复仇女神30
时间：2026-01-29 07:22:08
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Sixteen
THE INQUEST
I
Miss Marple walked slowly along the village street on her way towards the
market place where the inquest was to take place in the old-fashioned
Georgian building which had been known for a hundred years as the
Curfew Arms. She glanced at her watch. There was still a good twenty
minutes before she need be there. She looked into the shops. She paused
before the shop that sold wool and babies’ jackets, and peered inside for a
few moments. A girl in the shop was serving. Small woolly coats were be-
ing tried on two children. Further along the counter there was an elderly
woman.
Miss Marple went into the shop, went along the counter to a seat oppos-
ite the elderly woman, and produced a sample of pink wool. She had run
out, she explained, of this particular brand of wool and had a little jacket
she needed to finish. The match was soon made, some more samples of
wool that Miss Marple had admired were brought out for her to look at,
and soon she was in conversation. Starting with the sadness of the acci-
dent which had just taken place. Mrs. Merrypit, if her name was identical
with that which was written up outside the shop, was full of the import-
ance of the accident, and the general difficulties of getting local govern-
ments to do anything about the dangers of footpaths and public rights of
way.
“After the rain, you see, you get all the soil washed off and then the
boulders get loose and then down they comes. I remember one year they
had three falls—three accidents there was. One boy nearly killed, he was,
and then later that year, oh six months later, I think, there was a man got
his arm broken, and the third time it was poor old Mrs. Walker. Blind she
was and pretty well deaf too. She never heard nothing or she could have
got out of the way, they say. Somebody saw it and they called out to her,
but they was too far away to reach her or to run to get her. And so she was
killed.”
“Oh how sad,” said Miss Marple, “how tragic. The sort of thing that’s not
easily forgotten, is it.”
“No indeed. I expect the Coroner’ll mention it today.”
“I expect he will,” said Miss Marple. “In a terrible way it seems quite a
natural thing to happen, doesn’t it, though of course there are accidents
sometimes by pushing things about, you know. Just pushing, making
stones rock. That sort of thing.”
“Ah well, there’s boys as be up to anything. But I don’t think I’ve ever
seen them up that way, fooling about.”
Miss Marple went on to the subject of pullovers. Bright coloured
pullovers.
“It’s not for myself,” she said, “it’s for one of my great-nephews. You
know he wants a polo-necked pullover and very bright colours he’d like.”
“Yes, they do like bright colours nowadays, don’t they?” agreed Mrs.
Merrypit. “Not in jeans. Black jeans they like. Black or dark blue. But they
like a bit of brightness up above.”
Miss Marple described a pullover of check design in bright colours.
There appeared to be quite a good stock of pullovers and jerseys, but any-
thing in red and black did not seem to be on display, nor even was any-
thing like it mentioned as having been lately in stock. After looking at a
few samples Miss Marple prepared to take her departure, chatting first
about the former murders she had heard about which had happened in
this part of the world.
“They got the fellow in the end,” said Mrs. Merrypit. “Nice looking boy,
hardly have thought it of him. He’d been well brought up, you know. Been
to university and all that. Father was very rich, they say. Touched in the
head, I suppose. Not that they sent him to Broadway, or whatever the
place is. No, they didn’t do that, but I think myself he must have been a
mental case—there was five or six other girls, so they said. The police had
one after another of the young men round hereabouts to help them. Geof-
frey Grant they had up. They were pretty sure it was him to begin with. He
was always a bit queer, ever since he was a boy. Interfered with little girls
going to school, you know. He used to offer them sweets and get them to
come down the lanes with him and see the primroses, or something like
that. Yes, they had very strong suspicions about him. But it wasn’t him.
And then there was another one. Bert Williams, but he’d been far away on
two occasions, at least—what they call an alibi, so it couldn’t be him. And
then at last it came to this—what’sis-name, I can’t remember him now.
Luke I think his name was—no Mike something. Very nice looking, as I
say, but he had a bad record. Yes, stealing, forging cheques, all sorts of
things like that. And two what-you-call ’em paternity cases, no, I don’t
mean that, but you know what I mean. When a girl’s going to have a baby.
You know and they make an order and make the fellow pay. He’d got two
girls in the family way before this.”
“Was this girl in the family way?”
“Oh yes, she was. At first we thought when the body was found it might
have been Nora Broad. That was Mrs. Broad’s niece, down at the mill
shop. Great one for going with the boys, she was. She’d gone away missing
from home in the same way. Nobody knew where she was. So when this
body turned up six months later they thought at first it was her.”
“But it wasn’t?”
“No—someone quite different.”
“Did her body ever turn up?”
“No. I suppose it might some day, but they think on the whole it was
pushed into the river. Ah well, you never know, do you? You never know
what you may dig up off a ploughed field or something like that. I was
taken once to see all that treasure. Luton Loo was it—some name like
that? Somewhere in the East Counties. Under a ploughed field it was.
