"Have you got something you want to tell me, Miss Marple?"
"Now why should you think that?"
"You looked as though you had," said Davy.
"I'm sorry I showed it so plainly," said Miss Marple. "I didn't mean to."
"Well, what about it?"
"I don't know if I ought to do so. I would like you to believe, Inspector, that I am not really fond of interfering. I am against interference. Though often well meant, it can cause a great deal of harm."
"It's like that, is it? I see. Yes, it's quite a problem for you."
"Sometimes one sees people doing things that seem to one unwise - even dangerous. But has one any right to interfere? Usually not, I think."
"Is this Canon Pennyfather you're talking about?"
"Canon Pennyfather?" Miss Marple sounded very surprised. "Oh no. Oh dear me, no, nothing whatever to do with him. It concerns - a girl."
"A girl, indeed? And you thought I could help?"
"I don't know," said Miss Marple. "I simply don't know. But I'm worried, very worried."
Father did not press her. He sat there looking large and comfortable and rather stupid. He let her take her time. She had been willing to do her best to help him, and he was quite prepared to do anything he could to help her. He was not, perhaps, particularly interested. On the other hand, one never knew.
"One reads in the papers," said Miss Marple in a low clear voice, "accounts of proceedings in court; of young people, children or girls 'in need of care and protection.' It's just a sort of legal phrase, I suppose, but it could mean something real."
"This girl you mentioned, you feel she is in need of care and protection?"
"Yes. Yes, I do."
"Alone in the world?"
"Oh no," said Miss Marple. "Very much not so, if I may put it that way. She is to all outward appearances very heavily protected and very well cared for."
"Sounds interesting," said Father.
"She was staying in this hotel," said Miss Marple, "with a Mrs Carpenter, I think. I looked in the register to see the name. The girl's name is Elvira Blake."
Father looked up with a quick air of interest.
"She was a lovely girl. Very young, very much as I say, sheltered and protected. Her guardian was a Colonel Luscombe, a very nice man. Quite charming. Elderly, of course, and I am afraid terribly innocent."
"The guardian or the girl?"
"I meant the guardian," said Miss Marple. "I don't know about the girl. But I do think she is in danger. I came across her quite by chance in Battersea Park. She was sitting at a refreshment place there with a young man."
"Oh, that's it, is it?" said Father. "Undesirable, I suppose. Beatnik - spiv - thug -"
"A very handsome man," said Miss Marple. "Not so very young. Thirty-odd, the kind of man that I should say is very attractive to women, but his face is a bad face. Cruel, hawk-like, predatory."
"He mayn't be as bad as he looks," said Father soothingly.
"If anything he is worse than he looks," said Miss Marple. "I am convinced of it. He drives a large racing car."
Father looked up quickly. "Racing car?"
"Yes. Once or twice I've seen it standing near this hotel."
"You don't remember the number, do you?"
"Yes, indeed I do. FAN 2266. I had a cousin who stuttered," Miss Marple explained. "That's how I remember it."
Father looked puzzled.
"Do you know who he is?" demanded Miss Marple.
"As a matter of fact I do," said Father slowly. "Half French, half Polish. Very well-known racing driver, he was world champion three years ago. His name is Ladislaus Malinowski. You're quite right in some of your views about him. He has a bad reputation where women are concerned. That is to say, he is not a suitable friend for a young girl. But it's not easy to do anything about that sort of thing. I suppose she is meeting him on the sly, is that it?"
"Almost certainly," said Miss Marple.
"Did you approach her guardian?"
"I don't know him," said Miss Marple. "I've only just been introduced to him once by a mutual friend. I don't like the idea of going to him in a tale-bearing way. I wondered if perhaps in some way you could do something about it."
"I can try," said Father. "By the way, I thought you might like to know that your friend Canon Pennyfather has turned up all right."
"Indeed!" Miss Marple looked animated. "Where?"
"A place called Milton St John."
