They Do It With Mirrors (17 page)

I
nside the house, they found the family assembled in the library. Lewis was walking up and down, and there was an air of general tension in the atmosphere.

“Is anything the matter?” asked Miss Bellever.

Lewis said shortly, “Ernie Gregg is missing from roll call tonight.”

“Has he run away?”

“We don't know. Maverick and some of the staff are searching the grounds. If we cannot find him we must communicate with the police.”

“Grandam!” Gina ran over to Carrie Louise, startled by the whiteness of her face. “You look ill.”

“I am unhappy. The poor boy….”

Lewis said, “I was going to question him this evening as to whether he had seen anything noteworthy last night. I have the offer of a good post for him and I thought that after discussing that, I would bring up the other topic. Now—” he broke off.

Miss Marple murmured softly:

“Foolish boy … poor, foolish boy….”

She shook her head, and Mrs. Serrocold said gently:

“So
you
think so too, Jane …?”

Stephen Restarick came in. He said, “I missed you at the theatre, Gina. I thought you said you would—Hullo, what's up?”

Lewis repeated his information, and as he finished speaking, Dr. Maverick came in with a fair-haired boy with pink cheeks and a suspiciously angelic expression. Miss Marple remembered his being at dinner on the night she had arrived at Stonygates.

“I've brought Arthur Jenkins along,” said Dr. Maverick. “He seems to have been the last person to talk to Ernie.”

“Now, Arthur,” said Lewis Serrocold, “please help us if you can. Where has Ernie gone? Is this just a prank?”

“I dunno, sir. Straight, I don't. Didn't say nothing to me, he didn't. All full of the play at the theatre he was, that's all. Said as how he'd had a smashing idea for the scenery, what Mrs. Hudd and Mr. Stephen thought was first class.”

“There's another thing, Arthur. Ernie claims he was prowling about the grounds after lockup last night. Was that true?”

“'Course it ain't. Just boasting, that's all. Perishing liar, Ernie.
He
never got out at night. Used to boast he could, but he wasn't that good with locks! He couldn't do anything with a lock as
was
a lock. Anyway 'e was in larst night, that I do know.”

“You're not saying that just to satisfy us, Arthur?”

“Cross my heart,” said Arthur virtuously.

Lewis did not look quite satisfied.

“Listen,” said Dr. Maverick. “What's that?”

A murmur of voices was approaching. The door was flung open
and, looking very pale and ill, the spectacled Mr. Birnbaum staggered in.

He gasped out, “We've found him—
them.
It's horrible….”

He sank down on a chair and mopped his forehead.

Mildred Strete said sharply:

“What do you mean—found
them?
”

Birnbaum was shaking all over.

“Down at the theatre,” he said. “Their heads crushed in—the big counterweight must have fallen on them. Alexis Restarick and that boy Ernie Gregg. They're both dead….”

“I
've brought you a cup of strong soup, Carrie Louise,” said Miss Marple. “Now please drink it.”

Mrs. Serrocold sat up in the big carved oak four poster bed. She looked very small and childlike. Her cheeks had lost their rose pink flush, and her eyes had a curiously absent look. She took the soup obediently from Miss Marple. As she sipped it, Miss Marple sat down in a chair beside the bed.

“First, Christian,” said Carrie Louise, “and now Alex—and poor, sharp, silly little Ernie. Did he really—know anything?”

“I don't think so,” said Miss Marple. “He was just telling lies—making himself important by hinting that he had seen or knew something. The tragedy is that somebody believed his lies….”

Carrie Louise shivered. Her eyes went back to their faraway look.

“We meant to do so much for these boys … we did do something. Some of them have done wonderfully well. Several of them are in really responsible positions. A few slid back—that can't be
helped. Modern civilised conditions are so complex—too complex for some simple and undeveloped natures. You know Lewis' great scheme? He always felt that transportation was a thing that had saved many a potential criminal in the past. They were shipped overseas—and they made new lives in simpler surroundings. He wants to start a modern scheme on that basis. To buy up a great tract of territory—or a group of islands. Finance it for some years, make it a cooperative self-supporting community—with everyone having a stake in it. But cut off so that the early temptation to go back to cities and the bad old ways can be neutralised. It's his dream. But it will take a lot of money, of course, and there aren't many philanthropists with vision now. We want another Eric. Eric would have been enthusiastic.”

