“N obody could have made more of a muck of it than I seem to have done,” said Dermot Craddock gloomily.
He sat, his long legs stretched out, looking somehow incongruous in faithful Florence’s somewhat overfurnishedparlour. He was thoroughly1 tired, upset and dispirited.
Miss Marple made soft, soothing2 noises of dissent3. “No, no, you’ve done very good work, my dear boy. Very goodwork indeed.”
“I’ve done very good work, have I? I’ve let a whole family be poisoned. Alfred Crackenthorpe’s dead and nowHarold’s dead too. What the hell’s going on here. That’s what I should like to know.”
“Poisoned tablets,” said Miss Marple thoughtfully.
“Yes. Devilishly cunning, really. They looked just like the tablets that he’d been having. There was a printed slipsent in with them ‘by Doctor Quimper’s instructions.’ Well, Quimper never ordered them. There were chemist’s labelsused. The chemist knew nothing about it, either. No. That box of tablets came from Rutherford Hall.”
“Do you actually know it came from Rutherford Hall?”
“Yes. We’ve had a thorough check up. Actually, it’s the box that held the sedative4 tablets prescribed for Emma.”
“Oh, I see. For Emma….”
“Yes. It’s got her fingerprints5 on it and the fingerprints of both the nurses and the fingerprint6 of the chemist whomade it up. Nobody else’s, naturally. The person who sent them was careful.”
“And the sedative tablets were removed and something else substituted?”
“Yes. That of course is the devil with tablets. One tablet looks exactly like another.”
“You are so right,” agreed Miss Marple. “I remember so very well in my young days, the black mixture and thebrown mixture (the cough mixture that was) and the white mixture, and Doctor So-and- So’s pink mixture. Peopledidn’t mix those up nearly as much. In fact, you know, in my village of St. Mary Mead7 we still like that kind ofmedicine. It’s a bottle they always want, not tablets. What were the tablets?” she asked.
“Aconite. They were the kind of tablets that are usually kept in a poison bottle, diluted8 one in a hundred for outsideapplication.”
“And so Harold took them, and died,” Miss Marple said thoughtfully. Dermot Craddock uttered something like agroan.
“You mustn’t mind my letting off steam to you,” he said. “Tell it all to Aunt Jane; that’s how I feel!”
“That’s very, very nice of you,” said Miss Marple, “and I do appreciate it. I feel towards you, as Sir Henry’sgodson, quite differently from the way I feel to any ordinary detective-inspector.”
Dermot Craddock gave her a fleeting9 grin. “But the fact remains10 that I’ve made the most ghastly mess of things allalong the line,” he said. “The Chief Constable11 down here calls in Scotland Yard, and what do they get? They get memaking a prize ass12 of myself!”
“No, no,” said Miss Marple.
“Yes, yes. I don’t know who poisoned Alfred, I don’t know who poisoned Harold, and, to cap it all, I haven’t theleast idea who the original murdered woman was! This Martine business seemed a perfectly13 safe bet. The whole thingseemed to tie up. And now what happens? The real Martine shows up and turns out, most improbably, to be the wifeof Sir Robert Stoddart-West. So, who’s the woman in the barn now? Goodness knows. First I go all out on the ideashe’s Anna Stravinska, and then she’s out of it—”
He was arrested by Miss Marple giving one of her small peculiarly significant coughs.
“But is she?” she murmured.
Craddock stared at her. “Well, that postcard from Jamaica—”
“Yes,” said Miss Marple; “but that isn’t really evidence, is it? I mean, anyone can get a postcard sent from almostanywhere, I suppose. I remember Mrs. Brierly, such a very bad nervous breakdown14. Finally, they said she ought to goto the mental hospital for observation, and she was so worried about the children knowing about it and so she wrotefourteen postcards and arranged that they should be posted from different places abroad, and told them that Mummywas going abroad on a holiday.” She added, looking at Dermot Craddock, “You see what I mean.”
