Twenty-seven
“S o you see,” said Miss Marple, “it really turned out to be, as I began to suspect, very, very simple. The simplestkind of crime. So many men seem to murder their wives.”
Mrs. McGillicuddy looked at Miss Marple and Inspector¹ Craddock. “I’d be obliged,” she said, “if you’d put me alittle more up to date.”
“He saw a chance, you see,” said Miss Marple, “of marrying a rich wife, Emma Crackenthorpe. Only he couldn’tmarry her because he had a wife already. They’d been separated for years but she wouldn’t divorce him. That fitted invery well with what Inspector Craddock told me of this girl who called herself Anna Stravinska. She had an Englishhusband, so she told one of her friends, and it was also said she was a very devout² Catholic. Dr. Quimper couldn’t riskmarrying Emma bigamously, so he decided³, being a very ruthless and cold-blooded man, that he would get rid of hiswife. The idea of murdering her in the train and later putting her body in the sarcophagus in the barn was really rathera clever one. He meant it to tie up, you see, with the Crackenthorpe family. Before that he’d written a letter to Emmawhich purported⁴ to be from the girl Martine whom Edmund Crackenthorpe had talked of marrying. Emma had told Dr.
Quimper all about her brother, you see. Then, when the moment arose he encouraged her to go to the police with herstory. He wanted the dead woman identified as Martine. I think he may have heard that inquiries⁵ were being made bythe Paris police about Anna Stravinska, and so he arranged to have a postcard come from her from Jamaica.
“It was easy for him to arrange to meet his wife in London, to tell her that he hoped to be reconciled with her andthat he would like her to come down and ‘meet his family.’ We won’t talk about the next part of it, which is veryunpleasant to think about. Of course he was a greedy man. When he thought about taxation⁶, and how much it cuts intoincome, he began thinking that it would be nice to have a good deal more capital. Perhaps he’d already thought of thatbefore he decided to murder his wife. Anyway, he started spreading

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