4:50 from Paddington - Chapter 27

Chapter twenty seven

‘So you see,’ said Miss Marple, ‘it really was very, very simple. So many men seem to murder their wives.’

Mrs McGillicuddy looked at Miss Marple and Inspector Craddock. ‘Please explain it all to me.’

‘He saw his chance, you see,’ said Miss Marple, ‘of having a rich wife, Emma Crackenthorpe. But he couldn’t marry her because he had a wife already. They had been separated for years but she wouldn’t divorce him. That fitted very well with what Inspector Craddock told me of a girl called Anna Stravinska. She had an English husband and she was a Catholic.

‘So Dr Quimper decided to kill her. The idea of murdering her in the train and later putting her body in the sarcophagus was rather a clever one, because it would involve the Crackenthorpe family. Before that he had written a letter to Emma which said it was from Martine. Emma had told Dr Quimper all about her brother, you see. Then he encouraged her to go to the police with her story as he wanted the dead woman to be identified as Martine. I think he may have heard that inquiries were being made by the Paris police about Anna Stravinska, so he arranged to have a postcard come from her from Jamaica.

‘It was easy for him to meet his wife in London, to tell her that he hoped they could be together again and that he would like her to come and “meet his family”. We won’t talk about the next part of it, which is very unpleasant. Of course all he wanted was money, so perhaps he had already thought about murdering the brothers before he decided to murder his wife. Anyway, he started the idea that someone was trying to poison old Mr Crackenthorpe, to prepare for his other crimes. And then he gave arsenic to the whole family. Not too much, of course, because he didn’t want old Mr Crackenthorpe to die.’

‘But I still don’t see how he did that,’ said Craddock. ‘He wasn’t in the house when the curry was being prepared.’

‘Oh, but there wasn’t any arsenic in the curry then,’ said Miss Marple. ‘He added it to the curry afterwards when he took it away to be tested. He probably put the arsenic in the cocktail jug earlier. Then, of course, it was easy for him, as a doctor, to poison Alfred Crackenthorpe and also to send the pills to Harold in London. Everything he did was planned and selfish and cruel.’

‘I agree,’ said Inspector Craddock.

‘But I thought,’ continued Miss Marple, ‘that if Elspeth could see Dr Quimper in exactly the same position as she had seen him in the train, with his back to her, bent over a woman he was holding by the throat, then she would recognize him. That is why I had to prepare my little plan with Lucy’s help.’

‘I must say,’ said Mrs McGillicuddy, ‘it did give me a shock. I said, “That’s him” before I could stop myself. Yet I hadn’t in fact seen the man’s face and…’

‘I was afraid that you were going to say so, Elspeth,’ said Miss Marple. ‘And that would have been awful. Because he thought you really did recognize him. I mean, he couldn’t know that you hadn’t seen his face.’

‘A good thing I said nothing then,’ said Mrs McGillicuddy.

‘I wasn’t going to let you say another word,’ said Miss Marple. Craddock laughed. ‘So, Miss Marple, what is the happy ending? What happens to poor Emma Crackenthorpe?’

‘She’ll soon forget the doctor, and perhaps go off on a holiday and meet someone else. A nicer man than Dr Quimper, I hope.’

‘What about Lucy Eyelesbarrow? A wedding there, too?’

‘Perhaps,’ said Miss Marple.

‘Which of all the men is she going to choose?’ said Dermot Craddock.

‘Don’t you know?’ said Miss Marple.

‘No, I don’t,’ said Craddock. ‘Do you?’

‘Oh, yes, I think so,’ said Miss Marple. And she smiled at him.