A Caribbean Mystery by Agatha Christie
‘The weather having cleared, he had gone out for a stroll about eleven o’clock. His way had taken him some distance along the cliffs to a spot commonly known as Smugglers’ Cove, owing to the large number of caves to be found there. Here he had noticed some men landing something from a small boat, and had strolled down to see what was going on. Whatever the stuff was it seemed to be a great weight, and it was being carried into one of the farthermost caves.
‘With no real suspicion of anything being amiss, nevertheless Newman had wondered. He had drawn quite near them without being observed. Suddenly there was a cry of alarm, and immediately two powerful seafaring men had set upon him and rendered him unconscious. When next he came to himself he found himself lying on a motor vehicle of some kind, which was proceeding, with many bumps and bangs, as far as he could guess, up the lane which led from the coast to the village. To his great surprise, the lorry turned in at the gate of his own house. There, after a whispered conversation between the men, they at length drew him forth and flung him into a ditch at a spot where the depth of it rendered discovery unlikely for some time. Then the lorry drove on, and, he thought, passed out through another gate some quarter of a mile nearer the village. He could give no description of his assailants except that they were certainly seafaring men and, by their speech, Cornishmen.
‘Inspector Badgworth was very interested. ‘“Depend upon it that is where the stuff has been hidden,” he cried. “Somehow or other it has been salvaged from the wreck and has been stored in some lonely cave somewhere. It is known that we have searched all the caves in Smugglers’ Cove, and that we are now going farther afield, and they have evidently been moving the stuff at night to a cave that has been already searched and is not likely to be searched again. Unfortunately they have had at least eighteen hours to dispose of the stuff. If they got Mr Newman last night I doubt if we will find any of it there by now.”
‘The Inspector hurried off to make a search. He found definite evidence that the bullion had been stored as supposed, but the gold had been once more removed, and there was no clue as to its fresh hiding-place.
‘One clue there was, however, and the Inspector himself pointed it out to me the following morning.
‘“That lane is very little used by motor vehicles,” he said, “and in one or two places we get the traces of the tyres very clearly. There is a three-cornered piece out of one tyre, leaving a mark which is quite unmistakable. It shows going into the gate; here and there is a faint mark of it going out of the other gate, so there is not much doubt that it is the right vehicle we are after. Now, why did they take it out through the farther gate? It seems quite clear to me that the lorry came from the village. Now, there aren’t many people who own a lorry in the village – not more than two or three at most. Kelvin, the landlord of the Three Anchors, has one.”
‘“What was Kelvin’s original profession?” asked Newman. ‘“It is curious that you should ask me that, Mr Newman. In his young days Kelvin was a professional diver.”
‘Newman and I looked at each other. The puzzle seemed to be fitting itself together piece by piece.
‘“You didn’t recognize Kelvin as one of the men on the beach?” asked the Inspector.
‘Newman shook his head. ‘“I am afraid I can’t say anything as to that,” he said regretfully. “I really hadn’t time to see anything.”
‘The Inspector very kindly allowed me to accompany him to the Three Anchors. The garage was up a side street. The big doors were closed, but by going up a little alley at the side we found a small door that led into it, and the door was open. A very brief examination of the tyres sufficed for the Inspector. “We have got him, by Jove!” he exclaimed. “Here is the mark as large as life on the rear left wheel. Now, Mr Kelvin, I don’t think you will be clever enough to wriggle out of this.”’
Raymond West came to a halt.
‘Well?’ said Joyce. ‘So far I don’t see anything to make a problem about – unless they never found the gold.’
‘They never found the gold certainly,’ said Raymond. ‘And they never got Kelvin either. I expect he was too clever for them, but I don’t quite see how he worked it. He was duly arrested – on the evidence of the tyre mark. But an extraordinary hitch arose. Just opposite the big doors of the garage was a cottage rented for the summer by a lady artist.’
