Fourteen. Exercise in thinking
“I suppose what we ought to do is think,” said Tuppence.After a glad reunion in the hospital, Tuppence had eventually been honourably discharged.
The faithful pair were now comparing notes together in the sitting room of the best suite in The Lamb and Flag at Market Basing.
“You leave thinking alone,” said Tommy. “You know what that doctor told you before he let you go. No worries, no mental exertion, very little physical activity—take everything easy.”
“What else am I doing now?” demanded Tuppence. “I’ve got my feet up, haven’t I, and my head on two cushions? And as for thinking, thinking isn’t necessarily mental exertion. I’m not doing mathematics, or studying economics, or adding up the household accounts. Thinking is just resting comfortably, and leaving one’s mind open in case something interesting or important should just come floating in. Anyway, wouldn’t you rather I did a little thinking with my feet up and my head on cushions, rather than go in for action again?”
“I certainly don’t want you going in for action again,” said Tommy. “That’s out. You understand? Physically, Tuppence, you will remain quiescent. If possible, I shan’t let you out of my sight because I don’t trust you.”
“All right,” said Tuppence. “Lecture ends. Now let’s think. Think together. Pay no attention to what doctors have said to you. If you knew as much as I do about doctors—”
“Never mind about the doctors,” said Tommy, “you do as I tell you.”
“All right. I’ve no wish at present for physical activity, I assure you. The point is that we’ve got to compare notes. We’ve got hold of a lot of things. It’s as bad as a village jumble sale.”
“What do you mean by things?”
“Well, facts. All sorts of facts. Far too many facts. And not only facts—Hearsay, suggestions, legends, gossip. The whole thing is like a bran tub with different kinds of parcels wrapped up and shoved down in the sawdust.”
“Sawdust is right,” said Tommy.
“I don’t quite know whether you’re being insulting or modest,” said Tuppence. “Anyway, you do agree with me, don’t you? We’ve got far too much of everything. There are wrong things and right things, and important things and unimportant things and they’re all mixed up together. We don’t know where to start.”
“I do,” said Tommy.
“All right,” said Tuppence. “Where are you starting?”
“I’m starting with your being coshed on the head,” said Tommy.
Tuppence considered a moment. “I don’t see really that that’s a starting point. I mean, it’s the last thing that happened, not the first.”
“It’s the first in my mind,” said Tommy. “I won’t have people coshing my wife. And it’s a real point to start from. It’s not imagination. It’s a real thing that really happened.”
“I couldn’t agree with you more,” said Tuppence. “It really happened and it happened to me, and I’m not forgetting it. I’ve been thinking about it—Since I regained the power of thought, that is.”
“Have you any idea as to who did it?”
“Unfortunately, no. I was bending down over a gravestone and whoosh!”
“Who could it have been?”
“I suppose it must have been somebody in Sutton Chancellor. And yet that seems so unlikely. I’ve hardly spoken to anyone.”
“The vicar?”
“It couldn’t have been the vicar,” said Tuppence. “First because he’s a nice old boy. And secondly because he wouldn’t have been nearly strong enough. And thirdly because he’s got very asthmatic breathing. He couldn’t possibly have crept up behind me without my hearing him.”
“Then if you count the vicar out—”
“Don’t you?”
“Well,” said Tommy, “yes, I do. As you know, I’ve been to see him and talked to him. He’s been a vicar here for years and everyone knows him. I suppose a fiend incarnate could put on a show of being a kindly vicar, but not for more than about a week or so at the outside, I’d say. Not for about ten or twelve years.”
“Well, then,” said Tuppence, “the next suspect would be Miss Bligh. Nellie Bligh. Though heaven knows why. She can’t have thought I was trying to steal a tombstone.”
“Do you feel it might have been her?”
“Well, I don’t really. Of course, she’s competent. If she wanted to follow me and see what I was doing, and conk me, she’d make a success of it. And like the vicar, she was there—on the spot—She was in Sutton Chancellor, popping in and out of her house to do this and that, and she could have caught sight of me in the churchyard, come up behind me on tiptoe out of curiosity, seen me examining a grave, objected to my doing so for some particular reason, and hit me with one of the church metal flower vases or anything else handy. But don’t ask me why. There seems no possible reason.”
“Who next, Tuppence? Mrs. Cockerell, if that’s her name?”
“Mrs. Copleigh,” said Tuppence. “No, it wouldn’t be Mrs. Copleigh.”
