4.50 From Paddington (6 page)

After tea, Lucy rose.

“I'll be getting back,” she said. “As I've already told you, there's no one actually living at Rutherford Hall who could be the man we're looking for. There's only an old man and a middle-aged woman, and an old deaf gardener.”

“I didn't say he was actually living there,” said Miss Marple. All I mean is, that he's someone who knows Rutherford Hall very well. But we can go into that after you've found the body."

“You seem to assume quite confidently that I shall find it,” said Lucy. “I don't feel nearly so optimistic.”

“I'm sure you will succeed, my dear Lucy. You are such an efficient person.”

“In some ways, but I haven't had any experience in looking for bodies.”

“I'm sure all it needs is a little common sense,” said Miss Marple encouragingly.

Lucy looked at her, then laughed. Miss Marple smiled back at her.

Lucy set to work systematically the next afternoon.

She poked round outhouses, prodded the briars which wreathed the old pigsties, and was peering into the boiler room under the greenhouse when she heard a dry cough and turned to find old Hillman, the gardener, looking at her disapprovingly.

“You be careful you don't get a nasty fall, miss,” he warned her. “Them steps isn't safe, and you was up in the loft just now and the floor there ain't safe neither.”

Lucy was careful to display no embarrassment.

“I expect you think I'm very nosy,” she said cheerfully. “I was just wondering if something couldn't be made out of this place - growing mushrooms for the market, that sort of thing. Everything seems to have been let go terribly.”

“That's the master, that is. Won't spend a penny. Ought to have two men and a boy here, I ought, to keep the place proper, but won't hear of it, he won't. Had all I could do to make him get a motor mower. Wanted me to mow all that front grass by hand, he did.”

“But if the place could be made to pay - with some repairs?”

“Won't get a place like this to pay - too far gone. And he wouldn't care about that, anyway. Only cares about saving. Knows well enough what'll happen after he's gone - the young gentlemen'll sell up as fast as they can. Only waiting for him to pop off, they are. Going to come into a tidy lot of money when he dies, so I've heard.”

“I suppose he's a very rich man?” said Lucy.

“Crackenthorpe's Fancies, that's what they are. The old gentleman started it, Mr. Crackenthorpe's father. A sharp one he was, by all accounts. Made his fortune, and built this place. Hard as nails, they say, and never forgot an injury. But with all that, he was open-handed. Nothing of the miser about him. Disappointed in both his sons, so the story goes. Give 'em an education and brought 'em up to be gentlemen- Oxford and all. But they were too much of gentlemen to want to go into the business. The younger one married an actress and then smashed himself up in a car accident when he'd been drinking. The elder one, our one here, his father never fancied so much. Abroad a lot, he was, brought a lot of heathen statues and had them sent home. Wasn't so close with his money when he was young - come on him more in middle age, it did. No, they never did hit it off, him and his father, so I've heard.”

Lucy digested this information with an air of polite interest. The old man leant against the wall and prepared to go on with his saga. He much preferred talking to doing any work.

“Died afore the war, the old gentleman did. Terrible temper he had. Didn't do to give him any sauce, he wouldn't stand for it.”

“And after he died, this Mr. Crackenthorpe came and lived here?”

“Him and his family, yes. Nigh to grown up they was by then.”

“But surely... Oh, I see, you mean the 1914 war.”

“No, I don't. Died in 1928, that's what I mean.”

Lucy supposed that 1928 qualified as “before the war” though it was not the way she would have described it herself.

She said: “Well, I expect you'll be wanting to go on with your work. You mustn't let me keep you.”

“Ar,” said old Hillman without enthusiasm, “not much you can do this time of day. Light's too bad.”

Lucy went back to the house, pausing to investigate a likely-looking copse of birch and azalea on her way.

She found Emma Crackenthorpe standing in the hall reading a letter. The afternoon post had just been delivered.

“My nephew will be here tomorrow - with a school-friend. Alexander's room is the one over the porch. The one next to it will do for James Stoddart-West. They'll use the bathroom just opposite.”

“Yes, Miss Crackenthorpe. I'll see the rooms are prepared.”

“They'll arrive in the morning before lunch.” She hesitated. “I expect they'll be hungry.”

“I bet they will,” said Lucy. “Roast beef, do you think? And perhaps treacle tart?”

“Alexander's very fond of treacle tart.”

The two boys arrived on the following morning. They both had well-brushed hair, suspiciously angelic faces, and perfect manners. Alexander Eastley had fair hair and blue eyes, Stoddart-West was dark and spectacled.

They discoursed gravely during lunch on events in the sporting world, with occasional references to the latest space fiction. Their manner was that of elderly professors discussing palaeolithic implements.

In comparison with them, Lucy felt quite young.

The sirloin of beef vanished in no time and every crumb of the treacle tart was consumed.

Mr. Crackenthorpe grumbled: “You two will eat me out of house and home.”

Alexander gave him a blue-eyed reproving glance.

“We'll have bread and cheese if you can't afford meat. Grandfather.”

“Afford it? I can afford it. I don't like waste.”

“We haven't wasted any, sir,” said Stoddart-West, looking down at his place which bore clear testimony of that fact. “You boys both eat twice as much as I do.”

“We're at the body-building stage,” Alexander explained. “We need a big intake of proteins.”

The old man grunted.

