破镜谋杀案44
时间：2025-11-25 09:47:48
（单词翻译:单击）
Twenty-three
Jason Rudd looked up as Gilchrist entered.
“There’s an old dame downstairs,” said the doctor; “looks about a hun-
dred. Wants to see you. Won’t take no and says she’ll wait. She’ll wait till
this afternoon, I gather, or she’ll wait till this evening and she’s quite cap-
able, I should say, of spending the night here. She’s got something she
badly wants to say to you. I’d see her if I were you.”
Jason Rudd looked up from his desk. His face was white and strained.
“Is she mad?”
“No. Not in the least.”
“I don’t see why I—Oh, all right—send her up. What does it matter?”
Gilchrist nodded, went out of the room and called to Hailey Preston.
“Mr. Rudd can spare you a few minutes now, Miss Marple,” said Hailey
Preston, appearing again by her side.
“Thank you. That’s very kind of him,” said Miss Marple as she rose to
her feet. “Have you been with Mr. Rudd long?” she asked.
“Why, I’ve worked with Mr. Rudd for the last two and a half years. My
job is public relations generally.”
“I see.” Miss Marple looked at him thoughtfully. “You remind me very
much,” she said, “of someone I knew called Gerald French.”
“Indeed? What did Gerald French do?”
“Not very much,” said Miss Marple, “but he was a very good talker.” She
sighed. “He had had an unfortunate past.”
“You don’t say,” said Hailey Preston, slightly ill at ease. “What kind of a
past?”
“I won’t repeat it,” said Miss Marple. “He didn’t like it talked about.”
Jason Rudd rose from his desk and looked with some surprise at the
slender elderly lady who was advancing towards him.
“You wanted to see me?” he said. “What can I do for you?”
“I am very sorry about your wife’s death,” said Miss Marple. “I can see it
has been a great grief to you and I want you to believe that I should not in-
trude upon you now or offer you sympathy unless it was absolutely neces-
sary. But there are things that need badly to be cleared up unless an inno-
cent man is going to suffer.”
“An innocent man? I don’t understand you.”
“Arthur Badcock,” said Miss Marple. “He is with the police now, being
questioned.”
“Questioned in connection with my wife’s death? But that’s absurd, ab-
solutely absurd. He’s never been near the place. He didn’t even know
her.”
“I think he knew her,” said Miss Marple. “He was married to her once.”
“Arthur Badcock? But—he was—he was Heather Badcock’s husband.
Aren’t you perhaps—” he spoke kindly and apologetically— “Making a
little mistake?”
“He was married to both of them,” said Miss Marple. “He was married to
your wife when she was very young, before she went into pictures.”
Jason Rudd shook his head.
“My wife was first married to a man called Alfred Beadle. He was in real
estate. They were not suited and they parted almost immediately.”
“Then Alfred Beadle changed his name to Badcock,” said Miss Marple.
“He’s in a real estate firm here. It’s odd how some people never seem to
like to change their job and want to go on doing the same thing. I expect
really that’s why Marina Gregg felt that he was no use to her. He couldn’t
have kept up with her.”
“What you’ve told me is most surprising.”
“I can assure you that I am not romancing or imagining things. What I
am telling you is sober fact. These things get round very quickly in a vil-
lage, you know, though they take a little longer,” she added, “in reaching
the Hall.”
“Well,” Jason Rudd stalled, uncertain what to say, then he accepted the
position, “and what do you want me to do for you, Miss Marple?” he
asked.
“I want, if I may, to stand on the stairs at the spot where you and your
wife received guests on the day of the fête.”
He shot a quick doubtful glance at her. Was this, after all, just another
sensation-seeker? But Miss Marple’s face was grave and composed.
“Why certainly,” he said, “if you want to do so. Come with me.”
He led her to the staircase head and paused in the hollowed-out bay at
the top of it.
“You’ve made a good many changes in the house since the Bantrys were
here,” said Miss Marple. “I like this. Now, let me see. The tables would be
about here, I suppose, and you and your wife would be standing—”
“My wife stood here.” Jason showed her the place. “People came up the
stairs, she shook hands with them and passed them on to me.”
“She stood here,” said Miss Marple.
She moved over and took her place where Marina Gregg had stood. She
remained there quite quietly without moving. Jason Rudd watched her. He
was perplexed but interested. She raised her right hand slightly as though
shaking, looked down the stairs as though to see people coming up it. Then
she looked straight ahead of her. On the wall halfway up the stairs was a
large picture, a copy of an Italian Old Master. On either side of it were nar-
row windows, one giving out on the garden and the other giving on to the
end of the stables and the weathercock. But Miss Marple looked at neither
of these. Her eyes were fixed on the picture itself.
