I knew just what he meant, because a young
niece of mine not ing before had hurried her
child off to a very ell-known specialist in skin
diseases without consulting her own doctor whom
she considered an old dodderer, and the specialist
had ordered some vegY expensive treatment, and
later they found that all the child was suffering
from was rather an un0sual form of measles.
I just mention this--though I have a horror of digressing--to show that I appreciated Mr.
Petherick's point--bui I still hadn't any idea of
what he was driving at.
"If Mr. Rhodes is ill--" I said, and stopped--because
the poor ma gave the most dreadful
laugh.
He said: "I expect t( die of a broken neck in a
few months' time."
And then it all came out. There had been a case
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of murder lately in Barnchester--a town about
twenty miles away. I'm afraid I hadn't paid much
attention to it at the time, because we had been
having a lot of excitement in the village about our
district nurse, and outside occurrences like an
earthquake in India and a murder in Barnchester,
although of course far more important really--had
given way to our own little local excitements.
I'm afraid villages are like that. Still, I did
remember having read about a woman having
been stabbed in a hotel, though I hadn't remem-bered
her name. But now it seemed that this
woman had been Mr. Rhodes' wife--and as if that
wasn't bad enough--he was actually under suspi-cion
of having murdered her himself.
All this Mr. Petherick explained to me very
clearly, saying that, although the Coroner's jury
had brought in a verdict of murder by a person or
persons unknown, Mr. Rhodes had reason to be-lieve
that he would probably be arrested within a
day or two, and that he had come to Mr. Petherick
and placed himself in his hands. Mr. Petherick
went on to say that they had that afternoon con-suited
Sir Malcolm Olde, K.C., and that in the
event of the case coming to trial Sir Malcolm had
been briefed to defend Mr. Rhodes.
Sir Malcolm was a young man, Mr. Petherick
said, very up to date in his methods, and he had
indicated a certain line of defense. But with that
line of defense Mr. Petherick was not entirely
satisfied.
"You see, my dear lady," he said, "it is tainted
with what I call the specialist's point of view. Give
Sir Malcolm a case and he sees only one point--
MISS MARPLE LLS A STORY
133
the most likely line of defense. But even the best
line of defense may ignore completely what is, to
my mind, the vital point. It takes no account of
what actually happened."
Then he went on to say some very kind and flattering
things about my acumen and judgment and
my knowledge of human nature, and asked permission
to tell me the story of the case in the hopes
that I might be able to suggest some explanation.
I could see that Mr. Rhodes was highly skeptical
of my being of any use anl that he was annoyed at
being brought here. But Mr. Petherick took no
notice and proceeded to give me the fasts of what
occurred on the night of March 8th.
Mr. and Mrs. Rhodes had been staying at the
Crown Hotel in Barncheater. Mrs. Rhodes who
(so I gathered from Mr. Petherick's careful language)
was perhaps just a shade of a hypochondriac,
had retired to bed in, mediately after dinner.
She and her husband occupied adjoining rooms
with a connecting door. Mr. Rhodes, who is
writing a book on prehistoric flints, settled down
to work in the adjoining from. At eleven o'clock
he tidied up his papers and prepared to go to bed.
Before doing so, he just glanced into his wife's
room to make sure that there was nothing she
wanted. He discovered the electric light on and his
had been dead at least an hour--probably longer.
The following were the POints made. There was
another door in Mrs. Rholes' room leading into
the corridor. This door was locked and bolted
on the inside. The only wirdow in the room was
closed and latched. According to Mr. Rhodes no
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body had passed through the room in which he
was sitting except a chambermaid bringing hot
water bottles. The weapon found in the wound
was a stiletto dagger which had been lying on Mrs.
Rhodes' dressing-table. She was in the habit of using
it as a paper knife. There were no fingerprints
on it.
The situation boiled down to this--no one but
Mr. Rhodes and the chambermaid had entered the
victim's room.
I inquired about the chambermaid.
"That was our first line of inquiry," said Mr.
Petherick. "Mary Hill is a local woman. She has
been chambermaid at the Crown for ten years;
There seems absolutely no reason why she should
commit a sudden assault on a guest. She is, in any
case, extraordinarily stupid, almost half-witted.
Her story has never varied. She brought Mrs.
