P IP AND E MMA
IM iss Blacklock listened to him this time with more attention. She was an intelligent woman, as he had known, andshe grasped the implications of what he had to tell her.
“Yes,” she said quietly. “That does alter things … No one had any right to meddle1 with that door. Nobody hasmeddled with it to my knowledge.”
“You see what it means,” the Inspector2 urged. “When the lights went out, anybody in this room the other nightcould have slipped out of that door, come up behind Rudi Scherz and fired at you.”
“Without being seen or heard or noticed?”
“Without being seen or heard or noticed. Remember when the lights went out people moved, exclaimed, bumpedinto each other. And after that all that could be seen was the blinding light of the electric torch.”
Miss Blacklock said slowly, “And you believe that one of those people—one of my nice commonplace neighbours—slipped out and tried to murder me? Me? But why? For goodness’ sake, why?”
“I’ve a feeling that you must know the answer to that question, Miss Blacklock.”
“But I don’t, Inspector. I can assure you, I don’t.”
“Well, let’s make a start. Who gets your money if you were to die?”
Miss Blacklock said rather reluctantly:
“Patrick and Julia. I’ve left the furniture in this house and a small annuity3 to Bunny. Really, I’ve not much to leave.
I had holdings in German and Italian securities which became worthless, and what with taxation4, and the lowerpercentages that are now paid on invested capital, I can assure you I’m not worth murdering—I put most of my moneyinto an annuity about a year ago.”
“Still, you have some income, Miss Blacklock, and your nephew and niece would come into it.”
“And so Patrick and Julia would plan to murder me? I simply don’t believe it. They’re not desperately5 hard up oranything like that.”
“Do you know that for a fact?”
“No. I suppose I only know it from what they’ve told me … But I really refuse to suspect them. Some day I mightbe worth murdering, but not now.”
“What do you mean by some day you might be worth murdering, Miss Blacklock?” Inspector Craddock pouncedon the statement.
“Simply that one day—possibly quite soon—I may be a very rich woman.”
“That sounds interesting. Will you explain?”
“Certainly. You may not know it, but for more than twenty years I was secretary to and closely associated withRandall Goedler.”
Craddock was interested. Randall Goedler had been a big name in the world of finance. His daring speculations6 andthe rather theatrical7 publicity8 with which he surrounded himself had made him a personality not quickly forgotten. Hehad died, if Craddock remembered rightly, in 1937 or 1938.
“He’s rather before your time, I expect,” said Miss Blacklock. “But you’ve probably heard of him.”
“Oh, yes. He was a millionaire, wasn’t he?”
“Oh, several times over—though his finances fluctuated. He always risked most of what he made on some newcoup.”
She spoke10 with a certain animation11, her eyes brightened by memory.
“Anyway he died a very rich man. He had no children. He left his fortune in trust for his wife during her lifetimeand after death to me absolutely.”
A vague memory stirred in the Inspector’s mind.
IMMENSE FORTUNE TO COME TO FAITHFUL SECRETARY—something of that kind.
“For the last twelve years or so,” said Miss Blacklock with a slight twinkle, “I’ve had an excellent motive12 formurdering Mrs. Goedler—but that doesn’t help you, does it?”
“Did—excuse me for asking this—did Mrs. Goedler resent her husband’s disposition13 of his fortune?”
Miss Blacklock was now looking frankly14 amused.
“You needn’t be so very discreet15. What you really mean is, was I Randall Goedler’s mistress? No, I wasn’t. I don’tthink Randall ever gave me a sentimental16 thought, and I certainly didn’t give him one. He was in love with Belle17 (hiswife), and remained in love with her until he died. I think in all probability it was gratitude18 on his part that promptedhis making his will. You see, Inspector, in the very early days, when Randall was still on an insecure footing, he camevery near to disaster. It was a question of just a few thousands of actual cash. It was a big coup9, and a very excitingone; daring, as all his schemes were; but he just hadn’t got that little bit of cash to tide him over. I came to the rescue. Ihad a little money of my own. I believed in Randall. I sold every penny I had out and gave it to him. It did the trick. Aweek later he was an immensely wealthy man.
