They Do It With Mirrors

CHAPTER 3

Miss Marple got out of the train at Market Kindle station. A kindly fellow passenger handed out her suitcase after her, and Miss Marple, clutching a string bag, a faded leather handbag and some miscellaneous wraps, uttered appreciative twitters of thanks.

‘So kind of you, I’m sure … So difficult nowadays—not many porters. I get so flustered when I travel.’

The twitters were drowned by the booming noise of the station announcer saying loudly but indistinctly that the 3.18 was standing at Platform 1, and was about to proceed to various unidentifiable stations.

Market Kindle was a large empty windswept station with hardly any passengers or railway staff to be seen on it. Its claim to distinction lay in having six platforms and a bay where a very small train of one carriage was puffing importantly.

Miss Marple, rather more shabbily dressed than was her custom (so lucky that she hadn’t given away the old speckledy), was peering around her uncertainly when a young man came up to her.

‘Miss Marple?’ he said. His voice had an unexpectedly dramatic quality about it, as though the utterance of her name were the first words of a part he was playing in amateur theatricals. ‘I’ve come to meet you—from Stonygates.’

Miss Marple looked gratefully at him, a charming helpless-looking old lady with, if he had chanced to notice it, very shrewd blue eyes. The personality of the young man did not quite match his voice. It was less important, one might almost say insignificant. His eyelids had a trick of fluttering nervously.

‘Oh thank you,’ said Miss Marple. ‘There’s just this suitcase.’

She noticed that the young man did not pick up her suitcase himself. He flipped a finger at a porter who was trundling some packing cases past on a trolley.

‘Bring it out, please,’ he said, and added importantly, ‘for Stonygates.’

The porter said cheerfully:

‘Rightyho. Shan’t be long.’

Miss Marple fancied that her new acquaintance was not too pleased about this. It was as if Buckingham Palace had been dismissed as no more important than 3 Laburnum Road.

He said, ‘The railways get more impossible every day!’

Guiding Miss Marple towards the exit, he said: ‘I’m Edgar Lawson. Mrs Serrocold asked me to meet you. I help Mr Serrocold in his work.’

There was again the faint insinuation that a busy and important man had, very charmingly, put important affairs on one side out of chivalry to his employer’s wife.

And again the impression was not wholly convincing—it had a theatrical flavour.

Miss Marple began to wonder about Edgar Lawson.

They came out of the station and Edgar guided the old lady to where a rather elderly Ford V. 8 was standing.

He was just saying ‘Will you come in front with me, or would you prefer the back?’ when there was a diversion.

A new gleaming two-seater Rolls Bentley came purring into the station yard and drew up in front of the Ford. A very beautiful young woman jumped out of it and came across to them. The fact that she wore dirty corduroy slacks and a simple shirt open at the neck seemed somehow to enhance the fact that she was not only beautiful but expensive.

‘There you are, Edgar. I thought I wouldn’t make it in time. I see you’ve got Miss Marple. I came to meet her.’ She smiled dazzlingly at Miss Marple, showing a row of lovely teeth in a sunburnt southern face. ‘I’m Gina,’ she said. ‘Carrie Louise’s granddaughter. What was your journey like? Simply foul? What a nice string bag. I love string bags. I’ll take it and the coats and then you can get in better.’

Edgar’s face flushed. He protested.

‘Look here, Gina, I came to meet Miss Marple. It was all arranged …’

Again the teeth flashed in that wide lazy smile.

‘Oh I know, Edgar, but I suddenly thought it would be nice if I came along. I’ll take her with me and you can wait and bring her cases up.’

She slammed the door on Miss Marple, ran round to the other side, jumped in the driving seat, and they purred swiftly out of the station.

Looking back, Miss Marple noticed Edgar Lawson’s face.

‘I don’t think, my dear,’ she said, ‘that Mr Lawson is very pleased.’

Gina laughed.

‘Edgar’s a frightful idiot,’ she said. ‘Always so pompous about things. You’d really think he mattered!’

Miss Marple asked, ‘Doesn’t he matter?’

‘Edgar?’ There was an unconscious note of cruelty in Gina’s scornful laugh. ‘Oh, he’s bats anyway.’

‘Bats?’

‘They’re all bats at Stonygates,’ said Gina. ‘I don’t mean Lewis and Grandam and me and the boys—and not Miss Bellever, of course. But the others. Sometimes I feel I’m going a bit bats myself living there. Even Aunt Mildred goes out on walks and mutters to herself all the time—and you don’t expect a Canon’s widow to do that, do you?’

They swung out of the station approach and accelerated up the smooth surfaced empty road. Gina shot a swift sideways glance at her companion.