“Of course you always hear a thing right the first time,” she said. “Mrs.
Bantry told me that your wife stared at the picture and her face ‘froze,’ as
she put it.” She looked at the rich red and blue robes of the Madonna, a
Madonna with her head slightly back, laughing up at the Holy Child that
she was holding up in her arms. “Giacomo Bellini’s ‘Laughing Madonna,’”
she said. “A religious picture, but also a painting of a happy mother with
her child. Isn’t that so Mr. Rudd?”
“I would say so, yes.”
“I understand now,” said Miss Marple. “I understand quite well. The
whole thing is really very simple, isn’t it?” She looked at Jason Rudd.
“Simple?”
“I think you know how simple it is,” said Miss Marple. There was a peal
on the bell below.
“I don’t think,” said Jason Rudd, “I quite understand.” He looked down
the stairway. There was a sound of voices.
“I know that voice,” said Miss Marple. “It’s Inspector Craddock’s voice,
isn’t it?”
“Yes, it seems to be Inspector Craddock.”
“He wants to see you, too. Would you mind very much if he joined us?”
“Not at all as far as I am concerned. Whether he will agree—”
“I think he will agree,” said Miss Marple. “There’s really not much time
now to be lost is there? We’ve got to the moment when we’ve got to under-
stand just how everything happened.”
“I thought you said it was simple,” said Jason Rudd.
“It was so simple,” said Miss Marple, “that one just couldn’t see it.”
The decayed butler arrived at this moment up the stairs.
“Inspector Craddock is here, sir,” he said.
“Ask him to join us here, please,” said Jason Rudd.
The butler disappeared again and a moment or two later Dermot Crad-
dock came up the stairs.
“You!” he said to Miss Marple, “how did you get here?”
“I came in Inch,” said Miss Marple, producing the usual confused effect
that that remark always caused.
From slightly behind her Jason Rudd rapped his forehead interrogat-
ively. Dermot Craddock shook his head.
“I was saying to Mr. Rudd,” said Miss Marple, “—has the butler gone
away—”
Dermot Craddock cast a look down the stairs.
“Oh, yes,” he said, “he’s not listening. Sergeant Tiddler will see to that.”
“Then that is all right,” said Miss Marple. “We could of course have gone
into a room to talk, but I prefer it like this. Here we are on the spot where
the thing happened, which makes it so much easier to understand.”
“You are talking,” said Jason Rudd, “of the day of the fête here, the day
when Heather Badcock was poisoned.”
“Yes,” said Miss Marple, “and I’m saying that it is all very simple if one
only looks at it in the proper way. It all began, you see, with Heather Bad-
cock being the kind of person she was. It was inevitable, really, that some-
thing of that kind should happen some day to Heather.”
“I don’t understand what you mean,” said Jason Rudd. “I don’t under-
stand at all.”
“No, it has to be explained a little. You see, when my friend, Mrs. Bantry
who was here, described the scene to me, she quoted a poem that was a
great favourite in my youth, a poem of dear Lord Tennyson’s. ‘The Lady of
Shalott.’” She raised her voice a little.
“The mirror crack’d from side to side;
‘The Curse is come upon me,’ cried
The Lady of Shalott.
That’s what Mrs. Bantry saw, or thought she saw, though actually she mis-
quoted and said doom instead of curse—perhaps a better word in the cir-
cumstances. She saw your wife speaking to Heather Badcock and heard
Heather Badcock speaking to your wife and she saw this look of doom on
your wife’s face.”
“Haven’t we been over that a great many times?” said Jason Rudd.
“Yes, but we shall have to go over it once more,” said Miss Marple.
“There was that expression on your wife’s face and she was looking not at
Heather Badcock but at that picture. At a picture of a laughing, happy
mother holding up a happy child. The mistake was that though there was
doom foreshadowed in Marina Gregg’s face, it was not on her the doom
would come. The doom was to come upon Heather. Heather was doomed
from the first moment that she began talking and boasting of an incident
in the past.”
“Could you make yourself a little clearer?” said Dermot Craddock.
Miss Marple turned to him.
“Of course I will. This is something that you know nothing about. You
couldn’t know about it, because nobody has told you what it was Heather
Badcock actually said.”
“But they have,” protested Dermot. “They’ve told me over and over
again. Several people have told me.”
“Yes,” said Miss Marple, “but you don’t know because, you see, Heather
Badcock didn’t tell it to you.”
“She hardly could tell it to me seeing she was dead when I arrived here,”
said Dermot.
“Quite so,” said Miss Marple. “All you know is that she was ill but she got
up from bed and came along to a celebration of some kind where she met
Marina Gregg and spoke to her and asked for an autograph and was given
one.”
“I know,” said Craddock with slight impatience. “I’ve heard all that.”
