At Bertram's Hotel - Agatha Christie [61]
“I don’t know him,” said Miss Marple. “I’ve only just been introduced to him once by a mutual friend. I don’t like the idea of going to him in a tale-bearing way. I wondered if perhaps in some way you could do something about it.”
“I can try,” said Father. “By the way, I thought you might like to know that your friend, Canon Pennyfather, has turned up all right.”
“Indeed!” Miss Marple looked animated. “Where?”
“A place called Milton St. John.”
“How very odd. What was he doing there? Did he know?”
“Apparently—” Chief-Inspector Davy stressed the word—“he had had an accident.”
“What kind of an accident?”
“Knocked down by a car—concussed—or else, of course, he might have been conked on the head.”
“Oh! I see.” Miss Marple considered the point. “Doesn’t he know himself?”
“He says—” again the Chief-Inspector stressed the word—“that he does not know anything.”
“Very remarkable.”
“Isn’t it? The last thing he remembers is driving in a taxi to Kensington Air Station.”
Miss Marple shook her head perplexedly.
“I know it does happen that way in concussion,” she murmured. “Didn’t he say anything—useful?”
“He murmured something about the Walls of Jericho.”
“Joshua?” hazarded Miss Marple, “or Archaeology—excavations?—or I remember, long ago, a play—by Mr. Sutro, I think.”
“And all this week north of the Thames, Gaumont Cinemas—The Walls of Jericho, featuring Olga Radbourne and Bart Levinne,” said Father.
Miss Marple looked at him suspiciously.
“He could have gone to that film in the Cromwell Road. He could have come out about eleven and come back here—though if so, someone ought to have seen him—it would be well before midnight—”
“Took the wrong bus,” Miss Marple suggested. “Something like that—”
“Say he got back here after midnight,” Father said—“he could have walked up to his room without anyone seeing him—But if so, what happened then—and why did he go out again three hours later?”
Miss Marple groped for a word.
“The only idea that occurs to me is—oh!”
She jumped as a report sounded from the street outside.
“Car backfiring,” said Father soothingly.
“I’m sorry to be so jumpy—I am nervous tonight—that feeling one has—”
“That something’s going to happen? I don’t think you need worry.”
“I have never liked fog.”
“I wanted to tell you,” said Chief-Inspector Davy, “that you’ve given me a lot of help. The things you’ve noticed here—just little things—they’ve added up.”
“So there was something wrong with this place?”
“There was and is everything wrong with it.”
Miss Marple sighed.
“It seemed wonderful at first—unchanged you know—like stepping back into the past—to the part of the past that one had loved and enjoyed.”
She paused.
“But of course, it wasn’t really like that. I learned (what I suppose I really knew already) that one can never go back, that one should not ever try to go back—that the essence of life is going forward. Life is really a One Way Street, isn’t it?”
“Something of the sort,” agreed Father.
“I remember,” said Miss Marple, diverging from her main topic in a characteristic way, “I remember being in Paris with my mother and my grandmother, and we went to have tea at the Elysée Hotel. And my grandmother looked round, and she said suddenly, ‘Clara, I do believe I am the only woman here in a bonnet!’ And she was, too! When she got home she packed up all her bonnets, and her headed mantles too—and sent them off—”
“To the Jumble Sale?” inquired Father, sympathetically.
“Oh no. Nobody would have wanted them at a jumble sale. She sent them to a theatrical Repertory Company. They appreciated them very much. But let me see—” Miss Marple recovered her direction. “—Where was I?”
“Summing up this place.”
“Yes. It seemed all right—but it wasn’t. It was mixed-up—real people and people who weren’t real. One couldn’t always tell them apart.”
“What do you mean by not real?”
“There were retired military men, but there were also what seemed to be military men but who had never been in the Army. And clergymen who weren’t clergymen. And admirals and sea captains who’ve never been in the Navy.