Diana Glass
The Help
Even before I open my door, I know that the scream must have come from Mrs Bantry’s room. I hurry into the corridor from my room, just as a maid stumbles from my employer’s. All the colour has leached from her face; her cheeks are streaked with tears.
‘Que s’est-il passé?’ I ask. ‘What happened?’
It is several minutes before I can get any sense out of her.
She is so upset that she is hyperventilating.
Finally, she is able to find her voice. In French she says: ‘Something’ ? she covers her mouth with her hand ? ‘something very terrible has happened, Madame. I went to do the room service, you know and …’ She trails off, then continues in another language, one that I don’t recognise – Romansh, I think – as though she can’t express the horror in anything but her native tongue.
‘Please,’ I say. ‘I don’t understand.’
‘Un mort,’ says the maid, finally, her face ghastly. ‘Un autre mort.’
‘Dans cette chambre?’ I ask. ‘This is my employer’s room – please, I need to go inside.’
She moves aside to let me pass. I have a moment of hesitation on the threshold as the anticipation of what awaits me inside surges in my chest. And then I step, alone, into the room. I look about me, making sure not to miss a single detail.
There is the faint sound of voices, English voices, chattering quite merrily, but the room is apparently empty, seeming to look back at me with a blank, innocent face.
Neat as a pin due to the maid’s efforts: the bed immaculately dressed in its white linen, the chair tucked in at the little dressing table, a light scent of the pine resin they must use in the cleaning products upon the air.
It is very cold in the room; my breath mists as it would outside. The balcony doors are open.
‘They were not open when I went into the room,’ the maid says, entering behind me. ‘I went out onto the balcony to let in some fresh air.’ I notice the slight nicotine staining of her teeth and wonder if this provides the explanation. ‘And because I heard the voices …’
We move out onto the balcony and it becomes apparent that this is where the voices are coming from.
A wireless radio, propped just out of sight of the room itself, has been set up on the little ironwork table, the volume turned up to full.
Two patrician English voices squawk animatedly from it: unmistakably the BBC Light Programme.
I learned during the war that it was possible, albeit dangerous, to tune in from France.
There is only one last place to look. And so we peer downwards, through the vortex of falling snow and mist. Because the hotel is built on a promontory on this side, the drop is even bigger than expected.
At first it is very difficult to make anything out.
Then the freezing mist ebbs a little, and a large shape comes into view.
A sprawled figure, arms and legs splayed at angles they could never have found in life.
He has fallen three stories onto the snow below.
It seems somehow impossible that the apparent pillowy softness should not have totally cushioned the fall and prevented the death; that instead – it is clear from the angle of the limbs – it has broken his body as surely as if he had fallen onto rock.
I find that I can’t stop looking. Which is odd, as I know that the image will already be burned into memory, as clearly as if I had taken a photograph.
‘Diana!’
I drag my eyes away and look back into the room.
‘What’s going on here?’ This spoken by Mrs Bantry, followed swiftly by Miss Marple. ‘We heard a scream, so we came back. What is it?’
‘Something’s happened,’ I say. My voice sounds oddly distant, as though I am hearing it from the end of a long tunnel. ‘Another death.’ Un autre mort.
Mrs Bantry and Miss Marple step carefully onto the balcony. They too are now able to make out the long shape of the body, the distinctive blue Alpine jumper.
‘Oh, but it can’t be …’ Mrs Bantry says. ‘Inspector Moreau … dead! I don’t believe it.’
I watch Miss Marple. In spite of everything that has happened here I think this is the first time I have seen her appear truly shocked. I might even have believed her unshockable. She frowns. ‘But I had thought …’ She trails off, apparently lost to this unspoken reverie.
‘Who would dare kill a detective?’ Mrs Bantry asks.
‘Someone very desperate,’ Miss Marple says. ‘And very wicked.’
An unnerving change has come over Miss Marple’s countenance.
The softness of her elderly features seems to dissolve and the planes of her face become harder, unforgiving.
Those faded blue eyes are suddenly as cool as steel.
I would not have believed it possible if I had not seen it myself, but an elderly lady who at times dithers and twinkles and is prone to rambling and flights of fancy, suddenly looks like the personification of some dread winged creature from an ancient myth.
She even seems to grow in stature. It sends a chill through me.
‘I suppose,’ she says, ‘he must have seen or learned something that meant the killer was prepared to take the very great risk of murdering him, too.’
‘But why was he in my room?’ Mrs Bantry asks, once we have stepped back inside and closed the doors to the balcony, as if by doing so the horror of the scene outside can be kept somewhat at bay. ‘There is so much that cannot be explained, of course, but that is the thing I keep coming back to.’
‘Well,’ Miss Marple says, frowning, ‘that at least I think is rather easy to guess. I imagine he received a message, from “me”, ostensibly. Saying I had some detail that I just had to tell him, must urgently discuss with him. A phone call, perhaps … or even a simple note. And whoever it was must have known that I would be out for some time, that the coast would be clear for them to stage their horrible plan. The problem is that so many might have known, or indeed seen us getting into the sleigh, that it really doesn’t narrow things down in any useful way …
’ She trails off, apparently lost to her thoughts.
