Miss Marple – Miss Marple and Mystery: The Complete Short Stories

His wife’s cry startled him.

‘Ah! don’t, don’t! I can’t bear the smell!’

He stared at her in kindly astonishment.

‘My dear girl, you mustn’t be nervy. After all, you can’t escape from the smell of tobacco. You’ll meet it everywhere.’

‘Yes, everywhere!’ She smiled a slow, twisted smile, and murmured some words that he did not catch, words that she had chosen for the original obituary notice of Tim Nugent’s death. ‘While the light lasts I shall remember, and in the darkness I shall not forget.’

Her eyes widened as they followed the ascending spiral of smoke, and she repeated in a low, monotonous voice: ‘Everywhere, everywhere.’

4 The Red Signal (#ulink_f1b83e14-cb14-523e-8695-6e94d91805cb)

‘The Red Signal’ was first published in Grand Magazine, June 1924.

‘No, but how too thrilling,’ said pretty Mrs Eversleigh, opening her lovely, but slightly vacant eyes very wide. ‘They always say women have a sixth sense; do you think it’s true, Sir Alington?’

The famous alienist smiled sardonically. He had an unbounded contempt for the foolish pretty type, such as his fellow guest. Alington West was the supreme authority on mental disease, and he was fully alive to his own position and importance. A slightly pompous man of full figure.

‘A great deal of nonsense is talked, I know that, Mrs Eversleigh. What does the term mean – a sixth sense?’

‘You scientific men are always so severe. And it really is extraordinary the way one seems to positively know things sometimes – just know them, feel them, I mean – quite uncanny – it really is. Claire knows what I mean, don’t you, Claire?’

She appealed to her hostess with a slight pout, and a tilted shoulder.

Claire Trent did not reply at once. It was a small dinner party, she and her husband, Violet Eversleigh, Sir Alington West, and his nephew, Dermot West, who was an old friend of Jack Trent’s. Jack Trent himself, a somewhat heavy florid man, with a good-humoured smile, and a pleasant lazy laugh, took up the thread.

‘Bunkum, Violet! Your best friend is killed in a railway accident. Straight away you remember that you dreamt of a black cat last Tuesday – marvellous, you felt all along that something was going to happen!’

‘Oh, no, Jack, you’re mixing up premonitions with intuition now. Come, now, Sir Alington, you must admit that premonitions are real?’

‘To a certain extent, perhaps,’ admitted the physician cautiously. ‘But coincidence accounts for a good deal, and then there is the invariable tendency to make the most of a story afterwards – you’ve always got to take that into account.’

‘I don’t think there is any such thing as premonition,’ said Claire Trent, rather abruptly. ‘Or intuition, or a sixth sense, or any of the things we talk about so glibly. We go through life like a train rushing through the darkness to an unknown destination.’

‘That’s hardly a good simile, Mrs Trent,’ said Dermot West, lifting his head for the first time and taking part in the discussion. There was a curious glitter in the clear grey eyes that shone out rather oddly from the deeply tanned face. ‘You’ve forgotten the signals, you see.’

‘The signals?’

‘Yes, green if its all right, and red – for danger!’

‘Red – for danger – how thrilling!’ breathed Violet Eversleigh.

Dermot turned from her rather impatiently.

‘That’s just a way of describing it, of course. Danger ahead! The red signal! Look out!’

Trent stared at him curiously.

‘You speak as though it were an actual experience, Dermot, old boy.’

‘So it is – has been, I mean.’

‘Give us the yarn.’

‘I can give you one instance. Out in Mesopotamia – just after the Armistice, I came into my tent one evening with the feeling strong upon me. Danger! Look out! Hadn’t the ghost of a notion what it was all about. I made a round of the camp, fussed unnecessarily, took all precautions against an attack by hostile Arabs. Then I went back to my tent. As soon as I got inside, the feeling popped up again stronger than ever. Danger! In the end, I took a blanket outside, rolled myself up in it and slept there.’

‘Well?’

‘The next morning, when I went inside the tent, first thing I saw was a great knife arrangement – about half a yard long – struck down through my bunk, just where I would have lain. I soon found out about it – one of the Arab servants. His son had been shot as a spy. What have you got to say to that, Uncle Alington, as an example of what I call the red signal?’

The specialist smiled non-committally.

‘A very interesting story, my dear Dermot.’

‘But not one that you would accept unreservedly?’

‘Yes, yes, I have no doubt that you had the premonition of danger, just as you state. But it is the origin of the premonition I dispute. According to you, it came from without, impressed by some outside source upon your mentality. But nowadays we find that nearly everything comes from within – from our subconscious self.’

‘Good old subconscious,’ cried Jack Trent. ‘It’s the jack-of-all-trades nowadays.’

Sir Alington continued without heeding the interruption.

‘I suggest that by some glance or look this Arab had betrayed himself. Your conscious self did not notice or remember, but with your subconscious self it was otherwise. The subconscious never forgets. We believe, too, that it can reason and deduce quite independently of the higher or conscious will. Your subconscious self, then, believed that an attempt might be made to assassinate you, and succeeded in forcing its fear upon your conscious realization.’

‘That sounds very convincing, I admit,’ said Dermot smiling.

‘But not nearly so exciting,’ pouted Mrs Eversleigh.

‘It is also possible that you may have been subconsciously aware of the hate felt by the man towards you. What in the old days used to be called telepathy certainly exists, though the conditions governing it are very little understood.’

‘Have there been any other instances?’ asked Claire of Dermot.

‘Oh! yes, but nothing very pictorial – and I suppose they could all be explained under the heading of coincidence. I refused an invitation to a country house once, for no other reason than the hoisting of the “red signal”. The place was burnt out during the week. By the way, Uncle Alington, where does the subconscious come in there?’

‘I’m afraid it doesn’t,’ said Alington, smiling.

‘But you’ve got an equally good explanation. Come, now. No need to be tactful with near relatives.’

‘Well, then, nephew, I venture to suggest that you refused the invitation for the ordinary reason that you didn’t much want to go, and that after the fire, you suggested to yourself that you had had a warning of danger, which explanation you now believe implicitly.’

‘It’s hopeless,’ laughed Dermot. ‘It’s heads you win, tails I lose.’

‘Never mind, Mr West,’ cried Violet Eversleigh. ‘I believe in your Red Signal implicitly. Is the time in Mesopotamia the last time you had it?’

‘Yes – until –’

‘I beg your pardon?’