The Moving Finger mm-3

  The Moving Finger

  ( Miss Marole - 3 )

  Agatha Christie

  Agatha Christie

  The Moving Finger

  Chapter 1

  I have often recalled the morning when the first of the anonymous letters came.

  It arrived at breakfast and I turned it over in the idle way one does when time goes slowly and every event must be spun out to its full extent. It was, I saw, a local letter with a typewritten address. I opened it before the two with London postmarks, since one of them was clearly a bill, and on the other I recognised the handwriting of one of my more tiresome cousins.

  It seems odd, now, to remember that Joanna and I were more amused by the letter than anything else. We hadn't, then, the faintest inkling of what was to come – the trail of blood and violence and suspicion and fear.

  One simply didn't associate that sort of thing with Lymstock.

  I see that I have begun badly. I haven't explained Lymstock.

  When I took a bad crash flying, I was afraid for a long time, in spite of soothing words from doctors and nurses, that I was going to be condemned to lie on my back all my life. Then at last they took me out of the plaster and I learned cautiously to use my limbs, and finally Marcus Kent, my doctor, clapped me on my back and told me that everything was going to be all right, but that I'd got to go and live in the country and lead the life of a vegetable for at least six months.

  "Go to some part of the world where you haven't any friends. Get right away from things. Take an interest in local politics, get excited about village gossip, absorb all the local scandal. Small beer – that's the prescription for you. Absolute rest and quiet."

  Rest and quiet! It seems funny to think of that now.

  And so Lymstock – and Little Furze.

  Lymstock had been a place of importance at the time of the Norman Conquest. In the twentieth century it was a place of no importance whatsoever. It was three miles from a main road – a little provincial market town with a sweep of moorland rising above it. Little Furze was situated on the road leading up to the moors. It was a prim, low, white house with a sloping Victorian veranda painted a faded green.

  My sister Joanna, as soon as she saw it, decided that it was the ideal spot for a convalescent. Its owner matched the house, a charming little old lady, quite incredibly Victorian, who explained to Joanna that she would never have dreamed of letting her house if "things had not been so different nowadays – this terrible taxation."

  So everything was settled, and the agreement signed, and in due course Joanna and I arrived and settled in, while Miss Emily Barton went into rooms in Lymstock kept by a former parlourmaid ("my faithful Florence ") and we were looked after by Miss Barton's present maid, Partridge, a grim but efficient personage who was assisted by a daily "girl."

  As soon as we had been given a few days to settle down, Lymstock came solemnly to call. Everybody in Lymstock had a label – "rather like happy families," as Joanna said.

  There was Mr. Symmington the lawyer, thin and dry, with his querulous bridge-playing wife. Dr. Griffith – the dark, melancholy doctor – and his sister who was big and hearty. The vicar, a scholarly absent-minded elderly man and his erratic eager-faced wife. Rich dilettante Mr. Pye of Prior's End, and finally Miss Emily Barton herself, the perfect spinster of village tradition.

  Joanna fingered the cards with something like awe.

  "I didn't know," she said in an awestruck voice, "that people really called with cards!"

  "That," I told her, "is because you know nothing about the country."

  Joanna is very pretty and very gay, and she likes dancing and cocktails and love affairs and rushing about in high-powered cars. She is definitely and entirely urban.

  "At any rate," said Joanna, "I look all right."

  I studied her critically and was not able to agree.

  Joanna was dressed (by Mirotin) for 'le sport'. The effect was quite charming, but a bit startling for Lymstock.

  "No," I said. "You're all wrong. You ought to be wearing an old faded tweed skirt with a nice cashmere jumper matching it and perhaps a rather baggy cardigan coat, and you'd wear a felt hat and thick stockings and old well-worn brogues. Your face is all wrong, too," I added.

  "What's wrong with that? I've got on my Country Tan Make-Up No. 2."

