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  The stories appearing in this volume have all been previously published in

  the following books by Agatha Christie: The Tuesday Club Murders, The Regatta

  Mystery and Other Stories, Three Blind Mice and Other Stories and Double

  Sin and Other Stories

  Copyright © 1985 by Agatha Christie Limited

  CONTENTS

  FROM THE TUESDAY CLUB MURDERS

  The Tuesday Night Club 3

  The Idol House of Astarte

  17

  Ingots of Gold 33

  The Bloodstained Pavement

  47

  Motive v. Opportunity

  58

  The Thumbmark of St. Peter

  72

  The Blue Geranium

  87

  The Companion 105

  The Four Suspects

  125

  A Christmas Tragedy

  142

  The Herb of Death

  162

  The Affair at the Bungalow 179

  Death by Drowning

  197

  FROM THE REGATTA MYSTERY Miss Marple Tells a Story 221

  vi CONTENTS

  FROM THREE BLIND MICE

  Strange Jest 235 The Case of the Perfect Maid

  The Case of the Caretaker

  Tape-Measure Murder 279

  FROM DOUBLE SIN

  Greenshaw's Folly 297

  Sanctuary 324

  THE

  TUESDAY

  CLUB

  MURDERS

  The Tuesday Night Club

  "Unsolved Mysteries."

  Raymond West blew out a cloud of smoke and repeated the words with a kind of deliberate self-conscious

  pleasure.

  "Unsolved mysteries."

  He looked round him with satisfaction. The room was an old one with broad black beams across the ceiling and it was

  furnished with good old furniture that belonged to it.

  Hence Raymond West's approving glance. By profession he

  was a writer and he liked the atmosphere to be flawless. His

  Aunt Jane's house always pleased him as the right setting for

  her personality. He looked across the hearth to where she sat

  erect in the big grandfather chair. Miss Marple wore a black brocade dress, very much pinched in round the waist. Mech-lin

  lace was arranged in a cascade down the front of the bodice.

  She had on black lace mittens, and a black lace cap

  surmounted the piled-up masses of her snowy hair. She was

  knitting--something white and soft and fleecy. Her faded

  blue eyes, benignant and kindly, surveyed her nephew and

  her nephew's guests with gentle pleasure. They rested first

  on Raymond himself, self-consciously debonair, then on

  Joyce Lemprire, the artist, with her close-cropped black

  head and queer hazel-green eyes, then on that well-groomed

  4 MISS MA RPLE

  man of the world, Sir Henry Clithering. There were two other people in the room, Dr. Pen&r, the elderly clergyman

  of the parish, and Mr. Petherick, the solicitor, a dried-up little

  man with eyeglasses which he looked over and not

  through. Miss Marple gave a brief moment of attention to

  all these people and returned to her knitting with a gentle

  smile upon her lips.

  Mr. Petherick gave the dry little cough with which he usually prefaced his remarks.

  "What is that you say, Raymond? Unsolved mysteries? Ha--and what about them?"

  "Nothing about them," said Joyce Lemprire. "Raymond just likes the sound of the words and of himself saying

  them."

  Raymond West threw her a glance of reproach at which she threw back her head and laughed.

  "He is a humbug, isn't he, Miss Marple?" she demanded. "You know that, I am sure."

  Miss Marple smiled gently at her but made no reply.

  "Life itself is an unsolved mystery," said the clergyman gravely.

  Raymond sat up in his chair and flung away his cigarette with an impulsive gesture.

  "That's not what I mean. I was not talking philosophy," he said. "I was thinking of actual bare prosaic facts, things

  that have happened and that no one has ever explained."

  "I know just the sort of thing you mean, dear," said Miss Marple. "For instance Mrs. Carruthers had a very strange experience

  yesterday morning. She bought two gills of pickled

  shrimps at Elliot's. She called at two other shops and when

  she got home she found she had not got the shrimps with

  her. She went back to the two shops she had visited but

  these shrimps had completely disappeared. Now that seems

  to me very remarkable."

  THE TUESDAY NIGHT CLUB 5

  "A very fishy story," said Sir Henry Clithering gravely. "There are, of course, all kinds of possible explanations,"

  said Miss Marple, her cheeks growing slightly pinker with

  excitement. "For instance, somebody else--"

  "My dear Aunt," said Raymond West with some amusement, "I didn't mean that sort of village incident. I was

  thinking of murders and disappearances--the kind of thing

  that Sir Henry could tell us about by the hour if he liked."

  "But I never talk shop," said Sir Henry modestly. "No, I never talk shop."

  Sir Henry Clithering had been until lately Commissioner of Scotland Yard.

  "I suppose there are a lot of murders and things that never are solved by the police," said Joyce Lemprire.

  "That is an admitted fact, I believe," said Mr. Petherick.

