The Moving Finger - Agatha Christie [73]
“The great thing is in these cases to keep an absolutely open mind. Most crimes, you see, are so absurdly simple. This one was. Quite sane and straightforward—and quite understandable—in an unpleasant way, of course.”
“Very unpleasant!”
“The truth was really so very obvious. You saw it, you know, Mr. Burton.”
“Indeed I did not.”
“But you did. You indicated the whole thing to me. You saw perfectly the relationship of one thing to the other, but you just hadn’t enough self-confidence to see what those feelings of yours meant. To begin with, that tiresome phrase ‘No smoke without fire.’ It irritated you, but you proceeded quite correctly to label it for what it was—a smoke screen. Misdirection, you see—everybody looking at the wrong thing—the anonymous letters, but the whole point was that there weren’t any anonymous letters!”
“But my dear Miss Marple, I can assure you that there were. I had one.”
“Oh yes, but they weren’t real at all. Dear Maud here tumbled to that. Even in peaceful Lymstock there are plenty of scandals, and I can assure you any woman living in the place would have known about them and used them. But a man, you see, isn’t interested in gossip in the same way—especially a detached logical man like Mr. Symmington. A genuine woman writer of those letters would have made her letters much more to the point.
“So you see that if you disregard the smoke and come to the fire you know where you are. You just come down to the actual facts of what happened. And putting aside the letters, just one thing happened—Mrs. Symmington died.
“So then, naturally, one thinks of who might have wanted Mrs. Symmington to die, and of course the very first person one thinks of in such a case is, I am afraid, the husband. And one asks oneself is there any reason?—any motive?—for instance, another woman?
“And the very first thing I hear is that there is a very attractive young governess in the house. So clear, isn’t it? Mr. Symmington, a rather dry repressed unemotional man, tied to a querulous and neurotic wife and then suddenly this radiant young creature comes along.
“I’m afraid, you know, that gentlemen, when they fall in love at a certain age, get the disease very badly. It’s quite a madness. And Mr. Symmington, as far as I can make out, was never actually a good man—he wasn’t very kind or very affectionate or very sympathetic—his qualities were all negative—so he hadn’t really the strength to fight his madness. And in a place like this, only his wife’s death would solve his problem. He wanted to marry the girl, you see. She’s very respectable and so is he. And besides, he’s devoted to his children and didn’t want to give them up. He wanted everything, his home, his children, his respectability and Elsie. And the price he would have to pay for that was murder.
“He chose, I do think, a very clever way. He knew so well from his experience of criminal cases how soon suspicion falls on the husband if a wife dies unexpectedly—and the possibility of exhumation in the case of poison. So he created a death which seemed only incidental to something else. He created a non-existent anonymous letter writer. And the clever thing was that the police were certain to suspect a woman—and they were quite right in a way. All the letters were a woman’s letters; he cribbed them very cleverly from the letters in the case last year and from a case Dr Griffith told him about. I don’t mean that he was so crude as to reproduce any letter verbatim, but he took phrases and expressions from them and mixed them up, and the net result was that the letters definitely represented a woman’s mind—a half-crazed repressed personality.
“He knew all the tricks that the police use, handwriting, typewriting tests, etc. He’s been preparing his crime for some time. He typed all the envelopes before he gave away the typewriter to the Women’s Institute, and he cut the pages from the book at Little Furze probably quite a long time ago when he was waiting in the drawing room one day. People don’t open books of sermons much!
“And