The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding

‘Aunt Jane, you're looking very serious.’

‘Was I, my dear? Have you heard any more about the policeman?’

Lou looked bewildered. ‘I don't know anything about a policeman.’

‘That remark of hers, my dear,’ said Miss Marple, ‘must have meant something.’

Lou arrived at her work the next day in a cheerful mood. She passed through the open front door — the doors and windows of the house were always open. Miss Greenshaw appeared to have no fear of burglars, and was probably justified, as most things in the house weighed several tons and were of no marketable value.

Lou had passed Alfred in the drive. When she first caught sight him he had been leaning against a tree smoking a cigarette, but as soon as he had caught sight of her he had seized a broom and begun diligently to sweep leaves. An idle young man, she thought, but good-looking. His features reminded her of someone. As she passed through the hall on the way upstairs to the library she glanced at the large picture of Nathaniel Greenshaw which presided over the mantelpiece, showing him in the acme of Victorian prosperity, leaning back in a large arm-chair, his hands resting on the gold albert across his capacious stomach. As her glance swept up from the stomach to the face with its heavy jowls, its bushy eyebrows and its flourishing black moustache, the thought occurred to her that Nathaniel Greenshaw must have been handsome as a young man. He had looked, perhaps, a little like Alfred…

She went into the library on the second floor, shut the door behind her, opened her typewriter and got out the diaries from the drawer at the side of the desk. Through the open window she caught a glimpse of Miss Greenshaw in a puce-coloured sprigged print, bending over the rockery, weeding assiduously. They had had two wet days, of which the weeds had taken full advantage.

Lou, a town-bred girl, decided that if she ever had a garden it would never contain a rockery which needed hand weeding. Then she settled down to her work.

When Mrs Cresswell entered the library with the coffee tray at half-past eleven, she was clearly in a very bad temper. She banged the tray down on the table and observed to the universe.

‘Company for lunch — and nothing in the house! What am I supposed to do, I should like to know? And no sign of Alfred.’

‘He was sweeping in the drive when I got here,’ Lou offered.

‘I daresay. A nice soft job.’

Mrs Cresswell swept out of the room and banged the door behind her. Lou grinned to herself. She wondered what ‘the nephew’ would be like.

She finished her coffee and settled down to her work again. It was so absorbing that time passed quickly. Nathaniel Greenshaw, when he started to keep a diary, had succumbed to the pleasure of frankness. Typing out a passage relating to the personal charms of a barmaid in the neighbouring town, Lou reflected that a good deal of editing would be necessary.

As she was thinking this, she was startled by the scream from the garden. Jumping up, she ran to the open window. Miss Greenshaw was staggering away from the rockery towards the house. Her hands were clasped to her breast and between them there protruded a feathered shaft that Lou recognized with stupefaction to be the shaft of an arrow.

Miss Greenshaw's head, in its battered straw hat, fell forward on her breast. She called up to Lou in a failing voice: ‘… shot… he shot me… with an arrow… get help…’

Lou rushed to the door. She turned the handle, but the door would not open. It took her a moment or two of futile endeavour to realize that she was locked in. She rushed back to the window.

‘I'm locked in!’

Miss Greenshaw, her back towards Lou, and swaying a little on her feet was calling up to the housekeeper at a window farther along.

‘Ring police… telephone…’

Then, lurching from side to side like a drunkard she disappeared from Lou's view through the window below into the drawing-room. A moment later Lou heard a crash of broken china, a heavy fall, and then silence. Her imagination reconstructed the scene. Miss Greenshaw must have stumbled blindly into a small table with a Sévres teaset on it.

Desperately Lou pounded on the library door, calling and shouting. There was no creeper or drain-pipe outside the window that could help her to get out that way.

Tired at last of beating on the door, she returned to the window. From the window of her sitting-room farther along, the housekeeper's head appeared.

‘Come and let me out, Mrs Oxley. I'm locked in.’

‘So am I.’

‘Oh dear, isn't it awful? I've telephoned the police. There's an extension in this room, but what I can't understand, Mrs Oxley, is our being locked in. I never heard a key turn, did you?’

‘No. I didn't hear anything at all. Oh dear, what shall we do? Perhaps Alfred might hear us.’ Lou shouted at the top of her voice, ‘Alfred, Alfred.’

‘Gone to his dinner as likely as not. What time is it?’

Lou glanced at her watch.

‘Twenty-five past twelve.’

‘He's not supposed to go until half-past, but he sneaks off earlier whenever he can.’