The Moving Finger Read online

  It was only a brainstorm. It passed. But I wanted to see Megan— I wanted to see her badly.

  At half past nine that night I left the house and went down to the town and along to the Symmingtons.’

  It was then that an entirely new idea came into my mind. The idea of a woman whom nobody had considered for a moment.

  (Or had Nash considered her?)

  Wildly unlikely, wildly improbable, and I would have said up to today impossible, too. But that was not so. No, not impossible.

  I redoubled my pace. Because it was now even more imperative that I should see Megan straightaway.

  I passed through the Symmingtons’ gate and up to the house. It was a dark overcast night. A little rain was beginning to fall. The visibility was bad.

  I saw a line of light from one of the windows. The little morning room?

  I hesitated a moment or two, then instead of going up to the front door, I swerved and crept very quietly up to the window, skirting a big bush and keeping low.

  The light came from a chink in the curtains which were not quite drawn. It was easy to look through and see.

  It was a strangely peaceful and domestic scene. Symmington in a big armchair, and Elsie Holland, her head bent, busily patching a boy’s torn shirt.

  I could hear as well as see for the window was open at the top.

  Elsie Holland was speaking.

  “But I do think, really, Mr. Symmington, that the boys are quite old enough to go to boarding school. Not that I shan’t hate leaving them because I shall. I’m ever so fond of them both.”

  Symmington said: “I think perhaps you’re right about Brian, Miss Holland. I’ve decided that he shall start next term at Winhays—my old prep school. But Colin is a little young yet. I’d prefer him to wait another year.”

  “Well of course I see what you mean. And Colin is perhaps a little young for his age—”

  Quiet domestic talk—quiet domestic scene—and a golden head bent over needlework.

  Then the door opened and Megan came in.

  She stood very straight in the doorway, and I was aware at once of something tense and strung up about her. The skin of her face was tight and drawn and her eyes were bright and resolute. There was no diffidence about her tonight and no childishness.

  She said, addressing Symmington, but giving him no title (and I suddenly reflected that I never heard her call him anything. Did she address him as father or as Dick or what?)

  “I would like to speak to you, please. Alone.”

  Symmington looked surprised and, I fancied, not best pleased. He frowned, but Megan carried her point with a determination unusual in her.

  She turned to Elsie Holland and said:

  “Do you mind, Elsie?”

  “Oh, of course not,” Elsie Holland jumped up. She looked startled and a little flurried.

  She went to the door and Megan came farther in so that Elsie passed her.

  Just for a moment Elsie stood motionless in the doorway looking over her shoulder.

  Her lips were closed, she stood quite still, one hand stretched out, the other clasping her needlework to her.

  I caught my breath, overwhelmed by her beauty. When I think of her now, I always think of her like that—in arrested motion, with that matchless deathless perfection that belonged to ancient Greece.

  Then she went out shutting the door.

  Symmington said rather fretfully:

  “Well, Megan, what is it? What do you want?”

  Megan had come right up to the table. She stood there looking down at Symmington. I was struck anew by the resolute determination of her face and by something else—a hardness new to me.

  Then she opened her lips and said something that startled me to the core.

  “I want some money,” she said.

  The request didn’t improve Symmington’s temper. He said sharply:

  “Couldn’t you have waited until tomorrow morning? What’s the matter, do you think your allowance is inadequate?”

  A fair man, I thought even then, open to reason, though not to emotional appeal.

  Megan said: “I want a good deal of money.”

  Symmington sat up straight in his chair. He said coldly:

  “You will come of age in a few months’ time. Then the money left you by your grandmother will be turned over to you by the public trustee.”

  Megan said:

  “You don’t understand. I want money from you.” She went on, speaking faster. “Nobody’s ever talked much to me about my father. They’ve not wanted me to know about him. But I do know that he went to prison and I know why. It was for blackmail!”

  She paused.

