The Moving Finger Read online

  I ate both chops in an attempt to atone for Joanna’s lapse. All the same, I wondered where my sister was. She had taken to be very mysterious about her doings of late.

  It was half past three when Joanna burst into the drawing room. I had heard a car stop outside and I half expected to see Griffith, but the car drove on and Joanna came in alone.

  Her face was very red and she seemed upset. I perceived that something had happened.

  “What’s the matter?” I asked.

  Joanna opened her mouth, closed it again, sighed, plumped herself down in a chair and stared in front of her.

  She said:

  “I’ve had the most awful day.”

  “What’s happened?”

  “I’ve done the most incredible thing. It was awful—”

  “But what—”

  “I just started out for a walk, an ordinary walk—I went up over the hill and on to the moor. I walked miles—I felt like it. Then I dropped down into a hollow. There’s a farm there—A God-forsaken lonely sort of spot. I was thirsty and I wondered if they’d got any milk or something. So I wandered into the farmyard and then the door opened and Owen came out.”

  “Yes?”

  “He thought it might be the district nurse. There was a woman in there having a baby. He was expecting the nurse and he’d sent word to her to get hold of another doctor. It—things were going wrong.”

  “Yes?”

  “So he said—to me. ‘Come on, you’ll do—better than nobody.’ I said I couldn’t, and he said what did I mean? I said I’d never done anything like that, that I didn’t know anything—

  “He said what the hell did that matter? And then he was awful. He turned on me. He said, ‘You’re a woman, aren’t you? I suppose you can do your durnedest to help another woman?’ And he went on at me—said I’d talked as though I was interested in doctoring and had said I wished I was a nurse. ‘All pretty talk, I suppose! You didn’t mean anything real by it, but this is real and you’re going to behave like a decent human being and not like a useless ornamental nitwit!’

  “I’ve done the most incredible things, Jerry. Held instruments and boiled them and handed things. I’m so tired I can hardly stand up. It was dreadful. But he saved her—and the baby. It was born alive. He didn’t think at one time he could save it. Oh dear!”

  Joanna covered her face with her hands.

  I contemplated her with a certain amount of pleasure and mentally took my hat off to Owen Griffith. He’d brought Joanna slap up against reality for once.

  I said, “There’s a letter for you in the hall. From Paul, I think.”

  “Eh?” She paused for a minute and then said, “I’d no idea, Jerry, what doctors had to do. The nerve they’ve got to have!”

  I went out into the hall and brought Joanna her letter. She opened it, glanced vaguely at its contents, and let it drop.

  “He was—really—rather wonderful. The way he fought—the way he wouldn’t be beaten! He was rude and horrible to me—but he was wonderful.”

  I observed Paul’s disregarded letter with some pleasure. Plainly, Joanna was cured of Paul.

  Thirteen

  I

  Things never come when they are expected.

  I was full of Joanna’s and my personal affairs and was quite taken aback the next morning when Nash’s voice said over the telephone: “We’ve got her, Mr. Burton!”

  I was so startled I nearly dropped the receiver.

  “You mean the—”

  He interrupted.

  “Can you be overheard where you are?”

  “No, I don’t think so—well, perhaps—”

  It seemed to me that the baize door to the kitchen had swung open a trifle.

  “Perhaps you’d care to come down to the station?”

  “I will. Right away.”

  I was at the police station in next to no time. In an inner room Nash and Sergeant Parkins were together. Nash was wreathed in smiles.

  “It’s been a long chase,” he said. “But we’re there at last.”

  He flicked a letter across the table. This time it was all typewritten. It was, of its kind, fairly mild.

  “It’s no use thinking you’re going to step into a dead woman’s shoes. The whole town is laughing at you. Get out now. Soon it will be too late. This is a warning. Remember what happened to that other girl. Get out and stay out.”

  It finished with some mildly obscene language.

  “That reached Miss Holland this morning,” said Nash.

  “Thought it was funny she hadn’t had one before,” said Sergeant Parkins.