Rhodes her hot water bottle and says the lady was
drowsy--just dropping off to sleep. Frankly, I
cannot believe, and I am sure no jury would believe,
that she committed the crime."
Mr. Petherick went on to mention a few additional
details. At the head of the staircase in the
Crown Hotel is a kind of miniature lounge where
people sometimes sit and have coffee. A passage
goes off to the right and the last door in it is the
door into the room occupied by Mr. Rhodes. The
passage then turns sharply to the right again and
the first door round the corner is the door into
Mrs. Rhodes' room. As it happened, both these
doors could be seen by witnesses. The first door--that
into Mr. Rhodes' room, which I will call A,
could be seen by four people, two commercial
MISS MARPLE TELLS A STORY
135
travelers and an elderly married couple who were
having coffee. According to them nobody went in
or out of door A except Mr. Rhodes and the
chambermaid. As to the other door in passage B,
there was an electrician at work there and he also
swears that nobody entered or left door B except
the chambermaid.
It was certainly a very curious and interesting
case. On the face of it, it looked as though Mr.
Rhodes must have murdered his wife. But I could
see that Mr. Petherick was quite convinced of his
client's innocence and Mr. Petherick was a very
shrewd man.
At the inquest Mr. Rhodes had told a hesitating
and rambling story about some woman who had
written threatening letters to his wife. His story, I
gathere
d, had been unconvincing in the extreme.
Appealed to by Mr. Petherick, he explained him-self.
"Frankly," he said, "I never believed it. I
thought Amy had made most of it up."
Mrs. Rhodes, I gathered, was one of those ro-mantic
liars who go through life embroidering
everything that happens to them. The amount of
adventures that, according to her own account,
happened to her in a year was simply incredible. If
she slipped on a bit of banana peel it was a case of
near escape from death. If a lamp-shade caught
fire, she was rescued from a burning building at
the hazard of her life. Her husband got into the
habit of discounting her statements. Her tale as to
some woman whose child she had injured .in a
motor accident and who had vowed vengeance on
her--wellmMr. Rhodes had simply not taken any
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Agatha Christie
notice of it. The incident had happened before he
married his wife and although she had read him
letters couched in crazy language, he had suso
pected her of composing them herself. She had ac-tually
done such a thing once or twice before. She
was a woman of hysterical tendencies who craved
ceaselessly for excitement.
Now, all that seemed to me very natural--indeed,
we have a young woman in the village who
does much the same thing. The danger with such
people is that when anything at all extraordinary
really does happen to them, nobody believes they
are speaking the truth. It seemed to me that that
was what had happened in this case. The police, I
gathered, merely believed that Mr. Rhodes was
making up this unconvincing tale in order to avert
suspicion from himself.
I asked if there had been any women staying by
themselves in the Hotel. It seems there were two
--a Mrs. Granby, an Anglo-Indian widow, and a
Miss Carruthers, rather a horsey spinster who
dropped her g's. Mr. Petherick added that the
most minute inquiries had failed to elicit anyone
who had seen either of them near the scene of the
crime and there was nothing to connect either of
them with it in any way. I asked him to describe
their personal appearance. He said that Mrs.
Granby had reddish hair rather untidily done, was
sallow-faced and about fifty years of age. Her
clothes were rather picturesque, being made
mostly of native silks, etc. Miss Carruthers was
about forty, wore pince-nez, had close-cropped
hair like a man and wore mannish coats and skirts.
"Dear me," I said, "that makes it very dif-ficult.''
MISS MARPLE TELLS A STORY
137
Mr. Petherick looked inquiringly at me, but I
didn't want to say any more just then, so I asked
what Sir Malcolm Olde had said.
Sir Malcolm Olde, it seemed, was going all out
for suicide. Mr. Petherick said the medical evi-dence
was dead against this, and there was the ab-sence
of fingerprints, but Sir Malcolm was confi-dent
of being able to call conflicting medical testi-mony
and to suggest some way of getting over the
fingerprint difficulty. I asked Mr. Rhodes what
he thought and he said all doctors were fools but
he himself couldn't really believe his wife had
killed herself. "She wasn't that kind of woman,"
he said simply--and I believed him. Hysterical
people don't usually commit suicide.
I thought a minute and then I asked if the door
from Mrs. Rhodes' room led straight into the cor-ridor.
Mr. Rhodes said no--there was a little hall-way
with bathroom and lavatory. It was the door
from the bedroom to the hallway that was locked
and bolted on the inside.
