The Thirteen Problems by Agatha Christie Read Free Book Online Page B

was in pain, and awake most of the night, and that she would certainly have heard the lorry, it being an unusual noise, and the night being very quiet after the storm.’
    ‘H’m,’ said the clergyman, ‘that is certainly an additional fact. Had Kelvin himself any alibi?’
    ‘He declared that he was at home and in bed from ten o’clock onwards, but he could produce no witnesses in support of that statement.’
    ‘The nurse went to sleep,’ said Joyce, ‘and so did the patient. Ill people always think they have never slept a wink all night.’
    Raymond West looked inquiringly at Dr Pender.
    ‘Do you know, I feel very sorry for that man Kelvin. It seems to me very much a case of “Give a dog a badname.” Kelvin had been in prison. Apart from the tyre mark, which certainly seems too remarkable to be coincidence, there doesn’t seem to be much against him except his unfortunate record.’
    ‘You, Sir Henry?’
    Sir Henry shook his head.
    ‘As it happens,’ he said, smiling, ‘I know something about this case. So clearly I mustn’t speak.’
    ‘Well, go on, Aunt Jane; haven’t you got anything to say?’
    ‘In a minute, dear,’ said Miss Marple. ‘I am afraid I have counted wrong. Two purl, three plain, slip one, two purl—yes, that’s right. What did you say, dear?’
    ‘What is your opinion?’
    ‘You wouldn’t like my opinion, dear. Young people never do, I notice. It is better to say nothing.’
    ‘Nonsense, Aunt Jane; out with it.’
    ‘Well, dear Raymond,’ said Miss Marple, laying down her knitting and looking across at her nephew. ‘I do think you should be more careful how you choose your friends. You are so credulous, dear, so easily gulled. I suppose it is being a writer and having so much imagination. All that story about a Spanish galleon! If you were older and had more experience of life you would have been on your guard at once. A man you had known only a few weeks, too!’
    Sir Henry suddenly gave vent to a great roar of laughter and slapped his knee.
    ‘Got you this time, Raymond,’ he said. ‘Miss Marple, you are wonderful. Your friend Newman, my boy, has another name—several other names in fact. At the present moment he is not in Cornwall but in Devonshire—Dartmoor, to be exact—a convict in Princetown prison. We didn’t catch him over the stolen bullion business, but over the rifling of the strongroom of one of the London banks. Then we looked up his past record and we found a good portion of the gold stolen buried in the garden at Pol House. It was rather a neat idea. All along that Cornish coast there are stories of wrecked galleons full of gold. It accounted for the diver and it would account later for the gold. But a scapegoat was needed, and Kelvin was ideal for the purpose. Newman played his little comedy very well, and our friend Raymond, with his celebrity as a writer, made an unimpeachable witness.’
    ‘But the tyre mark?’ objected Joyce.
    ‘Oh, I saw that at once, dear, although I know nothing about motors,’ said Miss Marple. ‘People change a wheel, you know—I have often seen them doing it—and, of course, they could take a wheel off Kelvin’s lorry and take it out through the small door into the alley and put it on to Mr Newman’s lorry and take the lorry out of one gate down to the beach, fillit up with the gold and bring it up through the other gate, and then they must have taken the wheel back and put it back on Mr Kelvin’s lorry while, I suppose, someone else was tying up Mr Newman in a ditch. Very uncomfortable for him and probably longer before he was found than he expected. I suppose the man who called himself the gardener attended to that side of the business.’
    ‘Why do you say, “called himself the gardener,” Aunt Jane?’ asked Raymond curiously.
    ‘Well, he can’t have been a real gardener, can he?’ said Miss Marple. ‘Gardeners don’t work on Whit Monday. Everybody knows that.’
    She smiled and folded up her