  “Who wrote it?” I asked.

  Some of the exultation faded out of Nash’s face.

  He looked tired and concerned. He said soberly:

  “I’m sorry about it, because it will hit a decent man hard, but there it is. Perhaps he’s had his suspicions already.”

  “Who wrote it?” I reiterated.

  “Miss Aimée Griffith.”

  II

  Nash and Parkins went to the Griffiths’ house that afternoon with a warrant.

  By Nash’s invitation I went with them.

  “The doctor,” he said, “is very fond of you. He hasn’t many friends in this place. I think if it is not too painful to you, Mr. Burton, that you might help him to bear up under the shock.”

  I said I would come. I didn’t relish the job, but I thought I might be some good.

  We rang the bell and asked for Miss Griffith and we were shown into the drawing room. Elsie Holland, Megan and Symmington were there having tea.

  Nash behaved very circumspectly.

  He asked Aimée if he might have a few words with her privately.

  She got up and came towards us. I thought I saw just a faint hunted look in her eye. If so, it went again. She was perfectly normal and hearty.

  “Want me? Not in trouble over my car lights again, I hope?”

  She led the way out of the drawing room and across the hall into a small study.

  As I closed the drawing room door, I saw Symmington’s head jerk up sharply. I supposed his legal training had brought him in contact with police cases, and he had recognized something in Nash’s manner. He half rose.

  That is all I saw before I shut the door and followed the others.

  Nash was saying his piece. He was very quiet and correct. He cautioned her and then told her that he must ask her to accompany him. He had a warrant for her arrest and he read out the charge—

  I forget now the exact legal term. It was the letters, not murder yet.

  Aimée Griffith flung up her head and bayed with laughter. She boomed out: “What ridiculous nonsense! As though I’d write a packet of indecent stuff like that. You must be mad. I’ve never written a word of the kind.”

  Nash had produced the letter to Elsie Holland. He said:

  “Do you deny having written this, Miss Griffith?”

  If she hesitated it was only for a split second.

  “Of course I do. I’ve never seen it before.”

  Nash said quietly: “I must tell you, Miss Griffith, that you were observed to type that letter on the machine at the Women’s Institute between eleven and eleven thirty p.m. on the night before last. Yesterday you entered the post office with a bunch of letters in your hand—”

  “I never posted this.”

  “No, you did not. Whilst waiting for stamps, you dropped it inconspicuously on the floor, so that somebody should come along unsuspectingly and pick it up and post it.”

  “I never—”

  The door opened and Symmington came in. He said sharply: “What’s going on? Aimée, if there is anything wrong, you ought to be legally represented. If you wish me—”

  She broke then. Covered her face with her hands and staggered to a chair. She said:

  “Go away, Dick, go away. Not you! Not you!”

  “You need a solicitor, my dear girl.”

  “Not you. I—I—couldn’t bear it. I don’t want you to know—
all this.”

  He understood then, perhaps. He said quietly:

  “I’ll get hold of Mildmay, of Exhampton. Will that do?”

  She nodded. She was sobbing now.

  Symmington went out of the room. In the doorway he collided with Owen Griffith.

  “What’s this?” said Owen violently. “My sister—”

  “I’m sorry, Dr. Griffith. Very sorry. But we have no alternative.”

  “You think she—was responsible for those letters?”

  “I’m afraid there is no doubt of it, sir,” said Nash—he turned to Aimée, “You must come with us now, please, Miss Griffith—you shall have every facility for seeing a solicitor, you know.”

  Owen cried: “Aimée?”

  She brushed past him without looking at him.

  She said: “Don’t talk to me. Don’t say anything. And for God’s sake don’t look at me!”

  They went out. Owen stood like a man in a trance.

  I waited a bit, then I came up to him. “If there’s anything I can do, Griffith, tell me.”

  He said like a man in a dream:

  “Aimée? I don’t believe it.”

  “It may be a mistake,” I suggested feebly.

