The Mirror Crack'd - Agatha Christie [80]
‘You are full of surprises,’ said Dermot Craddock. ‘I’d no idea that’s what you kept in your corner cupboard. Are you quite sure you’re not a secret drinker, Aunt Jane?’
‘Now, now,’ Miss Marple admonished him. ‘I have never been an advocate of teetotalism. A little strong drink is always advisable on the premises in case there is a shock or an accident. Invaluable at such times. Or, of course, if a gentleman should arrive suddenly. There!’ said Miss Marple, handing him her remedy with an air of quiet triumph. ‘And you don’t need to joke any more. Just sit quietly there and relax.’
‘Wonderful wives there must have been in your young days,’ said Dermot Craddock.
‘I’m sure, my dear boy, you would find the young lady of the type you refer to as a very inadequate help-meet nowadays. Young ladies were not encouraged to be intellectual and very few of them had university degrees or any kind of academic distinction.’
‘There are things that are preferable to academic distinctions,’ said Dermot. ‘One of them is knowing when a man wants whisky and soda and giving it to him.’
Miss Marple smiled at him affectionately.
‘Come,’ she said, ‘tell me all about it. Or as much as you are allowed to tell me.’
‘I think you probably know as much as I do. And very likely you have something up your sleeve. How about your dogsbody, your dear Miss Knight? What about her having committed the crime?’
‘Now why should Miss Knight have done such a thing?’ demanded Miss Marple, surprised.
‘Because she’s the most unlikely person,’ said Dermot. ‘It so often seems to hold good when you produce your answer.’
‘Not at all,’ said Miss Marple with spirit. ‘I have said over and over again, not only to you, my dear Dermot — if I may call you so — that it is always the obvious person who has done the crime. One thinks so often of the wife or the husband and so very often it is the wife or the husband.’
‘Meaning Jason Rudd?’ He shook his head. ‘That man adores Marina Gregg.’
‘I was speaking generally,’ said Miss Marple, with dignity. ‘First we had Mrs Badcock apparently murdered. One asked oneself who could have done such a thing and the first answer would naturally be the husband. So one had to examine that possibility. Then we decided that the real object of the crime was Marina Gregg and there again we have to look for the person most intimately connected with Marina Gregg, starting as I say with the husband. Because there is no doubt about it that husbands do, very frequently, want to make away with their wives, though sometimes, of course, they only wish to make away with their wives and do not actually do so. But I agree with you, my dear boy, that Jason Rudd really cares with all his heart for Marina Gregg. It might be very clever acting, though I can hardly believe that. And one certainly cannot see a motive of any kind for his doing away with her. If he wanted to marry somebody else there could, I should say, be nothing more simple. Divorce, if I may say so, seems second nature to film stars. A practical advantage does not seem to arise either. He is not a poor man by any means. He has his own career, and is, I understand, most successful in it. So we must go farther afield. But it certainly is difficult. Yes, very difficult.’
‘Yes,’ said Craddock, ‘it must hold particular difficulties for you because of course this film world is entirely new to you. You don’t know the local scandals and all the rest of it.’
‘I know a little more than you may think,’ said Miss Marple. ‘I have studied very closely various numbers of Confidential, Film Life, Film Talk and Film Topics.’
Dermot Craddock laughed. He couldn’t help it.
‘I must say,’ he said, ‘it tickles me to see you sitting there and telling me what your course of literature has been.’
‘I found it very interesting,’ said Miss Marple. ‘They’re not particularly well written, if I may say so. But it really is disappointing in a way that it is all so much the same as it used to be in my young days. Modern Society and Tit Bits and all the rest of them. A lot of gossip. A lot of scandal.