"How very odd. What was he doing there? Did he know?"
"Apparently -" Chief Inspector Davy stressed the word - "he had had an accident."
"What kind of an accident?"
"Knocked down by a car - concussed - or else, of course, he might have been conked on the head."
"Oh, I see." Miss Marple considered the point. "Doesn't he know himself?"
"He says -" again the Chief Inspector stressed the word - "that he does not know anything."
"Very remarkable."
"Isn't it? The last thing he remembers is driving in a taxi to Kensington Air Station."
Miss Marple shook her head perplexedly.
"I know it does happen that way in concussion," she murmured. "Didn't he say anything - useful?"
"He murmured something about the walls of Jericho."
"Joshua?" hazarded Miss Marple, "or archaeology - excavations? - or I remember, long ago, a play - by Mr Sutro, I think."
"And all this week north of the Thames, Gaumont Cinemas - The Walls of Jericho, featuring Olga Radbourne and Bart Levinne," said Father.
Miss Marple looked at him suspiciously.
"He could have gone to that film in the Cromwell Road. He could have come out about eleven and come back here - though if so, someone ought to have seen him - it would be well before midnight -"
"Took the wrong bus," Miss Marple suggested. "Something like that -"
"Say he got back here after midnight," Father said. "He could have walked up to his room without anyone seeing him. But if so, what happened then - and why did he go out again three hours later?"
Miss Marple groped for a word. "The only idea that occurs to me is - oh!"
She jumped as a report sounded from the street outside.
"Car backfiring," said Father soothingly.
"I'm sorry to be so jumpy. I am nervous tonight - that feeling one has -"
"That something's going to happen? I don't think you need worry."
"I have never liked fog."
"I wanted to tell you," said Chief Inspector Davy, "that you've given me a lot of help. The things you've noticed here - just little things - they've added up."
"So there was something wrong with this place?"
"There was and is everything wrong with it."
Miss Marple sighed. "It seemed wonderful at first - unchanged you know - like stepping back into the past - to the part of the past that one had loved and enjoyed."
She paused. "But of course, it wasn't really like that, I learned (what I suppose I really knew already) that one can never go back, that one should not ever try to go back - that the essence of life is going forward. Life is really a one way street, isn't it?"
"Something of the sort," agreed Father.
"I remember," said Miss Marple, diverging from her main topic in a characteristic way, "I remember being in Paris with my mother and my grandmother, and we went to have tea at the Elysee Hotel. And my grandmother looked round, and she said suddenly, 'Clara, I do believe I am the only woman here in a bonnet!' And she was, too! When she got home she packed up all her bonnets and her beaded mantles, too, and sent them off -"
"To the jumble sale?" inquired Father sympathetically.
"Oh no. Nobody would have wanted them at a jumble sale. She sent them to a theatrical repertory company. They appreciated them very much. But let me see -" Miss Marple recovered her direction. "Where was I?"
"Summing up this place."
"Yes. It seemed all right, but it wasn't. It was mixed up - real people and people who weren't real. One couldn't always tell them apart."
"What do you mean by not real?"
"There were retired military men, but there were also what seemed to be military men but who had never been in the Army. And clergymen who weren't clergymen. And admirals and sea captains who've never been in the Navy. My friend Selina Hazy - it amused me at first how she was always so anxious to recognize people she knew (quite natural, of course) and how often she was mistaken and they weren't the people she thought they were. But it happened too often. And so - I began to wonder. Even Rose, the chambermaid - so nice - but I began to think that perhaps she wasn't real, either."
"If it interests you to know, she's an ex-actress. A good one. Gets a better salary here than she ever drew on the stage."
"But - why?"
"Mainly, as part of the decor. Perhaps there's more than that to it."
"I'm glad to be leaving here," said Miss Marple. She gave a little shiver. "Before anything happens."
Chief Inspector Davy looked at her curiously.
"What do you expect to happen?" he asked.
