The Moving Finger Read online

  But there were other possibilities. The pages could have been cut out by anyone who had been alone in this room, any visitor, for instance, who had sat there waiting for Miss Emily. Or even anyone who called on business.

  No, that wasn’t so likely. I had noticed that when, one day, a clerk from the bank had come to see me, Partridge had shown him into the little study at the back of the house. That was clearly the house routine.

  A visitor, then? Someone “of good social position.” Mr. Pye? Aimée Griffith? Mrs. Dane Calthrop?

  VII

  The gong sounded and I went in to lunch. Afterwards, in the drawing room I showed Joanna my find.

  We discussed it from every aspect. Then I took it down to the police station.

  They were elated at the find, and I was patted on the back for what was, after all, the sheerest piece of luck.

  Graves was not there, but Nash was, and rang up the other man. They would test the book for fingerprints, though Nash was not hopeful of finding anything. I may say that he did not. There were mine, Partridge’s and nobody else’s, merely showing that Partridge dusted conscientiously.

  Nash walked back with me up the hill. I asked how he was getting on. “We’re narrowing it down, Mr. Burton. We’ve eliminated the people it couldn’t be.”

  “Ah,” I said. “And who remains?”

  “Miss Ginch. She was to meet a client at a house yesterday afternoon by appointment. The house was situated not far along the Combeacre Road, that’s the road that goes past the Symmingtons.’ She would have to pass the house both going and coming…the week before, the day the anonymous letter was delivered, and Mrs. Symmington committed suicide, was her last day at Symmington’s office. Mr. Symmington thought at first she had not left the office at all that afternoon. He had Sir Henry Lushington with him all the afternoon and rang several times for Miss Ginch. I find, however, that she did leave the office between three and four. She went out to get some high denomination of stamp of which they had run short. The office boy could have gone, but Miss Ginch elected to go, saying she had a headache and would like the air. She was not gone long.”

  “But long enough?”

  “Yes, long enough to hurry along to the other end of the village, slip the letter in the box and hurry back. I must say, however, that I cannot find anybody who saw her near the Symmingtons’ house.”

  “Would they notice?”

  “They might and they might not.”

  “Who else is in your bag?”

  Nash looked very straight ahead of him.

  “You’ll understand that we can’t exclude anybody—anybody at all.”

  “No,” I said. “I see that.”

  He said gravely: “Miss Griffith went to Brenton for a meeting of Girl Guides yesterday. She arrived rather late.”

  “You don’t think—”

  “No, I don’t think. But I don’t know. Miss Griffith seems an eminently sane healthy-minded woman—but I say, I don’t know.”

  “What about the previous week? Could she have slipped the letter in the box?”

  “It’s possible. She was shopping in the town that afternoon.” He paused. “The same applies to Miss Emily Barton. She was out shopping early yesterday afternoon and she went for a walk to see some friends on the road past the Symmingtons’ house the week before.”

  I shook my head unbelievingly. Finding the cut book in Little Furze was bound, I knew, to direct attention to the owner of that house, but when I remembered Miss Emily coming in yesterday so bright and happy and excited….

  Damn it all—excited… Yes, excited—pink cheeks—shining eyes—surely not because—not because—

  I said thickly: “This business is bad for one! One sees things—one imagines things—”

  “Yes, it isn’t very pleasant to look upon the fellow creatures one meets as possible criminal lunatics.”

  He paused for a moment, then went on:

  “And there’s Mr. Pye—”

  I said sharply: “So you have considered him?”

  Nash smiled.

  “Oh, yes, we’ve considered him all right. A very curious character—not, I should say, a very nice character. He’s got no alibi. He was in his garden, alone, on both occasions.”

  “So you’re not only suspecting women?”

  “I don’t think a man wrote the letters—in fact I’m sure of it—and so is Graves—always excepting our Mr. Pye, that is to say, who’s got an abnormally female streak in his character. But we’ve checked up on everybody for yesterday afternoon. That’s a murder case, you see. You’re all right,” he grinned, “and so’s your sister, and Mr. Symmington didn’t leave his office after he got there and Dr. Griffith was on a round in the other direction, and I’ve checked upon his visits.”

