Complete Short Stories of Miss Marple Read Online Free PDF

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 strong-room 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, fill it 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 knitting.
    'It was really that little fact that put me on the right scent,' she said. She looked across at Raymond.
    'When you are a householder, dear, and have a garden of your own, you will know these little things.'
    The Bloodstained Pavement

    'It's curious,' said Joyce Lumpier, 'but I hardly like telling you my story. It happened a long time ago – five years ago to be exact – but it's sort of haunted me ever since. The smiling, bright, top part of it – and the hidden gruesomeness underneath. And the queer thing is that the sketch I painted at the time has become tinged with the same atmosphere. When you look at it first it is just a rough sketch of a little steep Cornish street with the sunlight on it. But if you look long enough at it, something sinister creeps in. I have never sold it, but I never look at it. It lives in the studio in a corner with its face to the wall.
    'The name of the place was Rathole. It is a queer little Cornish fishing village, very picturesque – too picturesque perhaps. There is rather too much of the atmosphere of 'Ye Olde Cornish Tea House' about it. It has shops with bobbed-headed girls in smocks doing hand-illuminated mottoes on parchment. It is pretty and it is quaint, but it is very self-consciously so.'
    'Don't I know,' said Raymond West, groaning. 'The curse of the tourist bus, I suppose. No matter how narrow the lanes leading down to them, no picturesque village is safe.'
    Joyce nodded. 'There are narrow lanes that lead down to Rathole and very steep, like the side of a house. Well, to get on with my story. I had come to Cornwall for a fortnight, to sketch. There is an old inn in Rathole, the Polharwith Arms. It was supposed to be the only house left standing by the Spaniards when they shelled the place in fifteen hundred and something.'
    'Not shelled,' said Raymond West, frowning. 'Do try to be historically accurate, Joyce.'
    'Well, at all events they landed guns somewhere along the coast and they fired them and the houses fell down. Anyway, that is not the point. The inn was a wonderful old place with a kind of porch in front built on four pillars. I was just settling down to work when a car