Agatha Christie – A Murder Is Announced

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—there were a hundred small rackets springing into being. You could check up—but it would take time—and time was what he hadn’t got, because Randall Goedler’s widow was very near death.

It was then that, worried and tired, lulled by the sunshine, he told Miss Marple about Randall Goedler and about Pip and Emma.

‘Just a couple of names,’ he said. ‘Nicknames at that! They mayn’t exist. They may be respectable citizens living in Europe somewhere. On the other hand one, or both, of them may be here in Chipping Cleghorn.’

Twenty-five years old approximately—Who filled that description? He said, thinking aloud:

‘That nephew and niece of hers—or cousins or whatever they are…I wonder when she saw them last—’

Miss Marple said gently: ‘I’ll find out for you, shall I?’

‘Now, please, Miss Marple, don’t—’

‘It will be quite simple, Inspector, you really need not worry. And it won’t be noticeable if I do it, because, you see, it won’t be official. If there is anything wrong you don’t want to put them on their guard.’

Pip and Emma, thought Craddock, Pip and Emma? He was getting obsessed by Pip and Emma. That attractive dare-devil young man, the good-looking girl with the cool stare…

He said: ‘I may find out more about them in the next forty-eight hours. I’m going up to Scotland. Mrs Goedler, if she’s able to talk, may know a good deal more about them.’

‘I think that’s a very wise move.’ Miss Marple hesitated. ‘I hope,’ she murmured, ‘that you have warned Miss Blacklock to be careful?’

‘I’ve warned her, yes. And I shall leave a man here to keep an unobtrusive eye on things.’