They Do It With Mirrors

'Never thinks of anything else,' said Miss Bellever grimly. 'Never dreams of looking after his wife or considering her in any way. She's a sweet creature, as you know, Miss Marple, and she ought to.have love and attention. But nothing's thought of or considered here except a lot of whining boys and young men who want to live easily and dishonestly and don't care about the idea of doing a little hard work. What about the decent boys from decent homes? Why isn't something done for them?

Honesty just isn't interesting to cranks like Mr Serrocold and Dr Maverick and all the bunch of half-baked sentimentalists we've got here. I and my brothers were brought up the hard way, Miss Marple, and we weren't encouraged to whine. Soft, that's what the world is nowadays?

They had crossed the garden and passed through a palisaded gate and had come to the arched gate which Eric Gulbrandsen had erected as an entrance to his College, a sturdily built, hideous, red brick building.

Dr Maverick, looking, Miss Marple decided, distinctly abnormal himself, came out to meet them.

'Thank you, Miss Believer,' he said. 'Now, Miss - er oh yes, Miss Marple - I'm sure you're going to be interested in what we're doing here. In our splendid approach to this great problem. Mr Serrocold is a man of great insight - great vision. And we've got Sir John Stillwell behind us - my old chief. He was at the Home Office until he retired and his influence turned the scales in getting this started. It's a medical problem - that's what we've got to get the legal authorities to understand.

Psychiatry came into its own in the war. The one positive good that did come out of it - Now first of all I want you to see our initial approach to the problem. Look up ' Miss Marple looked up at the words carved over the large arched doorway:

RECOVER HOPE ALL YE WHO ENTER HERE

'Isn't that splendid! Isn't that just the right note to strike. You don't want to scold these lads - or punish them. That's what they're hankering after half the time, punishment. We want to make them feel what fine fellows they are.' 'Like Edgar Lawson?' said Miss Marple.

'Interesting case, that. Have you been talking to him?' 'He has been talking to me,' said Miss Marple. She added apologetically, 'I wondered if, perhaps, he isn't a little mad?.' Dr Maverick laughed cheerfully.

'We're all mad, dear lady,' he said as he ushered her in through the door. 'That's the secret of existence. We're all a little mad.'

Chapter 6

On the whole it was rather an exhausting day.

Enthusiasm in itself can be extremely wearing, Miss Marple thought. She felt vaguely dissatisfied with herself and her own reactions. There was a pattern here perhaps several patterns, and yet she herself could obtain no clear glimpse of it or them. Any vague disquietude she felt centred round the pathetic but inconspicuous personality of Edgar Lawson. If she could only find in her memory the right parallel.

Painstakingly she rejected the curious behaviour of Mr Selkirk's delivery van - the absent-minded postman - the gardener who worked on Whit Monday - and that very curious affair of the summer weight combinations.

Something that she could not quite put her finger on was wrong about Edgar Lawson - something that went beyond the observed and admitted facts. But for the life of her, Miss Marple did not see how that wrongness, whatever it was, affected her friend Carrie Louise. In the confused patterns of life at Stonygates people's troubles and desires impinged on each other. But none of them (again as far as she could see) impinged on Carrie Louise.

Carrie Louise… Suddenly Miss Marple realized that it was she alone, except for the absent Ruth, who used that name. To her husband, she was Caroline. To Miss Believer, Cara. Stephen Restarick usually addressed her as Madonna. To Wally she was formally Mrs Serrocold, and Gina elected to address her as Grandam - a mixture, she had explained, of Grande Dame and Grandmamma.

Was there some significance, perhaps, in the various names that were found for Caroline Louise Serrocold?

Was she to all of them a symbol and not quite a real person?

When on the following morning Carrie Louise, drag-ging her feet a little as she walked, came and sat down on the garden seat beside her friend and asked her what she was thinking about, Miss Marple replied promptly: 'You, Carrie Louise.' 'What about me?'

'Tell me honestly - is there anything here that worries you?'

'Worries me?' The woman raised wondering clear blue eyes. 'But Jane, what should worry me?'

'Well, most of us have worries.' Miss Marple's eyes twinkled a little. 'I have. Slugs, you know - and the difficulty of getting linen properly darned - and not being able to get sugar candy for making my damson gin. Oh, lots of little things - it seems unnatural that you shouldn't have any worries at all.'