Nemesis - Agatha Christie [66]
‘But Miss Clotilde is not peculiar?’
‘Oh no, she’s clever, she is. Knows Latin and Greek, I believe. Would have liked to go to university but she had to look after her mother who was an invalid for a long time. But she was very fond of Miss — now, what was her name? — Faith perhaps. She was very fond of her and treated her like a daughter. And then along comes this young what’s-his-name, Michael I think it was — and then one day the girl just goes off without saying a word to anyone. I don’t know if Miss Clotilde knew as she was in the family way.’
‘But you knew,’ said Miss Marple.
‘Ah well, I’ve got a lot of experience. I usually know when a girl’s that way. It’s plain enough to the eye. It’s not only the shape, as you might say, you can tell by the look in their eyes and the way they walk and sit, and the sort of giddy fits they get and sick turns now and again. Oh yes, I thought to myself, here’s another one of them. Miss Clotilde had to go and identify the body. Nearly broke her up, it did. She was like a different woman for weeks afterwards. Fairly loved that girl, she did.’
‘And the other one — Miss Anthea?’
‘Funnily enough, you know, I thought she had a kind of pleased look as though she was — yes, just pleased. Not nice, eh? Farmer Plummer’s daughter used to look like that. Always used to go and see pigs killed. Enjoyed it. Funny things goes on in families.’
Miss Marple said goodbye, saw she had another ten minutes to go and passed on to the post office. The post office and general store of Jocelyn St Mary was just off the Market Square.
Miss Marple went into the post office, bought some stamps, looked at some of the postcards and then turned her attention to various paperback books. A middle-aged woman with rather a vinegary face presided behind the postal counter. She assisted Miss Marple to free a book from the wire support in which the books were.
‘Stick a bit sometimes, they do. People don’t put them back straight, you see.’
There was by now no one else in the shop. Miss Marple looked with distaste at the jacket of the book, a naked girl with blood-stained markings on her face and a sinister-looking killer bending over her with a blood-stained knife in his hand.
‘Really,’ she said, ‘I don’t like these horrors nowadays.’
‘Gone a bit too far with some of their jackets, haven’t they,’ said Mrs Vinegar. ‘Not everyone as likes them. Too fond of violence in every way, I’d say nowadays.’
Miss Marple detached a second book. ‘Whatever Happened to Baby Jane,’ she read. ‘Oh dear, it’s a sad world one lives in.’
‘Oh yes, I know. Saw in yesterday’s paper, I did, some woman left her baby outside a supermarket and then someone else comes along and wheels it away. And all for no reason as far as one can see. The police found her all right. They all seem to say the same things, whether they steal from a supermarket or take away a baby. Don’t know what came over them, they say.’
‘Perhaps they really don’t,’ suggested Miss Marple.
Mrs Vinegar looked even more like vinegar.
‘Take me a lot to believe that, it would.’
Miss Marple looked round — the post office was still empty. She advanced to the window.
‘If you are not too busy, I wonder if you could answer a question of mine,’ said Miss Marple. ‘I have done something extremely stupid. Of late years I make so many mistakes. This was a parcel addressed to a charity. I send them clothes — pullovers and children’s woollies, and I did it up and addressed it and it was sent off — and only this morning it came to me suddenly that I’d made a mistake and written the wrong address. I don’t suppose any list is kept of the address of parcels — but I thought someone might have just happened to remember it. The address I meant to put was The Dockyard and Thames Side Welfare Association.’
Mrs Vinegar was looking quite kindly now, touched by Miss Marple’s patent incapacity and general state of senility and dither.
‘Did you bring it yourself?’