“After that, he treated me more or less as a junior partner. Oh! they were exciting days.” She sighed. “I enjoyed itall thoroughly19. Then my father died, and my only sister was left a hopeless invalid20. I had to give it all up and go andlook after her. Randall died a couple of years later. I had made quite a lot of money during our association and I didn’treally expect him to leave me anything, but I was very touched, yes, and very proud to find that if Belle predeceasedme (and she was one of those delicate creatures whom everyone always says won’t live long) I was to inherit his entirefortune. I think really the poor man didn’t know who to leave it to. Belle’s a dear, and she was delighted about it.
She’s really a very sweet person. She lives up in Scotland. I haven’t seen her for years—we just write at Christmas.
You see, I went with my sister to a sanatorium in Switzerland just before the war. She died of consumption out there.”
She was silent for a moment or two, then said:
“I only came back to England just over a year ago.”
“You said you might be a rich woman very soon … How soon?”
“I heard from the nurse attendant who looks after Belle Goedler that Belle is sinking rapidly. It may be—only afew weeks.”
She added sadly:
“The money won’t mean much to me now. I’ve got quite enough for my rather simple needs. Once I should haveenjoyed playing the markets again—but now … Oh, well, one grows old. Still, you do see, Inspector, don’t you, that ifPatrick and Julia wanted to kill me for a financial reason they’d be crazy not to wait for another few weeks.”
“Yes, Miss Blacklock, but what happens if you should predecease Mrs. Goedler? Who does the money go to then?”
“D’you know, I’ve never really thought. Pip and Emma, I suppose….”
Craddock stared and Miss Blacklock smiled.
“Does that sound rather crazy? I believe, if I predecease Belle, the money would go to the legal offspring—orwhatever the term is—of Randall’s only sister, Sonia. Randall had quarrelled with his sister. She married a man whomhe considered a crook21 and worse.”
“And was he a crook?”
“Oh, definitely, I should say. But I believe a very attractive person to women. He was a Greek or a Roumanian orsomething—what was his name now—Stamfordis, Dmitri Stamfordis.”
“Randall Goedler cut his sister out of his will when she married this man?”
“Oh, Sonia was a very wealthy woman in her own right. Randall had already settled packets of money on her, asfar as possible in a way so that her husband couldn’t touch it. But I believe that when the lawyers urged him to put insomeone in case I predeceased Belle, he reluctantly put down Sonia’s offspring, simply because he couldn’t think ofanyone else and he wasn’t the sort of man to leave money to charities.”
“And there were children of the marriage?”
“Well, there are Pip and Emma.” She laughed. “I know it sounds ridiculous. All I know is that Sonia wrote once toBelle after her marriage, telling her to tell Randall that she was extremely happy and that she had just had twins andwas calling them Pip and Emma. As far as I know she never wrote again. But Belle, of course, may be able to tell youmore.”
Miss Blacklock had been amused by her own recital22. The Inspector did not look amused.
“It comes to this,” he said. “If you had been killed the other night, there are presumably at least two people in theworld who would have come into a very large fortune. You are wrong, Miss Blacklock, when you say that there is noone who has a motive for desiring your death. There are two people, at least, who are vitally interested. How oldwould this brother and sister be?”
Miss Blacklock frowned.
“Let me see … 1922… no—it’s difficult to remember … I suppose about twenty-five or twenty-six.” Her face hadsobered. “But you surely don’t think—?”
“I think somebody shot at you with the intent to kill you. I think it possible that that same person or persons mighttry again. I would like you, if you will, to be very very careful, Miss Blacklock. One murder has been arranged and didnot come off. I think it possible that another murder may be arranged very soon.”