‘Oh, these lady artists!’ said Joyce, laughing. ‘As you say, “Oh, these lady artists!” This particular one had been ill for some weeks, and, in consequence, had two hospital nurses attending her. The nurse who was on night duty had pulled her armchair up to the window, where the blind was up. She declared that the motor lorry could not have left the garage opposite without her seeing it, and she swore that in actual fact it never left the garage that night.’
‘I don’t think that is much of a problem,’ said Joyce. ‘The nurse went to sleep, of course. They always do.’
‘That has – er – been known to happen,’ said Mr Petherick, judiciously; ‘but it seems to me that we are accepting facts without sufficient examination. Before accepting the testimony of the hospital nurse, we should inquire very closely into her bona fides. The alibi coming with such suspicious promptness is inclined to raise doubts in one’s mind.’
‘There is also the lady artist’s testimony,’ said Raymond. ‘She declared that she was in pain, and awake most of the night, and that she would certainly have heard the lorry, it being an unusual noise, and the night being very quiet after the storm.’
‘H’m,’ said the clergyman, ‘that is certainly an additional fact. Had Kelvin himself any alibi?’
‘He declared that he was at home and in bed from ten o’clock onwards, but he could produce no witnesses in support of that statement.’
‘The nurse went to sleep,’ said Joyce, ‘and so did the patient. Ill people always think they have never slept a wink all night.’
Raymond West looked inquiringly at Dr Pender.
‘Do you know, I feel very sorry for that man Kelvin. It seems to me very much a case of “Give a dog a bad name.” Kelvin had been in prison. Apart from the tyre mark, which certainly seems too remarkable to be coincidence, there doesn’t seem to be much against him except his unfortunate record.’
‘You, Sir Henry?’
Sir Henry shook his head.
‘As it happens,’ he said, smiling, ‘I know something about this case. So clearly I mustn’t speak.’
‘Well, go on, Aunt Jane; haven’t you got anything to say?’
‘In a minute, dear,’ said Miss Marple. ‘I am afraid I have counted wrong. Two purl, three plain, slip one, two purl – yes, that’s right. What did you say, dear?’
‘What is your opinion?’
‘You wouldn’t like my opinion, dear. Young people never do, I notice. It is better to say nothing.’
‘Nonsense, Aunt Jane; out with it.’
‘Well, dear Raymond,’ said Miss Marple, laying down her knitting and looking across at her nephew. ‘I do think you should be more careful how you choose your friends. You are so credulous, dear, so easily gulled. I suppose it is being a writer and having so much imagination. All that story about a Spanish galleon! If you were older and had more experience of life you would have been on your guard at once. A man you had known only a few weeks, too!’
Sir Henry suddenly gave vent to a great roar of laughter and slapped his knee.
‘Got you this time, Raymond,’ he said. ‘Miss Marple, you are wonderful. Your friend Newman, my boy, has another name – several other names in fact. At the present moment he is not in Cornwall but in Devonshire – Dartmoor, to be exact – a convict in Princetown prison. We didn’t catch him over the stolen bullion business, but over the rifling of the stron-groom of one of the London banks. Then we looked up his past record and we found a good portion of the gold stolen buried in the garden at Pol House. It was rather a neat idea. All along that Cornish coast there are stories of wrecked galleons full of gold. It accounted for the diver and it would
‘But the tyre mark?’ objected Joyce. ‘Oh, I saw that at once, dear, although I know nothing about motors,’ said Miss Marple. ‘People change a wheel, you know – I have often seen them doing it – and, of course, they could take a wheel off Kelvin’s lorry and take it out through the small door into the alley and put it on to Mr Newman’s lorry and take the lorry out of one gate down to the beach, fill it up with the gold and bring it up through the other gate, and then they must have taken the wheel back and put it back on Mr Kelvin’s lorry while, I suppose, someone else was tying up Mr Newman in a ditch. Very uncomfortable for him and probably longer before he was found than he expected. I suppose the man who called himself the gardener attended to that side of the business.’
