破镜谋杀案41
时间：2025-11-25 09:47:42
（单词翻译:单击）
Twenty-one
I
It was a tired and depressed Inspector Craddock who came to see Miss
Marple the following day.
“Sit down and be comfortable,” she said. “I can see you’ve had a very
hard time.”
“I don’t like to be defeated,” said Inspector Craddock. “Two murders
within twenty-four hours. Ah well, I’m poorer at my job than I thought I
was. Give me a nice cup of tea, Aunt Jane, with some thin bread and butter
and soothe me with your earliest remembrances of St. Mary Mead.”
Miss Marple clicked with her tongue in a sympathetic manner.
“Now it’s no good talking like that, my dear boy, and I don’t think bread
and butter is at all what you want. Gentlemen, when they’ve had a disap-
pointment, want something stronger than tea.”
As usual, Miss Marple said the word “gentlemen” in the way of someone
describing a foreign species.
“I should advise a good stiff whisky and soda,” she said.
“Would you really, Aunt Jane? Well, I won’t say no.”
“And I shall get it for you myself,” said Miss Marple, rising to her feet.
“Oh, no, don’t do that. Let me. Or what about Miss What’s-her-name?”
“We don’t want Miss Knight fussing about in here,” said Miss Marple.
“She won’t be bringing my tea for another twenty minutes so that gives us
a little peace and quiet. Clever of you to come to the window and not
through the front door. Now we can have a nice quiet little time by
ourselves.”
She went to a corner cupboard, opened it and produced a bottle, a sy-
phon of soda and a glass.
“You are full of surprises,” said Dermot Craddock. “I’d no idea that’s
what you kept in your corner cupboard. Are you quite sure you’re not a
secret drinker, Aunt Jane?”
“Now, now,” Miss Marple admonished him. “I have never been an ad-
vocate of teetotalism. A little strong drink is always advisable on the
premises in case there is a shock or an accident. Invaluable at such times.
Or, of course, if a gentleman should arrive suddenly. There!” said Miss
Marple, handing him her remedy with an air of quiet triumph. “And you
don’t need to joke anymore. Just sit quietly there and relax.”
“Wonderful wives there must have been in your young days,” said
Dermot Craddock.
“I’m sure, my dear boy, you would find the young lady of the type you
refer to as a very inadequate helpmeet nowadays. Young ladies were not
encouraged to be intellectual and very few of them had university degrees
or any kind of academic distinction.”
“There are things that are preferable to academic distinctions,” said
Dermot. “One of them is knowing when a man wants whisky and soda and
giving it to him.”
Miss Marple smiled at him affectionately.
“Come,” she said, “tell me all about it. Or as much as you are allowed to
tell me.”
“I think you probably know as much as I do. And very likely you have
something up your sleeve. How about your dogsbody, your dear Miss
Knight? What about her having committed the crime?”
“Now why should Miss Knight have done such a thing?” demanded Miss
Marple, surprised.
“Because she’s the most unlikely person,” said Dermot. “It so often
seems to hold good when you produce your answer.”
“Not at all,” said Miss Marple with spirit. “I have said over and over
again, not only to you, my dear Dermot—if I may call you so—that it is al-
ways the obvious person who has done the crime. One thinks so often of
the wife or the husband and so very often it is the wife or the husband.”
“Meaning Jason Rudd?” He shook his head. “That man adores Marina
Gregg.”
“I was speaking generally,” said Miss Marple, with dignity. “First we had
Mrs. Badcock apparently murdered. One asked oneself who could have
done such a thing and the first answer would naturally be the husband. So
one had to examine that possibility. Then we decided that the real object
of the crime was Marina Gregg and there again we have to look for the
person most intimately connected with Marina Gregg, starting as I say
with the husband. Because there is no doubt about it that husbands do,
very frequently, want to make away with their wives, though sometimes,
of course, they only wish to make away with their wives and do not actu-
ally do so. But I agree with you, my dear boy, that Jason Rudd really cares
with all his heart for Marina Gregg. It might be very clever acting, though I
can hardly believe that. And one certainly cannot see a motive of any kind
for his doing away with her. If he wanted to marry somebody else there
could, I should say, be nothing more simple. Divorce, if I may say so,
seems second nature to film stars. A practical advantage does not seem to
arise either. He is not a poor man by any means. He has his own career,
and is, I understand, most successful in it. So we must go farther afield.
But it certainly is difficult. Yes, very difficult.”
“Yes,” said Craddock, “it must hold particular difficulties for you be-
cause of course this film world is entirely new to you. You don’t know the
local scandals and all the rest of it.”
“I know a little more than you may think,” said Miss Marple. “I have
studied very closely various numbers of Confidential, Film Life, Film Talk
and Film Topics.”
Dermot Craddock laughed. He couldn’t help it.
“I must say,” he said, “it tickles me to see you sitting there and telling me
what your course of literature has been.”
