Nemesis - Agatha Christie [48]
‘Oh, I see,’ said Miss Marple.
‘And what do you see, Miss Marple?’
‘Well, what I think I see is that you are talking of Mr Rafiel’s son.’
‘You are quite right. I am talking of Mr Rafiel’s son. What do you know about him?’
‘Nothing,’ said Miss Marple. ‘I only heard — and that was yesterday — that Mr Rafiel had a delinquent, or unsatisfactory, if we like to put it mildly, son. A son with a criminal record. I know very little about him. Was he Mr Rafiel’s only son?’
‘Yes, he was Mr Rafiel’s only son. But Mr Rafiel also had two daughters. One of them died when she was fourteen, the elder daughter married quite happily but had no children.’
‘Very sad for him.’
‘Possibly,’ said Professor Wanstead. ‘One never knows. His wife died young and I think it possible that her death saddened him very much, though he was never willing to show it. How much he cared for his son and daughters I don’t know. He provided for them. He did his best for them. He did his best for his son, but what his feelings were one cannot say. He was not an easy man to read that way. I think his whole life and interest lay in his profession of making money. It was the making of it, like all great financiers, that interested him. Not the actual money which he secured by it. That, as you might say, was sent out like a good servant to earn more money in more interesting and unexpected ways. He enjoyed finance. He loved finance. He thought of very little else.
‘I think he did all that was possible for his son. He got him out of scrapes at school, he employed good lawyers to get him released from Court proceedings whenever possible, but the final blow came, perhaps presaged by some early happenings. The boy was taken to Court on a charge of assault against a young girl. It was said to be assault and rape and he suffered a term of imprisonment for it, with some leniency shown because of his youth. But later, a second and really serious charge was brought against him.’
‘He killed a girl,’ said Miss Marple. ‘Is that right? That’s what I heard.’
‘He lured a girl away from her home. It was some time before her body was found. She had been strangled. And afterwards her face and head had been disfigured by some heavy stones or rocks, presumably to prevent her identity being made known.’
‘Not a very nice business,’ said Miss Marple, in her most old-ladylike tone.
Professor Wanstead looked at her for a moment or two.
‘You describe it that way?’
‘It is how it seems to me,’ said Miss Marple. ‘I don’t like that sort of thing. I never have. If you expect me to feel sympathy, regret, urge an unhappy childhood, blame bad environment; if you expect me in fact to weep over him, this young murderer of yours, I do not feel inclined so to do. I do not like evil beings who do evil things.’
‘I am delighted to hear it,’ said Professor Wanstead. ‘What I suffer in the course of my profession from people weeping and gnashing their teeth, and blaming everything on some happening in the past, you would hardly believe. If people knew the bad environments that people have had, the unkindness, the difficulties of their lives and the fact that nevertheless they can come through unscathed, I don’t think they would so often take the opposite point of view. The misfits are to be pitied, yes, they are to be pitied if I may say so for the genes with which they are born and over which they have no control themselves. I pity epileptics in the same way. If you know what genes are — ’
‘I know, more or less,’ said Miss Marple. ‘It’s common knowledge nowadays, though naturally I have no exact chemical or technical knowledge.’
‘The Governor, a man of experience, told me exactly why he was so anxious to have my verdict. He had felt increasingly in his experience of this particular inmate that, in plain words, the boy was not a killer. He