II

Miss Jane Marple was very nearly, if not quite, as Craddock had picturedher. She was far more benignant than he had imagined and a good dealolder. She seemed indeed very old. She had snow-white hair and a pinkcrinkled face and very soft innocent blue eyes, and she was heavily en-meshed in fleecy wool. Wool round her shoulders in the form of a lacycape and wool that she was knitting and which turned out to be a baby’sshawl.

She was all incoherent delight and pleasure at seeing Sir Henry, and be-came quite flustered when introduced to the Chief Constable and Detect-ive-Inspector Craddock.

“But really, Sir Henry, how fortunate … how very fortunate. So longsince I have seen you … Yes, my rheumatism. Very bad of late. Of course Icouldn’t have afforded this hotel (really fantastic what they chargenowadays) but Raymond—my nephew, Raymond West, you may remem-ber him—”

“Everyone knows his name.”

“Yes, the dear boy has been so successful with his clever books — heprides himself upon never writing about anything pleasant. The dear boyinsisted on paying all my expenses. And his dear wife is making a namefor herself too, as an artist. Mostly jugs of dying flowers and broken combson windowsills. I never dare tell her, but I still admire Blair Leighton andAlma Tadema. Oh, but I’m chattering. And the Chief Constable himself—indeed I never expected—so afraid I shall be taking up his time—”

“Completely ga-ga,” thought the disgusted Detective-Inspector Craddock.

“Come into the Manager’s private room,” said Rydesdale. “We can talkbetter there.”

When Miss Marple had been disentangled from her wool, and her spareknitting pins collected, she accompanied them, fluttering and protesting,to Mr. Rowlandson’s comfortable sitting-room.

“Now, Miss Marple, let’s hear what you have to tell us,” said the ChiefConstable.

Miss Marple came to the point with unexpected brevity.

“It was a cheque,” she said. “He altered it.”

“He?”

“The young man at the desk here, the one who is supposed to havestaged that hold-up and shot himself.”

“He altered a cheque, you say?”

Miss Marple nodded.

“Yes. I have it here.” She extracted it from her bag and laid it on thetable. “It came this morning with my others from the Bank. You can see, itwas for seven pounds, and he altered it to seventeen. A stroke in front ofthe 7, and teen added after the word seven with a nice artistic little blotjust blurring the whole word. Really very nicely done. A certain amount ofpractice, I should say. It’s the same ink, because I wrote the cheque actu-ally at the desk. I should think he’d done it quite often before, wouldn’tyou?”

“He picked the wrong person to do it to, this time,” remarked Sir Henry.

Miss Marple nodded agreement.

“Yes. I’m afraid he would never have gone very far in crime. I was quitethe wrong person. Some busy young married woman, or some girl havinga love affair—that’s the kind who write cheques for all sorts of differentsums and don’t really look through their passbooks carefully. But an oldwoman who has to be careful of the pennies, and who has formed habits—that’s quite the wrong person to choose. Seventeen pounds is a sum Inever write a cheque for. Twenty pounds, a round sum, for the monthlywages and books. And as for my personal expenditure, I usually cashseven—it used to be five, but everything has gone up so.”

“And perhaps he reminded you of someone?” prompted Sir Henry, mis-chief in his eye.

Miss Marple smiled and shook her head at him.

“You are very naughty, Sir Henry. As a matter of fact he did. Fred Tyler,at the fish shop. Always slipped an extra 1 in the shillings column. Eatingso much fish as we do nowadays, it made a long bill, and lots of peoplenever added it up. Just ten shillings in his pocket every time, not much butenough to get himself a few neckties and take Jessie Spragge (the girl inthe draper’s) to the pictures. Cut a splash, that’s what these young fellowswant to do. Well, the very first week I was here, there was a mistake in mybill. I pointed it out to the young man and he apologized very nicely andlooked very much upset, but I thought to myself then: ‘You’ve got a shiftyeye, young man.’

“What I mean by a shifty eye,” continued Miss Marple, “is the kind thatlooks very straight at you and never looks away or blinks.”

Craddock gave a sudden movement of appreciation. He thought to him-self “Jim Kelly to the life,” remembering a notorious swindler he hadhelped to put behind bars not long ago.

“Rudi Scherz was a thoroughly unsatisfactory character,” said Rydes-dale. “He’s got a police record in Switzerland, we find.”