“I found it very interesting,” said Miss Marple. “They’re not particularly
well written, if I may say so. But it really is disappointing in a way that it is
all so much the same as it used to be in my young days. Modern Society and
Tit Bits and all the rest of them. A lot of gossip. A lot of scandal. A great
preoccupation with who is in love with whom, and all the rest of it. Really,
you know, practically exactly the same sort of thing goes on in St. Mary
Mead. And in the Development too. Human nature, I mean, is just the
same everywhere. One comes back, I think, to the question of who could
have been likely to want to kill Marina Gregg, to want to so much that hav-
ing failed once they sent threatening letters and made repeated attempts
to do so. Someone perhaps a little—” very gently she tapped her forehead.
“Yes,” said Craddock, “that certainly seems indicated. And of course it
doesn’t always show.”
“Oh, I know,” agreed Miss Marple, fervently. “Old Mrs. Pike’s second
boy, Alfred, seemed perfectly rational and normal. Almost painfully pro-
saic, if you know what I mean, but actually, it seems, he had the most ab-
normal psychology, or so I understand. Really positively dangerous. He
seems quite happy and contented, so Mrs. Pike told me, now that he is in
Fairways Mental Home. They understand him there, and the doctors think
him a most interesting case. That of course pleases him very much. Yes, it
all ended quite happily, but she had one or two very near escapes.”
Craddock revolved in his mind the possibility of a parallel between
someone in Marina Gregg’s entourage and Mrs. Pike’s second son.
“The Italian butler,” continued Miss Marple, “the one who was killed. He
went to London, I understand, on the day of his death. Does anyone know
what he did there—if you are allowed to tell me, that is,” she added con-
scientiously.
“He arrived in London at eleven-thirty in the morning,” said Craddock,
“and what he did in London nobody knows until a quarter to two he vis-
ited his bank and made a deposit of five hundred pounds in cash. I may
say that there was no confirmation of his story that he went to London to
visit an ill relative or a relative who had got into trouble. None of his relat-
ives there had seen him.”
Miss Marple nodded her head appreciatively.
“Five hundred pounds,” she said. “Yes, that’s quite an interesting sum,
isn’t it? I should imagine it would be the first instalment of a good many
other sums, wouldn’t you?”
“It looks that way,” said Craddock.
“It was probably all the ready money the person he was threatening
could raise. He may even have pretended to be satisfied with that or he
may have accepted it as a down payment and the victim may have prom-
ised to raise further sums in the immediate future. It seems to knock out
the idea that Marina Gregg’s killer could have been someone in humble
circumstances who had a private vendetta against her. It would also
knock out, I should say, the idea of someone who’d obtained work as a stu-
dio helper or attendant or a servant or a gardener. Unless”—Miss Marple
pointed out—“such a person may have been the active agent whereas the
employing agent may not have been in the neighbourhood. Hence the visit
to London.”
“Exactly. We have in London Ardwyck Fenn, Lola Brewster and Margot
Bence. All three were present at the party. All three of them could have
met Giuseppe at an arranged meeting place somewhere in London
between the hours of eleven and a quarter to two. Ardwyck Fenn was out
of his office during those hours. Lola Brewster had left her suite to go
shopping. Margot Bence was not in her studio. By the way—”
“Yes?” said Miss Marple. “Have you something to tell me?”
“You asked me,” said Dermot, “about the children. The children that
Marina Gregg adopted before she knew she could have a child of her
own.”
“Yes I did.”
Craddock told her what he had learned.
“Margot Bence,” said Miss Marple softly. “I had a feeling, you know, that
it had something to do with children….”
“I can’t believe that after all these years—”
“I know, I know. One never can. But do you really, my dear Dermot,
know very much about children? Think back to your own childhood. Can’t
you remember some incident, some happening that caused you grief, or a
passion quite incommensurate with its real importance? Some sorrow or
passionate resentment that has really never been equalled since? There
was such a book, you know, written by that brilliant writer. Mr. Richard
Hughes. I forget the name of it but it was about some children who had
been through a hurricane. Oh yes—the hurricane in Jamaica. What made
a vivid impression on them was their cat rushing madly through the
house. It was the only thing they remembered. But the whole of the horror
and excitement and fear that they had experienced was bound up in that
one incident.”
“It’s odd you should say that,” said Craddock thoughtfully.
“Why, has it made you remember something?”
“I was thinking of when my mother died. I was five I think. Five or six. I
was having dinner in the nursery, jam roll pudding. I was very fond of
jam roll pudding. One of the servants came in and said to my nursery gov-
erness, ‘Isn’t it awful? There’s been an accident and Mrs. Craddock has
been killed.’… Whenever I think of my mother’s death, d’you know what I
see?”
“What?”
“A plate with jam roll pudding on it, and I’m staring at it. Staring at it
and I can see as well now as then, how the jam oozed out of it at one side. I
didn’t cry or say anything. I remember just sitting there as though I’d been
frozen stiff, staring at the pudding. And d’you know, even now if I see in a
shop or a restaurant or in anyone’s house a portion of jam roll pudding, a
whole wave of horror and misery and despair comes over me. Sometimes
for a moment I don’t remember why. Does that seem very crazy to you?”
“No,” said Miss Marple, “it seems entirely natural. It’s very interesting,
that. It’s given me a sort of idea….”
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