‘Why do you say, “called himself the gardener,” Aunt Jane?’ asked Raymond curiously.
‘Well, he can’t have been a real gardener, can he?’ said Miss Marple. ‘Gardeners don’t work on Whit Monday. Everybody knows that.’
She smiled and folded up her knitting.
‘It was really that little fact that put me on the right scent,’ she said. She looked across at Raymond.
‘When you are a householder, dear, and have a garden of your own, you will know these little things.’
Chapter 26
The Bloodstained Pavement
‘The Blood-Stained Pavement’ was first published in Royal Magazine, March 1928, and in the USA as ‘Drip! Drip!’ in Detective Story Magazine, 23 June 1928.
‘It’s curious,’ said Joyce Lemprière, ‘but I hardly like telling you my story. It happened a long time ago – five years ago to be exact – but it’s sort of haunted me ever since. The smiling, bright, top part of it – and the hidden gruesomeness underneath. And the queer thing is that the sketch I painted at the time has become tinged with the same atmosphere. When you look at it first it is just a rough sketch of a little steep Cornish street with the sunlight on it. But if you look long enough at it something sinister creeps in. I have never sold it but I never look at it. It lives in the studio in a corner with its face to the wall.
‘The name of the place was Rathole. It is a queer little Cornish fishing village, very picturesque – too picturesque perhaps. There is rather too much of the atmosphere of “Ye Olde Cornish Tea House” about it. It has shops with bobbed-headed girls in smocks doing hand-illuminated mottoes on parchment. It is pretty and it is quaint, but it is very self-consciously so.’
‘Don’t I know,’ said Raymond West, groaning. ‘The curse of the charabanc, I suppose. No matter how narrow the lanes leading down to them no picturesque village is safe.’
Joyce nodded.
‘They are narrow lanes that lead down to Rathole and very steep, like the side of a house. Well, to get on with my story. I had come down to Cornwall for a fortnight, to sketch. There is an old inn in Rathole, The Polharwith Arms. It was supposed to be the only house left standing by the Spaniards when they shelled the place in fifteen hundred and something.’
‘Not shelled,’ said Raymond West, frowning. ‘Do try to be historically accurate, Joyce.’
‘Well, at all events they landed guns somewhere along the coast and they fired them and the houses fell down. Anyway that is not the point. The inn was a wonderful old place with a kind of porch in front built on four pillars. I got a very good pitch and was just settling down to work when a car came creeping and twisting down the hill. Of course, it would stop before the inn – just where it was most awkward for me. The people got out – a man and a woman – I didn’t notice them particularly. She had a kind of mauve linen dress on and a mauve hat.
‘Presently the man came out again and to my great thankfulness drove the car down to the quay and left it there. He strolled back past me towards the inn. Just at that moment another beastly car came twisting down, and a woman got out of it dressed in the brightest chintz frock I have ever seen, scarlet poinsettias, I think they were, and she had on one of those big native straw hats – Cuban, aren’t they? – in very bright scarlet.
‘This woman didn’t stop in front of the inn but drove the car farther down the street towards the other one. Then she got out and the man seeing her gave an astonished shout. “Carol,” he cried, “in the name of all that is wonderful. Fancy meeting you in this out-of-the-way spot. I haven’t seen you for years. Hello, there’s Margery – my wife, you know. You must come and meet her.”
‘They went up the street towards the inn side by side, and I saw the other woman had just come out of the door and was moving down towards them. I had had just a glimpse of the woman called Carol as she passed by me. Just enough to see a very white powdered chin and a flaming scarlet mouth and I wondered – I just wondered – if Margery would be so very pleased to meet her. I hadn’t seen Margery near to, but in the distance she looked dowdy and extra prim and proper.
