A Murder Is Announced_ A Miss Marple Mystery - Agatha Christie [81]
Letitia Blacklock had assured him that there was no jewellery of value in the house. If these pearls were, by any chance, genuine, they must be worth a fabulous sum. And if Randall Goedler had given them to her—then they might be worth any sum you cared to name.
They looked false—they must be false, but—if they were real?
Why not? She might herself be unaware of their value. Or she might choose to protect her treasure by treating it as though it were a cheap ornament worth a couple of guineas at most. What would they be worth if real? A fabulous sum … Worth doing murder for—if anybody knew about them.
With a start, the Inspector wrenched himself away from his speculations. Miss Marple was missing. He must go to the Vicarage.
III
He found Bunch and her husband waiting for him, their faces anxious and drawn.
“She hasn’t come back,” said Bunch.
“Did she say she was coming back here when she left Boulders?” asked Julian.
“She didn’t actually say so,” said Craddock slowly, throwing his mind back to the last time he had seen Jane Marple.
He remembered the grimness of her lips and the severe frosty light in those usually gentle blue eyes.
Grimness, an inexorable determination … to do what? To go where?
“She was talking to Sergeant Fletcher when I last saw her,” he said. “Just by the gate. And then she went through it and out. I took it she was going straight home to the Vicarage. I would have sent her in the car—but there was so much to attend to, and she slipped away very quietly. Fletcher may know something! Where’s Fletcher?”
But Sergeant Fletcher, it seemed, as Craddock learned when he rang up Boulders, was neither to be found there nor had he left any message where he had gone. There was some idea that he had returned to Milchester for some reason.
The Inspector rang up headquarters in Milchester, but no news of Fletcher was to be found there.
Then Craddock turned to Bunch as he remembered what she had told him over the telephone.
“Where’s that paper? You said she’d been writing something on a bit of paper.”
Bunch brought it to him. He spread it out on the table and looked down on it. Bunch leant over his shoulder and spelled it out as he read. The writing was shaky and not easy to read:
Lamp.
Then came the word “Violets.”
Then after a space:
Where is bottle of aspirin?
The next item in this curious list was more difficult to make out. “Delicious death,” Bunch read. “That’s Mitzi’s cake.”
“Making enquiries,” read Craddock.
“Inquiries? What about, I wonder? What’s this? Severe affliction bravely borne … What on earth—!”
“Iodine,” read the Inspector. “Pearls. Ah, pearls.”
“And then Lotty—no, Letty. Her e’s look like o’s. And then Berne. And what’s this? Old Age Pension. …”
They looked at each other in bewilderment.
Craddock recapitulated swiftly:
“Lamp. Violets. Where is bottle of aspirin? Delicious Death. Making enquiries. Severe affliction bravely borne. Iodine. Pearls. Letty. Berne. Old Age Pension.”
Bunch asked: “Does it mean anything? Anything at all? I can’t see any connection.”
Craddock said slowly: “I’ve just a glimmer—but I don’t see. It’s odd that she should have put down that about pearls.”
“What about pearls? What does it mean?”
“Does Miss Blacklock always wear that three-tier choker of pearls?”
“Yes, she does. We laugh about it sometimes. They’re so dreadfully false-looking, aren’t they? But I suppose she thinks it’s fashionable.”
“There might be another reason,” said Craddock slowly.
“You don’t mean that they’re real. Oh! they couldn’t be!”
“How often have you had an opportunity of seeing real pearls of that size, Mrs. Harmon?”
“But they’re so glassy.”
Craddock shrugged his shoulders.
“Anyway, they don’t matter now. It’s Miss Marple that matters. We’ve got to find her.”
They’d got to find her before it was too late—but perhaps it was already too late? Those pencilled words showed that she was on the track … But that was dangerous—horribly dangerous. And where the hell was Fletcher?