4:50 From Paddington by Agatha Christie

  Lucy considered.

  “Actually,” she said, “anyone could have sneaked into the kitchen whilst I was laying the table in the dining room.”

  “I see. Now, who was here in the house? Old Mr. Crackenthorpe, Emma, Cedric—”

  “Harold and Alfred. They’d come down from London in the afternoon. Oh, and Bryan—Bryan Eastley. But he left just before dinner. He had to meet a man in Brackhampton.”

  Craddock said thoughtfully, “It ties up with the old man’s illness at Christmas. Quimper suspected that that was arsenic. Did they all seem equally ill last night?”

  Lucy considered. “I think old Mr. Crackenthorpe seemed the worst. Dr. Quimper had to work like a maniac on him. He’s a jolly good doctor, I will say. Cedric made by far the most fuss. Of course, strong healthy people always do.”

  “What about Emma?”

  “She has been pretty bad.”

  “Why Alfred, I wonder?” said Craddock.

  “I know,” said Lucy. “I suppose it was meant to be Alfred?”

  “Funny— I asked that too!”

  “It seems, somehow, so pointless.”

  “If I could only get at the motive for all this business,” said Craddock. “It doesn’t seem to tie up. The strangled woman in the sarcophagus was Edmund Crackenthorpe’s widow, Martine. Let’s assume that. It’s pretty well proved by now. There must be a connection between that and the deliberate poisoning of Alfred. It’s all here, in the family somewhere. Even saying one of them’s mad doesn’t help.”

  “Not really,” Lucy agreed.

  “Well, look after yourself,” said Craddock warningly. “There’s a poisoner in this house, remember, and one of your patients upstairs probably isn’t as ill as he pretends to be.”

  Lucy went upstairs again slowly after Craddock’s departure. An imperious voice, somewhat weakened by illness, called to her as she passed old Mr. Crackenthorpe’s room.

  “Girl—girl—is that you? Come here.”

  Lucy entered the room. Mr. Crackenthorpe was lying in bed well propped up with pillows. For a sick man he was looking Lucy thought, remarkably cheerful.

  “The house is full of damned hospital nurses,” complained Mr. Crackenthorpe. “Rustling about, making themselves important, taking my temperature, not giving me what I want to eat—a pretty penny all that must be costing. Tell Emma to send ’em away. You could look after me quite well.”

  “Everybody’s been taken ill, Mr. Crackenthorpe,” said Lucy. “I can’t look after everybody, you know.”

  “Mushrooms,” said Mr. Crackenthorpe. “Damned dangerous things, mushrooms. It was that soup we had last night. You made it,” he added accusingly.

  “The mushrooms were quite all right, Mr. Crackenthorpe.”

  “I’m not blaming you, girl, I’m not blaming you. It’s happened before. One blasted fungus slips in and does it. Nobody can tell. I know you’re a good girl. You wouldn’t do it on purpose. How’s Emma?”

  “Feeling rather better this afternoon.”

  “Ah, and Harold?”

  “He’s better too.”

  “What’s this about Alfred having kicked the bucket?”

  “Nobody’s supposed to have told you that, Mr. Crackenthorpe.”

  Mr. Crackenthorpe laughed, a high, whinnying laugh of intense amusement. “I hear things,” he said. “Can’t keep things from the old man. They try to. So Alfred’s dead, is he? He won’t sponge on me anymore, and he won’t get any of the money either. They’ve all been waiting for me to die, you know—Alfred in particular. Now he’s dead. I call that rather a good joke.”

  “That’s not very kind of you, Mr. Crackenthorpe,” said Lucy severely.

  Mr. Crackenthorpe laughed again. “I’ll outlive them all,” he crowed. “You see if I don’t, my girl. You see if I don’t.”

  Lucy went to her room, she took out her dictionary and looked up the word “tontine.” She closed the book thoughtfully and stared ahead of her.

  III

  “Don’t see why you want to come to me,” said Dr. Morris, irritably.

  “You’ve known the Crackenthorpe family a long time,” said Inspector Craddock.

