4_50 From Paddington - Agatha Christie [35]
Inspector Craddock said diplomatically that it was certainly a theory. But Mr. Alfred Crackenthorpe, he said, had not reccognized her.
“Pah! Afraid, that’s all! Alfred always was a coward. But he’s a liar, remember, always was! Lie himself black in the face. None of my sons are any good. Crowd of vultures, waiting for me to die, that’s their real occupation in life,” he chuckled. “And they can wait. I won’t die to oblige them! Well, if that’s all I can do for you… I’m tired. Got to rest.”
He shuffled out again.
“Alfred’s bit of skirt?” said Bacon questioningly. “In my opinion the old man just made that up,” he paused, hesitated. “I think, personally, Alfred’s quite all right—perhaps a shifty customer in some ways—but not our present cup of tea. Mind you—I did just wonder about that Air Force chap.”
“Bryan Eastley?”
“Yes. I’ve run into one or two of his type. They’re what you might call adrift in the world—had danger and death and excitement too early in life. Now they find life tame. Tame and unsatisfactory. In a way, we’ve given them a raw deal. Though I don’t really know what we could do about it. But there they are, all past and no future, so to speak. And they’re the kind that don’t mind taking chances—the ordinary fellow plays safe by instinct, it’s not so much morality as prudence. But these fellows aren’t afraid—playing safe isn’t really in their vocabulary. If Eastley were mixed up with a woman and wanted to kill her…” He stopped, threw out a hand hopelessly. “But why should he want to kill her? And if you do kill a woman, why plant her in your father-in-law’s sarcophagus? No, if you ask me, none of this lot had anything to do with the murder. If they had, they wouldn’t have gone to all the trouble of planting the body on their own back door step, so to speak.”
Craddock agreed that that hardly made sense.
“Anything more you want to do here?”
Craddock said there wasn’t.
Bacon suggested coming back to Brackhampton and having a cup of tea—but Inspector Craddock said that he was going to call on an old acquaintance.
Ten
I
Miss Marple, sitting erect against a background of china dogs and presents from Margate, smiled approvingly at Inspector Dermot Craddock.
“I’m so glad,” she said, “that you have been assigned to the case. I hoped you would be.”
“When I got your letter,” said Craddock, “I took it straight to the A.C. As it happened he had just heard from the Brackhampton people calling us in. They seemed to think it wasn’t a local crime. The A.C. was very interested in what I had to tell him about you. He’d heard about you, I gather, from my godfather.”
“Dear Sir Henry,” murmured Miss Marple affectionately.
“He got me to tell him all about the Little Paddocks business. Do you want to hear what he said next?”
“Please tell me if it is not a breach of confidence.”
“He said, ‘Well, as this seems a completely cockeyed business, all thought up by a couple of old ladies who’ve turned out, against all probability, to be right, and since you already know one of these old ladies, I’m sending you down on the case.’ So here I am! And now, my dear Miss Marple, where do we go from here? This is not, as you probably appreciate, an official visit. I haven’t got my henchmen with me. I thought you and I might take down our back hair together first.”
Miss Marple smiled at him.
“I’m sure,” she said, “that no one who only knows you officially would ever guess that you could be so human, and better-looking than ever—don’t blush… Now, what, exactly, have you been told so far?”
“I’ve got everything, I think. Your friend, Mrs. McGillicuddy’s original statement to the police at St. Mary Mead, confirmation of her statement by the ticket collector, and also the note to the stationmaster at Brackhampton. I may say that all the proper inquiries were made by the people concerned—the railway people and the police. But there