Kitabı oku: «The Case of the Caretaker: A Miss Marple Short Story»
The Case of the Caretaker
A Short Story
by Agatha Christie
Copyright
Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
Copyright © 2011 Agatha Christie Ltd.
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EPub Edition © 2011 ISBN: 9780007452057
Version: 2017-04-18
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
The Case of the Caretaker
Related Products
About the Publisher
The Case of the Caretaker
‘The Case of the Caretaker’ was first published in Strand Magazine, January 1942, and then in the USA in Chicago Sunday Tribune, 5 July 1942.
‘Well,’ demanded Doctor Haydock of his patient. ‘And how goes it today?’
Miss Marple smiled at him wanly from pillows. ‘I suppose, really, that I’m better,’ she admitted, ‘but I feel so terribly depressed. I can’t help feeling how much better it would have been if I had died. After all, I’m an old woman. Nobody wants me or cares about me.’
Doctor Haydock interrupted with his usual brusqueness. ‘Yes, yes, typical after-reaction of this type of flu. What you need is something to take you out of yourself. A mental tonic.’
Miss Marple sighed and shook her head.
‘And what’s more,’ continued Doctor Haydock, ‘I’ve brought my medicine with me!’
He tossed a long envelope on to the bed. ‘Just the thing for you. The kind of puzzle that is right up your street.’
‘A puzzle?’ Miss Marple looked interested.
‘Literary effort of mine,’ said the doctor, blushing a little. ‘Tried to make a regular story of it. “He said,” “she said,” “the girl thought,” etc. Facts of the story are true.’
‘But why a puzzle?’ asked Miss Marple.
Doctor Haydock grinned.
‘Because the interpretation is up to you. I want to see if you’re as clever as you always make out.’
With that Parthian shot he departed.
Miss Marple picked up the manuscript and began to read.
‘And where is the bride?’ asked Miss Harmon genially.
The village was all agog to see the rich and beautiful young wife that Harry Laxton had brought back from abroad. There was a general indulgent feeling that Harry – wicked young scapegrace – had had all the luck. Everyone had always felt indulgent towards Harry. Even the owners of windows that had suffered from his indiscriminate use of a catapult had found their indignation dissipated by young Harry’s abject expression of regret. He had broken windows, robbed orchards, poached rabbits, and later had run into debt, got entangled with the local tobacconist’s daughter – been disentangled and sent off to Africa – and the village as represented by various ageing spinsters had murmured indulgently. ‘Ah, well! Wild oats! He’ll settle down!’
And now, sure enough, the prodigal had returned – not in affliction, but in triumph. Harry Laxton had ‘made good’ as the saying goes. He had pulled himself together, worked hard, and had finally met and successfully wooed a young Anglo-French girl who was the possessor of a considerable fortune.
Harry might have lived in London, or purchased an estate in some fashionable hunting county, but he preferred to come back to the part of the world that was home to him. And there, in the most romantic way, he purchased the derelict estate in the dower house of which he had passed his childhood.
Kingsdean House had been unoccupied for nearly seventy years. It had gradually fallen into decay and abandon. An elderly caretaker and his wife lived in the one habitable corner of it. It was a vast, unprepossessing grandiose mansion, the gardens overgrown with rank vegetation and the trees hemming it in like some gloomy enchanter’s den.
The dower house was a pleasant, unpretentious house and had been let for a long term of years to Major Laxton, Harry’s father. As a boy, Harry had roamed over the Kingsdean estate and knew every inch of the tangled woods, and the old house itself had always fascinated him.
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