  “Yes, yes, I knew all the Crackenthorpes. I remember old Josiah Crackenthorpe. He was a hard nut—shrewd man, though. Made a lot of money,” he shifted his aged form in his chair and peered under bushy eyebrows at Inspector Craddock. “So you’ve been listening to that young fool, Quimper,” he said. “These zealous young doctors! Always getting ideas in their heads. Got it into his head that somebody was trying to poison Luther Crackenthorpe. Nonsense! Melodrama! Of course, he had gastric attacks. I treated him for them. Didn’t happen very often—nothing peculiar about them.”

  “Dr. Quimper,” said Craddock, “seemed to think there was.”

  “Doesn’t do for a doctor to go thinking. After all, I should hope I could recognize arsenical poisoning when I saw it.”

  “Quite a lot of well-known doctors haven’t noticed it,” Craddock pointed out. “There was”—he drew upon his memory—“the Greenbarrow case, Mrs. Teney, Charles Leeds, three people in the Westbury family, all buried nicely and tidily without the doctors who attended them having the least suspicion. Those doctors were all good, reputable men.”

  “All right, all right,” said Doctor Morris, “you’re saying that I could have made a mistake. Well, I don’t think I did.” He paused a minute and then said, “Who did Quimper think was doing it—if it was being done?”

  “He didn’t know,” said Craddock. “He was worried. After all, you know,” he added, “there’s a great deal of money there.”

  “Yes, yes, I know, which they’ll get when Luther Crackenthorpe dies. And they want it pretty badly. That is true enough, but it doesn’t follow that they’d kill the old man to get it.”

  “Not necessarily,” agreed Inspector Craddock.

  “Anyway,” said Dr. Morris, “my principle is not to go about suspecting things without due cause. Due cause,” he repeated. “I’ll admit that what you’ve just told me has shaken me up a bit. Arsenic on a big scale, apparently—but I still don’t see why you come to me. All I can tell you is that I didn’t suspect it. Maybe I should have. Maybe I should have taken those gastric attacks of Luther Crackenthorpe’s much more seriously. But you’ve got a long way beyond that now.”

  Craddock agreed. “What I really need,” he said, “is to know a little more about the Crackenthorpe family. Is there any queer mental strain in them—a kink of any kind?”

  The eyes under the bushy eyebrows looked at him sharply. “Yes, I can see your thoughts might run that way. Well, old Josiah was sane enough. Hard as nails, very much all there. His wife was neurotic, had a tendency to melancholia. Came of an inbred family. She died soon after her second son was born. I’d say, you know, that Luther inherited a certain—well, instability, from her. He was commonplace enough as a young man, but he was always at loggerheads with his father. His father was disappointed in him and I think he resented that and brooded on it, and in the end got a kind of obsession about it. He carried that on into his married life. You’ll notice, if you talk to him at all, that he’s got a hearty dislike for all his own sons. His daughters he was fond of. Both Emma and Edie—the one who died.”

  “Why does he dislike the sons so much?” asked Craddock.

  “You’ll have to go to one of these new-fashioned psychiatrists to find that out. I’d just say that Luther has never felt very adequate as a man himself, and that he bitterly resents his financial position. He has possession of an income but no power of appointment of capital. If he had the power to disinherit his sons he probably wouldn’t dislike them as much. Being powerless in that respect gives him a feeling of humiliation.”

  “That’s why he’s so pleased at the idea of outliving them all?” said Inspector Craddock.

  “Possibly. It is the root, too, of his parsimony, I think. I should say that he’s managed to save a considerable sum out of his large income—mostly, of course
, before taxation rose to its present giddy heights.”

  A new idea struck Inspector Craddock. “I suppose he’s left his savings by will to someone? That he can do.”

  “Oh, yes, though God knows who he has left it to. Maybe to Emma, but I should rather doubt it. She’ll get her share of the old man’s property. Maybe to Alexander, the grandson.”

  “He’s fond of him, is he?” said Craddock.

  “Used to be. Of course he was his daughter’s child, not a son’s child. That may have made a difference. And he had quite an affection for Bryan Eastley, Edie’s husband. Of course I don’t know Bryan well, it’s some years since I’ve seen any of the family. But it struck me that he was going to be very much at a loose end after the war. He’s got those qualities that you need in wartime; courage, dash, and a tendency to let the future take care of itself. But I don’t think he’s got any stability. He’ll probably turn into a drifter.”

  “As far as you know there’s no peculiar kink in any of the younger generation?”