As the two boys left the table, Lucy heard Alexander say apologetically to his friend:

“You mustn't pay any attention to my grandfather. He's on a diet or something and that makes him rather peculiar. He's terribly mean, too. I think it must be a complex of some kind.”

Stoddart-West said comprehendingly:

“I had an aunt who kept thinking she was going bankrupt. Really, she had oodles of money. Pathological, the doctors said. Have you got that football, Alex?”

After she had cleared away and washed up lunch, Lucy went out. She could hear the boys calling out in the distance on the lawn. She herself went in the opposite direction, down the front drive and from there she struck across to some clumped masses of rhododendron bushes. She began to hunt carefully, holding back the leaves and peering inside. She moved from clump to clump systematically, and was raking inside with a golf club when the polite voice of Alexander Eastley made her start.

“Are you looking for something, Miss Eyelesbarrow?”

“A golf ball,” said Lucy promptly. “Several golf balls in fact. I've been practising golf shots most afternoons and I've lost quite a lot of balls. I thought that today I really must find some of them.”

“We'll help you,” said Alexander obligingly.

“That's very kind of you. I thought you were playing football.”

“One can't go on playing footer,” explained Stoddart-West. “One gets too hot. Do you play a lot of golf?”

“I'm quite fond of it. I don't get much opportunity.”

“I suppose you don't. You do the cooking here, don't you?”

“Yes.”

“Did you cook the lunch today?”

“Yes. Was it all right?”

“Simply wizard,” said Alexander. “We get awful meat at school, all dried up, I love beef that's pink and juicy inside. That treacle tart was pretty smashing, too.”

“You must tell me what things you like best.”

“Could we have apple meringue one day? It's my favourite thing.”

“Of course.”

Alexander sighed happily.

“There's a clock golf set under the stairs,” he said. “We could fix it up on the lawn and do some putting. What about it, Stodders?”

“Good-oh!” said Stoddart-West.

“He isn't really Australian,” explained Alexander courteously. “But he's practising talking that way in case his people take him out to see the Test Match next year.”

Encouraged by Lucy, they went off to get the clock golf set. Later, as she returned to the house, she found them setting it out on the lawn and arguing about the position of the numbers.

“We don't want it like a clock,” said Stoddart-West. “That's kid stuff. We want to make a course of it. Long holes and short ones. It's a pity the numbers are so rusty. You can hardly see them.”

“They need a lick of white paint,” said Lucy. “You might get some tomorrow and paint them.”

“Good idea.” Alexander's face lit up. “I say, I believe there are some old pots of paint in the Long Barn - left there by the painters last hols. Shall we see?”

“What's the Long Barn?” asked Lucy. Alexander pointed to a long stone building a little way from the house near the back drive.

“It's quite old,” he said. “Grandfather calls it a Leak Barn and says it's Elizabethan, but that's just swank. It belonged to the farm that was here originally. My great-grandfather pulled it down and built this awful house instead.”

He added: “A lot of grandfather's collection is in the barn. Things he had sent home from abroad when he was a young man. Most of them are pretty frightful, too. The Long Barn is used sometimes for whist drives and things like that. Women's Institute stuff. And Conservative Sales of Work. Come and see it.”

Lucy accompanied them willingly.

There was a big nail-studded oak door to the barn.

Alexander raised his hand and detached a key on a nail just under some ivy to the right hand of the top of the door. He turned it in the lock, pushed the door open and they went in.

At a first glance Lucy felt that she was in a singularly bad museum. The heads of two Roman emperors in marble glared at her out of bulging eyeballs, there was a huge sarcophagus of a decadent Greco-Roman period, a simpering Venus stood on a pedestal clutching her falling draperies.

Besides these works of art, there were a couple of trestle tables, some stacked-up chairs, and sundry oddments such as a rusted hand-mower, two buckets, a couple of moth-eaten car seats, and a greenpainted iron garden seat that had lost a leg.

“I think I saw the paint over here,” said Alexander vaguely. He went to a corner and pulled aside a tattered curtain that shut it off.

They found a couple of paint pots and brushes, the latter dry and stiff.

“You really need some turps,” said Lucy.

They could not, however, find any turpentine. The boys suggested bicycling off to get some, and Lucy urged them to do so. Painting the clock golf numbers would keep them amused for some time, she thought.

The boys went off, leaving her in the barn.

“This really could do with a clean up,” she had murmured.

“I shouldn't bother,” Alexander advised her. “It gets cleaned up if it's going to be used for anything, but it's practically never used this time of year.”

“Do I hang the key up outside the door again? Is that where it's kept?”

“Yes. There's nothing to pinch here, you see. Nobody would want those awful marble things and, anyway, they weigh a ton.”

Lucy agreed with him. She could hardly admire old Mr. Crackenthorpe's taste in art. He seemed to have an unerring instinct for selecting the worst specimen of any period.

She stood looking round her after the boys had gone. Her eyes came to rest on the sarcophagus and stayed there.

That sarcophagus...

The air in the barn was faintly musty as though unaired for a long time. She went over to the sarcophagus. It had a heavy close-fitting lid. Lucy looked at it speculatively.

Then she left the barn, went to the kitchen, found a heavy crowbar, and returned.

It was not an easy task, but Lucy toiled doggedly.

Slowly the lid began to rise, prised up by the crowbar.

It rose sufficiently for Lucy to see what was inside...