“Made the place too hot for him, I suppose, and came over here withforged papers?” said Miss Marple.

“Exactly,” said Rydesdale.

“He was going about with the little red-haired waitress from the diningroom,” said Miss Marple. “Fortunately I don’t think her heart’s affected atall. She just liked to have someone a bit ‘different,’ and he used to give herflowers and chocolates which the English boys don’t do much. Has shetold you all she knows?” she asked, turning suddenly to Craddock. “Or notquite all yet?”

“I’m not absolutely sure,” said Craddock cautiously.

“I think there’s a little to come,” said Miss Marple. “She’s looking veryworried. Brought me kippers instead of herrings this morning, and forgotthe milk jug. Usually she’s an excellent waitress. Yes, she’s worried. Afraidshe might have to give evidence or something like that. But I expect”—hercandid blue eyes swept over the manly proportions and handsome face ofDetective-Inspector Craddock with truly feminine Victorian appreciation—“that you will be able to persuade her to tell you all she knows.”

Detective-Inspector Craddock blushed and Sir Henry chuckled.

“It might be important,” said Miss Marple. “He may have told her who itwas.”

Rydesdale stared at her.

“Who what was?”

“I express myself so badly. Who it was who put him up to it, I mean.”

“So you think someone put him up to it?”

Miss Marple’s eyes widened in surprise.

“Oh, but surely—I mean … Here’s a personable young man—who filchesa little bit here and a little bit there—alters a small cheque, perhaps helpshimself to a small piece of jewellery if it’s left lying around, or takes a littlemoney from the till—all sorts of small petty thefts. Keeps himself going inready money so that he can dress well, and take a girl about—all that sortof thing. And then suddenly he goes off, with a revolver, and holds up aroom full of people, and shoots at someone. He’d never have done a thinglike that—not for a moment! He wasn’t that kind of person. It doesn’tmake sense.”

Craddock drew in his breath sharply. That was what Letitia Blacklockhad said. What the Vicar’s wife had said. What he himself felt with in-creasing force. It didn’t make sense. And now Sir Henry’s old Pussy wassaying it, too, with complete certainty in her fluting old lady’s voice.

“Perhaps you’ll tell us, Miss Marple,” he said, and his voice was suddenlyaggressive, “what did happen, then?”

She turned on him in surprise.

“But how should I know what happened? There was an account in thepaper—but it says so little. One can make conjectures, of course, but onehas no accurate information.”

“George,” said Sir Henry, “would it be very unorthodox if Miss Marplewere allowed to read the notes of the interviews Craddock had with thesepeople at Chipping Cleghorn?”

“It may be unorthodox,” said Rydesdale, “but I’ve not got where I am bybeing orthodox. She can read them. I’d be curious to hear what she has tosay.”

Miss Marple was all embarrassment.

“I’m afraid you’ve been listening to Sir Henry. Sir Henry is always tookind. He thinks too much of any little observations I may have made in thepast. Really, I have no gifts — no gifts at all — except perhaps a certainknowledge of human nature. People, I find, are apt to be far too trustful.

I’m afraid that I have a tendency always to believe the worst. Not a nicetrait. But so often justified by subsequent events.”

“Read these,” said Rydesdale, thrusting the typewritten sheets upon her.

“They won’t take you long. After all, these people are your kind—you mustknow a lot of people like them. You may be able to spot something that wehaven’t. The case is just going to be closed. Let’s have an amateur’s opin-ion on it before we shut up the files. I don’t mind telling you that Craddockhere isn’t satisfied. He says, like you, that it doesn’t make sense.”

There was silence whilst Miss Marple read. She put the typewrittensheets down at last.

“It’s very interesting,” she said with a sigh. “All the different things thatpeople say—and think. The things they see—or think that they see. And allso complex, nearly all so trivial and if one thing isn’t trivial, it’s so hard tospot which one—like a needle in a haystack.”

Craddock felt a twinge of disappointment. Just for a moment or two, hewondered if Sir Henry might be right about this funny old lady. She mighthave put her finger on something—old people were often very sharp. He’dnever, for instance, been able to conceal anything from his own great auntEmma. She had finally told him that his nose twitched when he was aboutto tell a lie.

