They Do It With Mirrors by Agatha Christie Page B

got Sir John Stillwell behind us—my old chief. He was at the Home Office until he retired, and his influence turned the scales in getting this started. It’s a medical problem—that’s what we’ve got to get the legal authorities to understand. Psychiatry came into its own in the war. The one positive good that did come out of it—Now first of all I want you to see our initial approach to the problem. Look up—”
    Miss Marple looked up at the words carved over the large arched doorway.
    Â 
    RECOVER HOPE ALL YE WHO ENTER HERE
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    â€œIsn’t that splendid? Isn’t that just the right note to strike? You don’t want to scold these lads—or punish them. That’s what they’re hankering after half the time, punishment. We want to make them feel what fine fellows they are.”
    â€œLike Edgar Lawson?” said Miss Marple.
    â€œInteresting case, that. Have you been talking to him?”
    â€œHe has been talking to me,” said Miss Marple. She added apologetically, “I wondered if, perhaps, he isn’t a little mad? ”
    Dr. Maverick laughed cheerfully.
    â€œWe’re all mad, dear lady,” he said as he ushered her in through the door. “That’s the secret of existence. We’re all a little mad.”

Six
    O n the whole it was rather an exhausting day. Enthusiasm in itself can be extremely wearing, Miss Marple thought. She felt vaguely dissatisfied with herself and her own reactions. There was a pattern here—perhaps several patterns, and yet she herself could obtain no clear glimpse of it or them. Any vague disquietude she felt centered round the pathetic but inconspicuous personality of Edgar Lawson. If she could only find in her memory the right parallel.
    Painstakingly she rejected the curious behaviour of Mr. Selkirk’s delivery van—the absentminded postman—the gardener who worked on Whitmonday—and that very curious affair of the summer weight combinations.
    Something that she could not quite put her finger on was wrong about Edgar Lawson—something that went beyond the observed and admitted facts. But for the life of her, Miss Marple did not see how that wrongness, whatever it was, affected her friend Carrie Louise. In the confused patterns of life at Stonygates, people’s troubles and desires impinged on each other. But none of them (again as far as she could see) impinged on Carrie Louise.
    Carrie Louise … Suddenly Miss Marple realised that it was she alone, except for the absent Ruth, who used that name. To her husband, she was Caroline. To Miss Bellever, Cara. Stephen Restarick usually addressed her as Madonna. To Wally she was formally Mrs. Serrocold, and Gina elected to address her as Grandam—a mixture, she had explained, of Grande Dame and Grandmamma.
    Was there some significance, perhaps, in the various names that were found for Caroline Louise Serrocold? Was she to all of them a symbol and not quite a real person?
    When on the following morning Carrie Louise, dragging her feet a little as she walked, came and sat down on the garden seat beside her friend and asked her what she was thinking about, Miss Marple replied promptly:
    â€œYou, Carrie Louise.”
    â€œWhat about me?”
    â€œTell me honestly—is there anything here that worries you?”
    â€œWorries me?” The other woman raised wondering, clear blue eyes. “But, Jane, what should worry me?”
    â€œWell, most of us have worries.” Miss Marple’s eyes twinkled a little. “I have. Slugs, you know—and the difficulty of getting linen properly darned—and not being able to get sugar candy for making my damson gin. Oh, lots of little things—it seems unnatural that you shouldn’t have any worries at all.”
    â€œI suppose I must have really,” said Mrs. Serrocold vaguely. “Lewis works too hard, and Stephen forgets his meals slaving at thetheatre and Gina