The Mirror Crack'd - Agatha Christie [91]
The decayed butler arrived at this moment up the stairs.
‘Inspector Craddock is here, sir,’ he said.
‘Ask him to join us here, please,’ said Jason Rudd.
The butler disappeared again and a moment or two later Dermot Craddock came up the stairs.
‘You!’ he said to Miss Marple, ‘how did you get here?’
‘I came in Inch,’ said Miss Marple, producing the usual confused effect that that remark always caused.
From slightly behind her Jason Rudd rapped his forehead interrogatively. Dermot Craddock shook his head.
‘I was saying to Mr Rudd,’ said Miss Marple, ‘— has the butler gone away —’
Dermot Craddock cast a look down the stairs.
‘Oh, yes,’ he said, ‘he’s not listening. Sergeant Tiddler will see to that.’
‘Then that is all right,’ said Miss Marple. ‘We could of course have gone into a room to talk, but I prefer it like this. Here we are on the spot where the thing happened, which makes it so much easier to understand.’
‘You are talking,’ said Jason Rudd, ‘of the day of the fête here, the day when Heather Badcock was poisoned.’
‘Yes,’ said Miss Marple, ‘and I’m saying that it is all very simple if one only looks at it in the proper way. It all began, you see, with Heather Badcock being the kind of person she was. It was inevitable, really, that something of that kind should happen some day to Heather.’
‘I don’t understand what you mean,’ said Jason Rudd.
‘I don’t understand at all.’
‘No, it has to be explained a little. You see, when my friend, Mrs Bantry who was here, described the scene to me, she quoted a poem that was a great favourite in my youth, a poem of dear Lord Tennyson’s. “The Lady of Shalott”.’ She raised her voice a little.
‘The mirror crack’d from side to side;
“The Curse is come upon me,” cried
The Lady of Shalott.
That’s what Mrs Bantry saw, or thought she saw, though actually she misquoted and said doom instead of curse — perhaps a better word in the circumstances. She saw your wife speaking to Heather Badcock and heard Heather Badcock speaking to your wife and she saw this look of doom on your wife’s face.’
‘Haven’t we been over that a great many times?’ said Jason Rudd.
‘Yes, but we shall have to go over it once more,’ said Miss Marple. ‘There was that expression on your wife’s face and she was looking not at Heather Badcock but at that picture. At a picture of a laughing, happy mother holding up a happy child. The mistake was that though there was doom foreshadowed in Marina Gregg’s face, it was not on her the doom would come. The doom was to come upon Heather. Heather was doomed from the first moment that she began talking and boasting of an incident in the past.’
‘Could you make yourself a little clearer?’ said Dermot Craddock.
Miss Marple turned to him.
‘Of course I will. This is something that you know nothing about. You couldn’t know about it, because nobody has told you what it was Heather Badcock actually said.’
‘But they have,’ protested Dermot. ‘They’ve told me over and over again. Several people have told me.’
‘Yes,’ said Miss Marple, ‘but you don’t know because, you see, Heather Badcock didn’t tell it to you.’
‘She hardly could tell it to me seeing she was dead when I arrived here,’ said Dermot.
‘Quite so,’ said Miss Marple. ‘All you know is that she was ill but she got up from bed and came along to a celebration of some kind where she met Marina Gregg and spoke to her and asked for an autograph and was given one.’
‘I know,’ said Craddock with slight impatience. ‘I’ve heard all that.’
‘But you didn’t hear the one operative phrase, because no one thought it was important,’ said Miss Marple. ‘Heather Badcock was ill in bed — with German measles.’
‘German measles? What on earth has that got to do with it?’
‘It’s a very slight illness, really,’ said Miss Marple. ‘It hardly makes you feel ill at all. You have a rash which is easy to cover up with powder, and you have a little fever, but not very much. You feel quite well enough to go out and see people if you want to. And of course in repeating all this the fact