  He paused, smiled again, and said, “You see, we are thorough.”

  I said slowly, “So your case is eliminated down to those four— Miss Ginch, Mr. Pye, Miss Griffith and little Miss Barton?”

  “Oh, no, no, we’ve got a couple more—besides the vicar’s lady.”

  “You’ve thought of her?”

  “We’ve thought of everybody, but Mrs. Dane Calthrop is a little too openly mad, if you know what I mean. Still, she could have done it. She was in a wood watching birds yesterday afternoon—and the birds can’t speak for her.”

  He turned sharply as Owen Griffith came into the police station.

  “Hallo, Nash. I heard you were round asking for me this morning. Anything important?”

  “Inquest on Friday, if that suits you, Dr. Griffith.”

  “Right. Moresby and I are doing the P.M. tonight.”

  Nash said:

  “There’s just one other thing, Dr. Griffith. Mrs. Symmington was taking some cachets, powders or something, that you prescribed for her—”

  He paused. Owen Griffith said interrogatively:

  “Yes?”

  “Would an overdose of those cachets have been fatal?”

  Griffith said dryly:

  “Certainly not. Not unless she’d taken about twenty-five of them!”

  “But you once warned her about exceeding the dose, so Miss Holland tells me.”

  “Oh that, yes. Mrs. Symmington was the sort of woman who would go and overdo anything she was given—fancy that to take twice as much would do her twice as much good, and you don’t want anyone to overdo even phenacetin or aspirin—bad for the heart. And anyway there’s absolutely no doubt about the cause of death. It was cyanide.”

  “Oh, I know that—you don’t get my meaning. I only thought that when committing suicide you’d prefer to take an overdose of a soporific rather than to feed yourself prussic acid.”

  “Oh quite. On the other hand, prussic acid is more dramatic and is pretty certain to do the trick. With barbiturates, for instance, you can bring the victim round if only a short time has elapsed.”

  “I see, thank you, Dr. Griffith.”

  Griffith departed, and I said goodbye to Nash. I went slowly up the hill home. Joanna was out—at least there was no sign of her, and there was an enigmatical memorandum scribbled on the telephone block presumably for the guidance of either Partridge or myself.

  “If Dr. Griffith rings up, I can’t go on Tuesday, but could manage Wednesday or Thursday.”

  I raised my eyebrows and went into the drawing room. I sat down in the most comfortable armchair—(none of them were very comfortable, they tended to have straight backs and were reminiscent of the late Mrs. Barton)—stretched out my legs and tried to think the whole thing out.

  With sudden annoyance I remembered that Owen’s arrival had interrupted my conversation with the inspector, and that he had just mentioned two other people as being possibilities.

  I wondered who they were.

  Partridge, perhaps, for one? After all, the cut book had been found in this house. And Agnes could have been struck down quite unsuspecting by her guide and mentor. No, you couldn’t eliminate Partridge.

  But who was the other?
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  Somebody, perhaps, that I didn’t know? Mrs. Cleat? The original local suspect?

  I closed my eyes. I considered four people, strangely unlikely people, in turn. Gentle, frail little Emily Barton? What points were there actually against her? A starved life? Dominated and repressed from early childhood? Too many sacrifices asked of her? Her curious horror of discussing anything “not quite nice”? Was that actually a sign of inner preoccupation with just these themes? Was I getting too horribly Freudian? I remembered a doctor once telling me that the mutterings of gentle maiden ladies when going off under an anaesthetic were a revelation. “You wouldn’t think they knew such words!”

  Aimée Griffith?

  Surely nothing repressed or “inhibited” about her. Cheery, mannish, successful. A full, busy life. Yet Mrs. Dane Calthrop had said, “Poor thing!”

  And there was something—something—some remembrance… Ah! I’d got it. Owen Griffith saying something like, “We had an outbreak of anonymous letters up North where I had a practice.”

  Had that been Aimée Griffith’s work too? Surely rather a coincidence. Two outbreaks of the same thing. Stop a minute, they’d tracked down the author of those. Griffith had said so. A schoolgirl.