“Now why are you so sure of that? She lives in Sutton Chancellor, she could have seen you go out of the house and she could have followed you.”
“Oh yes, yes, but she talks too much,” said Tuppence.
“I don’t see where talking too much comes into it.”
“If you’d listened to her a whole evening as I did,” said Tuppence, “you’d realize that anyone who talks as much as she does, nonstop in a constant flow, could not possibly be a woman of action as well! She couldn’t have come up anywhere near me without talking at the top of her voice as she came.”
Tommy considered this.
“All right,” he said. “You have good judgement in that kind of thing, Tuppence. Wash out Mrs. Copleigh. Who else is there?”
“Amos Perry,” said Tuppence. “That’s the man who lives at the Canal House. (I have to call it the Canal House because it’s got so many other odd names. And it was called that originally.) The husband of the friendly witch. There’s something a bit queer about him. He’s a bit simpleminded and he’s a big powerful man, and he could cosh anyone on the head if he wanted to, and I even think it’s possible in certain circumstances he might want to—though I don’t exactly know why he should want to cosh me. He’s a better possibility really than Miss Bligh who seems to me just one of those tiresome, efficient women who go about running parishes and poking their noses into things. Not at all the type who would get up to the point of physical attack, except for some wildly emotional reason.” She added, with a slight shiver, “You know, I felt frightened of Amos Perry the first time I saw him. He was showing me his garden. I felt suddenly that I—well, that I wouldn’t like to get on the wrong side of him—or meet him in a dark road at night. I felt he was a man that wouldn’t often want to be violent but who could be violent if something took him that way.”
“All right,” said Tommy. “Amos Perry. Number one.”
“And there’s his wife,” said Tuppence slowly. “The friendly witch. She was nice and I liked her—I don’t want it to be her—I don’t think it was her, but she’s mixed up in things, I think . . . Things that have to do with that house. That’s another point, you see, Tommy—We don’t know what the important thing is in all this—I’ve begun to wonder whether everything doesn’t circulate round that house—whether the house isn’t the central point. The picture—That picture does mean something, doesn’t it, Tommy? It must, I think.”
“Yes,” said Tommy, “I think it must.”
“I came here trying to find Mrs. Lancaster—but nobody here seems to have heard of her. I’ve been wondering whether I got things the wrong way round—that Mrs. Lancaster was in danger (because I’m still sure of that) because she owned that picture. I don’t think she was ever in Sutton Chancellor—but she was either given, or she bought, a picture of a house here. And that picture means something—is in some way a menace to someone.”
“Mrs. Cocoa—Mrs. Moody—told Aunt Ada that she recognized someone at Sunny Ridge—someone connected with ‘criminal activities.’ I think the criminal activities are connected with the picture and with the house by the canal, and a child who perhaps was killed there.”
“Aunt Ada admired Mrs. Lancaster’s picture—and Mrs. Lancaster gave it to her—and perhaps she talked about it—where she got it, or who had given it to her, and where the house was—”
“Mrs. Moody was bumped off because she definitely recognized someone who had been ‘connected with criminal activities.’ ”
“Tell me again about your conversation with Dr. Murray,” said Tuppence. “After telling you about Mrs. Cocoa, he went on to talk about certain types of killers, giving examples of real life cases. One was a woman who ran a nursing home for elderly patients—I remember reading about it vaguely, though I can’t remember the woman’s name. But the idea was that they made over what money they had to her, and then they lived there until they died, well fed and looked after, and without any money worries. And they were very happy—only they usually died well within a year—quite peacefully in their sleep. And at last people began to notice. She was tried and convicted of murder—But had no conscience pangs and protested that what she had done was really a kindness to the old dears.”
“Yes. That’s right,” said Tommy. “I can’t remember the name of the woman now.”
“Well, never mind about that,” said Tuppence. “And then he cited another case. A case of a woman, a domestic worker or a cook or a housekeeper. She used to go into service into different families. Sometimes nothing happened, I believe, and sometimes it was a kind of mass poisoning. Food poisoning, it was supposed to be. All with quite reasonable symptoms. Some people recovering.”
“She used to prepare sandwiches,” said Tommy, “and make them up into packets and send them out for picnics with them. She was very nice and very devoted and she used to get, if it was a mass poisoning, some of the symptoms and signs herself. Probably exaggerating their effect. Then she’d go away after that and she’d take another place, in quite a different part of England. It went on for some years.”
