《魔手The Moving Finger》
作者:[英] 阿加莎·克里斯蒂Agatha Christie【完结】
故事简介（英文书籍）
Jerry and Joanna Burton, brother and sister from London society, take a country house in idyllic Lymstock so that Jerry can rest from injuries received in a wartime plane crash. They are just getting to know the town's strange cast of characters when an anonymous letter arrives, rudely accusing the two of not being brother and sister, but lovers. They quickly discover that these letters have been recently circulating around town, indiscriminate and completely inaccurate.
Things flare up when Mrs. Symmington, the wife of the local solicitor, commits suicide upon receiving a letter which states that her second child is actually illegitimate. Her body is discovered with the letter, a glass containing potassium cyanide and a torn suicide note which reads "I can't go on".
Chapter 1
I have often recalled the morning when the first of the anonymous letters came.
It arrived at breakfast and I turned it over in the idle way one does when time goes slowly and every event must be spun out to its full extent. It was, I saw, a local letter with a typewritten address. I opened it before the two with London postmarks, since one of them was clearly a bill, and on the other I recognised the handwriting of one of my more tiresome cousins.
It seems odd, now, to remember that Joanna and I were more amused by the letter than anything else. We hadn't, then, the faintest inkling of what was to come - the trail of blood and violence and suspicion and fear.
One simply didn't associate that sort of thing with Lymstock.
I see that I have begun badly. I haven't explained Lymstock.
When I took a bad crash flying, I was afraid for a long time, in spite of soothing words from doctors and nurses, that I was going to be condemned to lie on my back all my life. Then at last they took me out of the plaster and I learned cautiously to use my limbs, and finally Marcus Kent, my doctor, clapped me on my back and told me that everything was going to be all right, but that I'd got to go and live in the country and lead the life of a vegetable for at least six months.
"Go to some part of the world where you haven't any friends. Get right away from things. Take an interest in local politics, get excited about village gossip, absorb all the local scandal. Small beer - that's the prescription for you. Absolute rest and quiet."
Rest and quiet! It seems funny to think of that now.
And so Lymstock - and Little Furze.
Lymstock had been a place of importance at the time of the Norman Conquest. In the twentieth century it was a place of no importance whatsoever. It was three miles from a main road - a little provincial market town with a sweep of moorland rising above it. Little Furze was situated on the road leading up to the moors. It was a prim, low, white house with a sloping Victorian veranda painted a faded green.
My sister Joanna, as soon as she saw it, decided that it was the ideal spot for a convalescent. Its owner matched the house, a charming little old lady, quite incredibly Victorian, who explained to Joanna that she would never have dreamed of letting her house if "things had not been so different nowadays - this terrible taxation."
So everything was settled, and the agreement signed, and in due course Joanna and I arrived and settled in, while Miss Emily Barton went into rooms in Lymstock kept by a former parlourmaid ("my faithful Florence") and we were looked after by Miss Barton's present maid, Partridge, a grim but efficient personage who was assisted by a daily "girl."
As soon as we had been given a few days to settle down, Lymstock came solemnly to call. Everybody in Lymstock had a label - "rather like happy families," as Joanna said.
There was Mr. Symmington the lawyer, thin and dry, with his querulous bridge-playing wife. Dr. Griffith - the dark, melancholy doctor - and his sister who was big and hearty. The vicar, a scholarly absent-minded elderly man and his erratic eager-faced wife. Rich dilettante Mr. Pye of Prior's End, and finally Miss Emily Barton herself, the perfect spinster of village tradition.
Joanna fingered the cards with something like awe.
"I didn't know," she said in an awestruck voice, "that people really called with cards!"
"That," I told her, "is because you know nothing about the country."
Joanna is very pretty and very gay, and she likes dancing and cocktails and love affairs and rushing about in high-powered cars. She is definitely and entirely urban.
"At any rate," said Joanna, "I look all right."
I studied her critically and was not able to agree.
Joanna was dressed (by Mirotin) for 'le sport'. The effect was quite charming, but a bit startling for Lymstock.
"No," I said. "You're all wrong. You ought to be wearing an old faded tweed skirt with a nice cashmere jumper matching it and perhaps a rather baggy cardigan coat, and you'd wear a felt hat and thick stockings and old well-worn brogues. Your face is all wrong, too," I added.
"What's wrong with that? I've got on my Country Tan Make-Up No. 2."
"Exactly," I said. "If you lived here, you would have just a little powder to take the shine off the nose and you would almost certainly be wearing all your eyebrows instead of only a quarter of them."
Joanna laughed, and said that coming to the country was a new experience and she was going to enjoy it.
"I'm afraid you'll be terribly bored," I said remorsefully.
"No, I shan't. I really was fed up with all my crowd, and though you won't be sympathetic I really was very cut up about Paul. It will take me a long time to get over it."
