The Moving Finger mm-3

by Agatha Christie

  Around 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."

  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.

  Upstairs I sat by Megan's bed waiting for her to come around 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 around."

  "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."

  "Hullo, 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… "

  "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 around, 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 around," 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 in these cases is 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 on 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. But 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, any other 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 nonexistent 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 copied 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 th
em and mixed them up, and the net result was that the letters definitely represented a woman's mind – a half-crazy 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 boyfriend 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, 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.

  "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."

  Joanna said, "And he killed Agnes? But surely that was quite unnecessary?"

  "Perhaps it was, but what you don't realize, my dear (not having killed anyone) is that your judgement is distorted afterward and everything seems exaggerated. No doubt he heard the girl telephoning to Partridge, saying she'd been worried ever since Mrs. Symmington's death, that there was something she didn't understand. He can't take any chances – this stupid foolish girl has seen something, knows something."

  "Yet apparently he was at his office all that afternoon?"

  "I should imagine he killed her before he went. Miss Holland was in the dining room and kitchen. He just went out into the hall, opened and shut the front door as though he was going out, then slipped into the little cloakroom.

  "When only Agnes was left in the house, he probably rang the frontdoor bell, slipped back into the cloakroom, came out behind her and hit her on the head as she was opening the front door, and then after thrusting the body into the cupboard, he hurried along to his office, arriving just a little late if anyone had happened to notice it, but they probably didn't. You see, no one was suspecting a man."

  "Abominable brute," said Mrs. Dane Calthrop.

  "You're not sorry for him, Mrs. Dane Calthrop?" I inquired.

  "Not in the least. Why?"

  "I'm glad to hear it, that's all."

  Joanna said:

  "But why Aimée Griffith? I know that the police have found the pestle taken from Owen's dispensary – and the skewer too. I suppose it's not so easy for a man to return things to kitchen drawers. And guess where they were? Superintendent Nash only told me just now when I met him on my way here. In one of those musty old deed boxes in his office. Estate of Sir Jasper Harrington-West, deceased."

  "Poor Jasper," said Mrs. Dane Calthrop. "He was a cousin of mine. So a correct old boy. He would have had a fit!"

  "Wasn't it madness to keep them?" I asked.

  "Probably madder to throw them away," said Mrs. Dane Calthrop. "No one had any suspicions about Symmington."

  "He didn't strike her with the pestle," said Joanna. "There was a clock weight there too with hair and blood on it. He pinched the pestle, the thing, on the day Aimée was arrested, and hid the book pages in her house. And that brings me back to my original question. What about Aimée Griffith? The police actually saw her write that letter."

  "Yes, of course," said Miss Marple. "She did write that letter."

  "But why?"

  "Oh, my dear, surely, you have realized that Miss Griffith had been in love with Symmington all her life?"

  "Poor thing!" said Mrs. Dane Calthrop mechanically. "They'd always been good friends, and I daresay she thought, after Mrs. Symmington's death, that someday, perhaps – well -"

  Miss Marple coughed delicately. "And then the gossip began spreading about Elsie Holland and I expect that upset her badly. She thought of the girl as a designing minx worming her way into Symmington's affections and quite unworthy of him. And so, I think, she succumbed to temptation. Why not add one more anonymous letter, and frighten the girl out of the race? It must have seemed quite safe to her and she took, as she thought, every precaution."

  "Well?" said Joanna. "Finish the story."

  "I should imagine," said Miss Marple slowly, "that when Miss Holland showed that letter to Symmington he realized at once who had written it, and he saw a chance to finish the case once and for all, and make himself safe. Not very nice – no, not very nice, but he was frightened, you see. The police wouldn't be satisfied until they'd got the anonymous letter writer. When he took the letter down to the police and he found they'd actually seen Aimée writing it, he felt he'd got a chance in a thousand of finishing the whole thing.

  "He took the family to tea there that afternoon and as he came from the office with his attache case, he could easily bring the torn-out book pages to hide under the stairs and clinch the case. Hiding them under the stairs was a neat touch. It recalled the disposal of Agnes' body, and, from the practical point of view, it was very easy for him. When he followed Aimée and the police, just a minute or two in the hall passing through would be enough."

  "All the same," I said, "there's one thing I can't forgive you for, Miss Marple – roping in Megan."

  Miss Marple put down her crochet which she had resumed.

  She looked
at me over her spectacles and her eyes were stern.

  "My dear young man, something had to be done. There was no evidence against this very clever and unscrupulous man. I needed someone to help me, someone of high courage and good brains. I found the person I needed."

  "It was very dangerous for her."

  "Yes, it was dangerous, but we are not put into this world, Mr. Burton, to avoid danger when an innocent fellow creature's life is at stake. You understand me?"

  I understood.

  It was morning in the High Street.

  Miss Emily Barton came out of the grocer's with her shopping bag. Her cheeks were pink and her eyes were excited.

  "Oh, dear, Mr. Burton, I really am in such a flutter. To think I really am going on a cruise at last!"

  "I hope you'll enjoy it."

  "Oh, I'm sure I shall. I should never have dared to go by myself. It does seem so providential the way everything has turned out. For a long time I've felt that I ought to part with Little Furze, that my means were really too straitened, but I couldn't bear the idea of strangers there.

  "But now that you have bought it and are going to live there with Megan – it is quite different. And then dear Aimée, after her terrible ordeal, not quite knowing what to do with herself, and her brother getting married (how nice to think you have both settled down with us!), and agreeing to come with me. We mean to be away quite a long time. We might even" – Miss Emily dropped her voice – "go around the world! And Aimée is so splendid and so practical. I really do think – don't you? – that everything turns out for the best."

  Just for a fleeting moment I thought of Mrs. Symmington and Agnes Woddell in their graves in the churchyard and wondered if they would agree, and then I remembered that Agnes' boyfriend hadn't been very fond of her and that Mrs. Symmington hadn't been very nice to Megan and, what the hell? We've all got to die sometime! And I agreed with happy Miss Emily that everything was for the best in the best of possible worlds.

  I went along the High Street and in at the Symmingtons' gate and Megan came out to meet me.

  It was not a romantic meeting because an out-size old english sheep dog came out with Megan and nearly knocked me over with his ill-timed exuberance.