Nemesis by Agatha Christie
For a moment Professor Wanstead had all he could do to repress a laugh. It was the seriousness of Miss Marple’s tone. She gave him a slight twinkle from her eyes.
“Yes, it sounds rather silly, does it not, said like that? But I could see her that way, playing that part, that is to say. Very unfortunately, she had no husband. She had never had a husband, and therefore did not kill a husband. Then I considered my guide to the house. Lavinia Glynne. She seemed an extremely nice, wholesome and pleasant woman. But alas, certain people who have killed have produced much that effect on the world round them. They have been charming people. Many murderers have been delightful and pleasant men and people have been astonished. They are what I call the respectable killers. The ones who would commit murder from entirely utilitarian motives. Without emotion, but to gain a required end. I didn’t think it was very likely and I should be highly surprised if it was so, but I could not leave out Mrs. Glynne. She had had a husband. She was a widow and had been a widow for some years. It could be. I left it at that. And then I came to the third sister. Anthea. She was a disquieting personality. Badly coordinated, it seemed to me, scatterbrained, and in a condition of some emotion which I thought on the whole was fear. She was frightened of something. Intensely frightened of something. Well, that could fit in too. If she had committed a crime of some kind, a crime which she had thought was finished with and past, there might have been some recrudescence, some raising up of old problems, something perhaps connected with the Elizabeth Temple enquiries; she might have felt fear that an old crime would be revived or discovered. She had a curious way of looking at you, and then looking sharply from side to side over one shoulder as though she saw something standing behind her. Something that made her afraid. So she too was a possible answer. A possibly slightly mentally unhinged killer who could have killed because she considered herself persecuted. Because she was afraid. These were only ideas. They were only a rather more pronounced assessment of possibilities that I had already gone through on the coach. But the atmosphere of the house was on me more than ever. The next day I walked in the garden with Anthea. At the end of the principal grass path was a mound. A mound created by the falling down of a former greenhouse. Owing to a lack of repairs and of gardeners at the end of the war it had fallen into disuse, come to pieces, bricks had been piled up surmounted with earth and turf, and had been planted with a certain creeper. A creeper well known when you want to hide or cover some rather ugly pieces of building in your garden. Polygonum it is called. One of the quickest flowering shrubs which swallows and kills and dries up and gets rid of everything it grows over. It grows over everything. It is in a way a rather frightening plant. It has beautiful white flowers, it can look very lovely. It was not yet in bloom but it was going to be. I stood there with Anthea, and she seemed to be desperately unhappy over the loss of the greenhouse. She said it had had such lovely grapes, it seemed to be the thing she remembered most about the garden when she had been a child there. And she wanted, she wanted desperately to have enough money so as to dig up the mound, level the ground and rebuild the greenhouse and stock it with muscat grapes and peaches as the old greenhouse had been. It was a terrible nostalgia for the past she was feeling. It was more than that. Again, very clearly, I felt an atmosphere of fear. Something about the mound made her frightened. I couldn’t then think what it was. You know the next thing that happened. It was Elizabeth Temple’s death and there was no doubt from the story told by Emlyn Price and Joanna Crawford that there could be only one conclusion. It was not accident. It was deliberate murder.
“I think it was from then on,” said Miss Marple, “that I knew. I came to the conclusion there had been three killings. I heard the full story of Mr. Rafiel’s son, the delinquent boy, the exjailbird and I thought that he was all those things, but none of them showed him as being a killer or likely to be a killer. All the evidence was against him. There was no doubt in anyone’s mind that he had killed the girl whose name I had now learned as being Verity Hunt. But Archdeacon Brabazon put the final crown on the business, as it were. He had known those two young people. They had come to him with their story of wanting to get married and he had taken it upon himself to decide that they should get married. He thought that it was not perhaps a wise marriage, but it was a marriage that was justified by the fact that they both loved each other. The girl loved the boy with what he called a true love. A love as true as her name. And he thought that the boy, for all his bad sexual reputation, had truly loved the girl and had every intention of being faithful to her and trying to reform some of his evil tendencies. The Archdeacon was not optimistic. He did not, I think, believe it would be a thoroughly happy marriage, but it was to his mind what he called a necessary marriage. Necessary because if you love enough you will pay the price, even if the price is disappointment and a certain amount of unhappiness. But one thing I was quite sure of. That disfigured face, that battered-in head could not have been the action of a boy who really loved the girl. This was not a story of sexual assault. I was ready to take the Archdeacon’s word for that. But I knew, too, that I’d got the right clue, the clue that was given me by Elizabeth Temple. She had said that the cause of Verity’s death was Love—one of the most frightening words there is.
