The Body in the Library (Miss Marple, #3)

by Agatha Christie

She had a deep bass voice and visited the poor indefatigably, however hard they tried to avoid her ministrations.

“Oh, dear vicar, you are so unworldly! But I must tell you a little story. Last Thursday—or was it the Thursday before? well, it doesn’t matter—I was going up to London by the cheap day train. Colonel Bantry was in the same carriage. He looked, I thought, very abstracted. And nearly the whole way he buried himself behind The Times. As though, you know, he didn’t want to talk.” The vicar nodded with complete comprehension and possible sympathy.

“I say, are you the detectives? I’m Peter Carmody. It was my grandfather, Mr. Jefferson, who rang up the police about Ruby. Are you from Scotland Yard? You don’t mind my speaking to you, do you?” Colonel Melchett looked as though he were about to return a short answer, but Superintendent Harper intervened. He spoke benignly and heartily. “That’s all right, my son. Naturally interests you, I expect?” “You bet it does. Do you like detective stories? I do. I read them all, and I’ve got autographs from Dorothy Sayers and Agatha Christie and Dickson Carr and H. C. Bailey. Will the murder be in the papers?”

Stammering a good deal, Mr. Bartlett explained that what he meant was that he couldn’t find his car. Superintendent Harper said: “Do you mean it’s been stolen?” George Bartlett turned gratefully to the more placid voice. “Well, that’s just it, you know. I mean, one can’t tell, can one? I mean someone may just have buzzed off in it, not meaning any harm, if you know what I mean.” “When did you last see it, Mr. Bartlett?” “Well, I was tryin’ to remember. Funny how difficult it is to remember anything, isn’t it?” Colonel Melchett said coldly: “Not, I should think, to a normal intelligence.

“Downstairs in the lounge, by the third pillar from the left, there sits an old lady with a sweet, placid spinsterish face, and a mind that has plumbed the depths of human iniquity and taken it as all in the day’s work. Her name’s Miss Marple.

Miss Marple made a contribution to the conversation. “Gentlemen,” she said with her old-maid’s way of referring to the opposite sex as though it were a species of wild animal, “are frequently not as levelheaded as they seem.”