But just a few fluffy generalities, that was all that Sir Henry’s famousMiss Marple could produce. He felt annoyed with her and said rathercurtly:

“The truth of the matter is that the facts are indisputable. Whatever con-flicting details these people give, they all saw one thing. They saw amasked man with a revolver and a torch open the door and hold them up,and whether they think he said ‘Stick ’em up’ or ‘Your money or your life,’

or whatever phrase is associated with a hold-up in their minds, they sawhim.”

“But surely,” said Miss Marple gently. “They couldn’t—actually—haveseen anything at all….”

Craddock caught his breath. She’d got it! She was sharp, after all. He wastesting her by that speech of his, but she hadn’t fallen for it. It didn’t actu-ally make any difference to the facts, or to what happened, but she’d real-ized, as he’d realized, that those people who had seen a masked man hold-ing them up couldn’t really have seen him at all.

“If I understand rightly,” Miss Marple had a pink flush on her cheeks,her eyes were bright and pleased as a child’s, “there wasn’t any light in thehall outside—and not on the landing upstairs either?”

“That’s right,” said Craddock.

“And so, if a man stood in the doorway and flashed a powerful torchinto the room, nobody could see anything but the torch, could they?”

“No, they couldn’t. I tried it out.”

“And so when some of them say they saw a masked man, etc., they arereally, though they don’t realize it, recapitulating from what they saw af-terwards—when the lights came on. So it really all fits in very well, doesn’tit, on the assumption that Rudi Scherz was the—I think, ‘fall guy’ is the ex-pression I mean?”

Rydesdale stared at her in such surprise that she grew pinker still. “Imay have got the term wrong,” she murmured.

“I am not very clever about Americanisms — and I understand theychange very quickly. I got it from one of Mr. Dashiel Hammett’s stories. (Iunderstand from my nephew Raymond that he is considered at the top ofthe tree in what is called the ‘tough’ style of literature.) A ‘fall guy,’ if I un-derstand it rightly, means someone who will be blamed for a crime reallycommitted by someone else. This Rudi Scherz seems to me exactly theright type for that. Rather stupid really, you know, but full of cupidity andprobably extremely credulous.”

Rydesdale said, smiling tolerantly:

“Are you suggesting that he was persuaded by someone to go out andtake pot shots at a room full of people? Rather a tall order.”

“I think he was told that it was a joke,” said Miss Marple. “He was paidfor doing it, of course. Paid, that is, to put an advertisement in the newspa-per, to go out and spy out the household premises, and then, on the nightin question, he was to go there, assume a mask and a black cloak andthrow open a door, brandishing a torch, and cry ‘Hands up!’”

“And fire off a revolver?”

“No, no,” said Miss Marple. “He never had a revolver.”

“But everyone says—” began Rydesdale, and stopped.

“Exactly,” said Miss Marple. “Nobody could possibly have seen a re-volver even if he had one. And I don’t think he had. I think that after he’dcalled ‘Hands up’ somebody came up quietly behind him in the darknessand fired those two shots over his shoulder. It frightened him to death. Heswung round and as he did so, that other person shot him and then let therevolver drop beside him….”

The three men looked at her. Sir Henry said softly:

“It’s a possible theory.”

“But who is Mr. X who came up in the darkness?” asked the Chief Con-stable.

Miss Marple coughed.

“You’ll have to find out from Miss Blacklock who wanted to kill her.”

Good for old Dora Bunner, thought Craddock. Instinct against intelli-gence every time.

“So you think it was a deliberate attempt on Miss Blacklock’s life,” askedRydesdale.

“It certainly has that appearance,” said Miss Marple. “Though there areone or two difficulties. But what I was really wondering about waswhether there mightn’t be a short cut. I’ve no doubt that whoever ar-ranged this with Rudi Scherz took pains to tell him to keep his mouth shut,but if he talked to anybody it would probably be to that girl, Myrna Harris.

And he may—he just may—have dropped some hint as to the kind of per-son who’d suggested the whole thing.”

“I’ll see her now,” said Craddock, rising.

Miss Marple nodded.

“Yes, do, Inspector Craddock. I’ll feel happier when you have. Becauseonce she’s told you anything she knows she’ll be much safer.”

“Safer?… Yes, I see.”

He left the room. The Chief Constable said doubtfully, but tactfully:

“Well, Miss Marple, you’ve certainly given us something to think about.”