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

paint,’ said the inspector. ‘It’s the Patterson gang. They’ve done a lot of smart work lately. Big fair man, small dark man, and the girl.’

      ‘The girl?’

      ‘Yes, dark and mighty good looking. Acts as a decoy usually.’

      ‘A – a Spanish girl?’

      ‘She might call herself that. She was born in Hampstead.’

      ‘I said it was a bracing place,’ murmured Anthony.

      ‘Yes, it’s clear enough,’ said the inspector, rising to depart. ‘She got you on the phone and pitched you a tale – she guessed you’d come along all right. Then she goes along to old Mother Gibson’s who isn’t above accepting a tip for the use of her room for them as finds it awkward to meet in public – lovers, you understand, nothing criminal. You fall for it all right, they get you back here, and while one of them pitches you a tale, the other gets away with the swag. It’s the Pattersons all right – just their touch.’

      ‘And my things?’ said Anthony anxiously.

      ‘We’ll do what we can, sir. But the Pattersons are uncommon sharp.’

      ‘They seem to be,’ said Anthony bitterly.

      The inspector departed, and scarcely had he gone before there came a ring at the door. Anthony opened it. A small boy stood there, holding a package.

      ‘Parcel for you, sir.’

      Anthony took it with some surprise. He was not expecting a parcel of any kind. Returning to the sitting-room with it, he cut the string.

      It was the liqueur set!

      ‘Damn!’ said Anthony.

      Then he noticed that at the bottom of one of the glasses there was a tiny artificial rose. His mind flew back to the upper room in Kirk Street.

      ‘I do like you – yes, I do like you. You will remember that whatever happens, won’t you?’

      That was what she had said. Whatever happens … Did she mean –

      Anthony took hold of himself sternly.

      ‘This won’t do,’ he admonished himself.

      His eye fell on the typewriter, and he sat down with a resolute face.

      THE MYSTERY OF THE SECOND CUCUMBER

      His face grew dreamy again. The Shawl of a Thousand Flowers. What was it that was found on the floor beside the dead body? The gruesome thing that explained the whole mystery?

      Nothing, of course, since it was only a trumped-up tale to hold his attention, and the teller had used the old Arabian Nights’ trick of breaking off at the most interesting point. But couldn’t there be a gruesome thing that explained the whole mystery? couldn’t there now? If one gave one’s mind to it?

      Anthony tore the sheet of paper from his typewriter and substituted another. He typed a headline:

      THE MYSTERY OF THE SPANISH SHAWL

      He surveyed it for a moment or two in silence.

      Then he began to type rapidly …

       8 Philomel Cottage

      ‘Philomel Cottage’ was first published in Grand Magazine, November 1924.

      ‘Goodbye, darling.’

      ‘Goodbye, sweetheart.’

      Alix Martin stood leaning over the small rustic gate, watching the retreating figure of her husband as he walked down the road in the direction of the village.

      Presently he turned a bend and was lost to sight, but Alix still stayed in the same position, absentmindedly smoothing a lock of the rich brown hair which had blown across her face, her eyes far away and dreamy.

      Alix Martin was not beautiful, nor even, strictly speaking, pretty. But her face, the face of a woman no longer in her first youth, was irradiated and softened until her former colleagues of the old office days would hardly have recognized her. Miss Alex King had been a trim businesslike young woman, efficient, slightly brusque in manner, obviously capable and matter-of-fact.

      Alix had graduated in a hard school. For fifteen years, from the age of eighteen until she was thirty-three, she had kept herself (and for seven years of the time an invalid mother) by her work as a shorthand typist. It was the struggle for existence which had hardened the soft lines of her girlish face.

      True, there had been romance – of a kind – Dick Windyford, a fellow-clerk. Very much of a woman at heart, Alix had always known without seeming to know that he cared. Outwardly they had been friends, nothing more. Out of his slender salary Dick had been hard put to it to provide for the schooling of a younger brother. For the moment he could not think of marriage.

      And then suddenly deliverance from daily toil had come to the girl in the most unexpected manner. A distant cousin had died, leaving her money to Alix – a few thousand pounds, enough to bring in a couple of hundred a year. To Alix it was freedom, life, independence. Now she and Dick need wait no longer.

      But Dick reacted unexpectedly. He had never directly spoken of his love to Alix; now he seemed less inclined to do so than ever. He avoided her, became morose and gloomy. Alix was quick to realize the truth. She had become a woman of means. Delicacy and pride stood in the way of Dick’s asking her to be his wife.

      She liked him none the worse for it, and was indeed deliberating as to whether she herself might not take the first step, when for the second time the unexpected descended upon her.

      She met Gerald Martin at a friend’s house. He fell violently in love with her and within a week they were engaged. Alix, who had always considered herself ‘not the falling-in-love kind’, was swept clean off her feet.

      Unwittingly she had found the way to arouse her former lover. Dick Windyford had come to her stammering with rage and anger.

      ‘The man’s a perfect stranger to you! You know nothing about him!’

      ‘I know that I love him.’

      ‘How can you know – in a week?’

      ‘It doesn’t take everyone eleven years to find out that they’re in love with a girl,’ cried Alix angrily.

      His face went white.

      ‘I’ve cared for you ever since I met you. I thought that you cared also.’

      Alix was truthful.

      ‘I thought so too,’ she admitted. ‘But that was because I didn’t know what love was.’

      Then Dick had burst out again. Prayers, entreaties, even threats – threats against the man who had supplanted him. It was amazing to Alix to see the volcano that existed beneath the reserved exterior of the man she had thought she knew so well.

      Her thoughts went back to that interview now, on this sunny morning, as she leant on the gate of the cottage. She had been married a month, and she was idyllically happy. Yet, in the momentary absence of the husband who was everything to her, a tinge of anxiety invaded her perfect happiness. And the cause of that anxiety was Dick Windyford.

      Three times since her marriage she had dreamed the same dream. The environment differed, but the main facts were always the same. She saw her husband lying dead and Dick Windyford standing over him, and she knew clearly and distinctly that his was the hand which had dealt the fatal blow.

      But horrible though that was, there was something more horrible still – horrible, that was, on awakening, for in the dream it seemed perfectly natural and inevitable. She, Alix Martin, was glad that her husband was dead; she stretched out grateful hands to the murderer, sometimes she thanked him. The dream always ended the same way, with herself clasped in Dick Windyford’s arms.

      She