A Murder is Announced

Chapter 9
Concerning a Door

I

'I'm sorry to bother you again, Miss Blacklock - '

'Oh, it doesn't matter. I suppose, as the inquest was adjourned for a week, you're hoping to get more evidence?'

Detective-Inspector Craddock nodded.

'To begin with, Miss Blacklock, Rudi Scherz was not the son of the proprietor of the Hotel des Alpes at Montreux. He seems to have started his career as an orderly in a hospital at Berne. A good many of the patients missed small pieces of jewellery. Under another name he was a waiter at one of the small winter sports places. His speciality there was making out duplicate bills in the restaurant with items on one that didn't appear on the other. The difference, of course, went into his pocket. After that he was in a department store in Zurich. There losses from shoplifting were rather above the average whilst he was with them. It seems likely that the shoplifting wasn't entirely due to customers.'

'He was a picker up of unconsidered trifles, in fact?' said Miss Blacklock dryly. 'Then I was right in thinking that I had not seen him before?'

'You were quite right - no doubt you were pointed out to him at the Royal Spa Hotel and he pretended to recognize you. The Swiss police had begun to make his own country rather too hot for him, and he came over here with a very nice set of forged papers and took a job at the Royal Spa.'

'Quite a good hunting ground,' said Miss Blacklock dryly. 'It's extremely expensive and very well-off people stay there. Some of them are careless about their bills, I expect.'

'Yes,' said Craddock. 'There were prospects of a satisfactory harvest.'

Miss Blacklock was frowning.

'I see all that,' she said. 'But why come to Chipping Cleghorn? What does he think we've got here that could possibly be better than the rich Royal Spa Hotel?'

'You stick to your statement that there's nothing of especial value in the house?'

'Of course there isn't. I should know. I can assure you Inspector, we've not got an unrecognized Rembrandt or anything like that.'

'Then it looks, doesn't it, as though your friend Miss Bunner was right? He came here to attack you.'

('There, Letty, what did I tell you!'

'Oh, nonsense, Bunny.')

'But is it nonsense?' said Craddock. 'I think, you know, that it's true.'

Miss Blacklock stared very hard at him.

'Now, let's get this straight. You really believe that this young man came out here - having previously arranged by means of an advertisement that half the village would turn up agog at that particular time - '

'But he mayn't have meant that to happen,' interrupted Miss Bunner eagerly. 'It may have been just a horrid sort of warning - to you, Letty - that's how I read it at the time - "A murder is announced" - I felt in my bones that it was sinister - if it had all gone as planned he would have shot you and got away - and how would anyone have ever known who it was?'

'That's true enough,' said Miss Blacklock. 'But - '

'I knew that advertisement wasn't a joke, Letty. I said so. And look at Mitzi - she was frightened, too!'

'Ah,' said Craddock, 'Mitzi. I'd like to know rather more about that young woman.'

'Her permit and papers are quite in order.'

'I don't doubt that,' said Craddock dryly. 'Scherz's papers appeared to be quite correct, too.'

'But why should this Rudi Scherz want to murder me? That's what you don't attempt to explain, Inspector Craddock.'

'There may have been someone behind Scherz,' said Craddock slowly. 'Have you thought of that?'

He used the words metaphorically though it flashed across his mind that if Miss Marple's theory was correct, the words would also be true in a literal sense. In any case they made little impression on Miss Blacklock, who still looked sceptical.

'The point remains the same,' she said. 'Why on earth should anyone want to murder me?'

'It's the answer to that that I want you to give me, Miss Blacklock.'

'Well, I can't! That's flat. I've no enemies. As far as I'm aware I've always lived on perfectly good terms with my neighbours. I don't know any guilty secrets about anyone. The whole idea is ridiculous! And if what you're hinting is that Mitzi has something to do with this, that's absurd, too. As Miss Bunner has just told you she was frightened to death when she saw that advertisement in the Gazette. She actually wanted to pack up and leave the house then and there.'

'That may have been a clever move on her part. She may have known you'd press her to stay.'

'Of course, if you've made up your mind about it, you'll find an answer to everything. But I can assure you that if Mitzi had taken an unreasoning dislike to me, she might conceivably poison my food, but I'm sure she wouldn't go in for all this elaborate rigmarole.

