Diana Glass
The Help
By the time the interviews are concluded, dusk is falling and the snow beyond the windows is tinted indigo.
‘I can’t bear spending any more time in the hotel itself,’ Mrs Bantry says.
‘Shall we go to the spa, to discuss? Half the guests don’t seem to know it’s there, so it should be nice and quiet.
I want to hear everything! I’m very jealous that you can type, Diana – otherwise I think I’d have volunteered myself. ’
The spa is a twenty-minute walk along a fir-lined path and the snow is coming down heavily, so we ask the hotel for a horse-drawn sled instead.
We are swept along through sweeping curtains of white.
I look up and am dazzled by the vortex of falling snow against the darkening sky, the flakes smattering my face, melting upon the warmth of my cheeks.
The music of the little bells on the horse’s headdress is an ethereal accompaniment.
The woman on the desk welcomes us in; she seems delighted to have some company.
‘Hardly any one comes in this weather. We had a few yesterday. I was here when that film star came in. That dreadful animal jumping up, claws on the desk, barking … une vraie horreur. She actually tried to drag it into the spa with her! Can you imagine? In the end I had to arrange for a member of staff to take it back to the hotel for her.’
‘She wasn’t much better in the spa!’ Mrs Bantry says.
‘Keeping the hammam all to herself! One wonders if these people get so used to being fêted they actually think everyone else is beneath them. I’m not sure I’ll read those magazines at the hairdressers any more— Oh!
’ She suddenly looks rather thrilled at the entrance of five nuns, who move quickly into the depths of the spa.
‘Some of the most demanding spa guests,’ the woman tells us, sotto voce. ‘They all want very much to know if the water we offer is really sacred.’
Miss Marple eschews the hammam and indeed the Finnish sauna for the solarium, which has several comfortable seats arranged around a central open fire and large windows offering a stunning view of the glacier through a veil of steadily falling snow.
It also has the advantage of requiring no removal of clothing and no sweat; somehow, I cannot imagine Miss Marple wanting to sit in the sauna in nothing more than a towel.
The nuns must be using one of the other rooms.
Miss Marple gives Mrs Bantry a quick précis of the interviews. I notice that she has not missed a single detail – and has remembered, in fact, a few that I had forgotten.
‘So, what do you think?’ Mrs Bantry asks us.
‘Judging by the scene in the restaurant last night, I might have put my money on Mrs Narracott, but it couldn’t have been her unless she tampered with the flask in some way in the room before Narracott had it filled up, and that doesn’t seem very likely if they washed it out.
And relations between husband and wife can be very misleading.
If you’d caught me on the wrong morning you might have been convinced I was only minutes away from murdering Arthur.
But of course I loved him very much, even if he could be maddening at times.
’ She stares for a moment out at the mountains, her eyes a little misty. ‘Where was I?’
‘The interviews,’ I supply, gently.
‘Oh yes …’
‘Then there’s the actress,’ I say, giving Mrs Bantry some more time to collect herself. ‘She had a motive to kill Narracott, if she was really about to be thrown over by him as the wife claims.’
‘And the bruising about her neck,’ Miss Marple says.
I turn to her in surprise.
‘Hidden fairly well by her scarf,’ Miss Marple continues, ‘but definitely there. A couple of days old, I would say, from the colour. I noticed it last night at dinner, too: she’d used make-up to disguise it, I think, but bruising is so difficult to conceal.
Any attempt only seems to make it stand out more. ’
‘I wonder,’ Mrs Bantry says, ‘could she have asked a member of staff to place the poison in the flask for her? Telling them, oh, I don’t know, that it was medicine or something? That maid, for instance, who was seen with the bundle of laundry?’
Miss Marple shakes her head. ‘In my experience any domestic would have been extremely suspicious about the request in the first place and then, upon learning that it had caused a man’s death, would I’m sure have had some crisis of conscience.
I know they are Swiss, but I have spoken to a couple of the girls here and really, they are of the same type as the ones I have had under my roof.
Fundamentally honest – or certainly when it comes to something as large and terrible as murder – and on the whole happy with their lot.
They will be paid well enough in a place like the Grand Alpine; even a large bribe would not be worth such a risk.
They also like to gossip. So, if one had been acting strangely, or guiltily, we would have heard of it already. No, I don’t believe it.’
