The Moving Finger. Agatha Christie
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gurgled and seemed much amused.
‘Do you think they’ll think I’m awful?’ she said.
‘No,’ I said. ‘Just queer.’
Joanna had resumed her study of the cards left by our callers. Only the vicar’s wife had been so fortunate, or possibly unfortunate, as to catch Joanna at home.
Joanna murmured:
‘It’s rather like Happy Families, isn’t it? Mrs Legal the lawyer’s wife, Miss Dose the doctor’s daughter, etc.’ She added with enthusiasm: ‘I do think this is a nice place, Jerry! So sweet and funny and old-world. You just can’t think of anything nasty happening here, can you?’
And although I knew what she said was really nonsense, I agreed with her. In a place like Lymstock nothing nasty could happen. It is odd to think that it was just a week later that we got the first letter.
I see that I have begun badly. I have given no description of Lymstock and without understanding what Lymstock is like, it is impossible to understand my story.
To begin with, Lymstock has its roots in the past. Somewhere about the time of the Norman Conquest, Lymstock was a place of importance. That importance was chiefly ecclesiastical. Lymstock had a priory, and it had a long succession of ambitious and powerful priors. Lords and barons in the surrounding countryside made themselves right with Heaven by leaving certain of their lands to the priory. Lymstock Priory waxed rich and important and was a power in the land for many centuries. In due course, however, Henry the Eighth caused it to share the fate of its contemporaries. From then on a castle dominated the town. It was still important. It had rights and privileges and wealth.
And then, somewhere in seventeen hundred and something, the tide of progress swept Lymstock into a backwater. The castle crumbled. Neither railways nor main roads came near Lymstock. It turned into a little provincial market town, unimportant and forgotten, with a sweep of moorland rising behind it, and placid farms and fields ringing it round.
A market was held there once a week, on which day one was apt to encounter cattle in the lanes and roads. It had a small race meeting twice a year which only the most obscure horses attended. It had a charming High Street with dignified houses set flat back, looking slightly incongruous with their ground-floor windows displaying buns or vegetables or fruit. It had a long straggling draper’s shop, a large and portentous iron-monger’s, a pretentious post office, and a row of straggly indeterminate shops, two rival butchers and an International Stores. It had a doctor, a firm of solicitors, Messrs Galbraith, Galbraith and Symmington, a beautiful and unexpectedly large church dating from fourteen hundred and twenty, with some Saxon remains incorporated in it, a new and hideous school, and two pubs.
Such was Lymstock, and urged on by Emily Barton, anybody who was anybody came to call upon us, and in due course Joanna, having bought a pair of gloves and assumed a velvet beret rather the worse for wear, sallied forth to return them.
To us, it was all quite novel and entertaining. We were not there for life. It was, for us, an interlude. I prepared to obey my doctor’s instructions and get interested in my neighbours.
Joanna and I found it all great fun.
I remembered, I suppose, Marcus Kent’s instructions to enjoy the local scandals. I certainly didn’t suspect how these scandals were going to be introduced to my notice.
The odd part of it was that the letter, when it came, amused us more than anything else.
It arrived, I remember, at breakfast. 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 a bill and the other from a rather tiresome cousin.
Inside, printed words and letters had been cut out and gummed to a sheet of paper. For a minute or two I stared at the words without taking them in. Then I gasped.
Joanna, who was frowning over some bills, looked up.
‘Hallo,’ she said, ‘what is it? You look quite startled.’
The letter, using terms of the coarsest character, expressed the writer’s opinion that Joanna and I were not brother and sister.
‘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 frightfully 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 added. ‘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 towards 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—somebody 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.