  “Well, I’m his daughter. And perhaps I take after him. Anyway, I’m asking you to give me money because—if you don’t”—she stopped and then went on very slowly and evenly—“if you don’t—I shall say what I saw you doing to the cachet that day in my mother’s room.”

  There was a pause. Then Symmington said in a completely emotionless voice:

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  Megan said: “I think you do.”

  And she smiled. It was not a nice smile.

  Symmington got up. He went over to the writing desk. He took a cheque-book from his pocket and wrote out a cheque. He blotted it carefully and then came back. He held it out to Megan.

  “You’re grown up now,” he said. “I can understand that you may feel you want to buy something rather special in the way of clothes and all that. I don’t know what you’re talking about. I didn’t pay attention. But here’s a cheque.”

  Megan looked at it, then she said:

  “Thank you. That will do to go on with.”

  She turned and went out of the room. Symmington stared after her and at the closed door, then he turned round and as I saw his face I made a quick uncontrolled movement forward.

  It was checked in the most extraordinary fashion. The big bush that I had noticed by the wall stopped being a bush. Superintendent Nash’s arms went round me and Superintendent Nash’s voice just breathed in my ear:

  “Quiet, Burton. For God’s sake.”

  Then, with infinite caution he beat a retreat, his arm impelling me to accompany him.

  Round the side of the house he straightened himself and wiped his forehead.

  “Of course,” he said, “you would have to butt in!”

  “That girl isn’t safe,” I said urgently. “You saw his face? We’ve got to get her out of here.”

  Nash took a firm grip of my arm.

  “Now, look here, Mr. Burton, you’ve got to listen.”

  VI

  Well, I listened.

  I didn’t like it—but I gave in.

  But I insisted on being on the spot and I swore to obey orders implicitly.

  So that is how I came with Nash and Parkins into the house by the back door which was already unlocked.

  And I waited with Nash on the upstairs landing behind the velvet curtain masking the window alcove until the clocks in the house struck two, and Symmington’s door opened and he went across the landing and into Megan’s room.

  I did not stir or make a move for I knew that Sergeant Parkins was inside masked by the opening door, and I knew that Parkins was a good man and knew his job, and I knew that I couldn’t have trusted myself to keep quiet and not break out.

  And waiting there, with my heart thudding, I saw Symmington come out with Megan in his arms and carry her downstairs, with Nash and myself a discreet distance behind him.

  He carried her through to the kitchen and he had just arranged her comfortably with her head in the gas oven and had turned on the gas when Nash and I came through the kitchen door and switched on the light.

  And that was the end of Richard Symmington. He collapsed. Even while I was hauling Megan out and turning off the gas I saw the collapse. He didn’t even try to fight. He knew he’d played and lost.

  VII

  Upstairs I sat by Megan’s bed waiting for her to
come round and occasionally cursing Nash.

  “How do you know she’s all right? It was too big a risk.”

  Nash was very soothing.

  “Just a soporific in the milk she always had by her bed. Nothing more. It stands to reason, he couldn’t risk her being poisoned. As far as he’s concerned the whole business is closed with Miss Griffith’s arrest. He can’t afford to have any mysterious death. No violence, no poison. But if a rather unhappy type of girl broods over her mother’s suicide, and finally goes and puts her head in the gas oven—well, people just say that she was never quite normal and the shock of her mother’s death finished her.”

  I said, watching Megan:

  “She’s a long time coming round.”

  “You heard what Dr. Griffith said? Heart and pulse quite all right—she’ll just sleep and wake naturally. Stuff he gives a lot of his patients, he says.”

  Megan stirred. She murmured something.

  Superintendent Nash unobtrusively left the room.

  Presently Megan opened her eyes. “Jerry.”

  “Hallo, sweet.”

  “Did I do it well?”

  “You might have been blackmailing ever since your cradle!”

  Megan closed her eyes again. Then she murmured:

  “Last night—I was writing to you—in case anything went—went wrong. But I was too sleepy to finish. It’s over there.”

