Nemesis - Agatha Christie [72]
As the little crowd dispersed, Miss Marple took an unostentatious route of her own. From her handbag she took out a leaf torn from her notebook on which she had entered two addresses. The first, a Mrs Blackett, lived in a neat little house and garden just by the end of the road where it sloped down towards the valley. A small neat woman opened the door.
‘Mrs Blackett?’
‘Yes, yes, ma’am, that’s my name.’
‘I wonder if I might just come in and speak to you for a minute or two. I have just been to the service and I am feeling a little giddy. If I could just sit down for a minute or two?’
‘Dear me, now, dear me. Oh, I’m sorry for that. Come right in, ma’am, come right in. That’s right. You sit down here. Now I’ll get you a glass of water — or maybe you’d like a pot of tea?’
‘No, thank you,’ said Miss Marple, ‘a glass of water would put me right.’
Mrs Blackett returned with a glass of water and a pleasurable prospect of talking about ailments and giddiness and other things.
‘You know, I’ve got a nephew like that. He oughtn’t to be at his age, he’s not much over fifty but now and then he’ll come over giddy all of a sudden and unless he sits down at once — why you don’t know, sometimes he’ll pass out right on the floor. Terrible, it is. Terrible. And doctors, they don’t seem able to do anything about it. Here’s your glass of water.’
‘Ah,’ said Miss Marple, sipping, ‘I feel much better.’
‘Been to the service, have you, for the poor lady as got done in, as some say, or accident as others. I’d say it’s accident every time. But these inquests and coroners, they always want to make things look criminal, they do.’
‘Oh yes,’ said Miss Marple. ‘I’ve been so sorry to hear of a lot of things like that in the past. I was hearing a great deal about a girl called Nora. Nora Broad, I think.’
‘Ah, Nora, yes. Well, she was my cousin’s daughter. Yes. A long while ago, that was. Went off and never come back. These girls, there’s no holding them. I said often, I did, to Nancy Broad — that’s my cousin — I said to her, “You’re out working all day” and I said “What’s Nora doing? You know she’s the kind that likes the boys. Well,” I said, “there’ll be trouble. You see if there isn’t.” And sure enough, I was quite right.’
‘You mean —?’
‘Ah, the usual trouble. Yes, in the family way. Mind you, I don’t think as my cousin Nancy knew about it yet. But of course, I’m sixty-five and I know what’s what and I know the way a girl looks and I think I know who it was, but I’m not sure. I might have been wrong because he went on living in the place and he was real cut up when Nora was missing.’
‘She went off, did she?’
‘Well, she accepted a lift from someone — a stranger. That’s the last time she was seen. I forget the make of the car now. Some funny name it had. An Audit or something like that. Anyway, she’d been seen once or twice in that car. And off she went in it. And it was said it was that same car that the poor girl what got herself murdered used to go riding in. But I don’t think as that happened to Nora. If Nora’d been murdered, the body would have come to light by now. Don’t you think so?’
‘It certainly seems likely,’ said Miss Marple. ‘Was she a girl who did well at school and all that?’
‘Ah no, she wasn’t. She was idle and she wasn’t too clever at her books either. No. She was all for the boys from the time she was twelve-years-old onwards. I think in the end she must have gone off with someone or other for good. But she never let anyone know. She never sent as much as a postcard. Went off, I think, with someone as promised her things. You know. Another girl I knew — but that was when I was young — went off with one of them Africans. He told her as his father was a Shake. Funny sort of word, but a shake I think it was. Anyway it was somewhere in Africa or in Algiers. Yes, in Algiers it was. Somewhere there. And she was going to have all sorts of wonderful things. He had six camels, the boy’s father, she said and a whole troop of horses and she was going to live in a wonderful