Miss Marple's Final Cases Read Online Free PDF

suspicious. He didn’t trust anybody.’
    ‘Very wise of him,’ said Miss Marple. ‘The depravity of human nature is unbelievable.’
    ‘Well, you may be right. Anyway, Uncle Mathew thought so. He had a friend who lost his money in a bank, and another friend who was ruined by an absconding solicitor, and he lost some money himselfin a fraudulent company. He got so that he used to hold forth at great length that the only safe and sane thing to do was to convert your money into solid bullion and bury it.’
    ‘Ah,’ said Miss Marple. ‘I begin to see.’
    ‘Yes. Friends argued with him, pointed out that he’d get no interest that way, but he held that that didn’t really matter. The bulk of your money, he said, should be “kept in a box under the bed or buried in the garden”. Those were his words.’
    Charmian went on. ‘And when he died, he left hardly anything at all in securities, though he was very rich. So we think that that’s what he must have done.’
    Edward explained. ‘We found that he had sold securities and drawn out large sums of money from time to time, and nobody knows what he did with them. But it seems probable that he lived up to his principles, and that he did buy gold and bury it.’
    ‘He didn’t say anything before he died? Leave any paper? No letter?’
    ‘That’s the maddening part of it. He didn’t. He’d been unconscious for some days, but he rallied before he died. He looked at us both and chuckled—a faint, weak little chuckle. He said, “ You’ll be all right, my pretty pair of doves.” And then he tapped his eye—his right eye—and winked at us. And then—he died. Poor old Uncle Mathew.’
    ‘He tapped his eye,’ said Miss Marple thoughtfully.
    Edward said eagerly. ‘Does that convey anything to you? It made me think of an Arsene Lupin story where there was something hidden in a man’s glass eye. But Uncle Mathew didn’t have a glass eye.’
    Miss Marple shook her head. ‘No—I can’t think of anything at the moment.’
    Charmian said disappointedly, ‘Jane told us you’d say at once where to dig!’
    Miss Marple smiled. ‘I’m not quite a conjurer, you know. I didn’t know your uncle, or what sort of man he was, and I don’t know the house or the grounds.’
    Charmian said, ‘If you did know them?’
    ‘Well, it must be quite simple, really, mustn’t it?’ said Miss Marple.
    ‘Simple!’ said Charmian. ‘You come down to Ansteys and see if it’s simple!’
    It is possible that she did not mean the invitation to be taken seriously, but Miss Marple said briskly, ‘Well, really, my dear, that’s very kind of you. I’ve always wanted to have the chance of looking for buried treasure. And,’ she added, looking at them with a beaming, late-Victorian smile, ‘with a love interest, too!’
II
    ‘You see!’ said Charmian, gesturing dramatically.
    They had just completed a grand tour of Ansteys. They had been round the kitchen garden—heavily trenched. They had been through the little woods, where every important tree had been dug round, and had gazed sadly on the pitted surface of the once smooth lawn. They had been up to the attic, where old trunks and chests had been rifled of their contents. They had been down to the cellars, where flagstones had been heaved unwillingly from their sockets. They had measured and tapped walls, and Miss Marple had been shown every antique piece of furniture that contained or could be suspected of containing a secret drawer.
    On a table in the morning-room there was a heap of papers—all the papers that the late Mathew Stroud had left. Not one had been destroyed, and Charmian and Edward were wont to return to them again and again, earnestly perusing bills, invitations, and business correspondence in the hope of spotting a hitherto unnoticed clue.
    ‘Can you think of anywhere we haven’t looked?’ demanded Charmian hopefully.
    Miss Marple shook her head. ‘You seem to havebeen very thorough, my dear. Perhaps, if