Agatha Christie - Miss Marple 3-Book Collection 1 - The Murder at the Vicarage, The Body in the Library, The Moving Finger

‘I wonder what we shall have for tea,’ said Griselda, seating herself on my writing-table. ‘Dr Stone and Miss Cram, I suppose, and perhaps Mrs Lestrange. By the way, I called on her yesterday, but she was out. Yes, I’m sure we shall have Mrs Lestrange for tea. It’s so mysterious, isn’t it, her arriving like this and taking a house down here, and hardly ever going outside it? Makes one think of detective stories. You know – “Who was she, the mysterious woman with the pale, beautiful face? What was her past history? Nobody knew. There was something faintly sinister about her.” I believe Dr Haydock knows something about her.’

‘You read too many detective stories, Griselda,’ I observed mildly.

‘What about you?’ she retorted. ‘I was looking everywhere for The Stain on the Stairs the other day when you were in here writing a sermon. And at last I came in to ask you if you’d seen it anywhere, and what did I find?’

I had the grace to blush.

‘I picked it up at random. A chance sentence caught my eye and…’

‘I know those chance sentences,’ said Griselda. She quoted impressively, “And then a very curious thing happened – Griselda rose, crossed the room and kissed her elderly husband affectionately.”’ She suited the action to the word.

‘Is that a very curious thing?’ I inquired.

‘Of course it is,’ said Griselda. ‘Do you realize, Len, that I might have married a Cabinet Minister, a Baronet, a rich Company Promoter, three subalterns and a ne’er-do-weel with attractive manners, and that instead I chose you? Didn’t it astonish you very much?’

‘At the time it did,’ I replied. ‘I have often wondered why you did it.’

Griselda laughed.

‘It made me feel so powerful,’ she murmured. ‘The others thought me simply wonderful and of course it would have been very nice for them to have me. But I’m everything you most dislike and disapprove of, and yet you couldn’t withstand me! My vanity couldn’t hold out against that. It’s so much nicer to be a secret and delightful sin to anybody than to be a feather in their cap. I make you frightfully uncomfortable and stir you up the wrong way the whole time, and yet you adore me madly. You adore me madly, don’t you?’

‘Naturally I am very fond of you, my dear.’

‘Oh! Len, you adore me. Do you remember that day when I stayed up in town and sent you a wire you never got because the postmistress’s sister was having twins and she forgot to send it round? The state you got into and you telephoned Scotland Yard and made the most frightful fuss.’

There are things one hates being reminded of. I had really been strangely foolish on the occasion in question. I said:

‘If you don’t mind, dear, I want to get on with the C.E.M.S.’

Griselda gave a sigh of intense irritation, ruffled my hair up on end, smoothed it down again, said:

‘You don’t deserve me. You really don’t. I’ll have an affair with the artist. I will – really and truly. And then think of the scandal in the parish.’

‘There’s a good deal already,’ I said mildly.

Griselda laughed, blew me a kiss, and departed through the window.

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