  He said slowly: “She wouldn’t take it like that if it were. But I would never have believed it. I can’t believe it.”

  He sank down on a chair. I made myself useful by finding a stiff drink and bringing it to him. He swallowed it down and it seemed to do him good.

  He said: “I couldn’t take it in at first. I’m all right now. Thanks, Burton, but there’s nothing you can do. Nothing anyone can do.”

  The door opened and Joanna came in. She was very white.

  She came over to Owen and looked at me.

  She said: “Get out, Jerry. This is my business.”

  As I went out of the door, I saw her kneel down by his chair.

  III

  I can’t tell you coherently the events of the next twenty-four hours. Various incidents stand out, unrelated to other incidents.

  I remember Joanna coming home, very white and drawn, and of how I tried to cheer her up, saying:

  “Now who’s being a ministering angel?”

  And of how she smiled in a pitiful twisted way and said:

  “He says he won’t have me, Jerry. He’s very, very proud and stiff!”

  And I said: “My girl won’t have me, either….”

  We sat there for a while, Joanna saying at last:

  “The Burton family isn’t exactly in demand at the moment!”

  I said, “Never mind, my sweet, we still have each other,” and Joanna said, “Somehow or other, Jerry, that doesn’t comfort me much just now….”

  IV

  Owen came the next day and rhapsodied in the most fulsome way about Joanna. She was wonderful, marvellous! The way she’d come to him, the way she was willing to marry him—at once if he liked. But he wasn’t going to let her do that. No, she was too good, too fine to be associated with the kind of muck that would start as soon as the papers got hold of the news.

  I was fond of Joanna, and knew she was the kind who’s all right when standing by in trouble, but I got rather bored with all this highfalutin” stuff. I told Owen rather irritably not to be so damned noble.

  I went down to the High Street and found everybody’s tongues wagging nineteen to the dozen. Emily Barton was saying that she had never really trusted Aimée Griffith. The grocer’s wife was saying with gusto that she’d always thought Miss Griffith had a queer look in her eye—

  They had completed the case against Aimée, so I learnt from Nash. A search of the house had brought to light the cut pages of Emily Barton’s book—in the cupboard under the stairs, of all places, wrapped up in an old roll of wallpaper.

  “And a jolly good place too,” said Nash appreciatively. “You never know when a prying servant won’t tamper with a desk or a locked drawer—but those junk cupboards full of last year’s tennis balls and old wallpaper are never opened except to shove something more in.”

  “The lady would seem to have had a penchant for that particular hiding place,” I said.

  “Yes. The criminal mind seldom has much variety. By the way, talking of the dead girl, we’ve got one fact to go upon. There’s a large heavy pestle missing from the doctor’s dispensary. I’ll bet anything you like that’s what she was stunned with.”

  “Rather an awkward thing to carry about,” I objected.

  “Not for Miss Griffith. She was going to the Guides that afternoon, but she was going to leave flowers and vegetables at the Red Cross stall on the way, so she’d got a whopping great basket with her.”

  “You haven’t found the skewer?”

  “No, and I shan’t. The poor devil may be mad, but she wasn’t mad enough to keep a bloodstained skewer just to make it easy for us, when all she’d got to do was to wash it and return it to a kitchen drawer.”

  “I suppose,” I conceded, “that you can’t have everything.”

  The vicarage had been one of the last places to hear the news. Old Miss Marple was very much distressed by it. She spoke to me very earnestly on the subject.

  “It isn’t true, Mr. Burton. I’m sure it isn’t true.”

  “It’s true enough, I’m afraid. They were lying in wait, you know. They actually saw her type that letter.”

  “Yes, yes—perhaps they did. Yes, I can understand that.”

  “And the printed pages from which the letters were cut were found where she’d hidden them in her house.”

  Miss Marple stared at me. Then she said, in a very low voice: “But that is horrible—really wicked.”

  Mrs. Dane Calthrop came up with a rush and joined us and said: “What’s the matter, Jane?” Miss Marple was murmuring helplessly:

  “Oh dear, oh dear, what can one do?”

