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‘I feel rather out of this,’ said Sir Henry. ‘I feel sure that Mr Petherick has some clever legal legerdemain up his sleeve.’
‘Not at all,’ said Mr Petherick. ‘Not at all. It is a perfectly fair straightforward proposition. You must not pay any attention to Miss Marple. She has her own way of looking at things.’
‘We should be able to arrive at the truth,’ said Raymond West a trifle vexedly. ‘The facts certainly seem plain enough. Five persons actually touched that envelope. The Spraggs clearly could have meddled with it but equally clearly they did not do so. There remains the other three. Now, when one sees the marvellous ways that conjurers have of doing a thing before one’s eyes, it seems to me that the paper could have been extracted and another substituted by George Clode during the time he was carrying the overcoat to the far end of the room.’
‘Well, I think it was the girl,’ said Joyce. ‘I think the housemaid ran down and told her what was happening and she got hold of another blue envelope and just substituted the one for the other.’
Sir Henry shook his head. ‘I disagree with you both,’ he said slowly. ‘These sort of things are done by conjurers, and they are done on the stage and in novels, but I think they would be impossible to do in real life, especially under the shrewd eyes of a man like my friend Mr Petherick here. But I have an idea – it is only an idea and nothing more. We know that Professor Longman had just been down for a visit and that he said very little. It is only reasonable to suppose that the Spraggs may have been very anxious as to the result of that visit. If Simon Clode did not take them into his confidence, which is quite probable, they may have viewed his sending for Mr Petherick from quite another angle. They may have believed that Mr Clode had already made a will which benefited Eurydice Spragg and that this new one might be made for the express purpose of cutting her out as a result of Professor Longman’s revelations, or alternatively, as you lawyers say, Philip Garrod had impressed on his uncle the claims of his own flesh and blood. In that case, suppose Mrs Spragg prepared to effect a substitution. This she does, but Mr Petherick coming in at an unfortunate moment she had no time to read the real document and hastily destroys it by fire in case the lawyer should discover his loss.’
Joyce shook her head very decidedly. ‘She would never burn it without reading it.’
‘The solution is rather a weak one,’ admitted Sir Henry. ‘I suppose – er – Mr Petherick did not assist Providence himself.’
The suggestion was only a laughing one, but the little lawyer drew himself up in offended dignity.
‘A most improper suggestion,’ he said with some asperity.
‘What does Dr Pender say?’ asked Sir Henry.
‘I cannot say I have any very clear ideas. I think the substitution must have been effected by either Mrs Spragg or her husband, possibly for the motive that Sir Henry suggests. If she did not read the will until after Mr Petherick had departed, she would then be in somewhat of a dilemma, since she could not own up to her action in the matter. Possibly she would place it among Mr Clode’s papers where she thought it would be found after his death. But why it wasn’t found I don’t know. It might be a mere speculation this – that Emma Gaunt came across it – and out of misplaced devotion to her employers – deliberately destroyed it.’
‘I think Dr Pender’s solution is the best of all,’ said Joyce. ‘Is it right, Mr Petherick?’
The lawyer shook his head. ‘I will go on where I left off. I was dumbfounded and quite as much at sea as all of you are. I don’t think I should ever have guessed the truth – probably not – but I was enlightened. It was cleverly done too.
‘I went and dined with Philip Garrod about a month later and in the course of our after-dinner conversation he mentioned an interesting case that had recently come to his notice.’
‘“I should like to tell you about it, Petherick, in confidence, of course.”
‘“Quite so,” I replied.
‘“A friend of mine who had expectations from one of his relatives was greatly distressed to find that that relative had thoughts of benefiting a totally unworthy person. My friend, I am afraid, is a trifle unscrupulous in his methods. There was a maid in the house who was greatly devoted to the interests of what I may call the legitimate party. My friend gave her very simple instructions. He gave her a fountain pen, duly filled. She was to place this in a drawer in the writing table in her master’s room, but not the usual drawer where the pen was generally kept. If her master asked her to witness his signature to any document and asked her to bring him his pen, she was to bring him not the right one, but this one which was an exact duplicate of it. That was all she had to do. He gave her no other information. She was a devoted creature and she carried out his instructions faithfully.”
‘He broke off and said: ‘“I hope I am not boring you, Petherick.”
‘“Not at all,” I said. “I am keenly interested.” ‘Our eyes met. ‘“My friend is, of course, not known to you,” he said. ‘“Of course not,” I replied. ‘“Then that is all right,” said Philip Garrod. ‘He paused then said smilingly, “You see the point? The pen was filled with what is commonly known as Evanescent Ink – a solution of starch in water to which a few drops of iodine has been added. This makes a deep blue-black fluid, but the writing disappears entirely in four or five days.”’
Miss Marple chuckled.
‘Disappearing ink,’ she said. ‘I know it. Many is the time I have played with it as a child.’
And she beamed round on them all, pausing to shake a finger once more at Mr Petherick.
‘But all the same it’s a catch, Mr Petherick,’ she said. ‘Just like a lawyer.’
Chapter 28
The Thumb Mark of St Peter
‘The Thum
b Mark of St Peter’ was first published in Royal Magazine, May 1928, and in the USA as ‘The Thumb-Mark of St Peter’ in
Detective Story Magazine, 7 July 1928.
‘And now, Aunt Jane, it is up to you,’ said Raymond West.
‘Yes, Aunt Jane, we are expecting something really spicy,’ chimed in Joyce Lemprière.
‘Now, you are laughing at me, my dears,’ said Miss Marple placidly. ‘You think that because I have lived in this out-of-the-way spot all my life I am not likely to have had any very interesting experiences.’
‘God forbid that I should ever regard village life as peaceful and uneventful,’ said Raymond with fervour. ‘Not after the horrible revelations we have heard from you! The cosmopolitan world seems a mild and peaceful place compared with St Mary Mead.’
‘Well, my dear,’ said Miss Marple, ‘human nature is much the same everywhere, and, of course, one has opportunities of observing it at close quarters in a village.’
‘You really are unique, Aunt Jane,’ cried Joyce. ‘I hope you don’t mind me calling you Aunt Jane?’ she added. ‘I don’t know why I do it.’
‘Don’t you, my dear?’ said Miss Marple.
She looked up for a moment or two with something quizzical in her glance, which made the blood flame to the girl’s cheeks. Raymond West fidgeted and cleared his throat in a somewhat embarrassed manner.
Miss Marple looked at them both and smiled again, and bent her attention once more to her knitting.
‘It is true, of course, that I have lived what is called a very uneventful life, but I have had a lot of experience in solving different little problems that have arisen. Some of them have been really quite ingenious, but it would be no good telling them to you, because they are about such unimportant things that you would not be interested – just things like: Who cut the meshes of Mrs Jones’s string bag? and why Mrs Sims only wore her new fur coat once. Very interesting things, really, to any student of human nature. No, the only experience I can remember that would be of interest to you is the one about my poor niece Mabel’s husband.