Beautiful. Gold ships and Viking ships and gold plate, enormous great plat-
ters. Well, you never know. Any day you may turn up a dead body or you
may turn up a gold platter. And it may be hundreds of years old like that
gold plate was, or it may be a three-or four-years-old body, like Mary Lu-
cas who’d been missing for four years, they say. Somewhere near Reigate
she was found. Ah well, all these things! It’s a sad life. Yes, it’s a very sad
life. You never know what’s coming.”
“There was another girl who’d lived here, wasn’t there?” said Miss
Marple, “who was killed.”
“You mean the body they thought was Nora Broad’s but it wasn’t? Yes.
I’ve forgotten her name now. Hope, it was, I think. Hope or Charity. One of
those sort of names, if you know what I mean. Used to be used a lot in Vic-
torian times but you don’t hear them so much nowadays. Lived at the
Manor House, she did. She’d been there for some time after her parents
were killed.”
“Her parents died in an accident, didn’t they?”
“That’s right. In a plane going to Spain or Italy, one of those places.”
“And you say she came to live here? Were they relations of hers?”
“I don’t know if they were relations, but Mrs. Glynne as she is now, was
I think a great friend of her mother’s or something that way. Mrs. Glynne,
of course, was married and gone abroad but Miss Clotilde—that’s the eld-
est one, the dark one—she was very fond of the girl. She took her abroad,
to Italy and France and all sorts of places, and she had her trained a bit of
typewriting and shorthand and that sort of thing, and art classes too. She’s
very arty, Miss Clotilde is. Oh, she was mighty fond of the girl. Broken-
hearted she was when she disappeared. Quite different to Miss Anthea—”
“Miss Anthea is the youngest one, isn’t she?”
“Yes. Not quite all there, some people say. Scatty like, you know, in her
mind. Sometimes you see her walking along, talking to herself, you know,
and tossing her head in a very queer way. Children get frightened of her
sometimes. They say she’s a bit queer about things. I don’t know. You hear
everything in a village, don’t you? The great-uncle who lived here before,
he was a bit peculiar too. Used to practise revolver shooting in the garden.
For no reason at all so far as anyone could see. Proud of his marksman-
ship, he said he was, whatever marksmanship is.”
“But Miss Clotilde is not peculiar?”
“Oh no, she’s clever, she is. Knows Latin and Greek, I believe. Would
have liked to go to university but she had to look after her mother who
was an invalid for a long time. But she was very fond of Miss—now, what
was her name?—Faith perhaps. She was very fond of her and treated her
like a daughter. And then along comes this young what’s-his-name, Mi-
chael I think it was—and then one day the girl just goes off without saying
a word to anyone. I don’t know if Miss Clotilde knew as she was in the
family way.”
“But you knew,” said Miss Marple.
“Ah well, I’ve got a lot of experience. I usually know when a girl’s that
way. It’s plain enough to the eye. It’s not only the shape, as you might say,
you can tell by the look in their eyes and the way they walk and sit, and
the sort of giddy fits they get and sick turns now and again. Oh yes, I
thought to myself, here’s another one of them. Miss Clotilde had to go and
identify the body. Nearly broke her up, it did. She was like a different wo-
man for weeks afterwards. Fairly loved that girl, she did.”
“And the other one—Miss Anthea?”
“Funnily enough, you know, I thought she had a kind of pleased look as
though she was—yes, just pleased. Not nice, eh? Farmer Plummer’s daugh-
ter used to look like that. Always used to go and see pigs killed. Enjoyed it.
Funny things goes on in families.”
Miss Marple said good-bye, saw she had another ten minutes to go and
passed on to the post office. The post office and general store of Jocelyn St.
Mary was just off the Market Square.
Miss Marple went into the post office, bought some stamps, looked at
some of the postcards and then turned her attention to various paperback
books. A middle-aged woman with rather a vinegary face presided behind
the postal counter. She assisted Miss Marple to free a book from the wire
support in which the books were.
“Stick a bit sometimes, they do. People don’t put them back straight, you
see.”
There was by now no one else in the shop. Miss Marple looked with dis-
taste at the jacket of the book, a naked girl with blood-stained markings on
her face and a sinister- looking killer bending over her with a blood-
stained knife in his hand.
“Really,” she said, “I don’t like these horrors nowadays.”
“Gone a bit too far with some of their jackets, haven’t they,” said Mrs.
Vinegar. “Not everyone as likes them. Too fond of violence in every way,
I’d say nowadays.”
Miss Marple detached a second book. “Whatever Happened to Baby
Jane,” she read. “Oh dear, it’s a sad world one lives in.”
“Oh yes, I know. Saw in yesterday’s paper, I did, some woman left her
baby outside a supermarket and then someone else comes along and
wheels it away. And all for no reason as far as one can see. The police
found her all right. They all seem to say the same things, whether they
steal from a supermarket or take away a baby. Don’t know what came
over them, they say.”
