difference in class, her tone was not unlike that of Inspector Bacon. 'Very annoying for you all,' she agreed.
They went out from the dining-room and crossed into the small study where they usually sat when they were alone. Harold was feeling quite exhausted by now. 'I'll go up to bed early,' he thought.
He picked up the small parcel from the hall table, about which his wife had spoken to him. It was a small neatly waxed parcel, done up with meticulous exactness. Harold ripped it open as he came to sit down in his usual chair by the fire.
Inside was a small tablet box bearing the label, 'Two to be taken nightly.' With it was a small piece of paper with the chemist's heading in Brackhampton, 'Sent by request of Doctor Quimper,' was written on it.
Harold Crackenthorpe frowned. He opened the box and looked at the tablets.
Yes, they seemed to be the same tablets he had been having. But surely, surely Quimper had said that he needn't take any more? 'You won't want them now.'
That's what Quimper had said.
'What is it, dear?' said Alice . 'You look worried.'
'Oh, it's just – some tablets. I've been taking them at night. But I rather thought the doctor said don't take any more.'
His wife said placidly: 'He probably said don't forget to take them.'
'He may have done, I suppose,' said Harold doubtfully.
He looked across at her. She was watching him. Just for a moment or two he wondered – he didn't often wonder about Alice – exactly what she was thinking.
That mild gaze of hers told him nothing.
Her eyes were like windows in an empty house. What did Alice think about him, feel about him? Had she been in love with him once? He supposed she had. Or did she marry him because she thought he was doing well in the City, and she was tired of her own impecunious existence? Well, on the whole, she'd done quite well out of it.
She'd got a car and a house in London , she could travel abroad when she felt like it and get herself expensive clothes, though goodness knows they never looked like anything on Alice . Yes, on the whole she'd done pretty well. He wondered if she thought so. She wasn't really fond of him, of course, but then he wasn't really fond of her. They had nothing in common, nothing to talk about, no memories to share. If there had been children – but there hadn't been any children – odd that there were no children in the family except young Edie's boy. Young Edie. She'd been a silly girl, making that foolish, hasty war-time marriage. Well, he'd given her good advice.
He'd said: 'It's all very well, these dashing young pilots, glamour, courage, all that, but he'll be no good in peacetime, you know. Probably be barely able to support you.'
And Edie had said, what did it matter?
She loved Bryan and Bryan loved her, and he'd probably be killed quite soon. Why shouldn't they have some happiness? What was the good of looking to the future when they might all be bombed any minute. And after all, Edie had said, the future doesn't really matter because some day there'll be all grandfather's money.
Harold squirmed uneasily in his chair.
Really, that will of his grandfather's had been iniquitous! Keeping them all dangling on a string. The will hadn't pleased anybody.
It didn't please the grandchildren and it made their father quite livid. The old boy was absolutely determined not to die. That's what made him take so much care of himself. But he'd have to die soon.
Surely, surely he'd have to die soon.
Otherwise – all Harold's worries swept over him once more making him feel sick and tired and giddy.
Alice was still watching him, he noticed.
Those pale, thoughtful eyes, they made him uneasy somehow.
'I think I shall go to bed,' he said. 'It's been my first day out in the City.'
'Yes,' said Alice , 'I think that's a good idea. I'm sure the doctor told you to take things easily at first.'
'Doctors always tell you that,' said Harold.
'And don't forget to take your tablets, dear,' said Alice . She picked up the box and handed it to him.
He said good-night and went upstairs. Yes, he needed the tablets. It would have been a mistake to leave them off too soon.
He took two of them and swallowed them with a glass of water.
Chapter 24
'Nobody could have made more of a muck of it than I seem to have done,' said Dermot Craddock gloomily.
He sat, his long legs stretched out, looking somehow incongruous in faithful Florence 's somewhat over- furnished parlour.
He was thoroughly tired, upset and dispirited.
Miss Marple made soft, soothing noises of dissent. 'No, no, you've done very good work, my dear boy. Very good work indeed.'
'I've done very good work, have I? I've let a whole family be poisoned, Alfred Crackenthorpe's dead and now Harold's dead too. What the hell's going on there? That's what I should like to know.'
'Poisoned tablets,' said Miss Marple thoughtfully.
'Yes. Devilishly cunning, really. They looked just like the tablets that he'd been having. There was a printed slip sent in with them 'by Doctor Quimper's instructions'. Well, Quimper never ordered them. There were chemist's labels used. The chemist knew nothing about it, either. No. That box of tablets came from Rutherford Hall.'
'Do you actually know it came from Rutherford Hall?'
'Yes. We've had a thorough check up. Actually, it's the box that held the sedative tablets prescribed for Emma.'
'Oh, I see. For Emma…'
'Yes. It's got her fingerprints on it and the fingerprints of both the nurses and the fingerprint of the chemist who made it up. Nobody else's, naturally. The person who sent them was careful.'
'And the sedative tablets were removed and something else substituted?'
'Yes. That of course is the devil with tablets. One tablet looks exactly like another.'
'You are so right,' agreed Miss Marple. 'I remember so very well in my young days, the black mixture and the brown mixture (the cough mixture that was) and the white mixture, and Doctor So-and-So's pink mixture. People didn't mix those up nearly as much. In fact, you know, in my village of St. Mary Mead we still like that kind of medicine. It's a bottle they always want, not tablets. What were the tablets?' she asked.
'Aconite. They were the kind of tablets that are usually kept in a poison bottle, diluted one in a hundred for outside application.'
'And so Harold took them, and died,' Miss Marple said thoughtfully. Dermot Craddock uttered something like a groan.
'You mustn't mind my letting off steam to you,' he said. 'Tell it all to Aunt Jane, that's how I feel!'
