The Thirteen Problems by Agatha Christie
‘I will recapitulate the vital points in a brief summary: The will was signed by Mr Clode, placed by me in an envelope—so far so good. It was then put by me in my overcoat pocket. That overcoat was taken from me by Mary and handed by her to George, who was in full sight of me whilst handling the coat. During the time that I was in the study Mrs Eurydice Spragg would have had plenty of time to extract the envelope from the coat pocket and read its contents and, as a matter of fact, finding the envelope on the ground and not in the pocket seemed to point to her having done so. But here we come to a curious point: she had the opportunity of substituting the blank paper, but no motive. The will was in her favour, and by substituting a blank piece of paper she despoiled herself of the heritage she had been so anxious to gain. The same applied to Mr Spragg. He, too, had the opportunity. He was left alone with the document in question for some two or three minutes in my office. But again, it was not to his advantage to do so. So we are faced with this curious problem: the two people who had the opportunity of substituting a blank piece of paper had no motive for doing so, and the two people who had a motive had no opportunity. By the way, I would not exclude the housemaid, Emma Gaunt, from suspicion. She was devoted to her young master and mistress and detested the Spraggs. She would, I feel sure, have been quite equal to attempting the substitution if she had thought of it. But although she actually handled the envelope when she picked it up from the floor and handed it to me, she certainly had no opportunity of tampering with its contents and she could not have substituted another envelope by some sleight of hand (of which anyway she would not be capable) because the envelope in question was brought into the house by me and no one there would be likely to have a duplicate.’
He looked round, beaming on the assembly.
‘Now, there is my little problem. I have, I hope, stated it clearly. I should be interested to hear your views.’
To everyone’s astonishment Miss Marple gave vent to a long and prolonged chuckle. Something seemed to be amusing her immensely.
‘What is the matter, Aunt Jane? Can’t we share the joke?’ said Raymond.
‘I was thinking of little Tommy Symonds, a naughty little boy, I am afraid, but sometimes very amusing. One of those children with innocent childlike faces who are always up to some mischief or other. I was thinking how last week in Sunday School he said, “Teacher, do you say yolk of eggs is white or yolk of eggs are white?” And Miss Durston explained that anyone would say “yolks of eggs are white, or yolk of egg is white”—and naughty Tommy said: “Well, I should say yolk of egg is yellow!” Very naughty of him, of course, and as old as the hills. I knew that one as a child.’
‘Very funny, my dear Aunt Jane,’ Raymond said gently, ‘but surely that has nothing to do with the very interesting story that Mr Petherick has been telling us.’
‘Oh yes, it has,’ said Miss Marple. ‘It is a catch! And so is Mr Petherick’s story a catch. So like a lawyer! Ah, my dear old friend!’ She shook a reproving head at him.
‘I wonder if you really know,’ said the lawyer with a twinkle.
Miss Marple wrote a few words on a piece of paper, folded them up and passed them across to him.
Mr Petherick unfolded the paper, read what was written on it and looked across at her appreciatively.
‘My dear friend,’ he said, ‘is there anything you do not know?’
‘I knew that as a child,’ said Miss Marple. ‘Played with it too.’
‘I feel rather out of this,’ said Sir Henry. ‘I feel sure that Mr Petherick has some clever legal legerdemain up his sleeve.’
‘Not at all,’ said Mr Petherick. ‘Not at all. It is a perfectly fair straightforward proposition. You must not pay any attention to Miss Marple. She has her own way of looking at things.’
‘We should be able to arrive at the truth,’ said Raymond West a trifle vexedly. ‘The facts certainly seem plain enough. Five persons actually touched that envelope. The Spraggs clearly could have meddled with it but equally clearly they did not do so. There remains the other three. Now, when one sees the marvellous ways that conjurers have of doing a thing before one’s eyes, it seems to me that the paper could have been extracted and another substituted by George Clode during the time he was carrying the overcoat to the far end of the room.’
‘Well, I think it was the girl,’ said Joyce. ‘I think the housemaid ran down and told her what was happening and she got hold of another blue envelope and just substituted the one for the other.’
Sir Henry shook his head. ‘I disagree with you both,’ he said slowly. ‘These sort of things are done by conjurers, and they are done on the stage and in novels, but I think they would be impossible to do in real life, especially under the shrewd eyes of a man like my friend Mr Petherick here. But I have an idea—it is only an idea and nothing more. We know that Professor Longman had just been down for a visit and that he said very little. It is only reasonable to suppose that the Spraggs may have been very anxious as to the result of that visit. If Simon Clode did not take them into his confidence, which is quite probable, they may have viewed his sending for Mr Petherick from quite another angle. They may have believed that Mr Clode had already made a will which benefited Eurydice Spragg and that this new one might be made for the express purpose of cutting her out as a result of Professor Longman’s revelations, or alternatively, as you lawyers say, Philip Garrod had impressed on his uncle the claims of his own flesh and blood. In that case, suppose Mrs Spragg prepared to effect a substitution. This she does, but Mr Petherick coming in at an unfortunate moment she had no time to read the real document and hastily destroys it by fire in case the lawyer should discover his loss.’
