Miss Marple’s Final Cases

Edward said, ‘You know, Charmian, we still haven’t come to the vital point.’

‘Well, you talk, then.’

Edward turned to Miss Marple. ‘It’s like this, you see. As Uncle Mathew grew older, he got more and more suspicious. He didn’t trust anybody.’

‘Very wise of him,’ said Miss Marple. ‘The depravity of human nature is unbelievable.’

‘Well, you may be right. Anyway, Uncle Mathew thought so. He had a friend who lost his money in a bank, and another friend who was ruined by an absconding solicitor, and he lost some money himself in a fraudulent company. He got so that he used to hold forth at great length that the only safe and sane thing to do was to convert your money into solid bullion and bury it.’

‘Ah,’ said Miss Marple. ‘I begin to see.’

‘Yes. Friends argued with him, pointed out that he’d get no interest that way, but he held that that didn’t really matter. The bulk of your money, he said, should be “kept in a box under the bed or buried in the garden”. Those were his words.’

Charmian went on. ‘And when he died, he left hardly anything at all in securities, though he was very rich. So we think that that’s what he must have done.’

Edward explained. ‘We found that he had sold securities and drawn out large sums of money from time to time, and nobody knows what he did with them. But it seems probable that he lived up to his principles, and that he did buy gold and bury it.’

‘He didn’t say anything before he died? Leave any paper? No letter?’

‘That’s the maddening part of it. He didn’t. He’d been unconscious for some days, but he rallied before he died. He looked at us both and chuckled—a faint, weak little chuckle. He said, “You’ll be all right, my pretty pair of doves.” And then he tapped his eye—his right eye—and winked at us. And then—he died. Poor old Uncle Mathew.’

‘He tapped his eye,’ said Miss Marple thoughtfully.

Edward said eagerly. ‘Does that convey anything to you? It made me think of an Arsene Lupin story where there was something hidden in a man’s glass eye. But Uncle Mathew didn’t have a glass eye.’

Miss Marple shook her head. ‘No—I can’t think of anything at the moment.’

Charmian said disappointedly, ‘Jane told us you’d say at once where to dig!’

Miss Marple smiled. ‘I’m not quite a conjurer, you know. I didn’t know your uncle, or what sort of man he was, and I don’t know the house or the grounds.’

Charmian said, ‘If you did know them?’

‘Well, it must be quite simple, really, mustn’t it?’ said Miss Marple.

‘Simple!’ said Charmian. ‘You come down to Ansteys and see if it’s simple!’

It is possible that she did not mean the invitation to be taken seriously, but Miss Marple said briskly, ‘Well, really, my dear, that’s very kind of you. I’ve always wanted to have the chance of looking for buried treasure. And,’ she added, looking at them with a beaming, late-Victorian smile, ‘with a love interest, too!’

‘You see!’ said Charmian, gesturing dramatically.

They had just completed a grand tour of Ansteys. They had been round the kitchen garden—heavily trenched. They had been through the little woods, where every important tree had been dug round, and had gazed sadly on the pitted surface of the once smooth lawn. They had been up to the attic, where old trunks and chests had been rifled of their contents. They had been down to the cellars, where flagstones had been heaved unwillingly from their sockets. They had measured and tapped walls, and Miss Marple had been shown every antique piece of furniture that contained or could be suspected of containing a secret drawer.

On a table in the morning-room there was a heap of papers—all the papers that the late Mathew Stroud had left. Not one had been destroyed, and Charmian and Edward were wont to return to them again and again, earnestly perusing bills, invitations, and business correspondence in the hope of spotting a hitherto unnoticed clue.

‘Can you think of anywhere we haven’t looked?’ demanded Charmian hopefully.

Miss Marple shook her head. ‘You seem to have been very thorough, my dear. Perhaps, if I may say so, just a little too thorough. I always think, you know, that one should have a plan. It’s like my friend, Mrs Eldritch, she had such a nice little maid, polished linoleum beautifully, but she was so thorough that she polished the bathroom floor too much, and as Mrs Eldritch was stepping out of the bath the cork mat slipped from under her, and she had a very nasty fall and actually broke her leg! Most awkward, because the bathroom door was locked, of course, and the gardener had to get a ladder and come in through the window—terribly distressing to Mrs Eldritch, who had always been a very modest woman.’

