“S o you see,” said Mrs. Dane Calthrop, “I was quite right to call in an expert.”
I stared at her. We were all at the vicarage. The rain was pouring down outside and there was a pleasant log fire,and Mrs. Dane Calthrop had just wandered round, beat up a sofa cushion and put it for some reason of her own on thetop of the grand piano.
“But did you?” I said, surprised. “Who was it? What did he do?”
“It wasn’t a he,” said Mrs. Dane Calthrop.
With a sweeping1 gesture she indicated Miss Marple. Miss Marple had finished the fleecy knitting and was nowengaged with a crochet2 hook and a ball of cotton.
“That’s my expert,” said Mrs. Dane Calthrop. “Jane Marple. Look at her well. I tell you, that woman knows moreabout the different kinds of human wickedness than anyone I’ve ever known.”
“I don’t think you should put it quite like that, dear,” murmured Miss Marple.
“But you do.”
“One sees a good deal of human nature living in a village all the year round,” said Miss Marple placidly3.
Then, seeming to feel it was expected of her, she laid down her crochet, and delivered a gentle old-maidishdissertation on murder.
“The great thing is in these cases to keep an absolutely open mind. Most crimes, you see, are so absurdly simple.
This one was. Quite sane4 and straightforward—and quite understandable—in an unpleasant way, of course.”
“Very unpleasant!”
“The truth was really so very obvious. You saw it, you know, Mr. Burton.”
“Indeed I did not.”
“But you did. You indicated the whole thing to me. You saw perfectly5 the relationship of one thing to the other, butyou just hadn’t enough self-confidence to see what those feelings of yours meant. To begin with, that tiresome6 phrase‘No smoke without fire.’ It irritated you, but you proceeded quite correctly to label it for what it was—a smoke screen.
Misdirection, you see—everybody looking at the wrong thing—the anonymous7 letters, but the whole point was thatthere weren’t any anonymous letters!”
“But my dear Miss Marple, I can assure you that there were. I had one.”
“Oh yes, but they weren’t real at all. Dear Maud here tumbled to that. Even in peaceful Lymstock there are plentyof scandals, and I can assure you any woman living in the place would have known about them and used them. But aman, you see, isn’t interested in gossip in the same way—especially a detached logical man like Mr. Symmington. Agenuine woman writer of those letters would have made her letters much more to the point.
“So you see that if you disregard the smoke and come to the fire you know where you are. You just come down tothe actual facts of what happened. And putting aside the letters, just one thing happened—Mrs. Symmington died.
“So then, naturally, one thinks of who might have wanted Mrs. Symmington to die, and of course the very firstperson one thinks of in such a case is, I am afraid, the husband. And one asks oneself is there any reason?—anymotive?—for instance, another woman?
“And the very first thing I hear is that there is a very attractive young governess in the house. So clear, isn’t it? Mr.
Symmington, a rather dry repressed unemotional man, tied to a querulous and neurotic8 wife and then suddenly thisradiant young creature comes along.
“I’m afraid, you know, that gentlemen, when they fall in love at a certain age, get the disease very badly. It’s quitea madness. And Mr. Symmington, as far as I can make out, was never actually a good man—he wasn’t very kind orvery affectionate or very sympathetic—his qualities were all negative—so he hadn’t really the strength to fight hismadness. And in a place like this, only his wife’s death would solve his problem. He wanted to marry the girl, you see.
She’s very respectable and so is he. And besides, he’s devoted9 to his children and didn’t want to give them up. Hewanted everything, his home, his children, his respectability and Elsie. And the price he would have to pay for thatwas murder.
“He chose, I do think, a very clever way. He knew so well from his experience of criminal cases how soonsuspicion falls on the husband if a wife dies unexpectedly—and the possibility of exhumation10 in the case of poison. Sohe created a death which seemed only incidental to something else. He created a non-existent anonymous letter writer.
And the clever thing was that the police were certain to suspect a woman—and they were quite right in a way. All theletters were a woman’s letters; he cribbed them very cleverly from the letters in the case last year and from a case DrGriffith told him about. I don’t mean that he was so crude as to reproduce any letter verbatim, but he took phrases andexpressions from them and mixed them up, and the net result was that the letters definitely represented a woman’smind—a half-crazed repressed personality.
“He knew all the tricks that the police use, handwriting, typewriting tests, etc. He’s been preparing his crime forsome time. He typed all the envelopes before he gave away the typewriter to the Women’s Institute, and he cut thepages from the book at Little Furze probably quite a long time ago when he was waiting in the drawing room one day.
