The Moving Finger (Miss Marple 4)

“This has been a terrible shock to me, Mr. Burton,” she said. “Poor thing, poor thing.”

“Yes,” I said. “It’s awful to think of someone being driven to the stage of taking their own life.”

“Oh, you mean Mrs. Symmington?”

“Didn’t you?”

Mrs. Dane Calthrop shook her head.

“Of course one is sorry for her, but it would have been bound to happen anyway, wouldn’t it?”

“Would it?” said Joanna dryly.

Mrs. Dane Calthrop turned to her.

“Oh, I think so, dear. If suicide is your idea of escape from trouble then it doesn’t very much matter what the trouble is. Whenever some very unpleasant shock had to be faced, she’d have done the same thing. What it really comes down to is that she was that kind of woman. Not that one would have guessed it. She always seemed to me a selfish rather stupid woman, with a good firm hold on life. Not the kind to panic, you would think—but I’m beginning to realize how little I really know anyone.”

“I’m still curious as to whom you meant when you said ‘Poor thing,’” I remarked.

She stared at me.

“The woman who wrote the letters, of course.”

“I don’t think,” I said dryly, “I shall waste sympathy on her.”

Mrs. Dane Calthrop leaned forward. She laid a hand on my knee.

“But don’t you realize—can’t you feel? Use your imagination. Think how desperately, violently unhappy anyone must be to sit down and write these things. How lonely, how cut off from human kind. Poisoned through and through, with a dark stream of poison that finds its outlet in this way. That’s why I feel so self-reproachful. Somebody in this town has been racked with that terrible unhappiness, and I’ve had no idea of it. I should have had. You can’t interfere with actions— I never do. But that black inward unhappiness—like a septic arm physically, all black and swollen. If you could cut it and let the poison out it would flow away harmlessly. Yes, poor soul, poor soul.”

She got up to go.

I did not feel like agreeing with her. I had no sympathy for our anonymous letter writer whatsoever. But I did ask curiously:

“Have you any idea at all, Mrs. Calthrop, who this woman is?”

She turned her fine perplexed eyes on me.

“Well, I can guess,” she said. “But then I might be wrong, mightn’t I?”

She went swiftly out through the door, popping her head back to ask:

“Do tell me, why have you never married, Mr. Burton?”

In anyone else it would have been an impertinence, but with Mrs. Dane Calthrop you felt that the idea had suddenly come into her head and she had really wanted to know.

“Shall we say,” I said, rallying, “that I have never met the right woman?”

“We can say so,” said Mrs. Dane Calthrop, “but it wouldn’t be a very good answer, because so many men have obviously married the wrong woman.”

This time she really departed.

Joanna said:

“You know I really do think she’s mad. But I like her. The people in the village here are afraid of her.”

“So am I, a little.”

“Because you never know what’s coming next?”

“Yes. And there’s a careless brilliancy about her guesses.”

Joanna said slowly: “Do you really think whoever wrote these letters is very unhappy?”

“I don’t know what the damned hag is thinking or feeling! And I don’t care. It’s her victims I’m sorry for.”

It seems odd to me now that in our speculations about Poison Pen’s frame of mind, we missed the most obvious one. Griffith had pictured her as possibly exultant. I had envisaged her as remorseful—appalled by the result of her handiwork. Mrs. Dane Calthrop had seen her as suffering.

Yet the obvious, the inevitable reaction we did not consider—or perhaps I should say, I did not consider. That reaction was Fear.

For with the death of Mrs. Symmington, the letters had passed out of one category into another. I don’t know what the legal position was—Symmington knew, I suppose, but it was clear that with a death resulting, the position of the writer of the letters was much more serious. There could now be no question of passing it off as a joke if the identity of the writer was discovered. The police were active, a Scotland Yard expert called in. It was vital now for the anonymous author to remain anonymous.

And granted that Fear was the principal reaction, other things followed. Those possibilities also I was blind to. Yet surely they should have been obvious.