“But you didn’t hear the one operative phrase, because no one thought it
was important,” said Miss Marple. “Heather Badcock was ill in bed—with
German measles.”
“German measles? What on earth has that got to do with it?”
“It’s a very slight illness, really,” said Miss Marple. “It hardly makes you
feel ill at all. You have a rash which is easy to cover up with powder, and
you have a little fever, but not very much. You feel quite well enough to go
out and see people if you want to. And of course in repeating all this the
fact that it was German measles didn’t strike people particularly. Mrs.
Bantry, for instance, just said that Heather had been ill in bed and men-
tioned chicken pox and nettlerash. Mr. Rudd here said that it was “flu, but
of course he did that on purpose. But I think myself that what Heather
Badcock said to Marina Gregg was that she had had German measles and
got up from bed and went off to meet Marina. And that’s really the answer
to the whole thing, because, you see, German measles is extremely infec-
tious. People catch it very easily. And there’s one thing about it which
you’ve got to remember. If a woman contracts it in the first four months of
—” Miss Marple spoke the next word with a slight Victorian modesty “—of
—er—pregnancy, it may have a terribly serious effect. It may cause an un-
born child to be born blind or to be born mentally affected.”
She turned to Jason Rudd.
“I think I am correct in saying, Mr. Rudd, that your wife had a child who
was born mentally afflicted and that she has never really recovered from
the shock. She had always wanted a child and when at last the child came,
this was the tragedy that happened. A tragedy she has never forgotten,
that she has not allowed herself to forget and which ate into her as a kind
of deep sore, an obsession.”
“It’s quite true,” said Jason Rudd. “Marina developed German measles
early on in her pregnancy and was told by the doctor that the mental af-
fliction of her child was due to that cause. It was not a case of inherited in-
sanity or anything of that kind. He was trying to be helpful but I don’t
think it helped her much. She never knew how, or when or from whom
she had contracted the disease.”
“Quite so,” said Miss Marple, “she never knew until one afternoon here
when a perfectly strange woman came up those stairs and told her the fact
—told her, what was more—with a great deal of pleasure! With an air of
being proud of what she’d done! She thought she’d been resourceful and
brave and shown a lot of spirit in getting up from her bed, covering her
face with makeup, and going along to meet the actress on whom she had
such a crush and obtaining her autograph. It’s a thing she has boasted of
all through her life. Heather Badcock meant no harm. She never did mean
harm but there is no doubt that people like Heather Badcock (and like my
old friend Alison Wilde), are capable of doing a lot of harm because they
lack—not kindness, they have kindness—but any real consideration for
the way their actions may affect other people. She thought always of what
an action meant to her, never sparing a thought to what it might mean to
somebody else.”
Miss Marple nodded her head gently.
“So she died, you see, for a simple reason out of her own past. You must
imagine what that moment meant to Marina Gregg. I think Mr. Rudd un-
derstands it very well. I think she had nursed all those years a kind of
hatred for the unknown person who had been the cause of her tragedy.
And here suddenly she meets that person face to face. And a person who is
gay, jolly and pleased with herself. It was too much for her. If she had had
time to think, to calm down, to be persuaded to relax—but she gave her-
self no time. Here was this woman who had destroyed her happiness and
destroyed the sanity and health of her child. She wanted to punish her.
She wanted to kill her. And unfortunately the means were to hand. She
carried with her that well-known specific, Calmo. A somewhat dangerous
drug because you had to be careful of the exact dosage. It was very easy to
do. She put the stuff into her own glass. If by any chance anyone noticed
what she was doing they were probably so used to her pepping herself up
or soothing herself down in any handy liquid that they’d hardly notice it.
It’s possible that one person did see her, but I rather doubt it. I think that
Miss Zielinsky did no more than guess. Marina Gregg put her glass down
on the table and presently she managed to jog Heather Badcock’s arm so
that Heather Badcock spilt her own drink all down her new dress. And
that’s where the element of puzzle has come into the matter, owing to the
fact that people cannot remember to use their pronouns properly.
“It reminds me so much of that parlourmaid I was telling you about,”
she added to Dermot. “I only had the account, you see, of what Gladys
Dixon said to Cherry which simply was that she was worried about the
ruin of Heather Badcock’s dress with the cocktail spilt down it. What
seemed so funny, she said, was that she did it on purpose. But the ‘she’
that Gladys referred to was not Heather Badcock, it was Marina Gregg. As
Gladys said: She did it on purpose! She jogged Heather’s arm. Not by acci-
dent but because she meant to do so. We do know that she must have been
standing very close to Heather because we have heard that she mopped
up both Heather’s dress and her own before pressing her cocktail on
Heather. It was really,” said Miss Marple meditatively, “a very perfect
murder; because, you see, it was committed on the spur of the moment
without pausing to think or reflect. She wanted Heather Badcock dead and
a few minutes later Heather Badcock was dead. She didn’t realize, per-
haps, the seriousness of what she’d done and certainly not the danger of it
until afterwards. But she realized it then. She was afraid, horribly afraid.