Edward moved restlessly.

Miss Marple said quickly, ‘Please forgive me. So apt, I know, to fly off at a tangent. But one thing does remind one of another. And sometimes that is helpful. All I was trying to say was that perhaps if we tried to sharpen our wits and think of a likely place—’

Edward said crossly, ‘You think of one, Miss Marple. Charmian’s brains and mine are now only beautiful blanks!’

‘Dear, dear. Of course—most tiring for you. If you don’t mind I’ll just look through all this.’ She indicated the papers on the table. ‘That is, if there’s nothing private—I don’t want to appear to pry.’

‘Oh, that’s all right. But I’m afraid you won’t find anything.’

She sat down by the table and methodically worked through the sheaf of documents. As she replaced each one, she sorted them automatically into tidy little heaps. When she had finished she sat staring in front of her for some minutes.

Edward asked, not without a touch of malice, ‘Well, Miss Marple?’

Miss Marple came to herself with a little start. ‘I beg your pardon. Most helpful.’

‘You’ve found something relevant?’

‘Oh, no, nothing like that, but I do believe I know what sort of man your Uncle Mathew was. Rather like my own Uncle Henry, I think. Fond of rather obvious jokes. A bachelor, evidently—I wonder why—perhaps an early disappointment? Methodical up to a point, but not very fond of being tied up—so few bachelors are!’

Behind Miss Marple’s back, Charmian made a sign to Edward. It said, She’s ga-ga.

Miss Marple was continuing happily to talk of her deceased Uncle Henry. ‘Very fond of puns, he was. And to some people, puns are most annoying. A mere play upon words may be very irritating. He was a suspicious man, too. Always was convinced the servants were robbing him. And sometimes, of course, they were, but not always. It grew upon him, poor man. Towards the end he suspected them of tampering with his food, and finally refused to eat anything but boiled eggs! Said nobody could tamper with the inside of a boiled egg. Dear Uncle Henry, he used to be such a merry soul at one time—very fond of his coffee after dinner. He always used to say, “This coffee is very Moorish,” meaning, you know, that he’d like a little more.’

Edward felt that if he heard any more about Uncle Henry he’d go mad.

‘Fond of young people, too,’ went on Miss Marple, ‘but inclined to tease them a little, if you know what I mean. Used to put bags of sweets where a child just couldn’t reach them.’

Casting politeness aside, Charmian said, ‘I think he sounds horrible!’

‘Oh, no, dear, just an old bachelor, you know, and not used to children. And he wasn’t at all stupid, really. He used to keep a good deal of money in the house, and he had a safe put in. Made a great fuss about it—and how very secure it was. As a result of his talking so much, burglars broke in one night and actually cut a hole in the safe with a chemical device.’

‘Served him right,’ said Edward.

‘Oh, but there was nothing in the safe,’ said Miss Marple. ‘You see, he really kept the money somewhere else—behind some volumes of sermons in the library, as a matter of fact. He said people never took a book of that kind out of the shelf!’

Edward interrupted excitedly. ‘I say, that’s an idea. What about the library?’

But Charmian shook a scornful head. ‘Do you think I hadn’t thought of that? I went through all the books Tuesday of last week, when you went off to Portsmouth. Took them all out, shook them. Nothing there.’

Edward sighed. Then, rousing himself, he endeavoured to rid himself tactfully of their disappointing guest. ‘It’s been awfully good of you to come down as you have and try to help us. Sorry it’s been all a wash-out. Feel we trespassed a lot on your time. However—I’ll get the car out, and you’ll be able to catch the three-thirty—’

‘Oh,’ said Miss Marple, ‘but we’ve got to find the money, haven’t we? You mustn’t give up, Mr Rossiter. “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try, try again.”’

‘You mean you’re going to—go on trying?’

‘Strictly speaking,’ said Miss Marple, ‘I haven’t begun yet. “First catch your hare—” as Mrs Beaton says in her cookery book—a wonderful book but terribly expensive; most of the recipes begin, “Take a quart of cream and a dozen eggs.” Let me see, where was I? Oh, yes. Well, we have, so to speak, caught our hare—the hare being, of course, your Uncle Mathew, and we’ve only got to decide now where he would have hidden the money. It ought to be quite simple.’

‘Simple?’ demanded Charmian.