Miss Marple's final cases - Agatha Christie [20]
‘Quite, quite. But after all, you know, what’s a pin? Matter of fact he did pick the pin up just by Mrs Spenlow’s body. Came and told Slack about it yesterday—you put him up to that, I gather? Oughtn’t to have touched anything, of course, but as I said, what’s a pin? It was only a common pin. Sort of thing any woman might use.’
‘Oh, no, Colonel Melchett, that’s where you’re wrong. To a man’s eye, perhaps, it looked like an ordinary pin, but it wasn’t. It was a special pin, a very thin pin, the kind you buy by the box, the kind used mostly by dressmakers.’
Melchett stared at her, a faint light of comprehension breaking in on him. Miss Marple nodded her head several times, eagerly.
‘Yes, of course. It seems to me so obvious. She was in her kimono because she was going to try on her new dress, and she went into the front room, and Miss Politt just said something about measurements and put the tape measure round her neck—and then all she’d have to do was to cross it and pull—quite easy, so I’ve heard. And then, of course, she’d go outside and pull the door to and stand there knocking as though she’d just arrived. But the pin shows she’d already been in the house.’
‘And it was Miss Politt who telephoned to Spenlow?’
‘Yes. From the post office at two-thirty—just when the bus comes and the post office would be empty.’
Colonel Melchett said, ‘But my dear Miss Marple, why? In heaven’s name, why? You can’t have a murder without a motive.’
‘Well, I think, you know, Colonel Melchett, from all I’ve heard, that the crime dates from a long time back. It reminds me, you know, of my two cousins, Antony and Gordon. Whatever Antony did always went right for him, and with poor Gordon it was just the other way about. Race horses went lame, and stocks went down, and property depreciated. As I see it, the two women were in it together.’
‘In what?’
‘The robbery. Long ago. Very valuable emeralds, so I’ve heard. The lady’s maid and the tweeny. Because one thing hasn’t been explained—how, when the tweeny married the gardener, did they have enough money to set up a flower shop?
‘The answer is, it was her share of the—the swag, I think is the right expression. Everything she did turned out well. Money made money. But the other one, the lady’s maid, must have been unlucky. She came down to being just a village dressmaker. Then they met again. Quite all right at first, I expect, until Mr Ted Gerard came on the scene.
‘Mrs Spenlow, you see, was already suffering from conscience, and was inclined to be emotionally religious. This young man no doubt urged her to “face up” and to “come clean” and I dare say she was strung up to do it. But Miss Politt didn’t see it that way. All she saw was that she might go to prison for a robbery she had committed years ago. So she made up her mind to put a stop to it all. I’m afraid, you know, that she was always rather a wicked woman. I don’t believe she’d have turned a hair if that nice, stupid Mr Spenlow had been hanged.’
Colonel Melchett said slowly, ‘We can—er—verify your theory—up to a point. The identity of the Politt woman with the lady’s maid at the Abercrombies’, but—’
Miss Marple reassured him. ‘It will be all quite easy. She’s the kind of woman who will break down at once when she’s taxed with the truth. And then, you see, I’ve got her tape measure. I—er—abstracted it yesterday when I was trying on. When she misses it and thinks the police have got it—well, she’s quite an ignorant woman and she’ll think it will prove the case against her in some way.’
She smiled at him encouragingly. ‘You’ll have no trouble, I can assure you.’ It was the tone in which his favourite aunt had once assured him that he could not fail to pass his entrance examination into Sandhurst.
And he had passed.
The Case of the Caretaker
I
‘Well,’ demanded Doctor Haydock of his patient. ‘And how goes it today?’
Miss Marple smiled at him wanly from pillows.
‘I suppose, really, that I’m better,’ she admitted, ‘but I