‘You were at school with Grandam, weren’t you? It seems so queer.’

Miss Marple knew perfectly what she meant. To youth it seems very odd to think that age was once young and pigtailed and struggled with decimals and English literature.

‘It must,’ said Gina with awe in her voice, and obviously not meaning to be rude, ‘have been a very long time ago.’

‘Yes, indeed,’ said Miss Marple. ‘You feel that more with me than you do with your grandmother, I expect?’

Gina nodded. ‘It’s cute of you saying that. Grandam, you know, gives one a curiously ageless feeling.’

‘It is a long time since I’ve seen her. I wonder if I shall find her much changed.’

‘Her hair’s grey, of course,’ said Gina vaguely. ‘And she walks with a stick because of her arthritis. It’s got much worse lately. I suppose that—’ she broke off, and then asked: ‘Have you been to Stonygates before?’

‘No, never. I’ve heard a great deal about it, of course.’

‘It’s pretty ghastly, really,’ said Gina cheerfully. ‘A sort of Gothic monstrosity. What Steve calls Best Victorian Lavatory period. But it’s fun, too, in a way. Only of course everything’s madly earnest, and you tumble over psychiatrists everywhere underfoot. Enjoying themselves madly. Rather like Scout-masters, only worse. The young criminals are rather pets, some of them. One showed me how to diddle locks with a bit of wire and one angelic-faced boy gave me a lot of points about coshing people.’

Miss Marple considered this information thoughtfully.

‘It’s the thugs I like best,’ said Gina. ‘I don’t fancy the queers so much. Of course Lewis and Dr Maverick think they’re all queer—I mean they think it’s repressed desires and disordered home life and their mothers getting off with soldiers and all that. I don’t really see it myself because some people have had awful home lives and yet have managed to turn out quite all right.’

‘I’m sure it is all a very difficult problem,’ said Miss Marple.

Gina laughed, again showing her magnificent teeth.

‘It doesn’t worry me much. I suppose some people have these sort of urges to make the world a better place. Lewis is quite dippy about it all—he’s going to Aberdeen next week because there’s a case coming up in the police court—a boy with five previous convictions.’

‘The young man who met me at the station? Mr Lawson. He helps Mr Serrocold, he told me. Is he his secretary?’

‘Oh Edgar hasn’t brains enough to be a secretary. He’s a case, really. He used to stay at hotels and pretend he was a V.C. or a fighter pilot and borrow money and then do a flit. I think he’s just a rotter. But Lewis goes through a routine with them all. Makes them feel one of the family and gives them jobs to do and all that to encourage their sense of responsibility. I daresay we shall be murdered by one of them one of these days.’ Gina laughed merrily.

Miss Marple did not laugh.

They turned in through some imposing gates where a Commissionaire was standing on duty in a military manner and drove up a drive flanked with rhododendrons. The drive was badly kept and the grounds seemed neglected.

Interpreting her companion’s glance, Gina said, ‘No gardeners during the war, and since we haven’t bothered. But it does look rather terrible.’

They came round a curve and Stonygates appeared in its full glory. It was, as Gina had said, a vast edifice of Victorian Gothic—a kind of temple to Plutocracy. Philanthropy had added to it in various wings and outbuildings which, while not positively dissimilar in style, had robbed the structure as a whole of any cohesion or purpose.

‘Hideous, isn’t it?’ said Gina affectionately. ‘There’s Grandam on the terrace. I’ll stop here and you can go and meet her.’

Miss Marple advanced along the terrace towards her old friend.

From a distance, the slim little figure looked curiously girlish in spite of the stick on which she leaned and her slow and obviously rather painful progress. It was as though a young girl was giving an exaggerated imitation of old age.

‘Jane,’ said Mrs Serrocold.

‘Dear Carrie Louise.’

Yes, unmistakably Carrie Louise. Strangely unchanged, strangely youthful still, although, unlike her sister, she used no cosmetics or artificial aids to youth. Her hair was grey, but it had always been of a silvery fairness and the colour had changed very little. Her skin had still a rose leaf pink and white appearance, though now it was a crumpled rose leaf. Her eyes had still their starry innocent glance. She had the slender youthful figure of a girl and her head kept its eager birdlike tilt.

‘I do blame myself,’ said Carrie Louise in her sweet voice, ‘for letting it be so long. Years since I saw you, Jane dear. It’s just lovely that you’ve come at last to pay us a visit here.’

From the end of the terrace Gina called:

‘You ought to come in, Grandam. It’s getting cold—and Jolly will be furious.’

Carrie Louise gave her little silvery laugh.

‘They all fuss about me so,’ she said. ‘They rub it in that I’m an old woman.’

‘And you don’t feel like one.’

