Caribbean Mystery - Agatha Christie [39]
Who will go for me?
Whom shall I send?
The sound that reached her ears a moment later was not instantly recognized by her as an answer to prayer—far from it—At the back of her mind it registered only as a man possibly calling his dog.
“Hi!”
Miss Marple, lost in perplexity, paid no attention.
“Hi!” The volume thus increased, Miss Marple looked vaguely round.
“HI!” called Mr. Rafiel impatiently. He added—“You there—”
Miss Marple had not at first realized that Mr. Rafiel’s “Hi You” was addressed to her. It was not a method that anyone had ever used before to summon her. It was certainly not a gentlemanly mode of address. Miss Marple did not resent it, because people seldom did resent Mr. Rafiel’s somewhat arbitrary method of doing things. He was a law unto himself and people accepted him as such. Miss Marple looked across the intervening space between her bungalow and his. Mr. Rafiel was sitting outside on his loggia and he beckoned her.
“You were calling me?” she asked.
“Of course I was calling you,” said Mr. Rafiel. “Who did you think I was calling—a cat? Come over here.”
Miss Marple looked round for her handbag, picked it up, and crossed the intervening space.
“I can’t come to you unless someone helps me,” explained Mr. Rafiel, “so you’ve got to come to me.”
“Oh yes,” said Miss Marple, “I quite understand that.”
Mr. Rafiel pointed to an adjacent chair. “Sit down,” he said, “I want to talk to you. Something damned odd is going on in this island.”
“Yes, indeed,” agreed Miss Marple, taking the chair as indicated. By sheer habit she drew her knitting out of her bag.
“Don’t start knitting again,” said Mr. Rafiel, “I can’t stand it. I hate women knitting. It irritates me.”
Miss Marple returned her knitting to her bag. She did this with no undue air of meekness, rather with the air of one who makes allowances for a fractious patient.
“There’s a lot of chit-chat going on,” said Mr. Rafiel, “and I bet you’re in the forefront of it. You and the parson and his sister.”
“It is, perhaps, only natural that there should be chit-chat,” said Miss Marple with spirit, “given the circumstances.”
“This Island girl gets herself knifed. Found in the bushes. Might be ordinary enough. That chap she was living with might have got jealous of another man—or he’d got himself another girl and she got jealous and they had a row. Sex in the tropics. That sort of stuff. What do you say?”
“No,” said Miss Marple, shaking her head.
“The authorities don’t think so, either.”
“They would say more to you,” pointed out Miss Marple, “than they would say to me.”
“All the same, I bet you know more about it than I do. You’ve listened to the tittle-tattle.”
“Certainly I have,” said Miss Marple.
“Nothing much else to do, have you, except listen to tittle-tattle?”
“It is often informative and useful.”
“D’you know,” said Mr. Rafiel, studying her attentively. “I made a mistake about you. I don’t often make mistakes about people. There’s a lot more to you than I thought there was. All these rumours about Major Palgrave and the stories he told. You think he was bumped off, don’t you?”
“I very much fear so,” said Miss Marple.
“Well, he was,” said Mr. Rafiel.
Miss Marple drew a deep breath. “That is definite, is it?” she asked.
“Yes, it’s definite enough. I had it from Daventry. I’m not breaking a confidence because the facts of the autopsy will have to come out. You told Graham something, he went to Daventry, Daventry went to the Administrator, the CID were informed, and between them they agreed that things looked fishy, so they dug up old Palgrave and had a look.”
“And they found?” Miss Marple paused interrogatively.
“They found he’d had a lethal dose of something that only a doctor could pronounce properly. As far as I remember it sounds vaguely like di-flor, hexagonal-ethylcarbenzol. That’s not the right name. But that’s roughly what it sounds like. The police doctor put it that way so that nobody should know, I suppose, what it really was. The stuff’s probably got some quite simple nice easy name like Evipan