Miss Marple picked up a little pair of scissors and looked at them curiously.

“What an odd pair of scissors,” she said. “They've got two finger holes on one side and one on the other.”

Carrie Louise's eyes came back from that frightening far distance.

“Alex gave them to me this morning,” she said. “They're supposed to make it easier to cut your right-hand nails. Dear boy, he was so enthusiastic. He made me try them then and there.”

“And I suppose he gathered up the nail clippings and took them tidily away,” said Miss Marple.

“Yes,” said Carrie Louise. “He—” she broke off. “Why did you say that?”

“I was thinking about Alex. He had brains. Yes, he had brains.”

“You mean—that's why he died?”

“I think so—yes.”

“He and Ernie—it doesn't bear thinking about. When do they think it happened?”

“Late this evening. Between six and seven o'clock probably….”

“After they'd knocked off work for the day?”

“Yes.”

Gina had been down there that evening—and Wally Hudd. Stephen, too, said he had been down to look for Gina….

But as far as that went, anybody could have—

Miss Marple's train of thought was interrupted.

Carrie Louise said quietly and unexpectedly:

“How much do you know, Jane?”

Miss Marple looked up sharply. The eyes of the two women met.

Miss Marple said slowly, “If I was quite sure….”

“I think you are sure, Jane.”

Jane Marple said slowly, “What do you want me to do?”

Carrie leaned back against her pillows.

“It is in your hands, Jane. You'll do what you think right.”

She closed her eyes.

“Tomorrow”—Miss Marple hesitated—“I shall have to try and talk to Inspector Curry—if he'll listen….”

I
nspector Curry said rather impatiently:

“Yes, Miss Marple?”

“Could we, do you think, go into the Great Hall?”

Inspector Curry looked faintly surprised.

“Is that your idea of privacy? Surely in here—”

He looked round the study.

“It's not privacy I'm thinking of so much. It's something I want to show you. Something Alex Restarick made me see.”

Inspector Curry, stifling a sigh, got up and followed Miss Marple.

“Somebody has been talking to you?” he suggested hopefully.

“No,” said Miss Marple. “It's not a question of what people have said. It's really a question of conjuring tricks.
They do it with mirrors,
you know—that sort of thing—if you understand me.”

Inspector Curry did not understand. He stared and wondered if Miss Marple was quite right in the head.

Miss Marple took up her stand and beckoned the Inspector to stand beside her.

“I want you to think of this place as a stage set, Inspector. As it was on the night Christian Gulbrandsen was killed. You're here in the audience looking at the people on the stage. Mrs. Serrocold and myself and Mrs. Strete and Gina and Stephen—and just like on the stage, there are entrances and exits and the characters go out to different places. Only you don't think when you're in the audience where they are
really
going to. They go out ‘to the front door' or ‘to the kitchen' and when the door opens you see a little bit of painted backcloth. But
really
of course they go out to the wings—or the back of the stage with carpenters and electricians, and other characters waiting to come on—they go out—to a different world.”

“I don't quite see, Miss Marple—”

“Oh, I know—I daresay it sounds very silly—but if you think of this as a play and the scene is ‘the Great Hall at Stonygates'—what exactly is
behind
the scene?—I mean—what is backstage? The
terrace
—isn't it?—the terrace
and a lot of windows opening onto it.

“And that, you see, is how the conjuring trick was done. It was the trick of the Lady Sawn in Half that made me think of it.”

“The Lady Sawn in Half?” Inspector Curry was now quite sure that Miss Marple was a mental case.