‘No, I don’t, Jane. In spite of all my aches and pains and I’ve got plenty. Inside I go on feeling just a chit like Gina. Perhaps everyone does. The glass shows them how old they are and they just don’t believe it. It seems only a few months ago that we were at Florence. Do you remember Fraulein Schweich and her boots?’

The two elderly women laughed together at events that had happened nearly half a century ago.

They walked together to a side door. In the doorway a gaunt elderly lady met them. She had an arrogant nose, a short haircut and wore stout well-cut tweeds.

She said fiercely:

‘It’s absolutely crazy of you, Cara, to stay out so late. You’re absolutely incapable of taking care of yourself. What will Mr Serrocold say?’

‘Don’t scold me, Jolly,’ said Carrie Louise pleadingly.

She introduced Miss Bellever to Miss Marple.

‘This is Miss Bellever, who is simply everything to me. Nurse, dragon, watchdog, secretary, housekeeper and very faithful friend.’

Juliet Bellever sniffed, and the end of her big nose turned rather pink, a sign of emotion.

‘I do what I can,’ she said gruffly. ‘This is a crazy household. You simply can’t arrange any kind of planned routine.’

‘Darling Jolly, of course you can’t. I wonder why you ever try. Where are you putting Miss Marple?’

‘In the Blue Room. Shall I take her up?’ asked Miss Bellever.

‘Yes, please do, Jolly. And then bring her down to tea. It’s in the library today, I think.’

The Blue Room had heavy curtains of a rich faded blue brocade that must have been, Miss Marple thought, about fifty years old. The furniture was mahogany, big and solid, and the bed was a vast mahogany fourposter. Miss Bellever opened a door into a connecting bathroom. This was unexpectedly modern, orchid in colouring and with much dazzling chromium.

She observed grimly:

‘John Restarick had ten bathrooms put into the house when he married Cara. The plumbing is about the only thing that’s ever been modernized. He wouldn’t hear of the rest being altered—said the whole place was a perfect Period Piece. Did you ever know him at all?’

‘No, I never met him. Mrs Serrocold and I have met very seldom though we have always corresponded.’

‘He was an agreeable fellow,’ said Miss Bellever. ‘No good, of course! A complete rotter. But pleasant to have about the house. Great charm. Women liked him far too much. That was his undoing in the end. Not really Cara’s type.’

She added with a brusque resumption of her practical manner:

‘The housemaid will unpack for you. Do you want a wash before tea?’

Receiving an affirmative answer, she said that Miss Marple would find her waiting at the top of the stairs.

Miss Marple went into the bathroom and washed her hands and dried them a little nervously on a very beautiful orchid-coloured face towel. Then she removed her hat and patted her soft white hair into place.

Opening her door, she found Miss Bellever waiting for her, and was conducted down the big gloomy staircase and across a vast dark hall and into a room where bookshelves went up to the ceiling and a big window looked out over an artificial lake.

Carrie Louise was standing by the window and Miss Marple joined her.

‘What a very imposing house this is,’ said Miss Marple. ‘I feel quite lost in it.’

‘Yes, I know. It’s ridiculous, really. It was built by a prosperous iron master—or something of that kind. He went bankrupt not long after. I don’t wonder really. There were about fourteen living-rooms—all enormous. I’ve never seen what people can want with more than one sitting-room. And all those huge bedrooms. Such a lot of unnecessary space. Mine is terribly overpowering—and quite a long way to walk from the bed to the dressing table. And great heavy dark crimson curtains.’

‘You haven’t had it modernized and redecorated?’

Carrie Louise looked vaguely surprised.

‘No. On the whole it’s very much as it was when I first lived here with Eric. It’s been repainted, of course, but they always do it the same colour. Those things don’t really matter, do they? I mean I shouldn’t have felt justified in spending a lot of money on that kind of thing when there are so many things that are so much more important.’

‘Have there been no changes at all in the house?’

‘Oh—yes—heaps of them. We’ve just kept a kind of block in the middle of the house as it was—the Great Hall and the rooms off and over. They’re the best ones and Johnnie—my second husband—was lyrical over them and said they should never be touched or altered—and of course he was an artist and a designer and he knew about these things. But the East and West wings have been completely remodelled. All the rooms partitioned off and divided up, so that we have offices, and bedrooms for the teaching staff, and all that. The boys are all in the College building—you can see it from here.’

Miss Marple looked out towards where large red brick buildings showed through a belt of sheltered trees. Then her eyes fell on something nearer at hand, and she smiled a little.

‘What a very beautiful girl Gina is,’ she said.

Carrie Louise’s face lit up.