II
Phillipa Haymes straightened her back and pushed back a tendril of hair from her damp forehead. She was cleaning aflower border.
“Yes, Inspector?”
She looked at him inquiringly. In return he gave her a rather closer scrutiny23 than he had done before. Yes, a good-looking girl, a very English type with her pale ash-blonde hair and her rather long face. An obstinate24 chin and mouth.
Something of repression—of tautness25 about her. The eyes were blue, very steady in their glance, and told you nothingat all. The sort of girl, he thought, who would keep a secret well.
“I’m sorry always to bother you when you’re at work, Mrs. Haymes,” he said, “but I didn’t want to wait until youcame back for lunch. Besides, I thought it might be easier to talk to you here, away from Little Paddocks.”
“Yes, Inspector?”
No emotion and little interest in her voice. But was there a note of wariness—or did he imagine it?
“A certain statement has been made to me this morning. This statement concerns you.”
Phillipa raised her eyebrows26 very slightly.
“You told me, Mrs. Haymes, that this man, Rudi Scherz, was quite unknown to you?”
“Yes.”
“That when you saw him there, dead, it was the first time you had set eyes on him. Is that so?”
“Certainly. I had never seen him before.”
“You did not, for instance, have a conversation with him in the summerhouse of Little Paddocks?”
“In the summerhouse?”
He was almost sure he caught a note of fear in her voice.
“Yes, Mrs. Haymes.”
“Who says so?”
“I am told that you had a conversation with this man, Rudi Scherz, and that he asked you where he could hide andyou replied that you would show him, and that a time, a quarter past six, was definitely mentioned. It would be aquarter past six, roughly, when Scherz would get here from the bus stop on the evening of the hold-up.”
There was a moment’s silence. Then Phillipa gave a short scornful laugh. She looked amused.
“I don’t know who told you that,” she said. “At least I can guess. It’s a very silly, clumsy story—spiteful, ofcourse. For some reason Mitzi dislikes me even more than she dislikes the rest of us.”
“You deny it?”
“Of course it’s not true … I never met or saw Rudi Scherz in my life, and I was nowhere near the house thatmorning. I was over here, working.”
Inspector Craddock said very gently:
“Which morning?”
There was a momentary27 pause. Her eyelids28 flickered29.
“Every morning. I’m here every morning. I don’t get away until one o’clock.”
She added scornfully:
“It’s no good listening to what Mitzi tells you. She tells lies all the time.”
III
“And that’s that,” said Craddock when he was walking away with Sergeant30 Fletcher. “Two young women whosestories flatly contradict each other. Which one am I to believe?”
“Everyone seems to agree that this foreign girl tells whoppers,” said Fletcher. “It’s been my experience in dealingwith aliens that lying comes more easy than truth-telling. Seems to be clear she’s got a spite against this Mrs.
Haymes.”
“So, if you were me, you’d believe Mrs. Haymes?”
“Unless you’ve got reason to think otherwise, sir.”
And Craddock hadn’t, not really—only the remembrance of a pair of oversteady blue eyes and the glib31 enunciationof the words that morning. For to the best of his recollection he hadn’t said whether the interview in the summerhousehad taken place in the morning or the afternoon.
Still, Miss Blacklock, or if not Miss Blacklock, certainly Miss Bunner, might have mentioned the visit of the youngforeigner who had come to cadge32 his fare back to Switzerland. And Phillipa Haymes might have therefore assumedthat the conversation was supposed to have taken place on that particular morning.
But Craddock still thought that there had been a note of fear in her voice as she asked:
“In the summerhouse?”
He decided33 to keep an open mind on the subject.
