Chapter 24

"Nobody 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 over-furnished parlour. He was thoroughly
tired, upset and dispirited.

Miss Marple made soft, soothing noises of dissent. "No, no, you've done
very good work, my dear boy. Very good work indeed."

"I've done very good work, have I? I've let a whole family be poisoned,
Alfred Crackenthorpe's dead and now Harold's dead too. What the hell's
going on there? 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 slip sent in with them ‘by Doctor
Quimper's instructions.' Well, Quimper never ordered them. There were
chemist's labels used. 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
sedative tablets prescribed for Emma."

"Oh, I see. For Emma…."

"Yes. It's got her fingerprints on it and the fingerprints of both the
nurses and the fingerprints of the chemist who made 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 the brown mixture (the cough mixture that
was) and the white mixture, and Doctor So-and-So's pink mixture. People
didn't mix those up nearly as much. In fact, you know, in my village of St.
Mary Mead we still like that kind of medicine. 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, diluted one in a hundred for outside application."



"And so Harold took them, and died," Miss Marple said thoughtfully. Dermot
Craddock uttered something like a groan.

"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's godson, quite different from the way I
should feel to any ordinary detective-inspector."

Dermot Craddock gave her a fleeting grin. "But the fact remains that I've
made the most ghastly mess of things all along the line," he said. "The
Chief Constable down here calls in Scotland Yard, and what do they get?
They get me making a prize ass 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 the least idea now who the original
murdered woman was! This Martine business seemed a perfectly safe bet. The
whole thing seemed to tie up. And now what happens? The real Martine shows
up and turns out, most improbably, to be the wife of Sir Robert
 Stoddart-West. So, who's the woman in the barn now? Goodness knows. First
I go all out on the idea she'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 almost anywhere, I suppose. I remember
Mrs. Brierly, such a very bad nervous breakdown. Finally, they said she
ought to go to the mental hospital for observation, and she was so worried
about the children knowing about it and so she wrote fourteen postcards and
arranged that they should be posted from different places abroad, and told
them that Mummy was 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 the Martine 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. Lady Stoddart-West didn't send that, but
somebody did. Somebody who was going to pretend to be Martine, and who was
going 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 pointed out. "Not
in the sense you mean. She only came 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 her other papers and things, and then
dropped it by mistake - or – I wonder now, was it a mistake? Surely
Inspector Bacon, and your men too, made a thorough search of the place,
didn't they, and didn't find it. It only turned up later in the boiler
house."

"That's understandable," said Craddock. "The old gardener chap used to
spear up any odd stuff that was blowing about 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 to suggest to them…. Yes, I do
wonder. It stopped you thinking about Anna Stravinska any more, 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 inquiries
about her, that's all…. I think somebody didn't want those inquiries
made."

"Let's hold on to the basic fact that someone was going to impersonate
Martine," said Craddock. "And then for some reason – didn't. Why?"

"That's a very interesting question," said Miss Marple.

"Somebody sent a wire saying Martine was going back to France, then
arranged to travel down with the girl and kill 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 distressed 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?"

Miss Marple 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 same time 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 the window. "there's your Lucy Eyelesbarrow
coming to see you," he said. "Well, I'll be off. My amour propre is very
low this afternoon and having a young woman coming in, radiant with
efficiency and success, is more than I can bear."

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