  “What’s upset you, Jane?”

  Miss Marple said: “There must be something. But I am so old and so ignorant, and I am afraid, so foolish.”

  I felt rather embarrassed and was glad when Mrs. Dane Calthrop took her friend away.

  I was to see Miss Marple again that afternoon, however. Much later when I was on my way home.

  She was standing near the little bridge at the end of the village, near Mrs. Cleat’s cottage, and talking to Megan of all people.

  I wanted to see Megan. I had been wanting to see her all day. I quickened my pace. But as I came up to them, Megan turned on her heel and went off in the other direction.

  It made me angry and I would have followed her, but Miss Marple blocked my way.

  She said: “I wanted to speak to you. No, don’t go after Megan now. It wouldn’t be wise.”

  I was just going to make a sharp rejoinder when she disarmed me by saying:

  “That girl has great courage—a very high order of courage.”

  I still wanted to go after Megan, but Miss Marple said:

  “Don’t try and see her now. I do know what I am talking about. She must keep her courage intact.”

  There was something about the old lady’s assertion that chilled me. It was as though she knew something that I didn’t.

  I was afraid and didn’t know why I was afraid.

  I didn’t go home. I went back into the High Street and walked up and down aimlessly. I don’t know what I was waiting for, nor what I was thinking about….

  I got caught by that awful old bore Colonel Appleton. He asked after my pretty sister as usual and then went on:

  “What’s all this about Griffith’s sister being mad as a hatter? They say she’s been at the bottom of this anonymous letter business that’s been such a confounded nuisance to everybody? Couldn’t believe it at first, but they say it’s quite true.”

  I said it was true enough.

  “Well, well—I must say our police force is pretty good on the whole. Give ’em time, that’s all, give ’em time. Funny business this anonymous letter stunt—these desiccated old maids are always the ones who go in for it—though the
Griffith woman wasn’t bad looking even if she was a bit long in the tooth. But there aren’t any decent-looking girls in this part of the world—except that governess girl of the Symmingtons. She’s worth looking at. Pleasant girl, too. Grateful if one does any little thing for her. Came across her having a picnic or something with those kids not long ago. They were romping about in the heather and she was knitting—ever so vexed she’d run out of wool. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘like me to run you into Lymstock? I’ve got to call for a rod of mine there. I shan’t be more than ten minutes getting it, then I’ll run you back again.’ She was a bit doubtful about leaving the boys. ‘They’ll be all right,’ I said. ‘Who’s to harm them?’ Wasn’t going to have the boys along, no fear! So I ran her in, dropped her at the wool shop, picked her up again later and that was that. Thanked me very prettily. Grateful and all that. Nice girl.”

  I managed to get away from him.

  It was after that, that I caught sight of Miss Marple for the third time. She was coming out of the police station.

  V

  Where do one’s fears come from? Where do they shape themselves? Where do they hide before coming out into the open?

  Just one short phrase. Heard and noted and never quite put aside:

  “Take me away—it’s so awful being here—feeling so wicked….”

  Why had Megan said that? What had she to feel wicked about?

  There could be nothing in Mrs. Symmington’s death to make Megan feel wicked.

  Why had the child felt wicked? Why? Why?

  Could it be because she felt responsible in anyway?

  Megan? Impossible! Megan couldn’t have had anything to do with those letters—those foul obscene letters.

  Owen Griffith had known a case up North—a schoolgirl….

  What had Inspector Graves said?

  Something about an adolescent mind….

  Innocent middle-aged ladies on operating tables babbling words they hardly knew. Little boys chalking up things on walls.

  No, no, not Megan.

  Heredity? Bad blood? An unconscious inheritance of something abnormal? Her misfortune, not her fault, a curse laid upon her by a past generation?

  “I’m not the wife for you. I’m better at hating than loving.”

  Oh, my Megan, my little child. Not that! Anything but that. And that old Tabby is after you, she suspects. She says you have courage. Courage to do what?