  "I wonder," said Raymond West, "what class of brain

  really succeeds best in unravelling a mystery? One always

  feels that the average police detective must be hampered by

  lack of imagination."

  "That is the layman's point of view," said Sir Henry drily. "You really want a committee," said Joyce, smiling. "For

  psychology and imagination go to the writer--"

  She made an ironical bow to Raymond but he remained serious.

  "The art of writing gives one an insight into human nature,'' he said gravely. "One sees, perhaps, motives that the

  ordinary person would pass by."

  "I know, dear," said Miss Marple, "that your books are very clever. But do you think that people are really so unpleasant

  as you make them out to be?"

  "My dear Aunt," said Raymond gently, "keep your beliefs. Heaven forbid that I should in any way shatter them."

  "I mean," said Miss Marple, puckering her brow a little as she counted the stitches in her knitting, "that so many peo-

  6 MISS MARPLE

  ple seem to me not to be either bad or good, but simply you know, very silly."

  Mr. Petherick gave his dry little cough again.

  "Don't you think, Raymond," he said, "that you attach too much weight to imagination? Imagination is a very dangerous

  thing, as we lawyers know only too well. To be able

  to sift evidence impartially, to take the facts and look at

  them as facts--that seems to me the only logical method of

  arriving at the truth. I may add that in my experience it is

  the only one that succeeds."

  "Bah!" cried Joyce, flinging back her black head indignantly. "I bet I could beat you all at this game. I am not

  only a woman--and say what you like, women have an intuition

  that is denied to men--
I am an artist as well. I see

  things that you don't. And then, too, as an artist I have

  knocked about among all sorts and conditions of people. I

  know life as darling Miss Marple here cannot possibly know

  it."

  "I don't know about that, dear," said Miss Marple. "Very painful and distressing things happen in villages sometimes."

  "May I speak?" said Dr. Pender smiling. "It is the fashion nowadays to decry the clergy, I know, but we hear things,

  we know a side of human character which is a sealed book to

  the outside world."

  "Well," said Joyce, "it seems to me we are a pretty representative gathering. How would it be if we formed a Club?

  What is today? Tuesday? We will call it The Tuesday Night

  Club. It is to meet every week, and each member in turn has

  to propound a problem. Some mystery of which they have

  personal knowledge, and to which, of course, they know the

  answer. Let me see, how many are we? One, two, three, four,

  five. We ought really to be six."

  "You have forgotten me, dear," said Miss Marple, smiling brightly.

  · THE TUESDAY NIGHT CLUB

  '7

  Joyce was slightly taken aback, but she concealed the fact

  quickly.

  "That would be lovely, Miss Marple," she said. "I didn't think you would care to play."

  "I think it would be very interesting," said Miss Marple, "especially with so many clever gentlemen present. I am

  afraid I am not clever myself, but living all these years in St.

  Mary Mead does give one an insight into human nature."

  "I am sure your cooperation will be very valuable," said Sir Henry, courteously.

  "Who is going to start?" said Joyce.

  "I think there is no doubt as to that," said Dr. Pender, "when we have the great good fortune to have such a distinguished

  man as Sir Henry staying with us"

  He left his sentence unfinished, making a courtly bow in the direction of Sir Henry.

  The latter was silent for a minute or two. At last he sighed and recrossed his legs and began:

  "It is a little difficult for me to select just the kind of thing you want, but I think, as it happens, I know of an instance

  which fits these conditions very aptly. You may have

  seen some mention of the case in the papers of a year ago. It

  was laid aside at the time as an unsolved mystery, but, as it

  happens, the solution came into my hands not very many

  days ago.

  "The facts are very simple. Three people sat down to a supper consisting, amongst other things, of tinned lobster.

  Later in the night, all three were taken ill, and a doctor was

  hastily summoned. Two of the people recovered, the third

  one died."

  "Ah!" said Raymond approvingly.

  "As I say, the facts as such were very simple. Death was considered to be due to ptomaine poisoning, a certificate was

  given to that effect, and the victim was duly buried. But

  things did not rest at that."

  8 MISS MAR PLE

  Miss Marple nodded her head.

  "There was talk, I suppose," she said, "there csually is." "And now I must describe the actors in this littl151¢ drama. I

  will call the husband and wife Mr. and Mrs. Jon es, and the

  wife's companion Miss Clark. Mr. Jones was a trasveller for a

  firm of manufacturing chemists. He was a good-looJ°king man

  in a kind of coarse, florid way, aged about fifty. Hiis wife was

  a rather commonplace woman, of about forty-five,"' The companion,

  Miss Clark, was a woman of sixty, a sr5°ur cheery

  woman with a beaming rubicund face. None of ' them, you

  might say, very interesting.