  "Exactly," I said. "If you lived here, you would have just a little powder to take the shine off the nose and you would almost certainly be wearing all your eyebrows instead of only a quarter of them."

  Joanna laughed, and said that coming to the country was a new experience and she was going to enjoy it.

  "I'm afraid you'll be terribly bored," I said remorsefully.

  "No, I shan't. I really was fed up with all my crowd, and though you won't be sympathetic I really was very cut up about Paul. It will take me a long time to get over it."

  I was skeptical over this. Joanna's love affairs always run the same course. She has a mad infatuation for some completely spineless young man who is a misunderstood genius. She listens to his endless complaints and works to get him recognition. Then, when he is ungrateful, she is deeply wounded and says her heart is broken – until the next gloomy young man comes along, which is usually about three weeks later.

  I did not take Joanna's broken heart very seriously, but I did see that living in the country was like a new game to my attractive sister. She entered with zest into the pastime of returning calls. We duly received invitations to tea and to bridge, which we accepted, and issued invitations in our turn.

  To us, it was all novel and entertaining – a new game.

  And, as I say, when the anonymous letter came, it struck me, at first, as amusing too.

  For a minute or two after opening the letter, I stared at it uncomprehendingly. Printed words had been cut out and pasted on a sheet of paper.

  The letter, using terms of the coarsest character, expressed the writer's opinion that Joanna and I were not brother and sister.

  "Hullo," said Joanna. "What is it?"

  "It's a particularly foul anonymous letter," I said.

  I was still suffering from shock. Somehow one didn't expect that kind of thing in the placid backwater of Lymstock.

  Joanna at once displayed lively interest.

  "No? What does it say?"

  In novels, I have noticed, anonymous letters of a foul and disgusting character are never shown, if possible, to women. It is implied that women must at all cost be shielded from the shock it might give their delicate nervous systems.

  I am sorry to say it never occurred to me not to show the letter to Joanna. I handed it to her at once.

  She vindicated my belief in her toughness by displaying no emotion but that of amusement.

  "What an awful bit of dirt! I've always heard about anonymous letters, but I've never seen one before. Are they always like this?"

  "I can't tell you," I said. "It's my first experience, too."

  Joanna began to giggle.

  "You must have been right about my make-up, Jerry. I suppose they think I just must be an abandoned female!"

  "That," I said, "coupled with the fact that our father was a tall, dark, lantern-jawed man and our mother a fair-haired blue-eyed little creature, and that I take after him and you take after her."

  Joanna nodded thoughtfully. "Yes, we're not a bit alike. Nobody would take us for brother and sister."

  "Somebody certainly hasn't," I said with feeling.

  Joanna said she thought it was rightfully funny. She dangled the letter thoughtfully by one corner and asked what we were to do with it.

  "The correct procedure, I believe," I said, "is to drop it into the fire with a sharp exclamation of disgust."

  I suited
the action to the word, and Joanna applauded.

  "You did that beautifully," she said. "You ought to have been on the stage. It's lucky we still have fires, isn't it?"

  "The waste-paper basket would have been much less dramatic," I agreed. "I could, of course, have set light to it with a match and slowly watched it burn – or watched it slowly burn."

  "Things never burn when you want them to," said Joanna. "They go out. You'd probably have had to strike match after match."

  She got up and went toward the window. Then, standing there, she turned her head sharply.

  "I wonder," she said, "who wrote it?"

  "We're never likely to know," I said.

  "No – I suppose not." She was silent a moment, and then said: "I don't know when I come to think of it that it is so funny after all. You know, I thought they – they liked us down here."

  "So they do," I said. "This is just some half-crazy brain on the borderline."

  "I suppose so. Ugh-nasty!"

  As she went out into the sunshine I thought to myself as I smoked my after-breakfast cigarette that she was quite right. It was nasty. Someone resented our coming here – someone resented Joanna's bright young sophisticated beauty – someone wanted to hurt. To take it with a laugh was perhaps the best way – but deep down it wasn't funny.

