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Twenty-seven
“So you see,” said Miss Marple, “it really turned out to be, as I began to
suspect, very, very simple. The simplest kind of crime. So many men seem
to murder their wives.”
be obliged,” she said, “if you’d put me a little more up to date.”
“He saw a chance, you see,” said Miss Marple, “of marrying a rich wife,
Emma Crackenthorpe. Only he couldn’t marry her because he had a wife
already. They’d been separated for years but she wouldn’t divorce him.
That fitted in very well with what Inspector Craddock told me of this girl
who called herself Anna Stravinska. She had an English husband, so she
being a very ruthless and cold-blooded man, that he would get rid of his
wife. The idea of murdering her in the train and later putting her body in
the sarcophagus in the barn was really rather a clever one. He meant it to
tie up, you see, with the Crackenthorpe family. Before that he’d written a
mund Crackenthorpe had talked of marrying. Emma had told Dr. Quimper
all about her brother, you see. Then, when the moment arose he encour-
made by the Paris police about Anna Stravinska, and so he arranged to
have a postcard come from her from Jamaica.
“It was easy for him to arrange to meet his wife in London, to tell her
that he hoped to be reconciled with her and that he would like her to come
down and ‘meet his family.’ We won’t talk about the next part of it, which
is very unpleasant to think about. Of course he was a greedy man. When
thinking that it would be nice to have a good deal more capital. Perhaps
he’d already thought of that before he decided to murder his wife. Any-
Mr. Crackenthorpe so as to get the ground prepared, and then he ended by
want old Mr. Crackenthorpe to die.”
“But I still don’t see how he managed,” said Craddock. “He wasn’t in the
“Oh, but there wasn’t any arsenic in the curry then,” said Miss Marple.
“He added it to the curry afterwards when he took it away to be tested. He
quite easy for him, in his role of medical attendant, to poison off Alfred
Crackenthorpe and also to send the tablets to Harold in London, having
safeguarded himself by telling Harold that he wouldn’t need anymore tab-
lets. Everything he did was bold and audacious and cruel and greedy, and
I am really very, very sorry,” finished Miss Marple, looking as fierce as a
cause I do feel that if there is anyone who ought to hang, it’s Dr. Quimper.”
“Hear, hear,” said Inspector Craddock.
“It occurred to me, you know,” continued Miss Marple, “that even if you
only see anybody from the back view, so to speak, nevertheless a back
view is characteristic. I thought that if Elspeth were to see Dr. Quimper in
exactly the same position as she’d seen him in the train in, that is, with his
was almost sure she would recognize him, or would make some kind of
startled exclamation15. That is why I had to lay my little plan with Lucy’s
kind assistance.”
“I must say,” said Mrs. McGillicuddy, “it gave me quite a turn. I said,
‘That’s him’ before I could stop myself. And yet, you know, I hadn’t actu-
ally seen the man’s face and—”
“I was terribly afraid that you were going to say so, Elspeth,” said Miss
Marple.
“I was,” said Mrs. McGillicuddy. “I was going to say that of course I
hadn’t seen his face.”
“That,” said Miss Marple, “would have been quite fatal. You see, dear, he
thought you really did recognize him. I mean, he couldn’t know that you
hadn’t seen his face.”
“A good thing I held my tongue then,” said Mrs. McGillicuddy.
“I wasn’t going to let you say another word,” said Miss Marple.
Craddock laughed suddenly. “You two!” he said. “You’re a marvellous
pair. What next, Miss Marple? What’s the happy ending? What happens to
poor Emma Crackenthorpe, for instance?”
“She’ll get over the doctor, of course,” said Miss Marple, “and I dare say
thinks he is—that she’d go on a cruise or perhaps to stay abroad like Ger-
aldine Webb, and I dare say something might come of it. A nicer man than
Dr. Quimper, I hope.”
“What about Lucy Eyelesbarrow? Wedding bells there too?”
“Perhaps,” said Miss Marple, “I shouldn’t wonder.”
“Which of ’em is she going to choose?” said Dermot Craddock.
“Don’t you know?” said Miss Marple.
“No, I don’t,” said Craddock. “Do you?”
“Oh, yes, I think so,” said Miss Marple.
And she twinkled at him.
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