Afraid that someone had seen her dope her own glass, that someone had
seen her deliberately jog Heather’s elbow, afraid that someone would ac-
cuse her of having poisoned Heather. She could see only one way out. To
insist that the murder had been aimed at her, that she was the prospective
victim. She tried that idea first on her doctor. She refused to let him tell
her husband because I think she knew that her husband would not be de-
ceived. She did fantastic things. She wrote notes to herself and arranged to
find them in extraordinary places and at extraordinary moments. She
doctored her own coffee at the studios one day. She did things that could
really have been seen through fairly easily if one had happened to be
thinking that way. They were seen through by one person.”
She looked at Jason Rudd.
“This is only a theory of yours,” said Jason Rudd.
“You can put it that way, if you like,” said Miss Marple, “but you know
quite well, don’t you, Mr. Rudd, that I’m speaking the truth. You know, be-
cause you knew from the first. You knew because you heard that mention
of German measles. You knew and you were frantic to protect her. But
you didn’t realize how much you would have to protect her from. You
didn’t realize that it was not only a question of hushing up one death, the
death of a woman whom you might say quite fairly had brought her death
on herself. But there were other deaths—the death of Giuseppe, a black-
mailer, it is true, but a human being. And the death of Ella Zielinsky of
whom I expect you were fond. You were frantic to protect Marina and also
to prevent her from doing more harm. All you wanted was to get her
safely away somewhere. You tried to watch her all the time, to make sure
that nothing more should happen.”
She paused, and then coming nearer to Jason Rudd, she laid a gentle
hand on his arm.
“I am very sorry for you,” she said, “very sorry. I do realize the agony
you’ve been through. You cared for her so much, didn’t you?”
Jason Rudd turned slightly away.
“That,” he said, “is, I believe, common knowledge.”
“She was such a beautiful creature,” said Miss Marple gently. “She had
such a wonderful gift. She had a great power of love and hate but no sta-
bility. That’s what’s so sad for anyone, to be born with no stability. She
couldn’t let the past go and she could never see the future as it really was,
only as she imagined it to be. She was a great actress and a beautiful and
very unhappy woman. What a wonderful Mary, Queen of Scots she was! I
shall never forget her.”
Sergeant Tiddler appeared suddenly on the stairs.
“Sir,” he said, “can I speak to you a moment?”
Craddock turned.
“I’ll be back,” he said to Jason Rudd, then he went towards the stairs.
“Remember,” Miss Marple called after him, “poor Arthur Badcock had
nothing to do with this. He came to the fête because he wanted to have a
glimpse of the girl he had married long ago. I should say she didn’t even
recognize him. Did she?” she asked Jason Rudd.
Jason Rudd shook his head.
“I don’t think so. She certainly never said anything to me. I don’t think,”
he added thoughtfully, “she would recognize him.”
“Probably not,” said Miss Marple. “Anyway,” she added, “he’s quite in-
nocent of wanting to kill her or anything of that kind. Remember that,”
she added to Dermot Craddock as he went down the stairs.
“He’s not been in any real danger, I can assure you,” said Craddock, “but
of course when we found out that he had actually been Miss Marina
Gregg’s first husband we naturally had to question him on the point. Don’t
worry about him, Aunt Jane,” he added in a low murmur, then he hurried
down the stairs.
Miss Marple turned to Jason Rudd. He was standing there like a man in
a daze, his eyes faraway.
“Would you allow me to see her?” said Miss Marple.
He considered her for a moment or two, then he nodded.
“Yes, you can see her. You seem to—understand her very well.”
He turned and Miss Marple followed him. He preceded her into the big
bedroom and drew the curtains slightly aside.
Marina Gregg lay in the great white shell of the bed—her eyes closed,
her hands folded.
So, Miss Marple thought, might the Lady of Shalott have lain in the boat
that carried her down to Camelot. And there, standing musing, was a man
with a rugged, ugly face, who might pass as a Lancelot of a later day.
Miss Marple said gently, “It’s very fortunate for her that she—took an
overdose. Death was really the only way of escape left to her. Yes—very
fortunate she took that overdose—or—was given it?”
His eyes met hers, but he did not speak.
He said brokenly, “She was—so lovely—and she had suffered so much.”
Miss Marple looked back against the still figure.
She quoted softly the last lines of the poem:
“He said: ‘She has a lovely face;
God in His mercy lend her grace,
The Lady of Shalott.’”
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