she could make him happy-and she even thought, perhaps, that she’d be quite happy herself in the end.’
She stopped, nodded violently at Miss Marple, and said brightly: ‘That’s it.’
Giles was looking exasperated.
‘Really, Gwenda, you make a whole lot of things up and pretend that they actually happened.’
‘They did happen. They must have happened. And that gives us a third person for X.’
‘You mean-?’
‘The married man. We don’t know what he was like. He mayn’t have been nice at all. He may have been a little mad. He may have followed her here-’
‘You’ve just placed him as going out to India.’
‘Well, people can come back from India, can’t they? Walter Fane did. It was nearly a year later. I don’t say this man did come back, but I say he’s a possibility. You keep harping on who the men were in her life. Well, we’ve got three of them. Walter Fane, and some young man whose name we don’t know, and a married man-’
‘Whom we don’t know exists,’ finished Giles.
‘We’ll find out,’ said Gwenda. ‘Won’t we, Miss Marple?’
‘With time and patience,’ said Miss Marple, ‘we may find out a great deal. Now for my contribution. As a result of a very fortunate little conversation in the draper’s today, I have discovered that Edith Pagett who was cook at St Catherine’s at the time we are interested in, is still in Dillmouth. Her sister is married to a confectioner here. I think it would be quite natural, Gwenda, for you to want to see her. She may be able to tell us a good deal.’
‘That’s wonderful,’ said Gwenda. ‘I’ve thought of something else,’ she added. ‘I’m going to make a new will. Don’t look so grave, Giles, I shall still leave my money to you. But I shall get Walter Fane to do it for me.’
‘Gwenda,’ said Giles. ‘Do be careful.’
‘Making a will,’ said Gwenda, ‘is a most natural thing to do. And the line of approach I’ve thought up is quite good. Anyway, I want to see him. I want to see what he’s like, and if I think that possibly-’
She left the sentence unfinished.
‘What surprises me,’ said Giles, ‘is that no one else answered that advertisement of ours-this Edith Pagett, for example-’
Miss Marple shook her head.
‘People take a long time to make up their minds about a thing like that in these country districts,’ she said. ‘They’re suspicious. They like to think things over.’
Chapter 12. Lily Kimble
Then suddenly she stopped humming and called: ‘Jim-Jim. Listen here, will you?’
Jim Kimble, an elderly man of few words, was washing at the scullery sink. To answer his wife, he used his favourite monosyllable.
‘Ar?’ said Jim Kimble.
‘It’s a piece in the paper. Will anyone with any knowledge of Helen Spenlove Halliday, nee Kennedy, communicate with Messrs Reed and Hardy, Southampton Row! Seems to me they might be meaning Mrs Halliday as I was in service with at St Catherine’s. Took it from Mrs Findeyson, they did, she and’er’usband. Her name was Helen right enough-Yes, and she was sister to Dr Kennedy, him as always said I ought to have had my adenoids out.’
There was a momentary pause as Mrs Kimble adjusted the frying chips with an expert touch. Jim Kimble was snorting into the roller towel as he dried his face.
‘Course, it’s an old paper, this,’ resumed Mrs Kimble. She studied its date. ‘Nigh on a week or more old. Wonder what it’s all about? Think as there’s any money in it, Jim?’
Mr Kimble said, ‘Ar,’ noncommittally.
‘Might be a will or something,’ speculated his wife. ‘Powerful lot of time ago.’
‘Ar.’
‘Eighteen years or more, I shouldn’t wonder…Wonder what they’re raking it all up for now? You don’t think it could be police, do you, Jim?
‘Whatever?’ asked Mr Kimble.
‘Well, you know what I always thought,’ said Mrs Kimble mysteriously. ‘Told you at the time, I did, when we was walking out. Pretending that she’d gone off with a feller. That’s what they say, husbands, when they do their wives in. Depend upon it, it was murder. That’s what I said to you and what I said to Edie, but Edie she wouldn’t have it at any price. Never no imagination, Edie hadn’t. Those clothes she was supposed to have took away with her-well, they weren’t right, if you know what I mean. There was a suitcase gone and a bag, and enough clothes to fill ’em, but they wasn’t right, those clothes. And that’s when I said to Edie, “Depend upon it,” I said, “the master’s murdered her and put her in the cellar.” Only not really the cellar, because that Layonee, the Swiss nurse, she saw something. Out of the window. Come to the cinema along of me, she did, though she wasn’t supposed to leave the nursery-but there, I said, the child never wakes up-good as gold she was, always, in her bed at night. “And madam never comes up to the nursery in the evening,” I says. “Nobody will know if you slip out with me.” So she did. And when we got in there was ever such a schemozzle going on. Doctor was there and the master ill and sleeping in the dressing-room, and the doctor looking after him, and it was then he asked me about the clothes, and it seemed all right at the time. I thought she’d gone off all right with that fellow she was so keen on-and him a married man, too-and Edie said she did hope and pray we wouldn’t be mixed up in any divorce case. What was his name now? I can’t remember. Began with an M-or was it an R? Bless us, your memory does go.’
Mr Kimble came in from the scullery and ignoring all matters of lesser moment demanded if his supper was ready.
‘I’ll just drain the chips…Wait, I’ll get another paper. Better keep this one. ’Twouldn’t be likely to be police-not after all this time. Maybe it’s lawyers-and money in it. It doesn’tsay something to your advantage…but it might be all the same…Wish I knew who I could ask about it. It says write to some address in London-but I’m not sure I’d like to do a thing like that…not to a lot of people in London…What do you say, Jim?’
‘Ar,’ said Mr Kimble, hungrily eyeing the fish and chips.
The discussion was postponed.
Chapter 13. Walter Fane
Gwenda looked across the broad mahogany desk at Mr Walter Fane.
She saw a rather tired-looking man of about fifty, with a gentle, nondescript face. The sort of man, Gwenda thought, that you would find it a little difficult to recollect if you had just met him casually…A man who, in modern phrase, lacked personality. His voice, when he spoke, was slow and careful and pleasant. Probably, Gwenda decided, a very sound lawyer.
She stole a glance round the office-the office of the senior partner of the firm. It suited Walter Fane, she decided. It was definitely old-fashioned, the furniture was shabby, but was made of good solid Victorian material. There were deed boxes piled up against the walls-boxes with respectable County names on them. Sir John Vavasour-Trench. Lady Jessup. Arthur ffoulkes, Esq. Deceased.
The big sash windows, the panes of which were rather dirty, looked into a square backyard flanked by the solid walls of a seventeenth-century adjoining house. There was nothing smart or up to date anywhere, but there was nothing sordid either. It was superficially an untidy office with its piled-up boxes, and its littered desk, and its row of
