The Moving Finger (Miss Marple 4)

Joanna considered for a moment, her head on one side.

“I’m afraid not,” she said regretfully.

“You’ll have to fall back upon Owen Griffith,” I said. “He’s the only unattached male in the place. Unless you count old Colonel Appleton. He was looking at you like a hungry bloodhound most of the afternoon.”

Joanna laughed.

“He was, wasn’t he? It was quite embarrassing.”

“Don’t pretend. You’re never embarrassed.”

Joanna drove in silence through the gate and round to the garage.

She said then:

“There may be something in that idea of yours.”

“What idea?”

Joanna replied:

“I don’t see why any man should deliberately cross the street to avoid me. It’s rude, apart from anything else.”

“I see,” I said. “You’re going to hunt the man down in cold blood.”

“Well, I don’t like being avoided.”

I got slowly and carefully out of the car, and balanced my sticks. Then I offered my sister a piece of advice.

“Let me tell you this, my girl. Owen Griffith isn’t any of your tame whining artistic young men. Unless you’re careful you’ll stir up a hornet’s nest about your ears. That man could be dangerous.”

“Oo, do you think so?” demanded Joanna with every symptom of pleasure at the prospect.

“Leave the poor devil alone,” I said sternly.

“How dare he cross the street when he saw me coming?”

“All you women are alike. You harp on one theme. You’ll have Sister Aimée gunning you, too, if I’m not mistaken.”

“She dislikes me already,” said Joanna. She spoke meditatively, but with a certain satisfaction.

“We have come down here,” I said sternly, “for peace and quiet, and I mean to see we get it.”

But peace and quiet were the last things we were to have.

Four

I

It was, I think, about a week later, that Partridge informed me that Mrs. Baker would like to speak to me for a minute or two if I would be so kind.

The name Mrs. Baker conveyed nothing at all to me.

“Who is Mrs. Baker?” I said, bewildered—“Can’t she see Miss Joanna?”

But it appeared that I was the person with whom an interview was desired. It further transpired that Mrs. Baker was the mother of the girl Beatrice.

I had forgotten Beatrice. For a fortnight now, I had been conscious of a middle-aged woman with wisps of grey hair, usually on her knees retreating crablike from bathroom and stairs and passages when I appeared, and I knew, I suppose, that she was our new Daily Woman. Otherwise the Beatrice complication had faded from my mind.

I could not very well refuse to see Beatrice’s mother, especially as I learned that Joanna was out, but I was, I must confess, a little nervous at the prospect. I sincerely hoped that I was not going to be accused of having trifled with Beatrice’s affections. I cursed the mischievous activities of anonymous letter writers to myself at the same time as, aloud, I commanded that Beatrice’s mother should be brought to my presence.

Mrs. Baker was a big broad weather-beaten woman with a rapid flow of speech. I was relieved to notice no signs of anger or accusation.

“I hope, sir,” she said, beginning at once when the door had closed behind Partridge, “that you’ll excuse the liberty I’ve taken in coming to see you. But I thought, sir, as you was the proper person to come to, and I should be thankful if you could see your way to telling me what I ought to do in the circumstances, because in my opinion, sir, something ought to be done, and I’ve never been one to let the grass grow under my feet, and what I say is, no use moaning and groaning, but ‘Up and doing’ as vicar said in his sermon only the week before last.”

I felt slightly bewildered and as though I had missed something essential in the conversation.

“Certainly,” I said. “Won’t you—er—sit down, Mrs. Baker? I’m sure I shall be glad to—er help you in anyway I can—”

I paused expectantly.

“Thank you, sir.” Mrs. Baker sat down on the edge of a chair. “It’s very good of you, I’m sure. And glad I am that I came to you, I said to Beatrice, I said, and her howling and crying on her bed, Mr. Burton will know what to do, I said, being a London gentleman. And something must be done, what with young men being so hotheaded and not listening to reason the way they are, and not listening to a word a girl says, and anyway, if it was me, I says to Beatrice I’d give him as good as I got, and what about that girl down at the mill?”

I felt more than ever bewildered.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “But I don’t quite understand. What has happened?”

“It’s the letters, sir. Wicked letters—indecent, too, using such words and all. Worse than I’ve ever seen in the Bible, even.”

Passing over an interesting sideline here, I said desperately:

“Has your daughter been having more letters?”

“Not her, sir. She had just the one. That one as was the occasion of her leaving here.”

“There was absolutely no reason—” I began, but Mrs. Baker firmly and respectfully interrupted me:

“There is no need to tell me, sir, that what was wrote was all wicked lies. I had Miss Partridge’s word for that—and indeed I would have known it for myself. You aren’t that type of gentleman, sir, that I well know, and you an invalid and all. Wicked untruthful lies it was, but all the same I says to Beatrice as she’d better leave because you know what talk is, sir. No smoke without fire, that’s what people say. And a girl can’t be too careful. And besides the girl herself felt bashful like after what had been written, so I says, ‘Quite right,’ to Beatrice when she said she wasn’t coming up here again, though I’m sure we both regretted the inconvenience being such—”

Unable to find her way out of this sentence, Mrs. Baker took a deep breath and began again.

“And that, I hoped, would be the end of any nasty talk. But now George, down at the garage, him what Beatrice is going with, he’s got on

e of them. Saying awful things about our Beatrice, and how she’s going on with Fred Ledbetter’s Tom—and I can assure you, sir, the girl has been no more than civil to him and passing the time of day so to speak.”

My head was now reeling under this new complication of Mr. Ledbetter’s Tom.

“Let me get this straight,” I said. “Beatrice’s—er—young man has had an anonymous letter making accusations about her and another young man?”

“That’s right, sir, and not nicely put at all—horrible words used, and it drove young George mad with rage, it did, and he came round and told Beatrice he wasn’t going to put up with that sort of thing from her, and he wasn’t going to have her go behind his back with other chaps—and she says it’s all a lie—and he says no smoke without fire, he says, and rushes off being hot-like in his temper, and Beatrice she took on ever so, poor girl, and I said I’ll put my hat on and come straight up to you, sir.”

Mrs. Baker paused and looked at me expectantly, like a dog waiting for reward after doing a particularly clever trick.

“But why come to me?” I demanded.

“I understood, sir, that you’d had one of these nasty letters yourself, and I thought, sir, that being a London gentleman, you’d know what to do about them.”

“If I were you,” I said, “I should go to the police. This sort of thing ought to be stopped.”

Mrs. Baker looked deeply shocked.

“Oh, no, sir. I couldn’t go to the police.”

“Why not?”

“I’ve never been mixed up with the police, sir. None of us ever have.”

“Probably not. But the police are the only people who can deal with this sort of thing. It’s their business.”

“Go to Bert Rundle?”

Bert Rundle was the constable, I knew.

“There’s a sergeant, or an inspector, surely, at the police station.”

“Me, go into the police station?”

Mrs. Baker’s voice expressed reproach and incredulity. I began to feel annoyed.

“That’s the only advice I can give you.”

Mrs. Baker was silent, obviously quite unconvinced. She said wistfully and earnestly:

“These letters ought to be stopped, sir, they did ought to be stopped. There’ll be mischief done sooner or later.”