A Murder Is Announced_ A Miss Marple Mystery - Agatha Christie [42]
“Oh, perhaps,” said Craddock. “But—but don’t snoop around … I’ve a feeling—I have really—that it isn’t safe.”
Miss Marple smiled a little.
“But I’m afraid,” she said, “that we old women always do snoop. It would be very odd and much more noticeable if I didn’t. Questions about mutual friends in different parts of the world and whether they remember so and so, and do they remember who it was that Lady Somebody’s daughter married? All that helps, doesn’t it?”
“Helps?” said the Inspector, rather stupidly.
“Helps to find out if people are who they say they are,” said Miss Marple.
She went on:
“Because that’s what’s worrying you, isn’t it? And that’s really the particular way the world has changed since the war. Take this place, Chipping Cleghorn, for instance. It’s very much like St. Mary Mead where I live. Fifteen years ago one knew who everybody was. The Bantrys in the big house—and the Hartnells and the Price Ridleys and the Weatherbys … They were people whose fathers and mothers and grandfathers and grandmothers, or whose aunts and uncles, had lived there before them. If somebody new came to live there, they brought letters of introduction, or they’d been in the same regiment or served in the same ship as someone there already. If anybody new—really new—really a stranger—came, well, they stuck out—everybody wondered about them and didn’t rest till they found out.”
She nodded her head gently.
“But it’s not like that any more. Every village and small country place is full of people who’ve just come and settled there without any ties to bring them. The big houses have been sold, and the cottages have been converted and changed. And people just come—and all you know about them is what they say of themselves. They’ve come, you see, from all over the world. People from India and Hong Kong and China, and people who used to live in France and Italy in little cheap places and odd islands. And people who’ve made a little money and can afford to retire. But nobody knows any more who anyone is. You can have Benares brassware in your house and talk about tiffin and chota Hazri—and you can have pictures of Taormina and talk about the English church and the library—like Miss Hinchcliffe and Miss Murgatroyd. You can come from the South of France, or have spent your life in the East. People take you at your own valuation. They don’t wait to call until they’ve had a letter from a friend saying that the So-and-So’s are delightful people and she’s known them all their lives.”
And that, thought Craddock, was exactly what was oppressing him. He didn’t know. There were just faces and personalities and they were backed up by ration books and identity cards—nice neat identity cards with numbers on them, without photographs or fingerprints. Anybody who took the trouble could have a suitable identity card—and partly because of that, the subtler links that had held together English social rural life had fallen apart. In a town nobody expected to know his neighbour. In the country now nobody knew his neighbour either, though possibly he still thought he did….
Because of the oiled door, Craddock knew that there had been somebody in Letitia Blacklock’s drawing room who was not the pleasant friendly country neighbour he or she pretended to be….
And because of that he was afraid for Miss Marple who was frail and old and who noticed things….
He said: “We can, to a certain extent, check up on these people …” But he knew that that wasn’t so easy. India and China and Hong Kong and the South of France … It wasn’t as easy as it would have been fifteen years ago. There were people, as he knew only too well, who were going about the country with borrowed identities—borrowed from people who had met sudden death by “incidents’ in the cities. There were organizations who bought up identities, who faked identity and ration cards