II

Joanna and I came down rather late to breakfast the next morning. That is to say, late by the standards of Lymstock. It was nine-thirty, an hour at which, in London, Joanna was just unclosing an eyelid, and mine would probably be still tight shut. However when Partridge had said “Breakfast at half past eight, or nine o’clock?” neither Joanna nor I had had the nerve to suggest a later hour.

To my annoyance, Aimée Griffith was standing on the doorstep talking to Megan.

She gave tongue with her usual heartiness at the sight of us.

“Hallo, there, slackers! I’ve been up for hours.”

That, of course, was her own business. A doctor, no doubt, has to have early breakfast, and a dutiful sister is there to pour out his tea, or coffee. But it is no excuse for coming and butting in on one’s more somnolent neighbours. Nine-thirty is not the time for a morning call.

Megan slipped back into the house and into the dining room, where I gathered she had been interrupted in her breakfast.

“I said I wouldn’t come in,” said Aimée Griffith—though why it is more of a merit to force people to come and speak to you on the doorstep, than to talk to them inside the house I do not know. “I just wanted to ask Miss Burton if she’d any vegetables to spare for our Red Cross stall on the main road. If so, I’d get Owen to call for them in the car.”

“You’re out and about very early,” I said.

“The early bird catches the worm,” said Aimée. “You have a better chance of finding people in this time of day. I’m off to Mr. Pye’s next. Got to go over to Brenton this afternoon. Guides.”

“Your energy makes me quite tired,” I said, and at that moment the telephone rang and I retired to the back of the hall to answer it, leaving Joanna murmuring rather doubtfully something about rhubarb and French beans and exposing her ignorance of the vegetable garden.

“Yes?” I said into the telephone mouthpiece.

A confused noise of deep breathing came from the other end of the wire and a doubtful female voice said “Oh!”

“Yes?” I said again encouragingly.

“Oh,” said the voice again, and then it inquired adenoidally, “Is that—what I mean—is that Little Furze?”

“This is Little Furze.”

“Oh!” This was clearly a stock beginning to every sentence. The voice inquired cautiously: “Could I speak to Miss Partridge just a minute?”

“Certainly,” I said. “Who shall I say?”

“Oh. Tell her it’s Agnes, would you? Agnes Waddle.” “Agnes Waddle?”

“That’s right.”

Resisting the temptation to say, “Donald Duck to you,” I put down the telephone receiver and called up the stairs to where I could hear the sound of Partridge’s activities overheard.

“Partridge. Partridge.”

Partridge appeared at the head of the stairs, a long mop in one hand, and a look of “What is it now?” clearly discernible behind her invariably respectful manner.

“Yes, sir?”

“Agnes Waddle wants to speak to you on the telephone.”

“I beg your pardon, sir?”

I raised my voice. “Agnes Waddle.”

I have spelt the name as it presented itself to my mind. But I will now spell it as it was actually written.

“Agnes Woddell—whatever can she want now?”

Very much put out of countenance, Partridge relinquished her mop and ru

stled down the stairs, her print dress crackling with agitation.

I beat an unobtrusive retreat into the dining room where Megan was wolfing down kidneys and bacon. Megan, unlike Aimée Griffith, was displaying no “glorious morning face.” In fact she replied very gruffly to my morning salutations and continued to eat in silence.

I opened the morning paper and a minute or two later Joanna entered looking somewhat shattered.

“Whew!” she said. “I’m so tired. And I think I’ve exposed my utter ignorance of what grows when. Aren’t there runner beans this time of year?”

“August,” said Megan. “Well, one has them anytime in London,” said Joanna defensively.

“Tins, sweet fool,” I said. “And cold storage on ships from the far-flung limits of empire.”

“Like ivory, apes and peacocks?” asked Joanna.

“Exactly.”

“I’d rather have peacocks,” said Joanna thoughtfully.

“I’d like a monkey of my own as a pet,” said Megan.