  "Now the beginning of the troubles arose in very curious way. Mr. Jones had been staying the previous6 night at a

  small commercial hotel in Birmingham. It hap."Pened that the blotting paper in the blotting book had beenlno-r'ut intfr'esh

  that day, and the chambermaid, having apparenty nlng

  better to do, amused herself by studying the blc?tter in the

  mirror just after Mr. Jones had been writing a letrer there. A

  few days later there was a report in the papers of t/he death of

  Mrs. Jones as the result of eating tinned lobster' and the

  chambermaid then imparted to her fellow servant s the words

  that she had deciphered on the blotting pad. TIey were as

  follows: 'Entirely dependent on my wife ... v,/hen she is

  dead I will ... hundreds and thousands ...'

  You may remember that there had recently b n a ca.s.e of a wife being poisoned by her husband. It needed very little

  to fire the imagination of these maids. Mr. Jones had

  planned to do away with his wife and inherit undreds of

  thousands of pounds! As it happened one of thdr maids had

  relations living in the small market town where the Joneses

  resided. She wrote to them, and they in return vd'rote to her.

  Mr. Jones, it seemed, had been very attentive {o the local

  d '

  octor s daughter, a good-looking young woman of thirty-

  three. Scandal began to hum. The Home Secret0'fy was peri-

  THE TUESDAY NIGHT CLUB

  9 tioned. Numerous anonymous letters poured into Scotland

  Yard all accusing Mr. Jones of having murdered his wife. Now I may say that not for one moment did we think there

  was anything in it except idle village talk and gossip. Nevertheless,

  to quiet public opinion an exhumation order was

  granted. It was one of these cases of popular superstition

  based on nothing solid whatever, which proved to be so surprisingly

  justified. As a result of the autopsy sufficient arsenic

  was found to make it quite clear that the deceased lady had

  died of arsenical poisoning. It was for Scotland Yard working

  with the local authorities to prove how that arsenic had

  been administered, and by whom."

  "Ah!" said Joyce. "I like this. This is the real stuff."

  uspcon naturally fell on the husband. He benefited by his wife's death. Not to the extent of the hundreds of thousands

  romantically imagined by the hotel chambermaid, but

  to the very solid amount of.Cs000. He had no money of his

  own apart from what he earned, and he was a man of somewhat

  extravagant habits with a partiality for the society of

  women. We investigated as ddicately as possible the rumour

  of his attachment to the doctor's daughter; but while it

  seemed clear that there had been a strong friendship between

  them at one time, there had been a most abrupt break two

  months previously, and they did not appear to have seen

  each other since. The doctor himself, an elderly man of a

  straightforward and unsuspicious type, was dumbfounded at

  the result of the autopsy. He had been called in about midnight

  to find all three people suffering. He had realized immediately

  the serious condition of Mrs. Jones, and had sent

  back to his dispensary for some opium piJls, to allay the pain.

  In spite of all his efforts, however, she succumbed, but not

  for a moment did he suspect that anything was amiss. He

  Was Convinced that her death was due to a form of botulism.

  Supper that night had consisted of tinned lobster and salad,

  Io MISS MARPLE

  trifle and bread and cheese. Unfortunately none of the lobster remained--it had all been eaten and the tin thrown

  away. He had interrogat
ed the young maid, Gladys Linch.

  She was terribly upset, very tearful and agitated, and he

  found it hard to get her to keep to the point, but she declared

  again and again that the tin had not been distended in

  any way and that the lobster had appeared to her in a perfectly

  good condition.

  "Such were the facts we had to go upon. If Jones had feloniously administered arsenic to his wife, it seemed clear

  that it could not have been done in any of the things eaten

  at supper, as all three persons had partaken of the meal.

  Also--another point--Jones himself had returned from Birmingham

  just as supper was being brought in to table, so

  that he would have had no opportunity of doctoring any of

  the food beforehand."

  "What about the companion," asked Joyce--"the stout

  woman with the good-humoured face?"

  Sir Henry nodded.

  "We did not neglect Miss Clark, I can assure you. But it seemed doubtful what motive she could have had for the

  crime. Mrs. Jones left her no legacy of any kind and the net

  result of her employer's death was that she had to seek for

  another situation."

  "That seems to leave her out of it," said Joyce thoughtfully.

  "Now one of my inspectors soon discovered a significant fact," went on Sir Henry. "After supper on that evening Mr.

  Jones had gone down to the kitchen and had demanded

  a bowl of corn-flour for his wife, who had complained of

  not feeling well. He had waited in the kitchen until

  Gladys Linch prepared it, and then carried it up to his

  wife's room himself. That, I admit, seemed to clinch the

  case."

  THE TUESDAY NIGHT CLUB I I

  The lawyer nodded.

  "Motive," he said, ticking the point off on his fingers. "Opportunity. As a traveller for a firm of druggists, easy access