They Do It With Mirrors (16 page)

“Why indeed?” said Alex. “What I want to know is what you are going to do about it. Are you going to marry Stephen or are you going to marry me?”

“I'm married to Wally.”

“Temporarily. Every woman should make one mistake matrimonially—but there's no need to dwell on it. Having tried out the show in the provinces, the time has come to bring it to the West End.”

“And you're the West End?”

“Indubitably.”

“Do you really want to marry me? I can't imagine you married.”

“I insist on marriage.
Affaires,
I always think, are so very old-fashioned. Difficulties with passports and hotels and all that. I shall
never
have a mistress unless I can't get her any other way!”

Gina's laugh rang out fresh and clear.

“You do amuse me, Alex.”

“It is my principal asset. Stephen is much better looking than I am. He's extremely handsome and very intense which, of course, women adore. But intensity is fatiguing in the home. With me, Gina, you will find life entertaining.”

“Aren't you going to say you love me madly?”

“However true that may be, I shall certainly not say it. It would be one up to you and one down to me if I did. No, all I am prepared to do is to make you a businesslike offer of marriage.”

“I shall have to think about it,” said Gina, smiling.

“Naturally. Besides, you've got to put Wally out of his misery first. I've a lot of sympathy with Wally. It must be absolute hell for him to be married to you and trailed along at your chariot wheels into this heavy, family atmosphere of philanthropy.”

“What a beast you are, Alex!”

“A perceptive beast.”

“Sometimes,” said Gina, “I don't think Wally cares for me one little bit. He just doesn't notice me anymore.”

“You've stirred him up with a stick and he doesn't respond? Most annoying.”

Like a flash, Gina swung her palm and delivered a ringing slap on Alex's smooth cheek.

“Touché!” cried Alex.

With a quick, deft movement, he gathered her into his arms and before she could resist, his lips fastened on hers in a long ardent kiss. She struggled a moment and then relaxed….

“Gina!”

They sprang apart. Mildred Strete, her face red, her lips quivering, glared at them balefully. For a moment, the eagerness of her words choked their utterance.

“Disgusting … disgusting … you abandoned beastly girl … you're just like your mother … You're a bad lot … I always knew you were a bad lot … utterly depraved … and you're not only an adulteress—you're a murderess too. Oh yes, you are. I know what I know!”

“And what do you know? Don't be ridiculous, Aunt Mildred.”

“I'm no aunt of yours, thank goodness. No blood relation to you. Why you don't even know who your mother was or where she came from! But you know well enough what my father was like and my mother. What sort of a child do you think they would adopt? A criminal's child or a prostitute's probably! That's the sort of people they were. They ought to have remembered that bad blood will tell. Though I daresay that it's the Italian in you that makes you turn to
poison.
”

“How dare you say that?”

“I shall say what I like. You can't deny now, can you, that somebody tried to poison Mother? And who's the most likely person to do that? Who comes into an enormous fortune if Mother dies? You do, Gina, and you may be sure that the police have not overlooked that fact.”

Still trembling, Mildred moved rapidly away.

“Pathological,” said Alex. “Definitely pathological. Really
most
interesting. It makes one wonder about the late Canon Strete … religious scruples, perhaps?… Or would you say impotent?”

“Don't be disgusting, Alex. Oh I hate her, I hate her, I hate her.”

Gina clenched her hands and shook with fury.

“Lucky you hadn't got a knife in your stocking,” said Alex. “If you had, dear Mrs. Strete might have known something about murder from the point of view of the victim. Calm down, Gina. Don't look so melodramatic and like Italian Opera.”

“How dare she say I tried to poison Grandam?”

“Well, darling,
somebody
tried to poison her. And from the point of view of motive you're well in the picture, aren't you?”

“Alex!” Gina stared at him, dismayed. “Do the police think so?”

“It's extremely difficult to know what the police think … They keep their own counsel remarkably well. They're by no means fools, you know. That reminds me—”

“Where are you going?”

“To work out an idea of mine.”

1

“Y
ou say somebody has been trying to
poison
me?”

Carrie Louise's voice held bewilderment and disbelief.

“You know,” she said, “I can't really believe it….”

She waited a few moments, her eyes half closed.

Lewis said gently, “I wish I could have spared you this, dearest.”

Almost absently she stretched out a hand to him and he took it.

Miss Marple, sitting close by, shook her head sympathetically.

Carrie Louise opened her eyes.

“Is it really true, Jane?” she asked.

“I'm afraid so, my dear.”

“Then everything—” Carrie Louise broke off.