IV
It was very pleasant in the Vicarage garden. One of those sudden spells of autumn warmth had descended34 uponEngland. Inspector Craddock could never remember if it was St. Martin’s or St. Luke’s Summer, but he knew that itwas very pleasant—and also very enervating35. He sat in a deck chair provided for him by an energetic Bunch, just onher way to a Mothers’ Meeting, and, well protected with shawls and a large rug round her knees, Miss Marple satknitting beside him. The sunshine, the peace, the steady click of Miss Marple’s knitting needles, all combined toproduce a soporific feeling in the Inspector. And yet, at the same time, there was a nightmarish feeling at the back ofhis mind. It was like a familiar dream where an undertone of menace grows and finally turns Ease into Terror….
He said abruptly36, “You oughtn’t to be here.”
Miss Marple’s needles stopped clicking for a moment. Her placid37 china-blue eyes regarded him thoughtfully.
She said, “I know what you mean. You’re a very conscientious38 boy. But it’s perfectly39 all right. Bunch’s father (hewas vicar of our parish, a very fine scholar) and her mother (who is a most remarkable40 woman—real spiritual power)are very old friends of mine. It’s the most natural thing in the world that when I’m at Medenham I should come onhere to stay with Bunch for a little.”
“Oh, perhaps,” said Craddock. “But—but don’t snoop around … I’ve a feeling—I have really—that it isn’t safe.”
Miss Marple smiled a little.
“But I’m afraid,” she said, “that we old women always do snoop. It would be very odd and much more noticeableif I didn’t. Questions about mutual41 friends in different parts of the world and whether they remember so and so, and dothey remember who it was that Lady Somebody’s daughter married? All that helps, doesn’t it?”
“Helps?” said the Inspector, rather stupidly.
“Helps to find out if people are who they say they are,” said Miss Marple.
She went on:
“Because that’s what’s worrying you, isn’t it? And that’s really the particular way the world has changed since thewar. Take this place, Chipping Cleghorn, for instance. It’s very much like St. Mary Mead42 where I live. Fifteen yearsago one knew who everybody was. The Bantrys in the big house—and the Hartnells and the Price Ridleys and theWeatherbys … They were people whose fathers and mothers and grandfathers and grandmothers, or whose aunts anduncles, had lived there before them. If somebody new came to live there, they brought letters of introduction, or they’dbeen in the same regiment43 or served in the same ship as someone there already. If anybody new—really new—really astranger—came, well, they stuck out—everybody wondered about them and didn’t rest till they found out.”
She nodded her head gently.
“But it’s not like that any more. Every village and small country place is full of people who’ve just come andsettled there without any ties to bring them. The big houses have been sold, and the cottages have been converted andchanged. And people just come—and all you know about them is what they say of themselves. They’ve come, yousee, from all over the world. People from India and Hong Kong and China, and people who used to live in France andItaly in little cheap places and odd islands. And people who’ve made a little money and can afford to retire. Butnobody knows any more who anyone is. You can have Benares brassware in your house and talk about tiffin and chotaHazri — and you can have pictures of Taormina and talk about the English church and the library — like MissHinchcliffe and Miss Murgatroyd. You can come from the South of France, or have spent your life in the East. Peopletake you at your own valuation. They don’t wait to call until they’ve had a letter from a friend saying that the So-and-So’s are delightful44 people and she’s known them all their lives.”
And that, thought Craddock, was exactly what was oppressing him. He didn’t know. There were just faces andpersonalities and they were backed up by ration45 books and identity cards—nice neat identity cards with numbers onthem, without photographs or fingerprints46. Anybody who took the trouble could have a suitable identity card—andpartly because of that, the subtler links that had held together English social rural life had fallen apart. In a townnobody expected to know his neighbour. In the country now nobody knew his neighbour either, though possibly hestill thought he did….
Because of the oiled door, Craddock knew that there had been somebody in Letitia Blacklock’s drawing room whowas not the pleasant friendly country neighbour he or she pretended to be….
And because of that he was afraid for Miss Marple who was frail47 and old and who noticed things….