  Dr. Griffith came that morning. I had fixed up for him to give me a weekly overhaul. I liked Owen Griffith. He was dark, ungainly, with awkward ways of moving and deft, very gentle hands. He had a jerky way of talking and was rather shy.

  He reported progress to be encouraging. Then he added,

  "You're feeling all right, aren't you? Is it my fancy, or are you a bit under the weather this morning?"

  "Not really," I said. "A particularly scurrilous anonymous letter arrived with the morning coffee, and it's left rather a nasty taste in the mouth."

  He dropped his bag on the floor. His thin dark face was excited. "Do you mean to say that you've had one of them?"

  I was interested.

  "They've been going about, then?"

  "Yes. For some time."

  "Oh," I said. "I see. I was under the impression that our presence as strangers was resented here."

  "No, no, it's nothing to do with that. It's just -" He paused and then asked, "What did it say? At least" – he turned suddenly red and embarrassed – "perhaps I oughtn't to ask?"

  "I'll tell you with pleasure," I said. "It just said that the fancy tart I'd brought down with me wasn't my sister – not half! And that, I may say, is a shortened version."

  His dark face flushed angrily.

  "How damnable! Your sister didn't – she's not upset, I hope?"

  "Joanna," I said, "looks a little like the angel off the top of the Christmas tree, but she's eminently modern and quite tough. She found it highly entertaining. Such things haven't come her way before."

  "I should hope not, indeed," said Griffith warmly.

  "And anyway," I said firmly, "that's the best way to take it, I think. As something utterly ridiculous."

  "Yes," said Owen Griffith, "only -"

  He stopped, and I chimed in quickly.

  "Quite so," I said. "Only is the word!"

  "The trouble is," he said, "that this sort of thing, once it starts, grows."

  "So I should imagine."

  "It's pathological, of course."

  I nodded. "Any idea who's behind it?" I asked.

  "No, I wish I had. You see, the anonymous letter pest arises from one of two causes. Either it's particular – directed at one person or set of people, that is to say it's motivated, it's someone who's got a definite grudge (or thinks he has) and who chooses a particularly nasty and underhand way of working it off. It's mean and disgusting but it's not necessarily crazy, and it's usually fairly easy to trace the writer – a discharged servant, a jealous woman, and so on. But if it's general, and not particular, then it's more serious.

  "The letters are sent indiscriminately and serve the purpose of working off some frustration in the writer's mind. As I say, it's definitely pathological. And the craze grows. In the end, of course, you track down the person in question – (it's often someone extremely unlikely) and that's that. There was a bad outburst of that kind over the other side of the county last year – turned out to be the head of the millinery department in a big draper's establishment. Quiet, refined woman – had been there for years.

  "I remember something of the same kind in my last practice up north. But that turned out to be purely personal spite. Still, as I say, I've seen something of this kind of thing, and, quite frankly, it frightens me!"

  "Has it been going on long?" I asked.

  "I don't think so. Hard to say, of course, because people who get these letters don't go round advertising the fact. They put them in the fire."

  He paused.

  "I've had one myself. Symmington, the solicitor, he's had one. And one or two of my poorer patients have told me about them."

  "All much the same sort of thing?"

  "Oh, yes. A definite harping on the sex theme. That's always a feature." He grinned. "Symmington was accused of illicit relations with his lady clerk – poor old Miss Ginch, who's forty at least, with pince-nez and teeth like a rabbit. Symmington took it straight to the police. My letters accused me of violating professional decorum with my lady patients, stressing the details. They're all quite childish and absurd, but horribly venomous." His face changed, grew grave. "But all the same, I'm afraid. These things can be dangerous, you know."

  "I suppose they can."

  "You see," he said, "crude, childish-spite though it is, sooner or later one of these letters will hit the mark. And then, God knows what may happen! I'm afraid, too, of the effect upon the slow, suspicious, uneducated mind. If they see a thing written, they believe it's true. All sorts of complications may arise."