“Yes, of course,” said Craddock, staring at her. “Naturally we’d have checked that postcard if it hadn’t been for theMartine business fitting the bill so well.”
“So convenient,” murmured Miss Marple.
“It tied up,” said Craddock. “After all, there’s the letter Emma received signed Martine Crackenthorpe. LadyStoddart-West didn’t send that, but somebody did. Somebody who was going to pretend to be Martine, and who wasgoing to cash in, if possible, on being Martine. You can’t deny that.”
“No, no.”
“And then, the envelope of the letter Emma wrote to her with the London address on it. Found at Rutherford Hall,showing she’d actually been there.”
“But the murdered woman hadn’t been there!” Miss Marple pointed15 out. “Not in the sense you mean. She onlycame to Rutherford Hall after she was dead. Pushed out of a train on to the railway embankment.”
“Oh, yes.”
“What the envelope really proves is that the murderer was there. Presumably he took that envelope off her with herother papers and things, and then dropped it by mistake—or—I wonder now, was it a mistake? Surely InspectorBacon, and your men too, made a thorough search of the place, didn’t they, and didn’t find it. It only turned up later inthe boiler16 house.”
“That’s understandable,” said Craddock. “The old gardener chap used to spear up any odd stuff that was blowingabout and shove it in there.”
“Where it was very convenient for the boys to find,” said Miss Marple thoughtfully.
“You think we were meant to find it?”
“Well, I just wonder. After all, it would be fairly easy to know where the boys were going to look next, or even tosuggest to them… Yes, I do wonder. It stopped you thinking about Anna Stravinska anymore, didn’t it?”
Craddock said: “And you think it really may be her all the time?”
“I think someone may have got alarmed when you started making inquiries17 about her, that’s all… I think somebodydidn’t want those inquiries made.”
“Let’s hold on to the basic fact that someone was going to impersonate Martine,” said Craddock. “And then forsome reason—didn’t. Why?”
“That’s a very interesting question,” said Miss Marple.
“Somebody sent a note saying Martine was going back to France, then arranged to travel down with the girl andkill her on the way. You agree so far?”
“Not exactly,” said Miss Marple. “I don’t think, really, you’re making it simple enough.”
“Simple!” exclaimed Craddock. “You’re mixing me up,” he complained.
Miss Marple said in a distressed18 voice that she wouldn’t think of doing anything like that.
“Come, tell me,” said Craddock, “do you or do you not think you know who the murdered woman was?” MissMarple sighed. “It’s so difficult,” she said, “to put it the right way. I mean, I don’t know who she was, but at the sametime I’m fairly sure who she was, if you know what I mean.”
Craddock threw up his head. “Know what you mean? I haven’t the faintest idea.” He looked out through thewindow. “There’s your Lucy Eyelesbarrow coming to see you,” he said. “Well, I’ll be off. My amour propre is verylow this afternoon and having a young woman coming in, radiant with efficiency and success, is more than I can bear.”
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1
thoroughly
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| adv.完全地，彻底地，十足地 | |
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soothing
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| adj.慰藉的；使人宽心的；镇静的 | |
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dissent
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| n./v.不同意，持异议 | |
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sedative
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| adj.使安静的，使镇静的；n. 镇静剂，能使安静的东西 | |
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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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fingerprint
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| n.指纹；vt.取...的指纹 | |
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mead
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| n.蜂蜜酒 | |
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diluted
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| 无力的，冲淡的 | |
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fleeting
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| adj.短暂的，飞逝的 | |
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remains
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| n.剩余物，残留物；遗体，遗迹 | |
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constable
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| n.(英国)警察，警官 | |
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ass
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| n.驴；傻瓜，蠢笨的人 | |
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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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breakdown
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| n.垮，衰竭；损坏，故障，倒塌 | |
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15
pointed
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| adj.尖的，直截了当的 | |
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boiler
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| n.锅炉；煮器(壶，锅等) | |
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17
inquiries
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| n.调查( inquiry的名词复数 )；疑问；探究；打听 | |
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distressed
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| 痛苦的 | |
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