Caribbean Mystery - Agatha Christie [43]
She stopped and looked appealingly at Mr. Rafiel.
“So you see he had to do something very quickly, as quickly as possible.”
Mr. Rafiel spoke. “In fact, that very same night, eh?”
“Yes,” said Miss Marple.
“Quick work,” said Mr. Rafiel, “but it could be done. Put the tablets in old Palgrave’s room, spread the blood pressure rumour about and add a little of our fourteen-syllable drug to a Planters Punch. Is that it?”
“Yes—But that’s all over—we needn’t worry about it. It’s the future. It’s now. With Major Palgrave out of the way and the snapshot destroyed, this man will go on with his murder as planned.”
Mr. Rafiel whistled.
“You’ve got it all worked out, haven’t you?”
Miss Marple nodded. She said in a most unaccustomed voice, firm and almost dictatorial, “And we’ve got to stop it. You’ve got to stop it, Mr. Rafiel.”
“Me?” said Mr. Rafiel, astonished, “Why me?”
“Because you’re rich and important,” said Miss Marple, simply. “People will take notice of what you say or suggest. They wouldn’t listen to me for a moment. They would say that I was an old lady imagining things.”
“They might at that,” said Mr. Rafiel. “More fools if they did. I must say, though, that nobody would think you had any brains in your head to hear your usual line of talk. Actually, you’ve got a logical mind. Very few women have.” He shifted himself uncomfortably in his chair. “Where the hell’s Esther or Jackson?” he said. “I need resettling. No, it’s no good your doing it. You’re not strong enough. I don’t know what they mean, leaving me alone like this.”
“I’ll go and find them.”
“No, you won’t. You’ll stay here—and thrash this out. Which of them is it? The egregious Greg? The quiet Edward Hillingdon or my fellow Jackson? It’s got to be one of the three, hasn’t it?”
Seventeen
MR. RAFIEL TAKES CHARGE
“I don’t know,” said Miss Marple.
“What do you mean? What have we been talking about for the last twenty minutes?”
“It has occurred to me that I may have been wrong.”
Mr. Rafiel stared at her.
“Scatty after all!” he said disgustedly. “And you sounded so sure of yourself.”
“Oh, I am sure—about the murder. It’s the murderer I’m not sure about. You see I’ve found out that Major Palgrave had more than one murder story—you told me yourself he’d told you one about a kind of Lucrezia Borgia—”
“So he did—at that. But that was quite a different kind of story.”
“I know. And Mrs. Walters said he had one about someone being gassed in a gas oven—”
“But the story he told you—”
Miss Marple allowed herself to interrupt—a thing that did not often happen to Mr. Rafiel.
She spoke with desperate earnestness and only moderate incoherence.
“Don’t you see—it’s so difficult to be sure. The whole point is that—so often—one doesn’t listen. Ask Mrs. Walters—she said the same thing—you listen to begin with—and then your attention flags—your mind wanders—and suddenly you find you’ve missed a bit. I just wonder if possibly there may have been a gap—a very small one—between the story he was telling me—about a man—and the moment when he was getting out his wallet and saying—‘Like to see a picture of a murderer.’”
“But you thought it was a picture of the man he had been talking about?”
“I thought so—yes. It never occurred to me that it mightn’t have been. But now—how can I be sure?”
Mr. Rafiel looked at her very thoughtfully….
“The trouble with you is,” he said, “that you’re too conscientious. Great mistake—Make up your mind and don’t shilly shally. You didn’t shilly shally to begin with. If you ask me, in all this chit-chat you’ve been having with the parson’s sister and the rest of them, you’ve got hold of something that’s unsettled you.”
“Perhaps you’re right.”
“Well, cut it out for the moment. Let’s go ahead with what you had to