"In that case," I said, "the whole thing seems
to me remarkably simple."
And really, you know, it did .... The simplest
thing in the world. And yet no one seemed to have
seen it that way.
Both Mr. Petherick and Mr. Rhodes were star-ing
at me so that I felt quite embarrassed.
"Perhaps," said Mr. Rhodes, "Miss Marple
hasn't quite appreciated the difficulties."
"Yes," I said, "I think I have. There are four
possibilities. Either Mrs. Rhodes was killed by her
husband, or by the chambermaid, or she com-mitted
suicide, or she was killed by an outsider
whom nobody saw enter or leave."
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Agatha Christie
"And that's impossible," Mr. Rhodes broke in.
"Nobody could come in or go out through my
room without my seeing them, and even if anyone
did manage to come in through my wife's room
without the electrician seeing them, how the devil
could they get out again leaving the door locked
and bolted on the inside?"
Mr. Petherick looked at me and said: "Well,
Miss Marple?" in an encouraging manner.
"I should like," I said, "to ask a question. Mr.
Rhodes, what did the chambermaid look like?"
He said he wasn't sure--she was tallish, he
thought--he didn't remember if she was fair or
dark. I turned to Mr. Petherick and asked him the
same question.
He said she was of medium height, had fairish
hair and blue eyes and rather a high color.
Mr. Rhodes said: "You are a better observer
than I am, Petherick."
I ventured to disagree. I then asked Mr. Rhodes
if he could describe the maid in my house. Neither
he nor Mr. Petherick could do so.
"Don't you see what that means?" I said. "You
both came here full of your own affairs and the
person who let you in was only a parlorrnaid. The
same applies to Mr. Rhodes at the Hotel. He saw
only a chambermaid. He saw her uniform and her
apron. He was engrossed by his work. But Mr.
Petherick has interviewed the same woman in a
different capacity. He has looked at her as a
person.
"That's what the woman who did the murder
counted upon."
As they still didn't see, I had to explain.
MISS MARPLE TELLS A STORY
139
"I think," I said, "that this is how it went. The
chambermaid came in by door A, passed through
Mr. Rhodes' room into Mrs. Rhodes' room with
the hot water bottle and went out through the hall-way
into passage B. X--as I will call our murder-ess--came
in by door B into the little hallway,
concealed herself in--well, in a certain apartment,
ahem--and waited until the chambermaid had
passed out. Then she entered Mrs. Rhodes' room,
took the stiletto from the dressing-table--(she had
doubtless explored the room earlier in the day)
went up to the bed, stabbed the dozing woman,
wiped the handle of the stiletto, locked and bolted
the door by which she had entered, and then
passed out through the room where Mr. Rhodes
was working."
Mr. Rhodes cried out: "But I should have seen
&nb
sp; her. The electrician would have seen her go in."
"No," I said. "That's where you're wrong.
You wouldn't see her--not if she were dressed as a
chambermaid." I let it sink in, then I went on,
"You were engrossed in your work--out of the
tail of your eye you saw a chambermaid come in,
go into your wife's room, come back and go out.
It was the same dress--but not the same woman.
That's what the people having coffee saw--a
chambermaid go in and a chambermaid come
out. The electrician did the same. I daresay if a
chambermaid were very pretty a gentleman might
notice her face--human nature being what it is
--but if she were just an ordinary middle-aged
woman--well--it would be the chambermaid's
dressyou would see--not the woman herself."
Mr. Rhodes cried: "Who was she?"
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Agatha Christie
"Well," I said, "that is going to be a little dif-ficult.
It must be either Mrs. Granby or Miss Car-ruthers.
Mrs. Granby sounds as though she might
wear a wig normally--so she could wear her own
hair as a chambermaid. On the other hand, Miss
Carruthers with her close-cropped mannish head
might easily put on a wig to play her part: I
daresay you will find out easily enough which of
them it is. Personally, I incline myself to think it
will be Miss Carruthers."
And really, my dears, that is the end of the
story. Carruthers was a false name, but she was
the woman all right. There was insanity in her
family. Mrs. Rhodes, who was a most reckless and
dangerous driver, had run over her little girl, and
it had driven the poor woman off her head. She
concealed her madness very cunningly except for
writing distinctly insane letters to her intended vic-tim.