People don’t open books of sermons much!
“And finally, having got his false Poison Pen well established, he staged the real thing. A fine afternoon when thegoverness and the boys and his stepdaughter would be out, and the servants having their regular day out. He couldn’tforesee that the little maid Agnes would quarrel with her boy and come back to the house.”
Joanna asked:
“But what did she see? Do you know that?”
“I don’t know. I can only guess. My guess would be that she didn’t see anything.”
“That it was all a mare’s nest?”
“No, no, my dear, I mean that she stood at the pantry window all the afternoon waiting for the young man to comeand make it up and that—quite literally—she saw nothing. That is, no one came to the house at all, not the postman,nor anybody else.
“It would take her some time, being slow, to realize that that was very odd—because apparently11 Mrs. Symmingtonhad received an anonymous letter that afternoon.”
“Didn’t she receive one?” I asked, puzzled.
“But of course not! As I say, this crime is so simple. Her husband just put the cyanide in the top cachet of the onesshe took in the afternoon when her sciatica came on after lunch. All Symmington had to do was to get home before, orat the same time as Elsie Holland, call his wife, get no answer, go up to her room, drop a spot of cyanide in the plainglass of water she had used to swallow the cachet, toss the crumpled-up anonymous letter into the grate, and put byher hand the scrap12 of paper with ‘I can’t go on’ written on it.”
Miss Marple turned to me.
“You were quite right about that, too, Mr. Burton. A ‘scrap of paper’ was all wrong. People don’t leave suicidenotes on small torn scraps13 of paper. They use a sheet of paper—and very often an envelope too. Yes, the scrap ofpaper was wrong and you knew it.”
“You are rating me too high,” I said. “I knew nothing.”
“But you did, you really did, Mr. Burton. Otherwise why were you immediately impressed by the message yoursister left scribbled14 on the telephone pad?”
I repeated slowly, “‘Say that I can’t go on Friday’—I see! I can’t go on?”
Miss Marple beamed on me.
“Exactly. Mr. Symmington came across such a message and saw its possibilities. He tore off the words he wantedfor when the time came—a message genuinely in his wife’s handwriting.”
“Was there any further brilliance15 on my part?” I asked.
Miss Marple twinkled at me.
“You put me on the track, you know. You assembled those facts together for me—in sequence—and on top of ityou told me the most important thing of all—that Elsie Holland had never received any anonymous letters.”
“Do you know,” I said, “last night I thought that she was the letter writer and that that was why there had been noletters written to her?”
“Oh dear, me, no… The person who writes anonymous letters practically always sends them to herself as well.
That’s part of the—well, the excitement, I suppose. No, no, the fact interested me for quite another reason. It wasreally, you see, Mr. Symmington’s one weakness. He couldn’t bring himself to write a foul16 letter to the girl he loved.
It’s a very interesting sidelight on human nature—and a credit to him, in a way—but it’s where he gave himselfaway.”
Joanna said:
“And he killed Agnes? But surely that was quite unnecessary?”
“Perhaps it was, but what you don’t realize, my dear (not having killed anyone), is that your judgment17 is distortedafterwards and everything seems exaggerated. No doubt he heard the girl telephoning to Partridge, saying she’d beenworried ever since Mrs. Symmington’s death, that there was something she didn’t understand. He can’t take anychances—this stupid, foolish girl has seen something, knows something.”
“Yet apparently he was at his office all that afternoon?”
“I should imagine he killed her before he went. Miss Holland was in the dining room and kitchen. He just went outinto the hall, opened and shut the front door as though he had gone out, then slipped into the little cloakroom. Whenonly Agnes was left in the house, he probably rang the front door bell, slipped back into the cloakroom, came outbehind her and hit her on the head as she was opening the front door, and then after thrusting the body into thecupboard, he hurried along to his office, arriving just a little late if anyone had happened to notice it, but they probablydidn’t. You see, no one was suspecting a man.”
“Abominable brute,” said Mrs. Dane Calthrop.
“You’re not sorry for him, Mrs. Dane Calthrop?” I inquired.
“Not in the least. Why?”
“I’m glad to hear it, that’s all.”
Joanna said:
“But why Aimée Griffith? I know that the police have found the pestle18 taken from Owen’s dispensary—and theskewer too. I suppose it’s not so easy for a man to return things to kitchen drawers. And guess where they were?
Superintendent19 Nash only told me just now when I met him on my way here. In one of those musty old deed-boxes inhis office. Estate of Sir Jasper Harrington-West, deceased.”
