Miss Marple – Miss Marple and Mystery: The Complete Short Stories. Агата Кристи

before him.

      The virgin white of the sheet of paper was defaced by a title written in capital letters.

      ‘THE MYSTERY OF THE SECOND CUCUMBER,’ so it ran. A pleasing title. Anthony Eastwood felt that anyone reading that title would be at once intrigued and arrested by it. ‘The Mystery of the Second Cucumber,’ they would say. ‘What can that be about? A cucumber? The second cucumber? I must certainly read that story.’ And they would be thrilled and charmed by the consummate ease with which this master of detective fiction had woven an exciting plot round this simple vegetable.

      That was all very well. Anthony Eastwood knew as well as anyone what the story ought to be like – the bother was that somehow or other he couldn’t get on with it. The two essentials for a story were a title and a plot – the rest was mere spade-work, sometimes the title led to a plot all by itself, as it were, and then all was plain sailing – but in this case the title continued to adorn the top of the page, and not the vestige of a plot was forthcoming.

      Again Anthony Eastwood’s gaze sought inspiration from the ceiling, the floor, and the wallpaper, and still nothing materialized.

      ‘I shall call the heroine Sonia,’ said Anthony, to urge himself on. ‘Sonia or possibly Dolores – she shall have a skin of ivory pallor – the kind that’s not due to ill-health, and eyes like fathomless pools. The hero shall be called George, or possibly John – something short and British. Then the gardener – I suppose there will have to be a gardener, we’ve got to drag that beastly cucumber in somehow or other – the gardener might be Scottish, and amusingly pessimistic about the early frost.’

      This method sometimes worked, but it didn’t seem to be going to this morning. Although Anthony could see Sonia and George and the comic gardener quite clearly, they didn’t show any willingness to be active and do things.

      ‘I could make it a banana, of course,’ thought Anthony desperately. ‘Or a lettuce, or a Brussels sprout – Brussels sprout, now, how about that? Really a cryptogram for Brussels – stolen bearer bonds – sinister Belgian Baron.’

      For a moment a gleam of light seemed to show, but it died down again. The Belgian Baron wouldn’t materialize, and Anthony suddenly remembered that early frosts and cucumbers were incompatible, which seemed to put the lid on the amusing remarks of the Scottish gardener.

      ‘Oh! Damn!’ said Mr Eastwood.

      He rose and seized the Daily Mail. It was just possible that someone or other had been done to death in such a way as to lend inspiration to a perspiring author. But the news this morning was mainly political and foreign. Mr Eastwood cast down the paper in disgust.

      Next, seizing a novel from the table, he closed his eyes and dabbed his finger down on one of the pages. The word thus indicated by Fate was ‘sheep’. Immediately, with startling brilliance, a whole story unrolled itself in Mr Eastwood’s brain. Lovely girl – lover killed in the war, her brain unhinged, tends sheep on the Scottish mountains – mystic meeting with dead lover, final effect of sheep and moonlight like Academy picture with girl lying dead in the snow, and two trails of footsteps …

      It was a beautiful story. Anthony came out of its conception with a sigh and a sad shake of the head. He knew only too well the editor in question did not want that kind of story – beautiful though it might be. The kind of story he wanted, and insisted on having (and incidentally paid handsomely for getting), was all about mysterious dark women, stabbed to the heart, a young hero unjustly suspected, and the sudden unravelling of the mystery and fixing of the guilt on the least likely person, by the means of wholly inadequate clues – in fact, ‘THE MYSTERY OF THE SECOND CUCUMBER.’

      ‘Although,’ reflected Anthony, ‘ten to one, he’ll alter the title and call it something rotten, like “Murder Most Foul” without so much as asking me! Oh, curse that telephone.’

      He strode angrily to it, and took down the receiver. Twice already in the last hour he had been summoned to it – once for a wrong number, and once to be roped in for dinner by a skittish society dame whom he hated bitterly, but who had been too pertinacious to defeat.

      ‘Hallo!’ he growled into the receiver.

      A woman’s voice answered him, a soft caressing voice with a trace of foreign accent.

      ‘Is that you, beloved?’ it said softly.

      ‘Well – er – I don’t know,’ said Mr Eastwood cautiously. ‘Who’s speaking?’

      ‘It is I. Carmen. Listen, beloved. I am pursued – in danger – you must come at once. It is life or death now.’

      ‘I beg your pardon,’ said Mr Eastwood politely. ‘I’m afraid you’ve got the wrong –’

      She broke in before he could complete the sentence.

      ‘Madre de Dios! They are coming. If they find out what I am doing, they will kill me. Do not fail me. Come at once. It is death for me if you don’t come. You know, 320 Kirk Street. The word is cucumber … Hush …’

      He heard the faint click as she hung up the receiver at the other end.

      ‘Well, I’m damned,’ said Mr Eastwood, very much astonished.

      He crossed over to his tobacco jar, and filled his pipe carefully.

      ‘I suppose,’ he mused, ‘that that was some curious effect of my subconscious self. She can’t have said cucumber. The whole thing is very extraordinary. Did she say cucumber, or didn’t she?’

      He strolled up and down, irresolutely.

      ‘320 Kirk Street. I wonder what it’s all about? She’ll be expecting the other man to turn up. I wish I could have explained. 320 Kirk Street. The word is cucumber – oh, impossible, absurd – hallucination of a busy brain.’

      He glanced malevolently at the typewriter.

      ‘What good are you, I should like to know? I’ve been looking at you all the morning, and a lot of good it’s done me. An author should get his plot from life – from life, do you hear? I’m going out to get one now.’

      He clapped a hat on his head, gazed affectionately at his priceless collection of old enamels, and left the flat.

      Kirk Street, as most Londoners know, is a long, straggling thoroughfare, chiefly devoted to antique shops, where all kinds of spurious goods are offered at fancy prices. There are also old brass shops, glass shops, decayed second-hand shops and second-hand clothes dealers.

      No. 320 was devoted to the sale of old glass. Glass-ware of all kinds filled it to overflowing. It was necessary for Anthony to move gingerly as he advanced up a centre aisle flanked by wine glasses and with lustres and chandeliers swaying and twinkling over his head. A very old lady was sitting at the back of the shop. She had a budding moustache that many an undergraduate might have envied, and a truculent manner.

      She looked at Anthony and said, ‘Well?’ in a forbidding voice.

      Anthony was a young man somewhat easily discomposed. He immediately inquired the price of some hock glasses.

      ‘Forty-five shillings for half a dozen.’

      ‘Oh, really,’ said Anthony. ‘Rather nice, aren’t they? How much are these things?’

      ‘Beautiful, they are, old Waterford. Let you have the pair for eighteen guineas.’

      Mr Eastwood felt that he was laying up trouble for himself. In another minute he would be buying something, hypnotized by this fierce old woman’s eye. And yet he could not bring himself to leave the shop.

      ‘What about that?’ he asked, and pointed to a chandelier.

      ‘Thirty-five guineas.’

      ‘Ah!’ said Mr Eastwood regretfully. ‘That’s rather more than I can afford.’

      ‘What do you want?’ asked the old lady. ‘Something