The Moving Finger. Агата Кристи

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       CHAPTER 2

      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 dramatizing 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 stomachic 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, coupled with the obvious capital I of Insinuations, made me apprehensive that the insinuations were concerned with me. Since I would hardly have recognized 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. (Joanna and I always called it the village, although technically we were incorrect, and Lymstock would have been annoyed to hear us.)

      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.

      ‘No,’ I said, ‘I will not have a guardian angel teetering along beside me and uttering encouraging chirrups. A man travels fastest who travels alone, remember. I have much business to transact. I shall go to Galbraith, Galbraith and Symmington, and sign that transfer of shares, I shall call in at the baker’s and complain about the currant loaf, and I shall return that book we borrowed. I have to go to the bank, too. Let me away, woman, the morning is all too short.’

      It was arranged that Joanna 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.

      ‘Hallo,’ 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 step-daughter, 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 out 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.

      Megan was a tall awkward girl, and although she was actually twenty, she looked more like a schoolgirlish sixteen. She had a shock of untidy brown hair, hazel green eyes, a thin bony face, and an unexpected charming one-sided smile. Her clothes were drab and unattractive and she usually had on lisle thread stockings with holes in them.

      She looked, I decided this morning, much more like a horse than a human being. In fact she would have been a very nice horse with a little grooming.

      She spoke, as usual, in a kind of breathless rush.

      ‘I’ve been up to the farm—you know, Lasher’s—to see if they’d got any duck’s eggs. They’ve got an awfully nice lot of little pigs. Sweet! Do you like pigs? I do. I even like the smell.’

      ‘Well-kept pigs shouldn’t smell,’ I said.

      ‘Shouldn’t they? They all do round here. Are you walking down to the town? I saw you were alone, so I thought I’d stop and walk with you, only I stopped rather suddenly.’

      ‘You’ve torn your stocking,’ I said.

      Megan looked rather ruefully at her right leg.

      ‘So I have. But it’s got two holes already, so it doesn’t matter very much, does it?’

      ‘Don’t you ever mend your stockings, Megan?’

      ‘Rather. When Mummy catches me. But she doesn’t notice awfully what I do—so it’s lucky in a way, isn’t it?’

      ‘You don’t seem to realize you’re grown up,’ I said.

      ‘You mean I ought to be more like your sister? All dolled up?’

      I rather resented this description of Joanna.

      ‘She looks clean and tidy and pleasing to the eye,’ I said.

      ‘She’s awfully pretty,’ said Megan. ‘She isn’t a bit like you, is she? Why not?’

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