‘The young doctor?’ Mrs Bantry says. ‘I think you hit on something there, Jane! That he could have been blackmailing Narracott. I don’t think it could have been anything to do with inheritance, because he was illegitimate.’
‘No,’ says Miss Marple. ‘If Anthony Narracott died intestate – young men in the prime of health often fail to leave wills – I believe that legitimate offspring are favoured over a spouse but illegitimate children tend to be left out in the cold. Otherwise, a certain parishioner of St Mary Mead would have left very little indeed to his young widow. Eight was it, Dolly?’
‘Rumoured to be nine, I think, Jane.’
‘I was thinking,’ I say, ‘that there’s another possibility.
I know there’s a physical resemblance there, but could it even just be something he made up – being Narracott’s son, I mean?
To explain why he was following Narracott everywhere, accosting him?
But actually it was for some other reason.
It’s the problem with being stuck here like this …
there’s no way of properly checking any background detail someone gives about themself. ’
Mrs Bantry likes this. ‘It could be a cover! He could be an agent for the enemy. That sort of thing often happened in the books Arthur liked to read – Eric Ambler and such. His medical bag, full of lethal poisons—’
‘It’s certainly possible,’ Miss Marple says.
‘But I think there was real emotion there, real hurt, when he told us about his mother. I for one believe that he is Narracott’s son.
But I think you have touched on something important there, Diana.
We are in a snowbound hotel in the middle of a foreign country.
It isn’t like an English village where everyone knows everyone else – an English village of the past, I should say, because even in our villages that aspect is being lost. So, I think it is worth remembering that not everyone here may be exactly what they seem. ’
She looks at me earnestly for a moment, before Mrs Bantry says, ‘So who does that leave us? Within Narracott’s circle?’
‘Bruno Crane,’ Miss Marple says. ‘He certainly seemed to have no love for his so-called friend. Did you hear the coldness with which he spoke of him? Even after the man’s death, he couldn’t bring himself to pretend. I don’t think it can have been friendship that bound those two together.’
‘So you think that he did it?’
‘I think that there is a great deal he is keeping from us,’ Miss Marple says. ‘Whether or not he is a killer is another question. All that talk of enemies … he seemed genuinely fearful.’
‘I think he has it in him to kill,’ I say, ‘from what we saw in Catherine Narracott’s room, and from what I saw today on the train, I mean.’
‘I think you’re probably right, my dear,’ Miss Marple says. ‘But whether he could have pulled it off is another matter. This was something that took some planning and forethought.’
‘Do you have anyone else in mind, then?’ I ask her.
But Miss Marple only smiles, enigmatically.
‘Oh, only a few wild ideas and vague suppositions that I’m sure would all seem very foolish, were I to say them aloud.
Sometimes one has a premonition of something and it grows and grows – rather like a snowball rolling down a hill.
There are things that don’t quite fit. It is true that I am not a real detective, so I have to rely on a kind of intuition about these things, and sometimes that takes time.
But I do think it likely that there is something or someone else we are not considering.
Someone who is not what they seem … or something that seems almost beyond notice. ’
‘Speaking of detectives, isn’t Inspector Moreau divine?’ says Mrs Bantry, wistfully. ‘Wouldn’t it be wonderful to have a son, or indeed a nephew, like him?’
‘But I have dear Raymond, of course,’ Miss Marple says, with a note of gentle reproach. ‘And he has always been so kind to me.’
‘Ye?es,’ says Mrs Bantry, ‘I suppose he has, in his way.’ She sends a look in my direction that lets me know, instantly, that she does not count herself among Raymond’s foremost admirers.
‘What about you, Diana?’ Mrs Bantry says. ‘Don’t you think Inspector Moreau is divine?’
‘Oh …’ I say, feeling put on the spot. ‘He certainly seems very … capable.’
‘What are you looking at, Jane?’ Mrs Bantry asks, because Miss Marple is staring out of the window. ‘What have you seen?’
Almost dreamily, Miss Marple answers: ‘Oh, I was thinking of the glacier. All that ice. Hidden by a covering of snow, so that, at present, it seems like any other part of the mountain, unless you know it is there – hiding in plain sight, moving inexorably downwards. A powerful, even dangerous force. Working away secretly, all the time.’