She went on:

“I've always thought I knew what was real and what wasn't …
This
doesn't seem real—but it is … so I may be wrong everywhere … but who could want to do such a thing to me? Nobody in this house could want to—
kill
me?”

Her voice still held incredulity.

“That's what I would have thought,” said Lewis. “I was wrong.”

“And Christian knew about it? That explains it.”

“Explains what?” asked Lewis.

“His manner,” said Carrie Louise. “It was very odd, you know. Not at all his usual self. He seemed—upset about me—and as though he was wanting to say something to me—and then not saying it. And he asked me if my heart was strong. And if I'd been well lately. Trying to hint to me, perhaps. But why not say something straight out? It's so much simpler just to say straight out.”

“He didn't want to—cause you pain, Caroline.”

“Pain? But why—Oh I see …” Her eyes widened. “So
that's
what you believe. But you're wrong, Lewis, quite wrong. I can assure you of that.”

Her husband avoided her eyes.

“I'm sorry,” said Mrs. Serrocold after a moment or two. “But I can't believe anything of what has happened lately is true. Edgar shooting at you. Gina and Stephen. That ridiculous box of chocolates. It just isn't
true.
”

Nobody spoke.

Caroline Louise Serrocold sighed.

“I suppose,” she said, “that I must have lived outside reality for a long time … Please, both of you, I think I would like to be alone … I've got to try and understand….”

2

Miss Marple came down the stairs and into the Great Hall to find Alex Restarick standing near the large, arched entrance door with his hand flung out in a somewhat flamboyant gesture.

“Come in, come in,” said Alex happily and as though he were the owner of the Great Hall. “I'm just thinking about last night.”

Lewis Serrocold, who had followed Miss Marple down from Carrie Louise's sitting room, crossed the Great Hall to his study and went in and shut the door.

“Are you trying to reconstruct the crime?” asked Miss Marple with subdued eagerness.

“Eh?” Alex looked at her with a frown. Then his brow cleared.

“Oh,
that,
” he said. “No, not exactly. I was looking at the whole thing from an entirely different point of view. I was thinking of this place in the terms of the theatre. Not reality, but artificiality! Just come over here. Think of it in the terms of a stage set. Lighting, entrances, exits. Dramatis Personae. Noises off. All very interesting. Not all my own idea. The Inspector gave it to me. I think he's rather a cruel man. He did his best to frighten me this morning.”

“And did he frighten you?”

“I'm not sure.”

Alex described the Inspector's experiment and the timing of the performance of the puffing Constable Dodgett.

“Time,” he said, “is so very misleading. One thinks things take such a long time, but really, of course, they don't.”

“No,” said Miss Marple.

Representing the audience, she moved to a different position. The stage set now consisted of a vast, tapestry-covered wall going up to dimness, with a grand piano up L. and a window and window seat up R. Very near the window seat was the door into the library. The piano stool was only about eight feet from the door into the square lobby, which led to the corridor. Two very convenient exits! The audience, of course, had an excellent view of both of them….

But last night there had been no audience. Nobody, that is to say, had been facing the stage set that Miss Marple was now facing. The audience, last night, had been sitting with their backs to that particular stage.

How long, Miss Marple wondered, would it have taken to slip out of the room, run along the corridor, shoot Gulbrandsen and come back? Not nearly so long as one would think. Measured in minutes and seconds, a very short time indeed….

What had Carrie Louise meant when she had said to her husband: “So
that's
what you believe—but you're wrong, Lewis!”

“I must say that that was a very penetrating remark of the Inspector's,” Alex's voice cut in on her meditations. “About a stage set being real. Made of wood and cardboard and stuck together with glue and as real on the unpainted as on the painted side. ‘The illusion,' he pointed out, ‘is in the eyes of the audience.'”

“Like conjurers,” Miss Marple murmured vaguely. “
They do it with mirrors
is, I believe, the slang phrase.”

Stephen Restarick came in, slightly out of breath.

“Hullo, Alex,” he said. “That little rat, Ernie Gregg—I don't know if you remember him?”

“The one who played Feste when you did
Twelfth Night?
Quite a bit of talent there I thought.”

“Yes, he's got talent of a sort. Very good with his hands, too. Does a lot of our carpentry. However, that's neither here nor there. He's been boasting to Gina that he gets out at night and wanders about the grounds. Says he was wandering round last night and boasts he saw something.”

Alex spun round.

“Saw what?”

“Says he's not going to tell! Actually, I'm pretty certain he's only trying to show off and get into the limelight. He's an awful liar, but I thought perhaps he ought to be questioned.”

Alex said sharply, “I should leave him for a bit. Don't let him think we're too interested.”

“Perhaps—yes I think you may be right there. This evening, perhaps.”