'The whole idea's absurd. I believe you police have got an anti-foreigner complex. Mitzi may be a liar but she's not a cold-blooded murderer. Go and bully her if you must. But when she's departed in a whirl of indignation, or shut herself up howling in her room, I've a good mind to make you cook the dinner. Mrs Harmon is bringing some old lady who is staying with her to tea this afternoon and I wanted Mitzi to make some little cakes - but I suppose you'll upset her completely. Can't you possibly go and suspect somebody else?'

II

Craddock went out to the kitchen. He asked Mitzi questions that he had asked her before and received the same answers.

Yes, she had locked the front door soon after four o'clock. No, she did not always do so, but that afternoon she had been nervous because of 'that dreadful advertisement'. It was no good locking the side door because Miss Blacklock and Miss Bunner went out that way to shut up the ducks and feed the chickens and Mrs Haymes usually came in that way from work.

'Mrs Haymes says she locked the door when she came in at 5.30.'

'Ah, and you believe her - oh, yes, you believe her...'

'Do you think we shouldn't believe her?'

'What does it matter what I think? You will not believe me.'

'Supposing you give us a chance. You think Mrs Haymes didn't lock that door?'

'I thinking she was very careful not to lock it.'

'What do you mean by that?' asked Craddock.

'That young man, he does not work alone. No, he knows where to come, he knows that when he comes a door will be left open for him - oh, very conveniently open!'

'What are you trying to say?'

'What is the use of what I say? You will not listen. You say I am a poor refugee girl who tells lies. You say that a fair-haired English lady, oh, no, she does not tell lies - she is so British - so honest. So you believe her and not me. But I could tell you. Oh, yes, I could tell you!'

She banged down a saucepan on the stove.

Craddock was in two minds whether to take notice of what might be only a stream of spite.

'We note everything we are told,' he said.

'I shall not tell you anything at all. Why should I? You are all alike. You persecute and despise poor refugees. If I say to you that when, a week before, that young man come to ask Miss Blacklock for money and she sends him away, as you say, with a flea in the ear - if I tell you that after that I hear him talking with Mrs Haymes - yes, out there in the summerhouse - all you say is that I make it up!'

And so you probably are making it up, thought Craddock. But he said aloud:

'You couldn't hear what was said out in the summerhouse.'

'There you are wrong,' screamed Mitzi triumphantly. 'I go out to get nettles - it makes very nice vegetables, nettles. They do not think so, but I cook it and not tell them. And I hear them talking in there. He say to her "But where can I hide?" And she say "I will show you" - and then she say, "At a quarter-past six," and I think, "Ach so! That is how you behave, my fine lady! After you come back from work, you go out to meet a man. You bring him into the house." Miss Blacklock, I think, she will not like that. She will turn you out. I will watch, I think, and listen and then I will tell Miss Blacklock. But I understand now I was wrong. It was not love she planned with him, it was to rob and to murder. But you will say I make all this up. Wicked Mitzi, you will say. I will take her to prison.'

Craddock wondered. She might be making it up. But possibly she might not. He asked cautiously:

'You are sure it was this Rudi Scherz she was talking to?'

'Of course I am sure. He just leave and I see him go from the drive across to the summerhouse. And presently,' said Mitzi defiantly, 'I go out to see if there are any nice young green nettles.'

Would there, the Inspector wondered, be any nice young green nettles in October? But he appreciated that Mitzi had had to produce a hurried reason for what had undoubtedly been nothing more than plain snooping.

'You didn't hear any more than what you have told me?'

Mitzi looked aggrieved.

'That Miss Bunner, the one with the long nose, she call and call me. Mitzi! Mitzi! So I have to go. Oh, she is irritating. Always interfering. Says she will teach me to cook. Her cooking! It tastes, yes, everything she does, of water, water, water!'

'Why didn't you tell me this the other day?' asked Craddock sternly.

'Because I did not remember - I did not think...Only afterwards do I say to myself, it was planned then - planned with her.'

'You are quite sure it was Mrs Haymes?'