  I went across to the writing-table. In a shabby little blotter I found Megan’s unfinished letter.

  “My dear Jerry,” it began primly:

  “I was reading my school Shakespeare and the sonnet that begins:

  ‘So are you to my thoughts as food to life

  Or as sweet-season’d showers are to the ground.’

  and I see that I am in love with you after all, because that is what I feel….”

  Fourteen

  “So you see,” said Mrs. Dane Calthrop, “I was quite right to call in an expert.”

  I stared at her. We were all at the vicarage. The rain was pouring down outside and there was a pleasant log fire, and Mrs. Dane Calthrop had just wandered round, beat up a sofa cushion and put it for some reason of her own on the top of the grand piano.

  “But did you?” I said, surprised. “Who was it? What did he do?”

  “It wasn’t a he,” said Mrs. Dane Calthrop.

  With a sweeping gesture she indicated Miss Marple. Miss Marple had finished the fleecy knitting and was now engaged with a crochet hook and a ball of cotton.

  “That’s my expert,” said Mrs. Dane Calthrop. “Jane Marple. Look at her well. I tell you, that woman knows more about the different kinds of human wickedness than anyone I’ve ever known.”

  “I don’t think you should put it quite like that, dear,” murmured Miss Marple.

  “But you do.”

  “One sees a good deal of human nature living in a village all the year round,” said Miss Marple placidly.

  Then, seeming to feel it was expected of her, she laid down her crochet, and delivered a gentle old-maidish dissertation on murder.

  “The great thing is in these cases to keep an absolutely open mind. Most crimes, you see, are so absurdly simple. This one was. Quite sane and straightforward—and quite understandable—in an unpleasant way, of course.”

  “Very unpleasant!”

  “The truth was really so very obvious. You saw it, you know, Mr. Burton.”

  “Indeed I did not.”

  “But you did. You indicated the whole thing to me. You saw perfectly the relationship of one thing to the other, but you just hadn’t enough self-confidence to see what those feelings of yours meant. To begin with, that tiresome phrase ‘No smoke without fire.’ It irritated you, but you proceeded quite correctly to label it for what it was—a smoke screen. Misdirection, you see—everybody looking at the wrong thing—the anonymous letters, but the whole point was that there weren’t any anonymous letters!”

  “But my dear Miss Marple, I can assure you that there were. I had one.”

  “Oh yes, but they weren’t real at all. Dear Maud here tumbled to that. Even in peaceful Lymstock there are plenty of scandals, and I can assure you any woman living in the place would have known about them and used them. But a man, you see, isn’t interested in gossip in the same way—especially a detached logical man like Mr. Symmington. A genuine woman writer of those letters would have made her letters much more to the point.

  “So you see that if you disregard the smoke and come to the fire you know where you are. You just come down to the actual facts of what happened. And putting aside the letters, just one thing happened—Mrs. Symmington died.

  “So then, naturally, one thinks of who might have wanted Mrs. Symmington to die, and of course the very first person one thinks of in such a case is, I am afraid, the husband. And one asks oneself is there any reason?—any motive?—for instance, another woman?

  “And the very first thing I hear is that there is a very attractive young governess in the house. So clear, isn’t it? Mr. Symmington, a rather dry repressed unemotional man, tied to a querulous and neurotic wife and then suddenly this radiant young creature comes along.

  “I’m afraid, you know, that gentlemen, when they fall in love at a certain age, get the disease very badly. It’s quite a madness. And Mr. Symmington, as far as I can make out, was never actually a good man—he wasn’t very kind or very affectionate or very sympathetic—his qualities were all negative—so he hadn’t really the strength to fight his madness. And in a place like this, only his wife’s death would solve his problem. He wanted to marry the girl, you see. She’s very respectable and so is he. And besides, he’s devoted to his children and didn’t want to give them up. He wanted everything, his home, his children, his respectability and Elsie. And the price he would have to pay for that was murder.