Joyce shook her head very decidedly.
‘She would never burn it without reading it.’
‘The solution is rather a weak one,’ admitted Sir Henry. ‘I suppose—er—Mr Petherick did not assist Providence himself.’
The suggestion was only a laughing one, but the little lawyer drew himself up in offended dignity.
‘A most improper suggestion,’ he said with some asperity.
‘What does Dr Pender say?’ asked Sir Henry.
‘I cannot say I have any very clear ideas. I think the substitution must have been effected by either Mrs Spragg or her husband, possibly for the motive that Sir Henry suggests. If she did not read the will until after Mr Petherick had departed, she would then be in somewhat of a dilemma, since she could not own up to her action in the matter. Possibly she would place it among Mr Clode’s papers where she thought it would be found after his death. But why it wasn’t found I don’t know. It might be a mere speculation this—that Emma Gaunt came across it—and out of misplaced devotion to her employers—deliberately destroyed it.’
‘I think Dr Pender’s solution is the best of all,’ said Joyce. ‘Is it right, Mr Petherick?’
The lawyer shook his head.
‘I will go on where I left off. I was dumbfounded and quite as much at sea as all of you are. I don’t think I should ever have guessed the truth—probably not—but I was enlightened. It was cleverly done too.
‘I went and dined with Philip Garrod about a month later and in the course of our after-dinner conversation he mentioned an interesting case that had recently come to his notice.’
‘ “I should like to tell you about it, Petherick, in confidence, of course.”
‘ “Quite so,” I replied.
‘ “A friend of mine who had expectations from one of his relatives was greatly distressed to find that that relative had thoughts of benefiting a totally unworthy person. My friend, I am afraid, is a trifle unscrupulous in his methods. There was a maid in the house who was greatly devoted to the interests of what I may call the legitimate party. My friend gave her very simple instructions. He gave her a fountain pen, duly filled. She was to place this in a drawer in the writing table in her master’s room, but not the usual drawer where the pen was generally kept. If her master asked her to witness his signature to any docu
‘He broke off and said:
‘ “I hope I am not boring you, Petherick.”
‘ “Not at all,” I said. “I am keenly interested.”
‘Our eyes met.
‘ “My friend is, of course, not known to you,” he said.
‘ “Of course not,” I replied.
‘ “Then that is all right,” said Philip Garrod.
‘He paused then said smilingly, “You see the point? The pen was filled with what is commonly known as Evanescent Ink—a solution of starch in water to which a few drops of iodine has been added. This makes a deep blue-black fluid, but the writing disappears entirely in four or five days.” ’
Miss Marple chuckled.
‘Disappearing ink,’ she said. ‘I know it. Many is the time I have played with it as a child.’
And she beamed round on them all, pausing to shake a finger once more at Mr Petherick.
‘But all the same it’s a catch, Mr Petherick,’ she said. ‘Just like a lawyer.’
Chapter 6
The Thumb Mark of St Peter
‘And now, Aunt Jane, it is up to you,’ said Raymond West.
‘Yes, Aunt Jane, we are expecting something really spicy,’ chimed in Joyce Lemprière.
‘Now, you are laughing at me, my dears,’ said Miss Marple placidly. ‘You think that because I have lived in this out-of-the-way spot all my life I am not likely to have had any very interesting experiences.’
‘God forbid that I should ever regard village life as peaceful and uneventful,’ said Raymond with fervour. ‘Not after the horrible revelations we have heard from you! The cosmopolitan world seems a mild and peaceful place compared with St Mary Mead.’
‘Well, my dear,’ said Miss Marple, ‘human nature is much the same everywhere, and, of course, one has opportunities of observing it at close quarters in a village.’
‘You really are unique, Aunt Jane,’ cried Joyce. ‘I hope you don’t mind me calling you Aunt Jane?’ she added. ‘I don’t know why I do it.’
‘Don’t you, my dear?’ said Miss Marple.
She looked up for a moment or two with something quizzical in her glance, which made the blood flame to the girl’s cheeks. Raymond West fidgeted and cleared his throat in a somewhat embarrassed manner.
Miss Marple looked at them both and smiled again, and bent her attention once more to her knitting.
‘It is true, of course, that I have lived what is called a very uneventful life, but I have had a lot of experience in solving different little problems that have arisen. Some of them have been really quite ingenious, but it would be no good telling them to you, because they are about such unimportant things that you would not be interested—just things like: Who cut the meshes of Mrs Jones’s string bag? and why Mrs Sims only wore her new fur coat once. Very interesting things, really, to any student of human nature. No, the only experience I can remember that would be of interest to you is the one about my poor niece Mabel’s husband.
‘It is about ten or fifteen years ago now, and happily it is all over and done with, and everyone has forgotten about it. People’s memories are very short—a lucky thing, I always think.’
Miss Marple paused and murmured to herself:
‘I must just count this row. The decreasing is a little awkward. One, two, three, four, five, and then three purl; that is right. Now, what was I saying? Oh, yes, about poor Mabel.