“It was quite clear then,” said Miss Marple. “I think I’d known for some time really. It was just the small things that hadn’t fitted in, but now they did. They fitted in with what Elizabeth Temple had said. The cause of Verity’s death. She had said first the one word ‘Love’ and then that ‘Love could be the most frightening word there was.’ It was all mapped out so plainly then. The overwhelming love that Clotilde had had for this girl. The girl’s hero worship of her, dependency on her, and then as she grew a little older, her normal instincts came into play. She wanted Love. She wanted to be free to love, to marry, to have children. And along came the boy that she could love. She knew that he was unreliable, she knew he was what was technically called a bad lot, but that,” said Miss Marple, in a more ordinary tone of voice, “is not what puts any girl off a boy. No. Young women like bad lots. They always have. They fall in love with bad lots. They are quite sure they can change them. And the nice, kind, steady, reliable husbands got the answer, in my young days, that one would be ‘a sister to them,’ which never satisfied them at all. Verity fell in love with Michael Rafiel, and Michael Rafiel was prepared to turn over a new leaf and marry this girl and was sure he would never wish to look at another girl again. I don’t say this would have been a happy-ever-after thing, but it was, as the Archdeacon said quite surely, it was real love. And so they planned to get married. And I think Verity wrote to Elizabeth and told her that she was going to marry Michael Rafiel. It was arranged in secret because I think Verity did realize that what she was doing was essentially an escape. She was escaping from a life that she didn’t want to live any longer, from someone whom she loved very much but not in the way she loved Michael. And she would not be allowed to do so. Permission would not be willingly given, every obstacle would be put in their way. So, like other young people, they were going to elope. There was no need for them to fly off to Gretna Green, they were of sufficiently mature age to marry. So she appealed to Archdeacon Brabazon, her old friend who had confirmed her—who was a real friend. And the wedding was arranged, the day, the time, probably even she bought secretly some garment in which to be married. They were to meet somewhere, no doubt. They were to come to the rendezvous separately. I think he came there, but she did not come. He waited perhaps. Waited and then tried to find out, perhaps, why she didn’t come. I think then a message may have been given him, even a letter sent him, possibly in her forged handwriting, saying she had changed her mind. It was all over and she was going away for a time to get over it. I don’t know. But I don’t think he ever dreamt of the real reason of why she hadn’t come, of why she had sent no word. He hadn’t thought for one moment that she had been deliberately, cruelly, almost madly perhaps, destroyed. Clotilde was not going to lose the pers
“Did neither of the other sisters suspect it?”
“Mrs. Glynne was not there then. Her husband had not died and she was still abroad. But Anthea was there. I think Anthea did know something of what went on. I don’t know that she suspected death at first, but she knew that Clotilde had been occupying herself with the raising up of a mound at the end of the garden to be covered with flowering shrubs, to be a place of beauty. I think perhaps the truth came to her little by little. And then Clotilde, having accepted evil, done evil, surrendered to evil, had no qualms about what she would do next. I think she enjoyed planning it. She had a certain amount of influence over a sly, sexy little village girl who came to her cadging for benefits now and then. I think it was easy for her to arrange one day to take the girl on a picnic or an expedition a good long way away. Thirty or forty miles. She’d chosen the place beforehand, I think. She strangled the girl, disfigured her, hid her under turned earth, leaves and branches. Why should anyone ever suspect her of doing any such thing? She put Verity’s handbag there and a little chain Verity used to wear round her neck and possibly dressed her in clothes belonging to Verity. She hoped the crime would not be found out for some time but in the meantime she spread abroad rumours of Nora Broad having been seen about in Michael’s car, going about with Michael. Possibly she spread a story that Verity had broken off the engagement to be married because of his infidelity with this girl. She may have said anything and I think everything she said she enjoyed, poor lost soul.”
“Why do you say ‘poor lost soul,’ Miss Marple?”
“Because,” said Miss Marple, “I don’t suppose there can be any agony so great as what Clotilde has suffered all this time—ten years now—living in eternal sorrow. Living, you see, with the thing she had to live with. She had kept Verity, kept her there at The Old Manor House, in the garden, kept her there for ever. She didn’t realize at first what that meant. Her passionate longing for the girl to be alive again. I don’t think she ever suffered from remorse. I don’t think she had even that consolation. She just suffered—went on suffering year after year. And I know now what Elizabeth Temple meant. Better perhaps than she herself did. Love is a very terrible thing. It is alive to evil, it can be one of the most evil things there can be. And she had to live with that day after day, year after year. I think, you know, that Anthea was frightened of that. I think she knew more clearly the whole time what Clotilde had done and she thought that Clotilde knew that she knew. And she was afraid of what Clotilde might do. Clotilde gave that parcel to Anthea to post, the one with the pullover. She said things to me about Anthea, that she was mentally disturbed, that if she suffered from persecution or jealousy Anthea might do anything. I think—yes—that in the not so distant future—something might have happened to Anthea—an arranged suicide because of a guilty conscience—”
“And yet you are sorry for that woman?” asked Sir Andrew. “Malignant evil is like cancer—a malignant tumour. It brings suffering.”