He said: “We can, to a certain extent, check up on these people …” But he knew that that wasn’t so easy. India andChina and Hong Kong and the South of France … It wasn’t as easy as it would have been fifteen years ago. Therewere people, as he knew only too well, who were going about the country with borrowed identities—borrowed frompeople who had met sudden death by “incidents’ in the cities. There were organizations who bought up identities, whofaked identity and ration cards—there were a hundred small rackets springing into being. You could check up—but itwould take time—and time was what he hadn’t got, because Randall Goedler’s widow was very near death.
It was then that, worried and tired, lulled48 by the sunshine, he told Miss Marple about Randall Goedler and aboutPip and Emma.
“Just a couple of names,” he said. “Nicknames at that! They mayn’t exist. They may be respectable citizens livingin Europe somewhere. On the other hand one, or both, of them may be here in Chipping Cleghorn.”
Twenty-five years old approximately—Who filled that description? He said, thinking aloud:
“That nephew and niece of hers—or cousins or whatever they are … I wonder when she saw them last—”
Miss Marple said gently: “I’ll find out for you, shall I?”
“Now, please, Miss Marple, don’t—”
“It will be quite simple, Inspector, you really need not worry. And it won’t be noticeable if I do it, because, yousee, it won’t be official. If there is anything wrong you don’t want to put them on their guard.”
Pip and Emma, thought Craddock, Pip and Emma? He was getting obsessed49 by Pip and Emma. That attractivedare-devil young man, the good-looking girl with the cool stare….
He said: “I may find out more about them in the next forty-eight hours. I’m going up to Scotland. Mrs. Goedler, ifshe’s able to talk, may know a good deal more about them.”
“I think that’s a very wise move.” Miss Marple hesitated. “I hope,” she murmured, “that you have warned MissBlacklock to be careful?”
“I’ve warned her, yes. And I shall leave a man here to keep an unobtrusive eye on things.”
He avoided Miss Marple’s eye which said plainly enough that a policeman keeping an eye on things would be littlegood if the danger was in the family circle….
“And remember,” said Craddock, looking squarely at her, “I’ve warned you.”
“I assure you, Inspector,” said Miss Marple, “that I can take care of myself.”
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meddle
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| v.干预，干涉，插手 | |
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inspector
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| n.检查员，监察员，视察员 | |
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annuity
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| n.年金；养老金 | |
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taxation
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desperately
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speculations
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theatrical
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publicity
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coup
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spoke
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animation
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motive
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disposition
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frankly
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discreet
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| adj.(言行)谨慎的；慎重的；有判断力的 | |
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sentimental
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| adj.多愁善感的，感伤的 | |
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belle
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gratitude
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thoroughly
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invalid
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| n.病人，伤残人；adj.有病的，伤残的；无效的 | |
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crook
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| v.使弯曲；n.小偷，骗子，贼；弯曲(处) | |
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recital
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scrutiny
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| n.详细检查，仔细观察 | |
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obstinate
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tautness
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eyebrows
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momentary
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eyelids
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| n.眼睑( eyelid的名词复数 )；眼睛也不眨一下；不露声色；面不改色 | |
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flickered
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| （通常指灯光）闪烁，摇曳( flicker的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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sergeant
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| n.警官，中士 | |
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glib
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| adj.圆滑的，油嘴滑舌的 | |
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cadge
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decided
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descended
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enervating
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abruptly
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placid
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conscientious
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perfectly
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remarkable
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mutual
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| adj.相互的，彼此的；共同的，共有的 | |
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mead
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| n.蜂蜜酒 | |
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regiment
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| n.团，多数，管理；v.组织，编成团，统制 | |
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delightful
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ration
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fingerprints
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| n.指纹( fingerprint的名词复数 )v.指纹( fingerprint的第三人称单数 ) | |
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frail
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| adj.身体虚弱的；易损坏的 | |
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lulled
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| vt.使镇静，使安静（lull的过去式与过去分词形式） | |
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obsessed
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| adj.心神不宁的,鬼迷心窍的,沉迷的 | |
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