Stephen went on into the library.

Miss Marple, moving gently round the Hall in her character of mobile audience, collided with Alex Restarick as he stepped back suddenly.

Miss Marple said, “I'm so sorry.”

Alex frowned at her, said in an absent sort of way,

“I beg your pardon,” and then added in a surprised voice, “Oh, it's
you.
”

It seemed to Miss Marple an odd remark for someone with whom she had been conversing for some considerable time.

“I was thinking of something else,” said Alex Restarick. “That boy Ernie—” He made vague motions with both hands.

Then, with a sudden change of manner, he crossed the Hall and went through the library door shutting it behind him.

The murmur of voices came from behind the closed door, but Miss Marple hardly noticed them. She was uninterested in the versatile Ernie and what he had seen or pretended to see. She had a shrewd suspicion that Ernie had seen nothing at all. She did not believe for a moment that on a cold raw foggy night like last night, Ernie would have troubled to use his picklocking activities and wander about in the park. In all probability, he never
had
got out at night. Boasting, that was all it had been.

“Like Johnnie Backhouse,” thought Miss Marple who always had a good storehouse of parallels to draw upon, selected from inhabitants of St. Mary Mead.

“I seen you last night,” had been Johnnie Backhouse's unpleasant taunt to all he thought it might affect.

It had been a surprisingly successful remark. So many people, Miss Marple reflected, have been in places where they are anxious not to be seen!

She dismissed Johnnie from her mind and concentrated on a vague something which Alex's account of Inspector Curry's remarks had stirred to life. Those remarks had given Alex an idea. She was not sure that they had not given her an idea, too. The same idea? Or a different one?

She stood where Alex Restarick had stood. She thought to herself, “This is not a real hall. This is only cardboard and canvas and wood. This is a stage scene….” Scrappy phrases flashed across her mind. “Illusion—” “In the eyes of the audience.”
“They do it with mirrors….”
Bowls of goldfish … yards of coloured ribbon … vanishing ladies … All the panoply and misdirection of the conjurer's art….

Something stirred in her consciousness—a picture—something that Alex had said … something that he had described to her … Constable Dodgett puffing and panting … panting … something shifted in her mind—came into sudden focus….

“Why of
course!
” said Miss Marple. “
That
must be it….”

1

“O
h, Wally, how you startled me!”

Gina, emerging from the shadows by the theatre, jumped back a little, as the figure of Wally Hudd materialised out of the gloom. It was not yet quite dark, but had that eerie half light when objects lose their reality and take on the fantastic shapes of nightmare.

“What are you doing down here? You never come near the theatre as a rule.”

“Maybe I was looking for you, Gina. It's usually the best place to find you, isn't it?”

Wally's soft, faintly drawling voice held no special insinuation and yet Gina flinched a little.

“It's a job and I'm keen on it. I like the atmosphere of paint and canvas, and backstage generally.”

“Yes. It means a lot to you. I've seen that. Tell me, Gina, how long do you think it will be before this business is all cleared up?”

“The inquest's tomorrow. It will just be adjourned for a fortnight
or something like that. At least, that's what Inspector Curry gave us to understand.”

“A fortnight,” said Wally thoughtfully. “I see. Say three weeks, perhaps. And after that—we're free. I'm going back to the States then.”

“Oh! but I can't run off like that,” cried Gina. “I couldn't leave Grandam. And we've got these two new productions we're working on”—

“I didn't say
‘we.'
I said
I
was going.”

Gina stopped and looked up at her husband. Something in the effect of the shadows made him seem very big. A big, quiet figure—and in some way, or so it seemed to her, faintly menacing … standing over her. Threatening—what?

“Do you mean”—she hesitated—“you don't want me to come?”

“Why, no—I didn't say that.”

“You don't care if I come or not? Is that it?”

She was suddenly angry.

“See here, Gina. This is where we've got to have a showdown. We didn't know much about each other when we married—not much about each other's backgrounds, not much about the other one's folks. We thought it didn't matter. We thought nothing mattered except having a swell time together. Well, stage one is over. Your folks didn't—and don't—think much of me. Maybe they're right. I'm not their kind. But if you think I'm staying on here, kicking my heels, and doing odd jobs in what I consider is just a crazy setup—well, think again! I want to live in my own country, doing the kind of job I want to do, and can do. My idea of a wife is the kind of wife who used to go along with the old pioneers, ready for anything, hardship, unfamiliar country, danger, strange surround
ings … Perhaps that's too much to ask of you, but it's that or nothing! Maybe I hustled you into marriage. If so, you'd better get free of me and start again. It's up to you. If you prefer one of these arty boys—it's your life and you've got to choose. But I'm going home.”