  "It was an illiterate sort of letter," I said thoughtfully, "written by somebody practically illiterate, I should say."

  "Was it?" said Owen and went away.

  Thinking it over afterward, I found that "Was it?" rather disturbing.

  I am not going to pretend that the arrival of our anonymous letter did not leave a nasty taste in the mouth. It did. At the same time, it soon passed out of my mind. I did not, you see, at that point, take it seriously. I think I remember saying to myself that these things probably happen fairly often in out-of-the-way villages. Some hysterical woman with a taste for dramatising herself was probably at the bottom of it. Anyway, if the letters were as childish and silly as the one we had got, they couldn't do much harm.

  The next incident, if I may put it so, occurred about a week later, when Partridge, her lips set tightly together, informed me that Beatrice, the daily help, would not be coming today.

  "I gather, sir," said Partridge, "that the girl has been upset."

  I was not very sure what Partridge was implying, but I diagnosed (wrongly) some stomach trouble to which Partridge was too delicate to allude more directly. I said I was sorry and hoped she would soon be better.

  "The girl is perfectly well, sir," said Partridge. "She is upset in her feelings."

  "Oh," I said rather doubtfully.

  "Owing," went on Partridge, "to a letter she has received. Making, I understand, insinuations."

  The grimness of Partridge's eye made me apprehensive that the insinuations were concerned with me. Since I could hardly have recognised Beatrice by sight if I had met her in the town, so unaware of her had I been, I felt a not unnatural annoyance. An invalid hobbling about on two sticks is hardly cast for the role of deceiver of village girls.

  I said irritably:

  "What nonsense!"

  "My very words, sir, to the girl's mother," said Partridge. "'Goings-on in this house,' I said to her, 'there never have been and never will be while I am in charge. As to Beatrice,' I said, 'girls are different nowadays, and as to goings-on elsewhere I can say nothing.' But the truth is, sir, that Beatrice's friend from the garage as she walks out
with got one of them nasty letters, too, and he isn't acting reasonable at all."

  "I have never heard anything so preposterous in my life," I said angrily.

  "It's my opinion, sir," said Partridge, "that we're well rid of the girl. What I say is, she wouldn't take on so if there wasn't something she didn't want found out. No smoke without fire, that's what I say."

  I had no idea how horribly tired I was going to get of that particular phrase.

  That morning, by way of adventure, I was to walk down to the village. The sun was shining, the air was cool and crisp with the sweetness of spring in it. I assembled my sticks and started off, firmly refusing to permit Joanna to accompany me.

  It was arranged that she should pick me up with the car and drive me back up the hill in time for lunch.

  "That ought to give you time to pass the time of day with everyone in Lymstock."

  "I have no doubt," I said, "that I shall have seen anybody who is anybody by then."

  For morning in the High Street was a kind of rendezvous for shoppers, when news was exchanged.

  I did not, after all, walk down to the town unaccompanied. I had gone about two hundred yards, when I heard a bicycle bell behind me, then a scrunching of brakes, and then Megan Hunter more or less fell off her machine at my feet.

  "Hullo," she said breathlessly as she rose and dusted herself off.

  I rather liked Megan and always felt oddly sorry for her.

  She was Symmington the lawyer's stepdaughter, Mrs. Symmington's daughter by a first marriage. Nobody talked much about Mr. (or Captain) Hunter, and I gathered that he was considered best forgotten. He was reported to have treated Mrs. Symmington very badly. She had divorced him a year or two after the marriage. She was a woman with means of her own and had settled down with her little daughter in Lymstock "to forget," and had eventually married the only eligible bachelor in the place, Richard Symmington.

  There were two boys of the second marriage to whom their parents were devoted, and I fancied that Megan sometimes felt odd-man in the establishment. She certainly did not resemble her mother, who was a small anaemic woman, fadedly pretty, who talked in a thin melancholy voice of servant difficulties and her health.