  “He chose, I do think, a very clever way. He knew so well from his experience of criminal cases how soon suspicion falls on the husband if a wife dies unexpectedly—and the possibility of exhumation in the case of poison. So he created a death which seemed only incidental to something else. He created a non-existent anonymous letter writer. And the clever thing was that the police were certain to suspect a woman—and they were quite right in a way. All the letters were a woman’s letters; he cribbed them very cleverly from the letters in the case last year and from a case Dr Griffith told him about. I don’t mean that he was so crude as to reproduce any letter verbatim, but he took phrases and expressions from them and mixed them up, and the net result was that the letters definitely represented a woman’s mind—a half-crazed repressed personality.

  “He knew all the tricks that the police use, handwriting, typewriting tests, etc. He’s been preparing his crime for some time. He typed all the envelopes before he gave away the typewriter to the Women’s Institute, and he cut the pages from the book at Little Furze probably quite a long time ago when he was waiting in the drawing room one day. People don’t open books of sermons much!

  “And finally, having got his false Poison Pen well established, he staged the real thing. A fine afternoon when the governess and the boys and his stepdaughter would be out, and the servants having their regular day out. He couldn’t foresee that the little maid Agnes would quarrel with her boy and come back to the house.”

  Joanna asked:

  “But what did she see? Do you know that?”

  “I don’t know. I can only guess. My guess would be that she didn’t see anything.”

  “That it was all a mare’s nest?”

  “No, no, my dear, I mean that she stood at the pantry window all the afternoon waiting for the young man to come and make it up and that—quite literally—she saw nothing. That is, no one came to the house at all, not the postman, nor anybody else.

  “It would take her some time, being slow, to realize that that was very odd—because apparently Mrs. Symmington had received an anonymous letter that afternoon.”

  “Didn’t she receive one?” I asked, puzzled.
r />   “But of course not! As I say, this crime is so simple. Her husband just put the cyanide in the top cachet of the ones she took in the afternoon when her sciatica came on after lunch. All Symmington had to do was to get home before, or at the same time as Elsie Holland, call his wife, get no answer, go up to her room, drop a spot of cyanide in the plain glass of water she had used to swallow the cachet, toss the crumpled-up anonymous letter into the grate, and put by her hand the scrap of paper with ‘I can’t go on’ written on it.”

  Miss Marple turned to me.

  “You were quite right about that, too, Mr. Burton. A ‘scrap of paper’ was all wrong. People don’t leave suicide notes on small torn scraps of paper. They use a sheet of paper—and very often an envelope too. Yes, the scrap of paper was wrong and you knew it.”

  “You are rating me too high,” I said. “I knew nothing.”

  “But you did, you really did, Mr. Burton. Otherwise why were you immediately impressed by the message your sister left scribbled on the telephone pad?”

  I repeated slowly, “‘Say that I can’t go on Friday’—I see! I can’t go on?”

  Miss Marple beamed on me.

  “Exactly. Mr. Symmington came across such a message and saw its possibilities. He tore off the words he wanted for when the time came—a message genuinely in his wife’s handwriting.”

  “Was there any further brilliance on my part?” I asked.

  Miss Marple twinkled at me.

  “You put me on the track, you know. You assembled those facts together for me—in sequence—and on top of it you told me the most important thing of all—that Elsie Holland had never received any anonymous letters.”

  “Do you know,” I said, “last night I thought that she was the letter writer and that that was why there had been no letters written to her?”

  “Oh dear, me, no… The person who writes anonymous letters practically always sends them to herself as well. That’s part of the—well, the excitement, I suppose. No, no, the fact interested me for quite another reason. It was really, you see, Mr. Symmington’s one weakness. He couldn’t bring himself to write a foul letter to the girl he loved. It’s a very interesting sidelight on human nature—and a credit to him, in a way—but it’s where he gave himself away.”