"Evil of some kind," said Miss Marple.
"Evil is rather a big word -"
"You think it is too melodramatic? But I have some experience. I seem to have been - so often - in contact with murder."
"Murder?" Chief Inspector Davy shook his head. "I'm not suspecting murder. Just a nice cozy roundup of some remarkably clever criminals -"
"That's not the same thing. Murder - the wish to do murder - is something quite different. It - how shall I say? - it defies God."
He looked at her and shook his head gently and reassuringly.
"There won't be any murders," he said.
A sharp report, louder than the former one, came from outside. It was followed by a scream and another report.
Chief Inspector Davy was on his feet, moving with a speed surprising in such a bulky man. In a few seconds he was through the swing doors and out in the street.
II
The screaming - a woman's - was piercing the mist with a note of terror. Chief Inspector Davy raced down Pond Street in the direction of the screams. He could dimly visualize a woman's figure backed against a railing. In a dozen strides he had reached her. She wore a long pale fur coat, and her shining blonde hair hung down each side of her face. He thought for a moment that he knew who she was, then he realized that this was only a slip of a girl. Sprawled on the pavement at her feet was the body of a man in uniform. Chief Inspector Davy recognized him. It was Michael Gorman.
As Davy came up to the girl, she clutched at him, shivering all over, stammering out broken phrases.
"Someone tried to kill me... Someone... they shot at me... If it hadn't been for him -" She pointed down at the motionless figure at her feet. "He pushed me back and got in front of me - and then the second shot came... and he fell... He saved my life. I think he's hurt - badly hurt..."
Chief Inspector Davy went down on one knee. His torch came out. The tall commissionaire had fallen like a soldier. The left-hand side of his tunic showed a wet patch that was growing wetter as the blood oozed out into the cloth. Davy rolled up an eyelid, touched a wrist. He rose to his feet again.
"He's had it all right," he said.
The girl gave a sharp cry. "Do you mean he's dead? Oh no, no! He can't be dead."
"Who was it shot at you?"
"I don't know... I'd left my car just round the corner and was feeling my way along by the railings - I was going to Bertram's Hotel. And then suddenly there was a shot - and a bullet went past my cheek and then - he - the doorman from Bertram's - came running down the street towards me, and shoved me behind him, and then another shot came... I think - I think whoever it was must have been hiding in that area there."
Chief Inspector Davy looked where she pointed. At this end of Bertram's Hotel there was an old-fashioned area below the level of the street, with a gate and some steps down to it. Since it gave only on some store rooms it was not much used. But a man could have hidden there easily enough.
"You didn't see him?"
"Not properly. He rushed past me like a shadow. It was all thick fog."
Davy nodded.
The girl began to sob hysterically.
"But who could possibly want to kill me? Why should anyone want to kill me? That's the second time. I don't understand... Why?"
One arm round the girl, Chief Inspector Davy fumbled in his pocket with the other hand.
The shrill notes of a police whistle penetrated the mist.
III
In the lounge of Bertram's Hotel, Miss Gorringe had looked up sharply from the desk.
One or two of the visitors had looked up also. The older and deafer did not look up.
Henry, about to lower a glass of old brandy to a table, stopped poised with it still in his hand.
Miss Marple sat forward, clutching the arms of her chair.
"Accident!" a retired admiral said decisively. "Cars collided in the fog, I expect."
The swing doors from the street were pushed open. Through them came what seemed like an outsize policeman, looking a good deal larger than life.
He was supporting a girl in a pale fur coat. She seemed hardly able to walk. The policeman looked round for help with some embarrassment.
Miss Gorringe came out from behind the desk, prepared to cope. But at that moment the elevator came down. A tall figure emerged, and the girl shook herself free from the policeman's support, and ran frantically across the lounge.
"Mother," she cried. "Oh Mother, Mother..." and threw herself, sobbing, into Bess Sedgwick's arms.