“I think you're an absolute
pig,
” said Gina. “I'm enjoying myself here.”

“Is that so? Well, I'm not. You even enjoy murder, I suppose?”

Gina drew in her breath sharply.

“That's a cruel, wicked thing to say. I was very fond of Uncle Christian. And don't you realise that someone has been quietly poisoning Grandam for months? It's horrible!”

“I told you I didn't like it here. I don't like the kind of things that go on. I'm quitting.”

“If you're allowed to! Don't you realise you'll probably be arrested for Uncle Christian's murder? I hate the way Inspector Curry looks at you. He's just like a cat watching a mouse with a nasty sharp-clawed paw all ready to pounce. Just because you were out of the Hall fixing those lights, and because you're not English, I'm sure they'll go fastening it on you.”

“They'll need some evidence first.”

Gina wailed:

“I'm frightened for you, Wally. I've been frightened all along.”

“No good being scared. I tell you, they've got nothing on me!”

They walked in silence towards the house.

Gina said:

“I don't believe you really want me to come back to America with you….”

Walter Hudd did not answer.

Gina Hudd turned on him and stamped her foot.

“I hate you. I hate you. You are horrible—a beast—a cruel, unfeeling beast. After all I've tried to do for you! You want to be rid of me. You don't care if you never see me again. Well, I don't care if
I
never see
you
again! I was a stupid little fool ever to marry you, and I shall get a divorce as soon as possible, and I shall marry Stephen or Alexis and be much happier than I ever could be with you. And I hope you go back to the States and marry some horrible girl who makes you really miserable!”

“Fine!” said Wally. “Now we know where we are!”

2

Miss Marple saw Gina and Wally go into the house together.

She was standing at the spot where Inspector Curry had made his experiment with Constable Dodgett earlier in the afternoon.

Miss Bellever's voice behind her made her jump.

“You'll get a chill, Miss Marple, standing about like that after the sun's gone down.”

Miss Marple fell meekly into step with her and they walked briskly through the house.

“I was thinking about conjuring tricks,” said Miss Marple. “So difficult when you're watching them to see how they're done, and yet, once they are explained, so absurdly simple. (Although, even now, I can't imagine how conjurers produce bowls of goldfish!) Did you ever see the Lady who is Sawn in Half?—
such
a thrilling trick. It fascinated me when I was eleven years old, I remember. And I never
could
think how it was done. But the other day there was an article in some paper giving the whole thing away. I don't think a newspaper should do that, do you? It seems it's not one girl—but
two.
The head of the one and the feet of the other. You think it's one girl and it's really two—and the other way round would work equally well, wouldn't it?”

Miss Bellever looked at her with faint surprise. Miss Marple was not often so fluffy and incoherent as this. “It's been too much for the old lady, all this,” she thought.

“When you only look at one side of a thing, you only see one side,” continued Miss Marple. “But everything fits in perfectly well if you can only make up your mind what is reality and what is illusion.” She added abruptly, “Is Carrie Louise—all right?”

“Yes,” said Miss Bellever. “She's all right. But it must have been a shock, you know—finding out that someone wanted to kill her. I mean particularly a shock to
her,
because she doesn't understand violence.”

“Carrie Louise understands some things that we don't,” said Miss Marple thoughtfully. “She always has.”

“I know what you mean—but she doesn't live in the real world.”

“Doesn't she?”

Miss Bellever looked at her in surprise.

“There never was a more unworldly person than Cara—”

“You don't think that perhaps—” Miss Marple broke off, as Edgar Lawson passed them, swinging along at a great pace. He gave a kind of shamefaced nod, but averted his face as he passed.

“I've remembered now who he reminds me of,” said Miss Marple. “It came to me suddenly, just a few moments ago. He reminds me of a young man called Leonard Wylie. His father was a dentist, but he got old and blind and his hand used to shake, and so people preferred to go to the son. But the old man was very miserable about it, and moped, said he was no good for anything anymore, and Leon
ard, who was very softhearted and rather foolish, began to pretend he drank more than he should. He always smelt of whisky, and he used to sham being rather fuddled when his patients came. His idea was that they'd go back to the father again and say the younger man was no good.”

“And did they?”

“Of course not,” said Miss Marple. “What happened was what anybody with any sense could have told him would happen! The patients went to Mr. Reilly, the rival dentist. So many people with good hearts have no sense. Besides, Leonard Wylie was so unconvincing … His idea of drunkenness wasn't in the least like real drunkenness, and he overdid the whisky—spilling it on his clothes, you know, to a perfectly impossible extent.”

They went into the house by the side door.