“That’s right, yes. Nobody, I believe, has ever been able to understand why she did it. Did she get a sort of addiction for it—a sort of habit of it? Was it fun for her? Nobody really ever knew. She never seems to have had any personal malice for any of the people whose deaths she seems to have caused. Bit wrong in the top storey?”
“Yes. I think she must have been, though I suppose one of the trick cyclists would probably do a great deal of analysis and find out it had all something to do with a canary of a family she’d known years and years ago as a child who had given her a shock or upset her or something. But anyway, that’s the sort of thing it was.”
“The third one was queerer still,” said Tommy. “A French woman. A woman who’d suffered terribly from the loss of her husband and her child. She was brokenhearted and she was an angel of mercy.”
“That’s right,” said Tuppence, “I remember. They called her the angel of whatever the village was. Givon or something like that. She went to all the neighbours and nursed them when they were ill. Particularly she used to go to children when they were ill. She nursed them devotedly. But sooner or later, after apparently a slight recovery, they grew much worse and died. She spent hours crying and went to the funeral crying and everybody said they wouldn’t know what they’d have done without the angel who’d nursed their darlings and done everything she could.”
“Why do you want to go over all this again, Tuppence?”
“Because I wondered if Dr. Murray had a reason for mentioning them.”
“You mean he connected—”
“I think he connected up three classical cases that are well known, and tried them on, as it were, like a glove, to see if they fitted anyone at Sunny Ridge. I think in a way any of them might have fitted. Miss Packard would fit in with the first one. The efficient matron of a Home.”
“You really have got your knife into that woman. I always liked her.”
“I daresay people have liked murderers,” said Tuppence very reasonably. “It’s like swindlers and confidence tricksmen who always look so honest and seem so honest. I daresay murderers all seem very nice and particularly softhearted. That sort of thing. Anyway, Miss Packard is very efficient and she has all the means to hand whereby she could produce a nice natural death without suspicion. And only someone like Mrs. Cocoa would be likely to suspect her. Mrs. Cocoa might suspect her because she’s a bit batty herself and can understand batty people, or she might have come across her somewhere before.”
“I don’t think Miss Packard would profit financially by any of her elderly inmates’ deaths.”
“You don’t know,” said Tuppence. “It would be a cleverer way to do it, not to benefit from all of them. Just get one or two of them, perhaps, rich ones, to leave you a lot of money, but to always have some deaths that were quite natural as well, and where you didn’t get anything. So you see I think that Dr. Murray might, just might, have cast a glance at Miss Packard and said to himself, ‘Nonsense, I’m imagining things.’ But all the same the thought stuck in his mind. The second case he mentioned would fit with a domestic worker, or cook, or even some kind of hospital nurse. Somebody employed in the place, a middle-aged reliable woman, but who was batty in that particular way. Perhaps used to have little grudges, dislikes for some of the patients there. We can’t go guessing at that because I don’t think we know anyone well enough—”
“And the third one?”
“The third one’s more difficult,” Tuppence admitted. “Someone devoted. Dedicated.”
“Perhaps he just added that for good measure,” said Tommy. He added, “I wonder about that Irish nurse.”
“The nice one we gave the fur stole to?”
“Yes, the nice one Aunt Ada liked. The very sympathetic one. She seemed so fond of everyone, so sorry if they died. She was very worried when she spoke to us, wasn’t she? You said so—she was leaving, and she didn’t really tell us why.”
“I suppose she might have been a rather neurotic type. Nurses aren’t supposed to be too sympathetic. It’s bad for patients. They are told to be cool and efficient and inspire confidence.”
“Nurse Beresford speaking,” said Tommy, and grinned.
“But to come back to the picture,” said Tuppence. “If we just concentrate on the picture. Because I think it’s very interesting what you told me about Mrs. Boscowan, when you went to see her. She sounds—she sounds interesting.”
“She was interesting,” said Tommy. “Quite the most interesting person I think we’ve come across in this unusual business. The sort of person who seems to know things, but not by thinking about them. It was as though she knew something about this place that I didn’t, and that perhaps you don’t. But she knows something.”
“It was odd what she said about the boat,” said Tuppence. “That the picture hadn’t had a boat originally. Why do you think it’s got a boat now?”
“Oh,” said Tommy, “I don’t know.”
“Was there any name painted on the boat? I don’t remember seeing one—but then I never looked at it very closely.”
