Nemesis - Agatha Christie [64]
‘I’m sorry,’ said Miss Marple. ‘I’m really very, very sorry. Please tell your sister that I didn’t know. I had no idea.’
Chapter 16
The Inquest
I
Miss Marple walked slowly along the village street on her way towards the market place where the inquest was to take place in the old-fashioned Georgian building which had been known for a hundred years as the Curfew Arms. She glanced at her watch. There was still a good twenty minutes before she need be there. She looked into the shops. She paused before the shop that sold wool and babies’ jackets, and peered inside for a few moments. A girl in the shop was serving. Small woolly coats were being tried on two children. Further along the counter there was an elderly woman.
Miss Marple went into the shop, went along the counter to a seat opposite the elderly woman, and produced a sample of pink wool. She had run out, she explained, of this particular brand of wool and had a little jacket she needed to finish. The match was soon made, some more samples of wool that Miss Marple had admired were brought out for her to look at, and soon she was in conversation. Starting with the sadness of the accident which had just taken place. Mrs Merrypit, if her name was identical with that which was written up outside the shop, was full of the importance of the accident, and the general difficulties of getting local governments to do anything about the dangers of footpaths and public rights of way.
‘After the rain, you see, you get all the soil washed off and then the boulders get loose and then down they comes. I remember one year they had three falls — three accidents there was. One boy nearly killed, he was, and then later that year, oh six months later, I think, there was a man got his arm broken, and the third time it was poor old Mrs Walker. Blind she was and pretty well deaf too. She never heard nothing or she could have got out of the way, they say. Somebody saw it and they called out to her, but they was too far away to reach her or to run to get her. And so she was killed.’
‘Oh how sad,’ said Miss Marple, ‘how tragic. The sort of thing that’s not easily forgotten, is it.’
‘No indeed. I expect the Coroner’ll mention it today.’
‘I expect he will,’ said Miss Marple. ‘In a terrible way it seems quite a natural thing to happen, doesn’t it, though of course there are accidents sometimes by pushing things about, you know. Just pushing, making stones rock. That sort of thing.’
‘Ah well, there’s boys as be up to anything. But I don’t think I’ve ever seen them up that way, fooling about.’
Miss Marple went on to the subject of pullovers. Bright coloured pullovers.
‘It’s not for myself,’ she said, ‘it’s for one of my great-nephews. You know he wants a polo-necked pullover and very bright colours he’d like.’
‘Yes, they do like bright colours nowadays, don’t they?’ agreed Mrs Merrypit. ‘Not in jeans. Black jeans they like. Black or dark blue. But they like a bit of brightness up above.’
Miss Marple described a pullover of check design in bright colours. There appeared to be quite a good stock of pullovers and jerseys, but anything in red and black did not seem to be on display, nor even was anything like it mentioned as having been lately in stock. After looking at a few samples Miss Marple prepared to take her departure, chatting first about the former murders she had heard about which had happened in this part of the world.
‘They got the fellow in the end,’ said Mrs Merrypit. ‘Nice-looking boy, hardly have thought it of him. He’d been well brought up, you know. Been to university and all that. Father was very rich, they say. Touched in the head, I suppose. Not that they sent him to Broadway, or whatever the place is. No, they didn’t do that, but I think myself he must have been a mental case — there was five or six other girls, so they said. The police had