‘Jane,’ says Mrs Bantry. ‘Oh, but it’s too awful … I think it might have been worse than all that. This might be partly my fault.’
‘What do you mean, Dolly?’
‘When I told you, before, that there had been some confusion about the sleigh ride, what I really meant was that I forgot that I had booked it. I could not for the life of me remember having done so. But I was too embarrassed to say. After the incident – losing my room key. In all honesty I suppose I was a little frightened. One hears of this happening in later life … forgetting things. Small things at first and then increasingly larger things until in the end one loses oneself entirely. I did not want to make an issue of it. I did not want to acknowledge the possibility that it might be happening to me. But now I wonder—’
‘If you never booked it in the first place,’ Miss Marple finishes.
‘Dolly, I think it highly likely that you did not.
Moreover … I do not think you ever lost your key.
It seemed odd at the time and it is now perfectly clear to me that it was stolen.
That of course explains why Inspector Moreau was called to a meeting in your room, rather than mine.
‘Somebody wanted to ensure you would not be in this room, not even in this hotel. And then I have no doubt that a message was somehow conveyed to Inspector Moreau that we needed to talk to him as a matter of greatest urgency. He came in here and heard the voices on the balcony. The voices on the radio, that is. With the balcony doors closed they would have been harder to recognise for what they were.’
Mrs Bantry nods. ‘Oh how devious, and how horrible.’ She frowns. ‘And I suppose any of the guests or anyone working at the hotel could be a suspect in this …’
‘Yes,’ says Miss Marple. ‘We saw the actress out on our sleigh ride but apart from her, I think, most others would have been here. It was devious, as you say, Dolly. And yet,’ she says, ‘there are also aspects of this that feel more hazardous than the other two crimes. Still a certain degree of planning, but with more risks taken. He was killed in this very hotel, thrown off a balcony where the whole thing might have been witnessed from outside by a guest. Unlikely, but possible. Why, you and I could have become too cold and decided to come back from our sleigh ride earlier!’
‘We nearly did just that,’ says Mrs Bantry.
‘So I think,’ says Miss Marple, ‘that this shows an element of desperation. They, like the rest of us, are trapped here, unable to escape. Diana,’ she says, suddenly, turning to me. ‘Where were you, when this occurred? You didn’t see, or hear anything odd?’
‘I was in my room,’ I say. ‘And no, I was … well, I was having a rest. I haven’t been sleeping well. I woke only a little while ago. I heard the maid’s scream and I ran here.’
‘This must be stopped,’ Miss Marple says now, ‘before it can go any further. Before they kill again. Because this is what happens—’ Now the transformation reverses, like the spell in a fairy tale wearing off, and a frail old woman stands before us once again.
In fact, she looks almost slightly frailer, as though the change cost her something.
And I see the sadness now, too, that this has hurt her, personally.
‘I have seen it before. The first killing is planned in advance. They have been clever; it is planned out. It is the only one they think will be necessary. But then they need to kill again, and again, to prevent detection … and the poison spreads. They need to be rescued from themselves.’
‘And you can do that,’ Mrs Bantry says. ‘Can’t you, Jane?’
Miss Marple nods once, grimly. ‘Yes. And they will have their just deserts.’ I feel a whisper of that same chill I felt before.
A short while later we are let into Inspector Moreau’s room on the floor above, the hotel manager putting up no fight when we request the key. Perhaps he has decided this elderly Englishwoman is now his best hope. Or perhaps, more likely, he has given up entirely in the wake of this third killing.
The air inside has a particular stillness about it.
It is not like me to be fanciful about such things, but the clothes – the jacket hanging from the back of the chair, the tough-soled boots tucked away beside the wardrobe – they somehow look like the clothes of a dead man.
Forlorn relics, never to be worn again. I swallow, my throat dry.
The photographs will be in here somewhere: I know it. There … on the little desk. I can see them laid out. Pulse quickening, I try to move around the bed towards them without looking like I am rushing, trying to block the view with my body.
‘There!’ Mrs Bantry says. ‘On the desk – look. Are those … photographs?’
My heart sinks. I can’t very well seize them and hide them now.
The three of us move towards the desk. They are spread out, a magnifying glass beside them.
Miss Marple turns to me. ‘These are your photographs, I think, Diana?’
‘Yes,’ I say, trying to keep the dismay from my voice.
‘And here,’ Mrs Bantry says. ‘Look: a note.’
Something to discuss with you as a matter of great urgency. Will you come to see me in Mrs Bantry’s room? JM.
‘So this is how the killer tricked him,’ Mrs Bantry says. ‘You were right, Jane.’
‘It is all very wicked,’ says Miss Marple. ‘And a great tragedy, that another young man has been cut off in the prime of life.’ Then her tone changes, becomes more purposeful. ‘Now I suppose we will find out who he really was.’
‘What do you mean, Jane?’ Mrs Bantry looks at her.
‘Only that he was no policeman,’ Miss Marple says. ‘Of that, at least, I am quite certain.’