'Oh, yes, I am sure. Oh, yes, I am very sure. She is a thief, that Mrs Haymes. A thief and the associate of thieves. What she gets for working in the garden, it is not enough for such a fine lady, no. She has to rob Miss Blacklock who has been kind to her. Oh, she is bad, bad, bad, that one!'

'Supposing,' said the Inspector, watching her closely, 'that someone was to say that you had been seen talking to Rudi Scherz?'

The suggestion had less effect than he had hoped for. Mitzi merely snorted and tossed her head.

'If anyone say they see me talking to him, that is lies, lies, lies, lies,' she said contemptuously. 'To tell lies about anyone, that is easy, but in England you have to prove them true. Miss Blacklock tells me that, and it is true, is it not? I do not speak with murderers and thieves. And no English policeman shall say I do. And how can I do cooking for lunch if you are here, talk, talk, talk? Go out of my kitchens, please. I want now to make a very careful sauce.'

Craddock went obediently. He was a little shaken in his suspicions of Mitzi. Her story about Phillipa Haymes had been told with great conviction. Mitzi might be a liar (he thought she was), but he fancied that there might be some substratum of truth in this particular tale. He resolved to speak to Phillipa on the subject. She had seemed to him when he questioned her a quiet, well-bred young woman. He had had no suspicion of her.

Crossing the hall, in his abstraction, he tried to open the wrong door. Miss Bunner, descending the staircase, hastily put him right.

'Not that door,' she said. 'It doesn't open. The next one to the left. Very confusing, isn't it? So many doors.'

'There are a good many,' said Craddock, looking up and down the narrow hall.

Miss Bunner amiably enumerated them for him.

'First the door to the cloakroom, and then the cloaks cupboard door and then the dining-room - that's on that side. And on this side, the dummy door that you were trying to get through and then there's the drawing-room door proper, and then the china cupboard and the door of the little flower room, and at the end the side door. Most confusing. Especially these two being so near together. I've often tried the wrong one by mistake. We used to have the hall table against it, as a matter of fact, but then we moved it along against the wall there.'

Craddock had noted, almost mechanically, a thin line horizontally across the panels of the door he had been trying to open. He realized now it was the mark where the table had been. Something stirred vaguely in his mind as he asked, 'Moved? How long ago?'

In questioning Dora Bunner there was fortunately no need to give a reason for any question. Any query on any subject seemed perfectly natural to the garrulous Miss Bunner who delighted in the giving of information, however trivial.

'Now let me see, really quite recently - ten days or a fortnight ago.'

'Why was it moved?'

'I really can't remember. Something to do with the flowers. I think Phillipa did a big vase - she arranges flowers quite beautifully - all autumn colouring and twigs and branches, and it was so big it caught your hair as you went past, and so Phillipa said, "Why not move the table along and anyway the flowers would look much better against the bare wall than against the panels of the door." Only we had to take down Wellington at Waterloo. Not a print I'm really very fond of. We put it under the stairs.'

'It's not really a dummy, then?' Craddock asked, looking at the door.'

'Oh, no, it's a real door, if that's what you mean. It's the door of the small drawing-room, but when the rooms were thrown into one, one didn't need two doors, so this one was fastened up.'

'Fastened up?' Craddock tried it again, gently. 'You mean it's nailed up? Or just locked?'

'Oh, locked, I think, and bolted too.'

He saw the bolt at the top and tried it. The bolt slid back easily - too easily...

'When was it last open?' he asked Miss Bunner.

'Oh, years and years ago, I imagine. It's never been opened since I've been here, I know that.'

'You don't know where the key is?'

'There are a lot of keys in the hall drawer. It's probably among those.'

Craddock followed her and looked at a rusty assortment of old keys pushed far back in the drawer. He scanned them and selected one that looked different from the rest and went back to the door. The key fitted and turned easily. He pushed and the door slid open noiselessly.

'Oh, do be careful,' cried Miss Bunner. 'There may be something resting against it inside. We never open it.'

'Don't you?' said the Inspector.

His face now was grim. He said with emphasis:

'This door's been opened quite recently, Miss Bunner. The lock's been oiled and the hinges.'

She stared at him, her foolish face agape.

'But who could have done that?' she asked.

'That's what I mean to find out,' said Craddock grimly. He thought - 'X from outside? No - X was here - in this house - X was in the drawing-room that night...'