A Murder Is Announced_ A Miss Marple Mystery - Agatha Christie [32]
“But how should I know what happened? There was an account in the paper—but it says so little. One can make conjectures, of course, but one has no accurate information.”
“George,” said Sir Henry, “would it be very unorthodox if Miss Marple were allowed to read the notes of the interviews Craddock had with these people at Chipping Cleghorn?”
“It may be unorthodox,” said Rydesdale, “but I’ve not got where I am by being orthodox. She can read them. I’d be curious to hear what she has to say.”
Miss Marple was all embarrassment.
“I’m afraid you’ve been listening to Sir Henry. Sir Henry is always too kind. He thinks too much of any little observations I may have made in the past. Really, I have no gifts—no gifts at all—except perhaps a certain knowledge of human nature. People, I find, are apt to be far too trustful. I’m afraid that I have a tendency always to believe the worst. Not a nice trait. But so often justified by subsequent events.”
“Read these,” said Rydesdale, thrusting the typewritten sheets upon her. “They won’t take you long. After all, these people are your kind—you must know a lot of people like them. You may be able to spot something that we haven’t. The case is just going to be closed. Let’s have an amateur’s opinion on it before we shut up the files. I don’t mind telling you that Craddock here isn’t satisfied. He says, like you, that it doesn’t make sense.”
There was silence whilst Miss Marple read. She put the typewritten sheets down at last.
“It’s very interesting,” she said with a sigh. “All the different things that people say—and think. The things they see—or think that they see. And all so complex, nearly all so trivial and if one thing isn’t trivial, it’s so hard to spot which one—like a needle in a haystack.”
Craddock felt a twinge of disappointment. Just for a moment or two, he wondered if Sir Henry might be right about this funny old lady. She might have put her finger on something—old people were often very sharp. He’d never, for instance, been able to conceal anything from his own great aunt Emma. She had finally told him that his nose twitched when he was about to tell a lie.
But just a few fluffy generalities, that was all that Sir Henry’s famous Miss Marple could produce. He felt annoyed with her and said rather curtly:
“The truth of the matter is that the facts are indisputable. Whatever conflicting details these people give, they all saw one thing. They saw a masked man with a revolver and a torch open the door and hold them up, and whether they think he said ‘Stick ’em up’ or ‘Your money or your life,’ or whatever phrase is associated with a hold-up in their minds, they saw him.”
“But surely,” said Miss Marple gently. “They couldn’t—actually—have seen anything at all….”
Craddock caught his breath. She’d got it! She was sharp, after all. He was testing her by that speech of his, but she hadn’t fallen for it. It didn’t actually make any difference to the facts, or to what happened, but she’d realized, as he’d realized, that those people who had seen a masked man holding them up couldn’t really have seen him at all.
“If I understand rightly,” Miss Marple had a pink flush on her cheeks, her eyes were bright and pleased as a child’s, “there wasn’t any light in the hall outside—and not on the landing upstairs either?”
“That’s right,” said Craddock.
“And so, if a man stood in the doorway and flashed a powerful torch into the room, nobody could see anything but the torch, could they?”
“No, they couldn’t. I tried it out.”
“And so when some of them say they saw a masked man, etc., they are really, though they don’t realize it, recapitulating from what they saw afterwards—when the lights came on. So it really all fits in very well, doesn’t it, on the assumption that Rudi Scherz was the—I think, ‘fall guy’ is the expression I mean?”
Rydesdale stared at her in such surprise that she grew pinker still. “I may have got the term wrong,” she murmured.
“I am not very clever about Americanisms—and I understand they change very quickly. I got it from one of Mr. Dashiel Hammett