Nemesis - Agatha Christie [63]
She turned her face away.
‘I — do you mind if we don’t talk about it any more just now?’
‘Oh, of course not,’ said Miss Marple. ‘I’m so sorry to have impinged on some tragedy. I didn’t know. I — I haven’t heard…I thought — well I mean…’ She became more and more incoherent.
II
That evening she heard a little more. Mrs Glynne came to her bedroom when she was changing her dress to go out and join the others at the hotel.
‘I thought I ought to come and explain a little to you,’ said Mrs Glynne, ‘about — about the girl Verity Hunt. Of course you couldn’t know that our sister Clotilde was particularly fond of her and that her really horrible death was a terrible shock. We never mention her if we can help it, but — I think it would be easier if I told you the facts completely and you will understand. Apparently Verity had, without our knowledge, made friends with an undesirable — a more than undesirable — it turned out to be a dangerous — young man who already had a criminal record. He came here to visit us when he was passing through once. We knew his father very well.’ She paused. ‘I think I’d better tell you the whole truth if you don’t know, and you don’t seem to. He was actually Mr Rafiel’s son, Michael — ’
‘Oh dear,’ said Miss Marple, ‘not — not — I can’t remember his name but I do remember hearing that there was a son — and, that he hadn’t been very satisfactory.’
‘A little more than that,’ said Mrs Glynne. ‘He’d always given trouble. He’d been had up in court once or twice for various things. Once assaulting a teenager — other things of that type. Of course I consider myself that the magistrates are too lenient with that kind of thing. They don’t want to upset a young man’s university career. And so they let them off with a — I forget what they call it — a suspended sentence, something of that kind. If these boys were sent to gaol at once it would perhaps warn them off that type of life. He was a thief, too. He had forged cheques, he pinched things. He was a thoroughly bad lot. We were friends of his mother’s. It was lucky for her, I think, that she died young before she had time to be upset by the way her son was turning out. Mr Rafiel did all he could, I think. Tried to find suitable jobs for the boy, paid fines for him and things like that. But I think it was a great blow to him, though he pretended to be more or less indifferent and to write it off as one of those things that happen. We had, as probably people here in the village will tell you, we had a bad outbreak of murders and violence in this district. Not only here. They were in different parts of the country, twenty miles away, sometimes fifty miles away. One or two, it’s suspected by the police, were nearly a hundred miles away. But they seemed to centre more or less on this part of the world. Anyway, Verity one day went out to visit a friend and — well, she didn’t come back. We went to the police about it, the police sought for her, searched the whole countryside but they couldn’t find any trace of her. We advertised, they advertised, and they suggested that she’d gone off with a boy-friend. Then word began to get round that she had been seen with Michael Rafiel. By now the police had their eye on Michael as a possibility for certain crimes that had occurred, although they couldn’t find any direct evidence. Verity was said to have been seen, described by her clothing and other things, with a young man of Michael’s appearance and in a car that corresponded to a description of his car. But there was no further evidence until her body was discovered six months later, thirty miles from here in a rather wild part of wooded country, in a ditch covered with stones and piled earth. Clotilde had to go to identify it — it was Verity all right. She’d been strangled and her head beaten in. Clotilde has never quite got