  “Cedric’s an eccentric type, one of those natural rebels. I wouldn’t say he was perfectly normal, but you might say, who is? Harold’s fairly orthodox, not what I call a very pleasant character, coldhearted, eye to the main chance. Alfred’s got a touch of the delinquent about him. He’s a wrong ’un, always was. Saw him taking money out of a missionary box once that they used to keep in the hall. That type of thing. Ah, well, the poor fellow’s dead, I suppose I shouldn’t be talking against him.”

  “What about…” Craddock hesitated. “Emma Crackenthorpe?”

  “Nice girl, quiet, one doesn’t always know what she’s thinking. Has her own plans and her own ideas, but she keeps them to herself. She’s more character than you might think from her general appearance.”

  “You knew Edmund, I suppose, the son who was killed in France?”

  “Yes. He was the best of the bunch I’d say. Goodhearted, gay, a nice boy.”

  “Did you ever hear that he was going to marry, or had married, a French girl just before he was killed?”

  Dr. Morris frowned. “It seems as though I remember something about it,” he said, “but it’s a long time ago.”

  “Quite early on in the war, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes. Ah, well, I dare say he’d have lived to regret it if he had married a foreign wife.”

  “There’s some reason to believe that he did do just that,” said Craddock.

  In a few brief sentences he gave an account of recent happenings.

  “I remember seeing something in the papers about a woman found in a sarcophagus. So it was at Rutherford Hall.”

  “And there’s reason to believe that the woman was Edmund Crackenthorpe’s widow.”

  “Well, well, that seems extraordinary. More like a novel than real life. But who’d want to kill the poor thing—I mean, how does it tie up with arsenical poisoning in the Crackenthorpe family?”

  “In one of two ways,” said Craddock; “but they are both very farfetched. Somebody perhaps is greedy and wants the whole of Josiah Crackenthorpe’s fortune.”

  “Damn fool if he does,” said Dr. Morris. “He’ll only have to pay the most stupendous taxes on the income from it.”

  Twenty-one

  “Nasty things, mushrooms,” said Mrs. Kidder.

  Mrs. Kidder had made the same remark about ten times in the last few days. Lucy did not reply.

  “Never touch ’em myself,” said Mrs. Kidder, “much too dangerous. It’s a merciful Providence as there’s only been one death. The whole lot might have gone, and you, too, miss. A wonderful escape, you’ve had.”

  “It wasn’t the mushrooms,” said Lucy. “They were perfectly all right.”

  “Don’t you believe it,” said Mrs. Kidder. “Dangerous they are, mushrooms. One toadstool in among the lot and you’ve had it.”

  “Funny,” went on Mrs. Kidder, among the rattle of plates and dishes in the sink, “how things seem to come all together, as it were. My sister’s eldest had measles and our Ernie fell down and broke ’is arm, and my ’usband came out all over with boils. All in the same week! You’d hardly believe it, would you? It’s been the same thing here,” went on Mrs. Kidder, “first that nasty murder and now Mr. Alfred dead with mushroom-poisoning. Who’ll be the next, I’d like to know?”

  Lucy felt rather uncomfortably that she would like to know too.

  “My husband, he doesn’t like me coming here now,” said Mrs. Kidder, “thinks it’s unlucky, but what I say is I’ve known Miss Crackenthorpe a long time now and she’s a nice lady and she depends on me. And I couldn’t leave poor Miss Eyelesbarrow, I said, not to do everything herself in the house. Pretty hard it is on you, miss, all these trays.”

  Lucy was forced to agree that life did seem to consist very largely of trays at the moment. She was at the moment arranging trays to take to the various invalids.

  “As for them nurses, they never do a hand’s turn,” said Mrs. Kidder. “All they want is pots and pots of tea made strong. And meals prepared. Wore out, that’s what I am.” She spoke in a tone of great satisfaction, though actually she had done very little more than her normal morning’s work.

  Lucy said solemnly, “You never spare yourself, Mrs. Kidder.”

  Mrs. Kidder looked pleased. Lucy picked up the first of the trays and started off up the stairs.

  “What’s this?” said Mr. Crackenthorpe disapprovingly.

  “Beef tea and baked custard,” said Lucy.