“Perhaps they really don’t,” suggested Miss Marple.
Mrs. Vinegar looked even more like vinegar.
“Take me a lot to believe that, it would.”
Miss Marple looked round — the post office was still empty. She ad-
vanced to the window.
“If you are not too busy, I wonder if you could answer a question of
mine,” said Miss Marple. “I have done something extremely stupid. Of late
years I make so many mistakes. This was a parcel addressed to a charity. I
send them clothes—pullovers and children’s woollies, and I did it up and
addressed it and it was sent off—and only this morning it came to me sud-
denly that I’d made a mistake and written the wrong address. I don’t sup-
pose any list is kept of the address of parcels—but I thought someone
might have just happened to remember it. The address I meant to put was
The Dockyard and Thames Side Welfare Association.”
Mrs. Vinegar was looking quite kindly now, touched by Miss Marple’s
patent incapacity and general state of senility and dither.
“Did you bring it yourself?”
“No, I didn’t—I’m staying at The Old Manor House—and one of them,
Mrs. Glynne, I think—said she or her sister would post it. Very kind of her
—”
“Let me see now. It would have been on Tuesday, would it? It wasn’t
Mrs. Glynne who brought it in, it was the youngest one, Miss Anthea.”
“Yes, yes, I think that was the day—”
“I remember it quite well. In a good sized dress box—and moderately
heavy, I think. But not what you said, Dockyard Association—I can’t recall
anything like that. It was the Reverend Matthews—The East Ham Women
and Children’s Woollen Clothing Appeal.”
“Oh yes.” Miss Marple clasped her hands in an ecstasy of relief. “How
clever of you—I see now how I came to do it. At Christmas I did send
things to the East Ham Society in answer to a special appeal for knitted
things, so I must have copied down the wrong address. Can you just repeat
it?” She entered it carefully in a small notebook.
“I’m afraid the parcel’s gone off, though—”
“Oh yes, but I can write, explaining the mistake and ask them to forward
the parcel to the Dockyard Association instead. Thank you so much.”
Miss Marple trotted out.
Mrs. Vinegar produced stamps for her next customer, remarking in an
aside to a colleague—“Scatty as they make them, poor old creature. Expect
she’s always doing that sort of thing.”
Miss Marple went out of the post office and ran into Emlyn Price and
Joanna Crawford.
Joanna, she noticed, was very pale and looked upset.
“I’ve got to give evidence,” she said. “I don’t know—what will they ask
me? I’m so afraid. I—I don’t like it. I told the police sergeant, I told him
what I thought we saw.”
“Don’t you worry, Joanna,” said Emlyn Price. “This is just a coroner’s in-
quest, you know. He’s a nice man, a doctor, I believe. He’ll just ask you a
few questions and you’ll say what you saw.”
“You saw it too,” said Joanna.
“Yes, I did,” said Emlyn. “At least I saw there was someone up there.
Near the boulders and things. Now come on, Joanna.”
“They came and searched our rooms in the hotel,” said Joanna. “They
asked our permission but they had a search warrant. They looked in our
rooms and among the things in our luggage.”
“I think they wanted to find that check pullover you described. Anyway,
there’s nothing for you to worry about. If you’d had a black and scarlet
pullover yourself you wouldn’t have talked about it, would you. It was
black and scarlet, wasn’t it?”
“I don’t know,” said Emlyn Price. “I don’t really know the colours of
things very well. I think it was a sort of bright colour. That’s all I know.”
“They didn’t find one,” said Joanna. “After all, none of us have very
many things with us. You don’t when you go on a coach travel. There
wasn’t anything like that among anybody’s things. I’ve never seen anyone
—of our lot, I mean, wearing anything like that. Not so far. Have you?”
“No, I haven’t, but I suppose—I don’t know that I should know if I had
seen it,” said Emlyn Price. “I don’t always know red from green.”
“No, you’re a bit colour-blind, aren’t you,” said Joanna. “I noticed that
the other day.”
“What do you mean, you noticed it.”
“My red scarf. I asked if you’d seen it. You said you’d seen a green one
somewhere and you brought me the red one. I’d left it in the dining room.
But you didn’t really know it was red.”
“Well, don’t go about saying I’m colour-blind. I don’t like it. Puts people
off in some way.”
“Men are more often colour-blind than women,” said Joanna. “It’s one of
those sex-link things,” she added, with an air of erudition. “You know, it
passes through the female and comes out in the male.”
“You make it sound as though it was measles,” said Emlyn Price. “Well,
here we are.”
“You don’t seem to mind,” said Joanna, as they walked up the steps.
“Well, I don’t really. I’ve never been to an inquest. Things are rather in-
teresting when you do them for the first time.”
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