A Murder Is Announced_ A Miss Marple Mystery - Agatha Christie [82]
Craddock strode out of the Vicarage to where he’d left his car. Search—that was all he could do—search.
A voice spoke to him out of the dripping laurels.
“Sir!” said Sergeant Fletcher urgently. “Sir. …”
Twenty-one
THREE WOMEN
Dinner was over at Little Paddocks. It had been a silent and uncomfortable meal.
Patrick, uneasily aware of having fallen from grace, only made spasmodic attempts at conversation—and such as he did make were not well received. Phillipa Haymes was sunk in abstraction. Miss Blacklock herself had abandoned the effort to behave with her normal cheerfulness. She had changed for dinner and had come down wearing her necklace of cameos but for the first time fear showed from her darkly circled eyes, and betrayed itself by her twitching hands.
Julia, alone, had maintained her air of cynical detachment throughout the evening.
“I’m sorry, Letty,” she said, “that I can’t pack my bag and go. But I presume the police wouldn’t allow it. I don’t suppose I’ll darken your roof—or whatever the expression is—for long. I should imagine that Inspector Craddock will be round with a warrant and the handcuffs any moment. In fact I can’t imagine why something of the kind hasn’t happened already.”
“He’s looking for the old lady—for Miss Marple,” said Miss Blacklock.
“Do you think she’s been murdered, too?” Patrick asked with scientific curiosity. “But why? What could she know?”
“I don’t know,” said Miss Blacklock dully. “Perhaps Miss Murgatroyd told her something.”
“If she’s been murdered too,” said Patrick, “there seems to be logically only one person who could have done it.”
“Who?”
“Hinchcliffe, of course,” said Patrick triumphantly. “That’s where she was last seen alive—at Boulders. My solution would be that she never left Boulders.”
“My head aches,” said Miss Blacklock in a dull voice. She pressed her fingers to her forehead. “Why should Hinch murder Miss Marple? It doesn’t make sense.”
“It would if Hinch had really murdered Murgatroyd,” said Patrick triumphantly.
Phillipa came out of her apathy to say:
“Hinch wouldn’t murder Murgatroyd.”
“She might have if Murgatroyd had blundered on something to show that she—Hinch—was the criminal.”
“Anyway, Hinch was at the station when Murgatroyd was killed.”
“She could have murdered Murgatroyd before she left.”
Startling them all, Letitia Blacklock suddenly screamed out:
“Murder, murder, murder—! Can’t you talk of anything else? I’m frightened, don’t you understand? I’m frightened. I wasn’t before. I thought I could take care of myself … But what can you do against a murderer who’s waiting—and watching—and biding his time! Oh, God!”
She dropped her head forward on her hands. A moment later she looked up and apologized stiffly.
“I’m sorry. I—I lost control.”
“That’s all right, Aunt Letty,” said Patrick affectionately. “I’ll look after you.”
“You?” was all Letitia Blacklock said, but the disillusionment behind the word was almost an accusation.
That had been shortly before dinner, and Mitzi had then created a diversion by coming and declaring that she was not going to cook the dinner.
“I do not do anything more in this house. I go to my room. I lock myself in. I stay there until it is daylight. I am afraid—people are being killed—that Miss Murgatroyd with her stupid English face—who would want to kill her? Only a maniac! Then it is a maniac that is about! And a maniac does not care who he kills. But me, I do not want to be killed. There are shadows in the kitchen—and I hear noises—I think there is someone out in the yard and then I think I see a shadow by the larder door and then it is footsteps I hear. So I go now to my room and I lock the door and perhaps even I put the chest of drawers against it. And in the morning I tell that cruel hard policeman that I go away from here. And if he will not let me I say: ‘I scream and I scream and I scream until you have to let me go!’”
Everybody, with a vivid recollection of what Mitzi could do in the screaming line, shuddered at the threat.
“So I go to my room,” said Mitzi, repeating the statement once more