‘Mabel was my niece. A nice girl, really a very nice girl, but just a trifle what one might call silly. Rather fond of being melodramatic and of saying a great deal more than she meant whenever she was upset. She married a Mr Denman when she was twenty-two, and I am afraid it was not a very happy marriage. I had hoped very much that the attachment would not come to anything, for Mr Denman was a man of very violent temper—not the kind of man who would be patient with Mabel’s foibles—and I also learned that there was insanity in his family. However, girls were just as obstinate then as they are now, and as they always will be. And Mabel married him.
‘I didn’t see very much of her after her marriage. She came to stay with me once or twice, and they asked me there several times, but, as a matter of fact, I am not very fond of staying in other people’s houses, and I always managed to make some excuse. They had been married ten years when Mr Denman died suddenly. There were no children, and he left all his money to Mabel. I wrote, of course, and offered to come to Mabel if she wanted me; but she wrote back a very sensible letter, and I gathered that she was not altogether overwhelmed by grief. I thought that was only natural, because I knew they had not been getting on together for some time. It was not until about three months afterwards that I got a most hysterical letter from Mabel, begging me to come to her, and saying that things were going from bad to worse, and she couldn’t stand it much longer.
‘So, of course,’ continued Miss Marple, ‘I put Clara on board wages and sent the plate and the King Charles tankard to the bank, and I went off at once. I found Mabel in a very nervous state. The house, Myrtle Dene, was a fairly large one, very comfortably furnished. There was a cook and a house-parlourmaid as well as a nurse-attendant to look after old Mr Denman, Mabel’s husband’s father, who was what is called “not quite right in the head”. Quite peaceful and well behaved, but distinctly odd at times. As I say, there was insanity in the family.
‘I was really shocked to see the change in Mabel. She was a mass of nerves, twitching all over, yet I had the greatest difficulty in making her tell me what the trouble was. I got at it, as one always does get at these things, indirectly. I asked her about some friends of hers she was always mentioning in her letters, the Gallaghers. She said, to my surprise, that she hardly ever saw them nowadays. Other friends whom I mentioned elicited the same remark. I spoke to her then of the folly of shutting herself up and brooding, and especially of the silliness of cutting herself adrift from her friends. Then she came bursting out with the truth.
‘ “It is not my doing, it is theirs. There is not a soul in the place who will speak to me now. When I go down the High Street they all get out of the way so that they shan’t have to meet me or speak to me. I am like a kind of leper. It is awful, and I can’t bear it any longer. I shall have to sell the house and go abroad. Yet why should I be driven away from a home like this? I have done nothing.”
‘I was more disturbed than I can tell you. I was knitting a comforter for old Mrs Hay at the time, and in my perturbation I dropped two stitches and never discovered it until long after.
‘ “My dear Mabel,” I said, “you amaze me. But what is the cause of all this?”
‘Even as a child Mabel was always difficult. I had the greatest difficulty in getting her to give me a straightforward answer to my question. She would only say vague things about wicked talk and idle people who had nothing better to do than gossip, and people who put ideas into other people’s heads.
‘ “That is all quite clear to me,” I said. “There is evidently some story being circulated about you. But what that story is you must know as well as anyone. And you are going to tell me.”
‘ “It is so wicked,” moaned Mabel.
‘ “Of course it is wicked,” I said briskly. “There is nothing that you can tell me about people’s minds that would astonish or surprise me. Now, Mabel, will you tell me in plain English what people are saying about you?”
‘Then it all came out.
‘It seemed that Geoffrey Denman’s death, being quite sudden and unexpected, gave rise to various rumours. In fact—and in plain English as I had put it to her—people were saying that she had poisoned her husband.
‘Now, as I expect you know, there is nothing more cruel than talk, and there is nothing more difficult to combat. When people say things behind your back there i
‘ “There is no smoke without fire,” I said. “Now, Mabel, you have got to tell me what started people off on this tack. There must have been something.”
‘Mabel was very incoherent, and declared there was nothing—nothing at all, except, of course, that Geoffrey’s death had been very sudden. He had seemed quite well at supper that evening, and had taken violently ill in the night. The doctor had been sent for, but the poor man had died a few minutes after the doctor’s arrival. Death had been thought to be the result of eating poisoned mushrooms.
‘ “Well,” I said, “I suppose a sudden death of that kind might start tongues wagging, but surely not without some additional facts. Did you have a quarrel with Geoffrey or anything of that kind?”
‘She admitted that she had had a quarrel with him on the preceding morning at breakfast time.
‘ “And the servants heard it, I suppose?” I asked.
‘ “They weren’t in the room.”
‘ “No, my dear,” I said, “but they probably were fairly near the door outside.”
‘I knew the carrying power of Mabel’s high-pitched hysterical voice only too well. Geoffrey Denman, too, was a man given to raising his voice loudly when angry.
‘ “What did you quarrel about?” I asked.
‘ “Oh, the usual things. It was always the same things over and over again. Some little thing would start us off, and then Geoffrey became impossible and said abominable things, and I told him what I thought of him.”
‘ “There had been a lot of quarrelling, then?” I asked.