“Poor Jasper,” said Mrs. Dane Calthrop. “He was a cousin of mine. Such a correct old boy. He would have had afit!”
“Wasn’t it madness to keep them?” I asked.
“Probably madder to throw them away,” said Mrs. Dane Calthrop. “No one had any suspicions aboutSymmington.”
“He didn’t strike her with the pestle,” said Joanna. “There was a clock weight there too, with hair and blood on it.
He pinched the pestle, they think, on the day Aimée was arrested, and hid the book pages in her house. And that bringsme back to my original question. What about Aimée Griffith? The police actually saw her write that letter.”
“Yes, of course,” said Miss Marple. “She did write that letter.”
“But why?”
“Oh, my dear, surely you have realized that Miss Griffith had been in love with Symmington all her life?”
“Poor thing!” said Mrs. Dane Calthrop mechanically.
“They’d always been good friends, and I dare say she thought, after Mrs. Symmington’s death, that some day,perhaps—well—” Miss Marple coughed delicately. “And then the gossip began spreading about Elsie Holland and Iexpect that upset her badly. She thought of the girl as a designing minx worming her way into Symmington’saffections and quite unworthy of him. And so, I think, she succumbed20 to temptation. Why not add one moreanonymous letter, and frighten the girl out of the place? It must have seemed quite safe to her and she took, as shethought, every precaution.”
“Well?” said Joanna. “Finish the story.”
“I should imagine,” said Miss Marple slowly, “that when Miss Holland showed that letter to Symmington herealized at once who had written it, and he saw a chance to finish the case once and for all, and make himself safe. Notvery nice—no, not very nice, but he was frightened, you see. The police wouldn’t be satisfied until they’d got theanonymous letter writer. When he took the letter down to the police and he found they’d actually seen Aimée writingit, he felt he’d got a chance in a thousand of finishing the whole thing.
“He took the family to tea there that afternoon and as he came from the office with his attaché case, he could easilybring the tornout book pages to hide under the stairs and clinch21 the case. Hiding them under the stairs was a neattouch. It recalled the disposal of Agnes’s body, and, from the practical point of view, it was very easy for him. Whenhe followed Aimée and the police, just a minute or two in the hall passing through would be enough.”
“All the same,” I said, “there’s one thing I can’t forgive you for, Miss Marple—roping in Megan.”
Miss Marple put down her crochet which she had resumed. She looked at me over her spectacles and her eyes werestern.
“My dear young man, something had to be done. There was no evidence against this very clever and unscrupulousman. I needed someone to help me, someone of high courage and good brains. I found the person I needed.”
“It was very dangerous for her.”
“Yes, it was dangerous, but we are not put into this world, Mr. Burton, to avoid danger when an innocent fellow-creature’s life is at stake. You understand me?”
I understood.
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收听单词发音
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sweeping
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| adj.范围广大的，一扫无遗的 | |
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crochet
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| n.钩针织物；v.用钩针编制 | |
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placidly
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| adv.平稳地，平静地 | |
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sane
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| adj.心智健全的，神志清醒的，明智的，稳健的 | |
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perfectly
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| adv.完美地，无可非议地，彻底地 | |
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tiresome
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| adj.令人疲劳的，令人厌倦的 | |
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anonymous
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| adj.无名的；匿名的；无特色的 | |
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neurotic
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| adj.神经病的，神经过敏的；n.神经过敏者，神经病患者 | |
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devoted
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| adj.忠诚的，忠实的，热心的，献身于...的 | |
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exhumation
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| n.掘尸，发掘；剥璐 | |
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apparently
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| adv.显然地；表面上，似乎 | |
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scrap
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| n.碎片；废料；v.废弃，报废 | |
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scraps
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| 油渣 | |
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scribbled
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| v.潦草的书写( scribble的过去式和过去分词 )；乱画；草草地写；匆匆记下 | |
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brilliance
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| n.光辉，辉煌，壮丽，（卓越的）才华，才智 | |
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foul
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| adj.污秽的；邪恶的；v.弄脏；妨害；犯规；n.犯规 | |
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judgment
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| n.审判；判断力，识别力，看法，意见 | |
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pestle
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| n.杵 | |
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superintendent
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| n.监督人，主管，总监；(英国)警务长 | |
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succumbed
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| 不再抵抗（诱惑、疾病、攻击等）( succumb的过去式和过去分词 )； 屈从； 被压垮； 死 | |
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clinch
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| v.敲弯，钉牢；确定；扭住对方 [参]clench | |
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