  Cold it was suddenly—must be a draught, from the window. I turned uncomfortably in my chair. Why did I suddenly feel so queer and upset?

  Go on thinking… Aimée Griffith? Perhaps it was Aimée Griffith, not that other girl? And Aimée had come down here and started her tricks again. And that was why Owen Griffith was looking so unhappy and hag ridden. He suspected. Yes, he suspected….

  Mr. Pye? Not, somehow, a very nice little man. I could imagine him staging the whole business…laughing….

  That telephone message on the telephone pad in the hall…why did I keep thinking of it? Griffith and Joanna—he was falling for her… No, that wasn’t why the message worried me. It was something else….

  My senses were swimming, sleep was very near. I repeated idiotically to myself, “No smoke without fire. No smoke without fire… That’s it…it all links up together….”

  And then I was walking down the street with Megan and Elsie Holland passed. She was dressed as a bride, and people were murmuring:

  “She’s going to marry Dr. Griffith at last. Of course they’ve been engaged secretly for years….”

  There we were, in the church, and Dane Calthrop was reading the service in Latin.

  And in the middle of it Mrs. Dane Calthrop jumped up and cried energetically:

  “It’s got to be stopped, I tell you. It’s got to be stopped!”

  For a minute or two I didn’t know whether I was asleep or awake. Then my brain cleared, and I realized I was in the drawing room of Little Furze and that Mrs. Dane Calthrop had just come through the window and was standing in front of me saying with nervous violence:

  “It has got to be stopped, I tell you.”

  I jumped up. I said: “I beg your pardon. I’m afraid I was asleep. What did you say?”

  Mrs. Dane Calthrop beat one fist fiercely on the palm of her other hand.

  “It’s got to be stopped. These letters! Murder! You can’t go on having poor innocent children like Agnes Woddell killed!”

  “You’re quite right,” I said. “But how do you propose to set about it?”

  Mrs. Dane Calthrop said:

  “We’ve got to do something!”

  I smiled, perhaps in rather a superior fashion.

  “And what do you suggest that we should do?”

  “Get the whole thing cleared up! I said this wasn’t a wicked place. I was wrong. It is.”

  I felt annoyed. I said, not too politely:

  “Yes, my dear woman, but what are you going to do?”

  Mrs. Dane Calthrop said: “Put a stop to it all, of course.”

  “The police are doing their best.”

  “If Agnes could be killed yesterday, their best isn’t good enough.”

  “So you know better than they do?”

  “Not at all. I don’t know anything at all. That’s why I’m going to call in an expert.”

  I shook my head.

  “You can’t do that. Scotland Yard will only take over on a demand from the chief constable of the county. Actually they have sent Graves.”

  “I don’t mean that kind of an expert. I don’t mean someone who knows about anonymous letters or even about murder. I mean someone who knows people. Don’t you see? We want someone who knows a great deal about wickedness!”

  It was a queer point of view. But it was, somehow, stimulating.

  Before I could say anything more, Mrs. Dane Calthrop nodded her head at me and said in a quick, confident tone:

  “I’m going to see about it right away.”

  And she went out of the window again.

  Ten

  I

  The next week, I think, was one of the queerest times I have ever passed through. It had an odd dream quality. Nothing seemed real.

  The inquest on Agnes Woddell was held and the curious of Lymstock attended en masse. No new facts came to light and the only possible verdict was returned, “Murder by person or persons unknown.”

  So poor little Agnes Woddell, having had her hour of limelight, was duly buried in the quiet old churchyard and life in Lymstock went on as before.

  No, that last statement is untrue. Not as before….

  There was a half-scared, half-avid gleam in almost everybody’s eye. Neighbour looked at neighbour. One thing had been brought out clearly at the inquest—it was most unlikely that any stranger had killed Agnes Woddell. No tramps nor unknown men had been noticed or reported in the district. Somewhere, then, in Lymstock, walking down the High Street, shopping, passing the time of day, was a person who had cracked a defenceless girl’s skull and driven a sharp skewer home to her brain.