  “Take it away,” said Mr. Crackenthorpe. “I won’t touch that stuff. I told that nurse I wanted a beef steak.”

  “Dr. Quimper thinks you ought not to have beef steak just yet,” said Lucy.

  Mr. Crackenthorpe snorted. “I’m practically well again. I’m getting up tomorrow. How are the others?”

  “Mr. Harold’s much better,” said Lucy. “He’s going back to London tomorrow.”

  “Good riddance,” said Mr. Crackenthorpe. “What about Cedric—any hope that he’s going back to his island tomorrow?”

  “He won’t be going just yet.”

  “Pity. What’s Emma doing? Why doesn’t she come and see me?”

  “She’s still in bed, Mr. Crackenthorpe.”

  “Women always coddle themselves,” said Mr. Crackenthorpe. “But you’re a good strong girl,” he added approvingly. “Run about all day, don’t you?”

  “I get plenty of exercise,” said Lucy.

  Old Mr. Crackenthorpe nodded his head approvingly. “You’re a good strong girl,” he said, “and don’t think I’ve forgotten what I talked to you about before. One of these days you’ll see what you’ll see. Emma isn’t always going to have things her own way. And don’t listen to the others when they tell you I’m a mean old man. I’m careful of my money. I’ve got a nice little packet put by and I know who I’m going to spend it on when the time comes.” He leered at her affectionately.

  Lucy went rather quickly out of the room, avoiding his clutching hand.

  The next tray was taken in to Emma.

  “Oh, thank you, Lucy. I’m really feeling quite myself again by now. I’m hungry, and that’s a good sign, isn’t it? My dear,” went on Emma as Lucy settled the tray on her knees, “I’m really feeling very upset about your aunt. You haven’t had any time to go and see her, I suppose?”

  “No, I haven’t, as a matter of fact.”

  “I’m afraid she must be missing you.”

  “Oh, don’t worry, Miss Crackenthorpe. She understands what a terrible time we’ve been through.”

  “Have you rung her up?”

  “No, I haven’t just lately.”

  “Well, do. Ring her up every day. It makes such a difference to old people to get news.”

  “You’re very kind,” said Lucy. Her conscience smote her a little as she went down to fetch the next tray. The complications of illness in a house had kept her thoroughly absorbed and she had had no time to think of anything else. She decided that she would ring Miss Marple up as soon as she had
taken Cedric his meal.

  There was only one nurse in the house now and she passed Lucy on the landing, exchanging greetings.

  Cedric, looking incredibly tidied up and neat, was sitting up in bed writing busily on sheets of paper.

  “Hallo, Lucy,” he said, “what hell brew have you got for me today? I wish you’d get rid of that god-awful nurse, she’s simply too arch for words. Calls me ‘we’ for some reason. ‘And how are we this morning? Have we slept well? Oh, dear, we’re very naughty, throwing off the bedclothes like that.’” He imitated the refined accents of the nurse in a high falsetto voice.

  “You seem very cheerful,” said Lucy. “What are you busy with?”

  “Plans,” said Cedric. “Plans for what to do with this place when the old man pops off. It’s a jolly good bit of land here, you know. I can’t make up my mind whether I’d like to develop some of it myself, or whether I’ll sell it in lots all in one go. Very valuable for industrial purposes. The house will do for a nursing home or a school. I’m not sure I shan’t sell half the land and use the money to do something rather outrageous with the other half. What do you think?”

  “You haven’t got it yet,” said Lucy, dryly.

  “I shall have it, though,” said Cedric. “It’s not divided up like the other stuff. I get it outright. And if I sell it for a good fat price the money will be capital, not income, so I shan’t have to pay taxes on it. Money to burn. Think of it.”

  “I always understood you rather despised money,” said Lucy.

  “Of course I despise money when I haven’t got any,” said Cedric. “It’s the only dignified thing to do. What a lovely girl you are, Lucy, or do I just think so because I haven’t seen any good-looking women for such a long time?”

  “I expect that’s it,” said Lucy.

  “Still busy tidying everyone and everything up?”

  “Somebody seems to have been tidying you up,” said Lucy, looking at him.

  “That’s that damned nurse,” said Cedric with feeling. “Have you had the inquest on Alfred yet? What happened?”

  “It was adjourned,” said Lucy.