‘Well, of course, it was not any of my business but you get very queer little glimpses of life sometimes, and you can’t help speculating about them. From where they were standing I could just catch fragments of their conversation that floated down to me. They were talking about bathing. The husband, whose name seemed to be Denis, wanted to take a boat and row round the coast. There was a famous cave well worth seeing, so he said, about a mile along. Carol wanted to see the cave too but suggested walking along the cliffs and seeing it from the land side. She said she hated boats. In the end they fixed it that way. Carol was to go along the cliff path and meet them at the cave, and Denis and Margery would take a boat and row round.
‘Hearing them talk about bathing made me want to bathe too. It was a very hot morning and I wasn’t doing particularly good work. Also, I fancied that the afternoon sunlight would be far more attractive in effect. So I packed up my things and went off to a little beach that I knew of – it was quite the opposite direction from the cave, and was rather a discovery of mine. I had a ripping bathe there and I lunched off a tinned tongue and two tomatoes, and I came back in the afternoon full of confidence and enthusiasm to get on with my sketch.
‘The whole of Rathole seemed to be asleep. I had been right about the afternoon sunlight, the shadows were far more telling. The Polhar-with Arms was the principal note of my sketch. A ray of sunlight came slanting obliquely down and hit the ground in front of it and had rather a curious effect. I gathered that the bathing party had returned safely, because two bathing dresses, a scarlet one and a dark blue one, were hanging from the balcony, drying in the sun.
‘Something had gone a bit wrong with one corner of my sketch and I bent over it for some moments doing something to put it right. When I looked up again there was a figure leaning against one of the pillars of The Polharwith Arms, who seemed to have appeared there by magic. He was dressed in seafaring clothes and was, I suppose, a fisherman. But he had a long dark beard, and if I had been looking for a model for a wicked Spanish captain I couldn’t have imagined anyone better. I got to work with feverish haste before he should move away, though from his attitude he looked as though he was pefectly prepared to prop up the pillars through all eternity.
‘He did move, however, but luckily not until I had got what I wanted. He came over to me and he began to talk. Oh, how that man talked.
‘“Rathole,” he said, “was a very interesting place.” ‘I knew that already but although I said so that didn’t save me. I had the whole history of the shelling – I mean the destroying – of the village, and how the landlord of the Polharwith Arms was the last man to be killed. Run through on his own threshold by a Spanish captain’s sword, and of how his blood spurted out on the pavement and no one could wash out the stain for a hundred years.
‘It all fitted in very well with the languorous drowsy feeling of the afternoon. The man’s voice was very suave and yet at the same time there was an undercurrent in it o
‘All the time he was talking to me I went on painting, and suddenly I realized that in the excitement of listening to his story I had painted in something that was not there. On that white square of pavement where the sun fell before the door of The Polharwith Arms, I had painted in bloodstains. It seemed extraordinary that the mind could play such tricks with the hand, but as I looked over towards the inn again I got a second shock. My hand had only painted what my eyes saw – drops of blood on the white pavement.
‘I stared for a minute or two. Then I shut my eyes, said to myself, “Don’t be so stupid, there’s nothing there, really,” then I opened them again, but the bloodstains were still there.
‘I suddenly felt I couldn’t stand it. I interrupted the fisherman’s flood of language.
‘“Tell me,” I said, “my eyesight is not very good. Are those bloodstains on that pavement over there?”
‘He looked at me indulgently and kindly. ‘“No bloodstains in these days, lady. What I am telling you about is nearly five hundred years ago.”
‘“Yes,” I said, “but now – on the pavement” – the words died away in my throat. I knew – I knew that he wouldn’t see what I was seeing. I got up and with shaking hands began to put my things together. As I did so the young man who had come in the car that morning came out of the inn door. He looked up and down the street perplexedly. On the balcony above his wife came out and collected the bathing things. He walked down towards the car but suddenly swerved and came across the road towards the fisherman.
‘“Tell me, my man,” he said. “You don’t know whether the lady who came in that second car there has got back yet?”
‘“Lady in a dress with flowers all over it? No, sir, I haven’t seen her. She went along the cliff towards the cave this morning.”