Miss Marple's final cases - Agatha Christie [51]
‘Alfred. Alfred, come here.’
Round the corner of the house a young man appeared in answer to the summons, carrying a spade in his hand. He had a bold, handsome face and as he drew near he cast an unmistakably malevolent glance towards Mrs Cresswell.
‘You wanted me, miss?’ he said.
‘Yes, Alfred. I hear you’ve refused to go down for the fish. What about it, eh?’
Alfred spoke in a surly voice.
‘I’ll go down for it if you wants it, miss. You’ve only got to say.’
‘I do want it. I want it for my supper.’
‘Right you are, miss. I’ll go right away.’
He threw an insolent glance at Mrs Cresswell, who flushed and murmured below her breath:
‘Really! It’s unsupportable.’
‘Now that I think of it,’ said Miss Greenshaw, ‘a couple of strange visitors are just what we need aren’t they, Mrs Cresswell?’
Mrs Cresswell looked puzzled.
‘I’m sorry, madam—’
‘For you-know-what,’ said Miss Greenshaw, nodding her head. ‘Beneficiary to a will mustn’t witness it. That’s right, isn’t it?’ She appealed to Raymond West.
‘Quite correct,’ said Raymond.
‘I know enough law to know that,’ said Miss Greenshaw. ‘And you two are men of standing.’
She flung down her trowel on her weeding-basket.
‘Would you mind coming up to the library with me?’
‘Delighted,’ said Horace eagerly.
She led the way through french windows and through a vast yellow and gold drawing-room with faded brocade on the walls and dust covers arranged over the furniture, then through a large dim hall, up a staircase and into a room on the first floor.
‘My grandfather’s library,’ she announced.
Horace looked round the room with acute pleasure. It was a room, from his point of view, quite full of monstrosities. The heads of sphinxes appeared on the most unlikely pieces of furniture, there was a colossal bronze representing, he thought, Paul and Virginia, and a vast bronze clock with classical motifs of which he longed to take a photograph.
‘A fine lot of books,’ said Miss Greenshaw.
Raymond was already looking at the books. From what he could see from a cursory glance there was no book here of any real interest or, indeed, any book which appeared to have been read. They were all superbly bound sets of the classics as supplied ninety years ago for furnishing a gentleman’s library. Some novels of a bygone period were included. But they too showed little signs of having been read.
Miss Greenshaw was fumbling in the drawers of a vast desk. Finally she pulled out a parchment document.
‘My will,’ she explained. ‘Got to leave your money to someone—or so they say. If I died without a will I suppose that son of a horse-coper would get it. Handsome fellow, Harry Fletcher, but a rogue if there ever was one. Don’t see why his son should inherit this place. No,’ she went on, as though answering some unspoken objection, ‘I’ve made up my mind. I’m leaving it to Cresswell.’
‘Your housekeeper?’
‘Yes. I’ve explained it to her. I make a will leaving her all I’ve got and then I don’t need to pay her any wages. Saves me a lot in current expenses, and it keeps her up to the mark. No giving me notice and walking off at any minute. Very la-di-dah and all that, isn’t she? But her father was a working plumber in a very small way. She’s nothing to give herself airs about.’
She had by now unfolded the parchment. Picking up a pen she dipped it in the inkstand and wrote her signature, Katherine Dorothy Greenshaw.
‘That’s right,’ she said. ‘You’ve seen me sign it, and then you two sign it, and that makes it legal.’
She handed the pen to Raymond West. He hesitated a moment, feeling an unexpected repulsion to what he was asked to do. Then he quickly scrawled the well-known signature, for which his morning’s mail usually brought at least six demands a day.
Horace took the pen from him and added his own minute signature.
‘That’s done,’ said Miss Greenshaw.
She moved across to the bookcase and stood looking at them uncertainly, then she opened a glass door, took out a book and slipped the folded parchment inside.
‘I’ve my own places for