4.50 From Paddington Read Online Free PDF

continual source of entertainment.
    Lucy Eyelesbarrow read and re-read the letter from Miss Marple. She had made Miss Marple's acquaintance two years ago when her services had been retained by Raymond West, the novelist, to go and look after his old aunt who was recovering from pneumonia. Lucy had accepted the job and had gone down to St. Mary Mead.
    She had liked Miss Marple very much. As for Miss Marple, once she had caught a glimpse out of her bedroom window of Lucy Eyelesbarrow really trenching for sweet peas in the proper way, she had leaned back on her pillows with a sigh of relief, eaten the tempting little meals that Lucy Eyelesbarrow brought to her, and listened, agreeably surprised, to the tales told by her elderly irascible maidservant of how “I taught that Miss Eyelesbarrow a crochet pattern what she'd never heard of! Proper grateful, she was.” And had surprised her doctor by the rapidity of her convalescence.
    Miss Marple wrote asking if Miss Eyelesbarrow could undertake a certain task for her - rather an unusual one. Perhaps Miss Eyelesbarrow could arrange a meeting at which they could discuss the matter.
    Lucy Eyelesbarrow frowned for a moment or two as she considered. She was in reality fully booked up. But the word unusual and her recollection of Miss Marple's personality, carried the day and she rang up Miss Marple straight away explaining that she could not come down to St. Mary Mead as she was at the moment working, but that she was free from 2 to 4 on the following afternoon and could meet Miss Marple anywhere in London. She suggested her own club, a rather nondescript establishment which had the advantage of having several small dark writing-rooms which were usually empty.
    Miss Marple accepted the suggestion and on the following day the meeting took place.
    Greetings were exchanged; Lucy Eyelesbarrow led her guest to the gloomiest of the writing-rooms, and said: “I'm afraid I'm rather booked up just at present, but perhaps you'll tell me what it is you want me to undertake?”
    “It's very simple, really,” said Miss Marple. “Unusual, but simple. I want you to find a body.”
    For a moment the suspicion crossed Lucy's mind that Miss Marple was mentally unhinged, but she rejected the idea.
    Miss Marple was eminently sane. She meant exactly what she had said.
    “What kind of a body?” asked Lucy Eyelesbarrow with admirable composure.
    “A woman's body,” said Miss Marple. “The body of a woman who was murdered - strangled actually - in a train.”
    Lucy's eyebrows rose slightly.
    “Well, that's certainly unusual. Tell me about it.”
    Miss Marple told her. Lucy Eyelesbarrow listened attentively, without interrupting.
    At the end she said:
    “It all depends on what your friend saw - or thought she saw?”
    She left the sentence unfinished with a question in it.
    “Elspeth McGillicuddy doesn't imagine things,” said Miss Marple. “That's why I'm relying on what she said. If it had been Dorothy Cartwright, now - it would have been quite a different matter. Dorothy always has a good story, and quite often believes it herself, and there is usually a kind of basis of truth but certainly no more. But Elspeth is the kind of woman who finds it very hard to make herself believe that anything at all extraordinary or out of the way could happen. She's most unsuggestible, rather like granite.”
    “I see,” said Lucy thoughtfully. “Well, let's accept it all. Where do I come in?”
    “I was very much impressed by you,” said Miss Marple, “and you see, I haven't got the physical strength nowadays to get about and do things.”
    “You want me to make inquiries? That sort of thing? But won't the police have done all that? Or do you think they have been just slack?”
    “Oh, no,” said Miss Marple. “They haven't been slack. It's just that I've got a theory about the woman's body. It's got to be somewhere. If it wasn't found in the train, then it must have been pushed or thrown out of the