  And no one knew who that person was.

  As I say, the days went by in a kind of dream. I looked at everyone I met in a new light, the light of a possible murderer. It was not an agreeable sensation!

  And in the evenings, with the curtain drawn, Joanna and I sat talking, talking, arguing, going over in turn all the various possibilities that still seemed so fantastic and incredible.

  Joanna held firm to her theory of Mr. Pye. I, after wavering a little, had gone back to my original suspect, Miss Ginch. But we went over the possible names again and again.

  Mr. Pye?

  Miss Ginch?

  Mrs. Dane Calthrop?

  Aimée Griffith?

  Emily Barton?

  Partridge?

  And all the time, nervously, apprehensively, we waited for something to happen.

  But nothing did happen. Nobody, so far as we knew, received anymore letters. Nash made periodic appearances in the town but what he was doing and what traps the police were setting, I had no idea. Graves had gone again.

  Emily Barton came to tea. Megan came to lunch. Owen Griffith went about his practice. We went and drank sherry with Mr. Pye. And we went to tea at the vicarage.

  I was glad to find Mrs. Dane Calthrop displayed none of the militant ferocity she had shown on the occasion of our last meeting. I think she had forgotten all about it.

  She seemed now principally concerned with the destruction of white butterflies so as to preserve cauliflower and cabbage plants.

  Our afternoon at the vicarage was really one of the most peaceful we had spent. It was an attractive old house and had a big shabby comfortable drawing room with faded rose cretonne. The Dane Calthrops had a guest staying with them, an amiable elderly lady who was knitting something with white fleecy wool. We had very good hot scones for tea, the vicar came in, and beamed placidly on us whilst he pursued his gentle erudite conversation. It was very pleasant.

  I don’t mean that we got away from the topic of the murder, because we didn’t.

  Miss Marple, the guest, was naturally thrilled by the subject. As she said apologetically: “We have so little to talk about in the country!” She had ma
de-up her mind that the dead girl must have been just like her Edith.

  “Such a nice little maid, and so willing, but sometimes just a little slow to take in things.”

  Miss Marple also had a cousin whose niece’s sister-in-law had had a great deal of annoyance and trouble over some anonymous letters, so the letters, also, were very interesting to the charming old lady.

  “But tell me, dear,” she said to Mrs. Dane Calthrop, “what do the village people—I mean the townspeople—say? What do they think?”

  “Mrs. Cleat still, I suppose,” said Joanna.

  “Oh no,” said Mrs. Dane Calthrop. “Not now.”

  Miss Marple asked who Mrs. Cleat was.

  Joanna said she was the village witch.

  “That’s right, isn’t it, Mrs. Dane Calthrop?”

  The vicar murmured a long Latin quotation about, I think, the evil power of witches, to which we all listened in respectful and uncomprehending silence.

  “She’s a very silly woman,” said his wife. “Likes to show off. Goes out to gather herbs and things at the full of the moon and takes care that everybody in the place knows about it.”

  “And silly girls go and consult her, I suppose?” said Miss Marple.

  I saw the vicar getting ready to unload more Latin on us and I asked hastily: “But why shouldn’t people suspect her of the murder now? They thought the letters were her doing.”

  Miss Marple said: “Oh! But the girl was killed with a skewer, so I hear—(very unpleasant!). Well, naturally, that takes all suspicion away from this Mrs. Cleat. Because, you see, she could ill-wish her, so that the girl would waste away and die from natural causes.”

  “Strange how the old beliefs linger,” said the vicar. “In early Christian times, local superstitions were wisely incorporated with Christian doctrines and their more unpleasant attributes gradually eliminated.”

  “It isn’t superstition we’ve got to deal with here,” said Mrs. Dane Calthrop, “but facts.”

  “And very unpleasant facts,” I said.

  “As you say, Mr. Burton,” said Miss Marple. “Now you—excuse me if I am being too personal—are a stranger here, and have a knowledge of the world and of various aspects of life. It seems to me that you ought to be able to find a solution to this distasteful problem.”