4_50 From Paddington - Agatha Christie [36]
“Not guesswork,” said Miss Marple. “And I had a great advantage. I knew Elspeth McGillicuddy. Nobody else did. There was no obvious confirmation of her story, and if there was no question of any woman being reported missing, then quite naturally they would think it was just an elderly lady imagining things—as elderly ladies often do—but not Elspeth McGillicuddy.”
“Not Elspeth McGillicuddy,” agreed the inspector. “I’m looking forward to meeting her, you know. I wish she hadn’t gone to Ceylon. We’re arranging for her to be interviewed there, by the way.”
“My own process of reasoning was not really original,” said Miss Marple. “It’s all in Mark Twain. The boy who found the horse. He just imagined where he would go if he were a horse and he went there and there was the horse.”
“You imagined what you’d do if you were a cruel and cold-blooded murderer?” said Craddock looking thoughtfully at Miss Marple’s pink and white elderly fragility. “Really, your mind—”
“Like a sink, my nephew Raymond used to say,” Miss Marple agreed, nodding her head briskly. “But as I always told him, sinks are necessary domestic equipment and actually very hygienic.”
“Can you go a little further still, put yourself in the murderer’s place, and tell me just where he is now?”
Miss Marple sighed.
“I wish I could. I’ve no idea—no idea at all. But he must be someone who has lived in, or knows all about, Rutherford Hall.”
“I agree. But that opens up a very wide field. Quite a succession of daily women have worked there. There’s the Women’s Institute—and the A.R.P. Wardens before them. They all know the Long Barn and the sarcophagus and where the key was kept. The whole setup there is widely known locally. Anybody living round about might hit on it as a good spot for his purpose.”
“Yes, indeed. I quite understand your difficulties.”
Craddock said: “We’ll never get anywhere until we identify the body.”
“And that, too, may be difficult?”
“Oh, we’ll get there—in the end. We’re checking up on all the reported disappearances of a woman of that age and appearance. There’s no one outstanding who fits the bill. The M.O. puts her down as about thirty-five, healthy, probably a married woman, has had at least one child. Her fur coat is a cheap one purchased at a London store. Hundreds of such coats were sold in the last three months, about sixty per cent of them to blonde women. No sales girl can recognize the photograph of the dead woman, or is likely to if the purchase were made just before Christmas. Her other clothes seem mainly of foreign manufacture mostly purchased in Paris. There are no English laundry marks. We’ve communicated with Paris and they are checking up there for us. Sooner or later, of course, someone will come forward with a missing relative or lodger. It’s just a matter of time.”
“The compact wasn’t any help?”
“Unfortunately, no. It’s a type sold by the hundred in the Rue de Rivoli, quite cheap. By the way, you ought to have turned that over to the police at once, you know—or rather Miss Eyelesbarrow should have done so.”
Miss Marple shook her head.
“But at that moment there wasn’t any question of a crime having been committed,” she pointed out. “If a young lady, practising golf shots, picks up an old compact of no particular value in the long grass, surely she doesn’t rush straight off to the police with it?” Miss Marple paused, and then added firmly: “I thought it much wiser to find the body first.”
Inspector Craddock was tickled.
“You don’t seem ever to have had any doubts but that it would be found?”
“I was sure it would. Lucy Eyelesbarrow is a most efficient and intelligent person.”
“I’ll say she is! She scares the life out of me, she’s so devastatingly efficient! No man will ever dare marry that girl.”
“Now you know, I wouldn’t say that… It would have to be a special type of man, of course.” Miss Marple brooded on this thought a moment. “How is she getting on at Rutherford Hall?”
“They’re completely dependent on her as far as I can see. Eating