‘Yes, isn’t she?’ she said softly. ‘It’s so lovely to have her back here again. I sent her to America at the beginning of the war—to Ruth. Did Ruth talk about her at all?’

‘No. At least she did just mention her.’

Carrie Louise sighed.

‘Poor Ruth! She was frightfully upset over Gina’s marriage. But I’ve told her again and again that I don’t blame her in the least. Ruth doesn’t realize, as I do, that the old barriers and class shibboleths are gone—or at any rate are going.

‘Gina was doing her war work—and she met this young man. He was a Marine and had a very good war record. And a week later they were married. It was all far too quick, of course, no time to find out if they were really suited to each other—but that’s the way of things nowadays. Young people belong to their generation. We may think they’re unwise in many of their doings, but we have to accept their decisions. Ruth, though, was terribly upset.’

‘She didn’t consider the young man suitable?’

‘She kept saying that one didn’t know anything about him. He came from the Middle West and he hadn’t any money—and naturally no profession. There are hundreds of boys like that everywhere—but it wasn’t Ruth’s idea of what was right for Gina. However, the thing was done. I was so glad when Gina accepted my invitation to come over here with her husband. There’s so much going on here—jobs of every kind, and if Walter wants to specialize in medicine or get a degree or anything he could do it in this country. After all, this is Gina’s home. It’s delightful to have her back, to have someone so warm and gay and alive in the house.’

Miss Marple nodded and looked out of the window again at the two young people standing near the lake.

‘They’re a remarkably handsome couple, too,’ she said. ‘I don’t wonder Gina fell in love with him!’

‘Oh, but that—that isn’t Wally.’ There was, quite suddenly, a touch of embarrassment, or restraint, in Mrs Serrocold’s voice. ‘That’s Steve—the younger of Johnnie Restarick’s two boys. When Johnnie—when he went away, he’d no place for the boys in the holidays, so I always had them here. They look on this as their home. And Steve’s here permanently now. He runs our dramatic branch. We have a theatre, you know, and plays—we encourage all the artistic instincts. Lewis says that so much of this juvenile crime is due to exhibitionism, most of the boys have had such a thwarted unhappy home life, and these hold-ups and burglaries make them feel heroes. We urge them to write their own plays and act in them and design and paint their own scenery. Steve is in charge of the theatre. He’s so keen and enthusiastic. It’s wonderful what life he’s put into the whole thing.’

‘I see,’ said Miss Marple slowly.

Her long-distance sight was good (as many of her neighbours knew to their cost in the village of St Mary Mead) and she saw very clearly the dark handsome face of Stephen Restarick as he stood facing Gina, talking eagerly. Gina’s face she could not see, since the girl had her back to them, but there was no mistaking the expression in Stephen Restarick’s face.

‘It isn’t any business of mine,’ said Miss Marple, ‘but I suppose you realize, Carrie Louise, that he’s in love with her.’

‘Oh no—’ Carrie Louise looked troubled. ‘Oh no, I do hope not.’

‘You were always up in the clouds, Carrie Louise. There’s not the least doubt about it.’

CHAPTER 4

Before Mrs Serrocold could say anything, her husband came in from the hall carrying some open letters in his hand.

Lewis Serrocold was a short man, not particularly impressive in appearance, but with a personality that immediately marked him out. Ruth had once said of him that he was more like a dynamo than a human being. He usually concentrated entirely on what was immediately occupying his attention and paid no attention to the objects or persons who were surrounding them.

‘A bad blow, dearest,’ he said. ‘That boy, Jackie Flint. Back at his tricks again. And I really did think he meant to go straight this time if he got a proper chance. He was most earnest about it. You know we found he’d always been keen on railways—and both Maverick and I thought that if he got a job on the railways he’d stick to it and make good. But it’s the same story. Petty thieving from the parcels office. Not even stuff he could want or sell. That shows that it must be psychological. We haven’t really got to the root of the trouble. But I’m not giving up.’

‘Lewis—this is my old friend, Jane Marple.’

‘Oh how d’you do,’ said Mr Serrocold absently. ‘So glad—they’ll prosecute, of course. A nice lad, too, not too many brains, but a really nice boy. Unspeakable home he came from. I—’

He suddenly broke off, and the dynamo was switched on to the guest.

‘Why, Miss Marple, I’m so delighted you’ve come to stay with us for a while. It will make such a great difference to Caroline to have a friend of old days with whom she can exchange memories. She has in many ways a grim time here—so much sadness in the stories of these poor children. We do hope you’ll stay with us a very long time.’

Miss Marple felt the magnetism and realized how attractive it would have been to her friend. That Lewis Serrocold was a man who would always put causes before people she did not doubt for a moment. It might have irritated some women, but not Carrie Louise.