“Of course,” said Miss Marple.
“I suppose you have been told what happened that night,” said Professor Wanstead, “after your guardian angels had removed you?”
“You mean Clotilde? She had picked up my glass of milk, I remember. She was still holding it when Miss Cooke took me out of the room. I suppose she—drank it, did she?”
“Yes. Did you know that might happen?”
“I didn’t think of it, no, not at the moment. I suppose I could have known it if I’d thought about it.”
“Nobody could have stopped her. She was so quick about it, and nobody quite realized there was anything wrong in the milk.”
“So she drank it.”
“Does that surprise you?”
“No, it would have seemed to her the natural thing to do, one can’t really wonder. It had come by this time that she wanted to escape—from all the things she was having to live with. Just as Verity had wanted to escape from the life that she was living there. Very odd, isn’t it, that the retribution one brings on oneself fits so closely with what has caused it.”
“You sound sorrier for her than you were for the girl who died.”
“No,” said Miss Marple, “it’s a different kind of being sorry. I’m sorry for Verity because of all that she missed, all that she was so near to obtaining. A life of love and devotion and service to the man she had chosen, and whom she truly loved. Truly and in all verity. She missed all that and nothing can give that back to her. I’m sorry for her because of what she didn’t have. But she escaped what Clotilde had to suffer. Sorrow, misery, fear and a growing cultivation and imbibing of evil. Clotilde had to live with all those. Sorrow, frustrated love which she could never get back, she had to live with the two sisters who suspected, who were afraid of her, and she had to live with the girl she had kept there.”
“You mean Verity?”
“Yes. Buried in the garden, buried in the tomb that Clotilde had prepared. She was there in The Old Manor House and I think Clotilde knew she was there. It might be that she even saw her or thought she saw her, sometimes when she went to pick a spray of polygonum blossom. She must have felt very close to Verity then. Nothing worse could happen to her, could it, than that? Nothing worse….”
Twenty-three
END PIECES
I
“That old lady gives me the creeps,” said Sir Andrew McNeil, when he had said good-bye and thanks to Miss Marple.
“So gentle—and so ruthless,” said the Assistant Commissioner.
Professor Wanstead took Miss Marple down to his car which was waiting, and then returned for a few final words.
“What do you think of her, Edmund?”
“The most frightening woman I ever met,” said the Home Secretary.
“Ruthless?” asked Professor Wanstead.
“No, no, I don’t mean that but—well, a very frightening woman.”
“Nemesis,” said Professor Wanstead thoughtfully.
“Those two women,” said the P.P.D. man, “you know, the security agents who were looking after her, they gave a most extraordinary description of her that night. They got into the house quite easily, hid themselves in a small downstairs room until everyone went upstairs, then one went into the bedroom and into the wardrobe and the other stayed outside the room to watch. The one in the bedroom said that when she threw open the door of the wardrobe and came out, there was the old lady sitting up in bed with a pink fluffy shawl round her neck and a perfectly placid face, twittering away and talking like an elderly school marm. They said she gave them quite a turn.”
“A pink fluffy shawl,” said Professor Wanstead. “Yes, yes, I do remember—.”
“What do you remember?”
“Old Rafiel. He told me about her, you know, and then he laughed. He said one thing he’d never forget in all his life. He said it was when one of the funniest scatterbrained old pussies he’d ever met came marching into his bedroom out in the West Indies, with a fluffy pink scarf round her neck, telling him he was to get up and do something to prevent a murder. And he said, ‘What on earth do you think you’re doing?’ And she said she was Nemesis. Nemesis! He could not imagine anything less like it, he said. I like the touch of the pink woolly scarf,” said Professor Wanstead, thoughtfully, “I like that, very much.”
II
“Michael,” said Profes
The young man of thirty-two looked at the white-haired, rather dicky old lady with a slightly doubtful expression.
“Oh—er—” he said, “well, I guess I have heard about it. Thanks very much.”
He looked at Wanstead.
“It’s true, is it, they’re going to give me a free pardon or something silly like that?”
“Yes. A release will be put through quite soon. You’ll be a free man in a very short time.”
“Oh.” Michael sounded slightly doubtful.
“It will take a little getting used to, I expect,” said Miss Marple kindly.
She looked at him thoughtfully. Seeing him in retrospect as he might have been ten years or so ago. Still quite attractive—though he showed all the signs of strain. Attractive, yes. Very attractive, she thought he would have been once. A gaiety about him then, there would have been, and a charm. He’d lost that now, but it would come back perhaps. A weak mouth and attractively shaped eyes that could look you straight in the face, and probably had been always extremely useful for telling lies that you really wanted to believe. Very like—who was it?—she dived into past memories—Jonathan Birkin, of course. He had sung in the choir. A really delightful baritone voice. And how fond the girls had been of him! Quite a good job he’d had as a clerk in Messrs. Gabriel’s firm. A pity there had been that little matter of the cheques.