“It’s got Waterlily on it.”
“A very appropriate name for a boat—what does that remind me of?”
“I’ve no idea.”
“And she was quite positive that her husband didn’t paint that boat—He could have put it in afterwards.”
“She says not—she was very definite.”
“Of course,” said Tuppence, “there’s another possibility we haven’t gone into. About my coshing, I mean—the outsider—somebody perhaps who followed me here from Market Basing that day to see what I was up to. Because I’d been there asking all those questions. Going into all those house agents. Blodget & Burgess and all the rest of them. They put me off about the house. They were evasive. More evasive than would be natural. It was the same sort of evasion as we had when we were trying to find out where Mrs. Lancaster had gone. Lawyers and banks, an owner who can’t be communicated with because he’s abroad. The same sort of pattern. They send someone to follow my car, they want to see what I am doing, and in due course I am coshed. Which brings us,” said Tuppence, “to the gravestone in the churchyard. Why didn’t anyone want me to look at old gravestones? They were all pulled about anyway—a group of boys, I should say, who’d got bored with wrecking telephone boxes, and went into the churchyard to have some fun and sacrilege behind the church.”
“You say there were painted words—or roughly carved words?”
“Yes—done with a chisel, I should think. Someone who gave it up as a bad job.
“The name—Lily Waters—and the age—seven years old. That was done properly—and then the other bits of words—It looked like ‘Whosoever . . .’ and then ‘offend least of these’—and—‘Millstone’—”
“Sounds familiar.”
“It should do. It’s definitely biblical—but done by someone who wasn’t quite sure what the words he wanted to remember were—”
“Very odd—the whole thing.”
“And why anyone should object—I was only trying to help the vicar—and the poor man who was trying to find his lost child—There we are—back to the lost child motif again—Mrs. Lancaster talked about a poor child walled up behind a fireplace, and Mrs. Copleigh chattered about walled-up nuns and murdered children, and a mother who killed a baby, and a lover, and an illegitimate baby, and a suicide—It’s all old tales and gossip and hearsay and legends, mixed up in the most glorious kind of hasty pudding! All the same, Tommy, there was one actual fact—not just hearsay or legend—”
“You mean?”
“I mean that in the chimney of this Canal House, this old rag doll fell out—A child’s doll. It had been there a very, very long time, all covered with soot and rubble—”
“Pity we haven’t got it,” said Tommy.
“I have,” said Tuppence. She spoke triumphantly.
“You brought it away with you?”
“Yes. It startled me, you know. I thought I’d like to take it and examine it. Nobody wanted it or anything. I should imagine the Perrys would just have thrown it into the ashcan straight away. I’ve got it here.”
She rose from her sofa, went to her suitcase, rummaged a little and then brought out something wrapped in newspaper.
“Here you are, Tommy, have a look.”
With some curiosity Tommy unwrapped the newspaper. He took out carefully the wreck of a child’s doll. Its limp arms and legs hung down, faint festoons of clothing dropped off as he touched them. The body seemed made of a very thin suede leather sewn up over a body that had once been plump with sawdust and now was sagging because here and there the sawdust had escaped. As Tommy handled it, and he was quite gentle in his touch, the body suddenly disintegrated, flapping over in a great wound from which there poured out a cupful of sawdust and with it small pebbles that ran to and fro about the floor. Tommy went round picking them up carefully.
“Good Lord,” he said to himself, “Good Lord!”
“How odd,” Tuppence said, “it’s full of pebbles. Is that a bit of the chimney disintegrating, do you think? The plaster or something crumbling away?”
“No,” said Tommy. “These pebbles were inside the body.”
He had gathered them up now carefully, he poked his finger into the carcase of the doll and a few more pebbles fell out. He took them over to the window and turned them over in his hand. Tuppence watched him with uncomprehending eyes.
“It’s a funny idea, stuffing a doll with pebbles,” she said.
“Well, they’re not exactly the usual kind of pebbles,” said Tommy. “There was a very good reason for it, I should imagine.”
“What do you mean?”
“Have a look at them. Handle a few.”
She took some wonderingly from his hand.
“They’re nothing but pebbles,” she said. “Some are rather large and some small. Why are you so excited?”
“Because, Tuppence, I’m beginning to understand things. Those aren’t pebbles, my dear girl, they’re diamonds.”
Book 4 Here is a church and here is the steeple open the doors and there are the people