The Moving Finger

Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by Collins, The Crime Club 1943

The Moving Finger™ is a trade mark of Agatha Christie Limited and Agatha Christie^>® Marple^>® and the Agatha Christie Signature are registered trade marks of Agatha Christie Limited in the UK and elsewhere.

Copyright © 1943 Agatha Christie Limited. All rights reserved.

www.agathachristie.com

Cover by Nick Castle © HarperCollins/Agatha Christie Ltd 2016

Agatha Christie asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

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Source ISBN: 9780008196547

Ebook Edition © December 2016 ISBN: 9780007422470

Version: 2017-04-12

To my Friends Sidney and Mary Smith

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Also by Agatha Christie

About the Publisher

When at last I was taken out of the plaster, and the doctors had pulled me about to their hearts’ content, and nurses had wheedled me into cautiously using my limbs, and I had been nauseated by their practically using baby talk to me, Marcus Kent told me I was to go and live in the country.

‘Good air, quiet life, nothing to do—that’s the prescription for you. That sister of yours will look after you. Eat, sleep and imitate the vegetable kingdom as far as possible.’

I didn’t ask him if I’d ever be able to fly again. There are questions that you don’t ask because you’re afraid of the answers to them. In the same way during the last five months I’d never asked if I was going to be condemned to lie on my back all my life. I was afraid of a bright hypocritical reassurance from Sister. ‘Come now, what a question to ask! We don’t let our patients go talking in that way!’

So I hadn’t asked—and it had been all right. I wasn’t to be a helpless cripple. I could move my legs, stand on them, finally walk a few steps—and if I did feel rather like an adventurous baby learning to toddle, with wobbly knees and cotton wool soles to my feet—well, that was only weakness and disuse and would pass.

Marcus Kent, who is the right kind of doctor, answered what I hadn’t said.

‘You’re going to recover completely,’ he said. ‘We weren’t sure until last Tuesday when you had that final overhaul, but I can tell you so authoritatively now. But—it’s going to be a long business. A long and, if I may so, a wearisome business. When it’s a question of healing nerves and muscles, the brain must help the body. Any impatience, any fretting, will throw you back. And whatever you do, don’t “will yourself to get well quickly”. Anything of that kind and you’ll find yourself back in a nursing home. You’ve got to take life slowly and easily, the tempo is marked Legato. Not only has your body got to recover, but your nerves have been weakened by the necessity of keeping you under drugs for so long.

‘That’s why I say, go down to the country, take a house, get interested in local politics, in local scandal, in village gossip. Take an inquisitive and violent interest in your neighbours. If I may make a suggestion, go to a part of the world where you haven’t got any friends scattered about.’

I nodded. ‘I had already,’ I said, ‘thought of that.’

I could think of nothing more insufferable than members of one’s own gang dropping in full of sympathy and their own affairs.

‘But Jerry, you’re looking marvellous—isn’t he? Absolutely. Darling, I must tell you—What do you think Buster has done now?’

No, none of that for me. Dogs are wise. They crawl away into a quiet corner and lick their wounds and do not rejoin the world until they are whole once more.

So it came about that Joanna and I, sorting wildly through house-agents’ glowing eulogies of properties all over the British Isles, selected Little Furze, Lymstock, as one of the ‘possibles’ to be viewed, mainly because we had never been to Lymstock, and knew no one in that neighbourhood.

And when Joanna saw Little Furze she decided at once that it was just the house we wanted.