“A most thrilling conjuring trick. You must have seen it—only not really one girl but two girls. The head of one and the feet of the other. It looks like one person and is really two. And so I thought it could just as well be
the other way about. Two
people could be really one person.”

“Two people really one?” Inspector Curry looked desperate.

“Yes. Not for long. How long did your constable take in the park to run to this house and back? Two minutes and forty-five seconds, wasn't it? This would be less than that. Well under two minutes.”

“What was under two minutes?”

“The conjuring trick. The trick when it wasn't two people but one person. In there—in the study. We're only looking at the visible part of the stage. Behind the scenes, there is the terrace and a
row of windows.
So easy when there are two people in the study to open the study window, get out, run along the terrace (those footsteps Alex heard), in at the side door, shoot Christian Gulbrandsen and run back, and during that time, the other person in the study does both voices so that we're all quite sure there are
two
people in there. And so there were most of the time, but not for that little period of under—two minutes.”

Inspector Curry found his breath and his voice.

“Do you mean that it was
Edgar Lawson
who ran along the terrace and shot Gulbrandsen? Edgar Lawson who poisoned Mrs. Serrocold?”

“But you see, Inspector,
no one has been poisoning Mrs. Serrocold at all.
That's where the misdirection comes in. Someone very cleverly used the fact that Mrs. Serrocold's sufferings from arthritis were not unlike the symptoms of arsenic poisoning. It's the old conjurer's trick of forcing a card on you. Quite easy to add arsenic to a bottle of tonic—quite easy to add a few lines to a typewritten letter. But the
real
reason for Mr. Gulbrandsen's coming here was the most likely reason—something to do with the Gulbrandsen Trust. Money, in fact. Suppose that there had been embezzlement—embezzlement on a very big scale—you see where that points? To just one person—”

“Lewis Serrocold?”

“Lewis Serrocold….”

P
art of a letter from Gina Hudd to her aunt Mrs. Van Rydock:

—and so you see, darling Aunt Ruth, the whole thing has been just like a nightmare—especially the end of it. I've told you all about this funny young man Edgar Lawson. He always was a complete rabbit—and when the Inspector began questioning him and breaking him down, he lost his nerve completely and scuttled like a rabbit. Just lost his nerve and ran—literally ran. Jumped out of the window and round the house and down the drive, and then there was a policeman coming to head him off, and he swerved and ran full tilt for the lake. He leaped into a rotten old punt that's mouldered there for years and pushed off. Quite a mad, senseless thing to do, of course, but as I say he was just a panic-stricken rabbit. And then Lewis gave a great shout and said, “That punt's rotten” and raced off to the lake, too. The punt went down and there was Edgar struggling in the water. He couldn't swim. Lewis jumped in and swam out to him. He got to him, but they were both in difficulty because they'd got among the reeds. One of the Inspector's men went in with a rope round him, but he got entangled, too, and they had to pull him in. Aunt
Mildred said “They'll drown—they'll drown—they'll both drown …” in a silly sort of way, and Grandam just said “Yes.” I can't describe to you just how she made that one word sound. Just “yes” and it went through you like—like a
sword.

Am I being just silly and melodramatic? I suppose I am. But it did sound like that….

And then—when it was all over, and they'd got them out and tried artificial respiration (but it was no good), the Inspector came to us and said to Grandam:

“I'm afraid, Mrs. Serrocold, there's no hope.”

Grandam said very quietly:

“Thank you, Inspector.”

Then she looked at us all. Me, longing to help but not knowing how, and Jolly, looking grim and tender and ready to minister as usual, and Stephen, stretching out his hands, and funny old Miss Marple looking so sad, and tired, and even Wally looking upset. All so fond of her and wanting to do
something.

But Grandam just said, “Mildred.” And Aunt Mildred said, “Mother.” And they went away together into the house, Grandam looking so small and frail and leaning on Aunt Mildred. I never realised, until then, how fond of each other they were. It didn't show much, you know.

Gina paused and sucked the end of her fountain pen. She resumed:

About me and Wally—we're coming back to the States as soon as we can….