I was skeptical over this. Joanna's love affairs always run the same course. She has a mad infatuation for some completely spineless young man who is a misunderstood genius. She listens to his endless complaints and works to get him recognition. Then, when he is ungrateful, she is deeply wounded and says her heart is broken - until the next gloomy young man comes along, which is usually about three weeks later.
I did not take Joanna's broken heart very seriously, but I did see that living in the country was like a new game to my attractive sister. She entered with zest into the pastime of returning calls. We duly received invitations to tea and to bridge, which we accepted, and issued invitations in our turn.
To us, it was all novel and entertaining - a new game.
And, as I say, when the anonymous letter came, it struck me, at first, as amusing too.
For a minute or two after opening the letter, I stared at it uncomprehendingly. Printed words had been cut out and pasted on a sheet of paper.
The letter, using terms of the coarsest character, expressed the writer's opinion that Joanna and I were not brother and sister.
"Hullo," said Joanna. "What is it?"
"It's a particularly foul anonymous letter," I said.
I was still suffering from shock. Somehow one didn't expect that kind of thing in the placid backwater of Lymstock.
Joanna at once displayed lively interest.
"No? What does it say?"
In novels, I have noticed, anonymous letters of a foul and disgusting character are never shown, if possible, to women. It is implied that women must at all cost be shielded from the shock it might give their delicate nervous systems.
I am sorry to say it never occurred to me not to show the letter to Joanna. I handed it to her at once.
She vindicated my belief in her toughness by displaying no emotion but that of amusement.
"What an awful bit of dirt! I've always heard about anonymous letters, but I've never seen one before. Are they always like this?"
"I can't tell you," I said. "It's my first experience, too."
Joanna began to giggle.
"You must have been right about my make-up, Jerry. I suppose they think I just must be an abandoned female!"
"That," I said, "coupled with the fact that our father was a tall, dark, lantern-jawed man and our mother a fair-haired blue-eyed little creature, and that I take after him and you take after her."
Joanna nodded thoughtfully. "Yes, we're not a bit alike. Nobody would take us for brother and sister."
"Somebody certainly hasn't," I said with feeling.
Joanna said she thought it was rightfully funny. She dangled the letter thoughtfully by one corner and asked what we were to do with it.
"The correct procedure, I believe," I said, "is to drop it into the fire with a sharp exclamation of disgust."
I suited the action to the word, and Joanna applauded.
"You did that beautifully," she said. "You ought to have been on the stage. It's lucky we still have fires, isn't it?"
"The waste-paper basket would have been much less dramatic," I agreed. "I could, of course, have set light to it with a match and slowly watched it burn - or watched it slowly burn."
"Things never burn when you want them to," said Joanna. "They go out. You'd probably have had to strike match after match."
She got up and went toward the window. Then, standing there, she turned her head sharply.
"I wonder," she said, "who wrote it?"
"We're never likely to know," I said.
"No - I suppose not." She was silent a moment, and then said: "I don't know when I come to think of it that it is so funny after all. You know, I thought they - they liked us down here."
"So they do," I said. "This is just some half-crazy brain on the borderline."
"I suppose so. Ugh-nasty!"
As she went out into the sunshine I thought to myself as I smoked my after-breakfast cigarette that she was quite right. It was nasty. Someone resented our coming here - someone resented Joanna's bright young sophisticated beauty - someone wanted to hurt. To take it with a laugh was perhaps the best way - but deep down it wasn't funny.
Dr. Griffith came that morning. I had fixed up for him to give me a weekly overhaul. I liked Owen Griffith. He was dark, ungainly, with awkward ways of moving and deft, very gentle hands. He had a jerky way of talking and was rather shy.
He reported progress to be encouraging. Then he added,
"You're feeling all right, aren't you? Is it my fancy, or are you a bit under the weather this morning?"
"Not really," I said. "A particularly scurrilous anonymous letter arrived with the morning coffee, and it's left rather a nasty taste in the mouth."
He dropped his bag on the floor. His thin dark face was excited. "Do you mean to say that you've had one of them?"
I was interested.
"They've been going about, then?"
"Yes. For some time."
"Oh," I said. "I see. I was under the impression that our presence as strangers was resented here."
"No, no, it's nothing to do with that. It's just -" He paused and then asked, "What did it say? At least" - he turned suddenly red and embarrassed - "perhaps I oughtn't to ask?"
"I'll tell you with pleasure," I said. "It just said that the fancy tart I'd brought down with me wasn't my sister - not half! And that, I may say, is a shortened version."
His dark face flushed angrily.
"How damnable! Your sister didn't - she's not upset, I hope?"
"Joanna," I said, "looks a little like the angel off the top of the Christmas tree, but she's eminently modern and quite tough. She found it highly entertaining. Such things haven't come her way before."
"I should hope not, indeed," said Griffith warmly.
"And anyway," I said firmly, "that's the best way to take it, I think. As something utterly ridiculous."
"Yes," said Owen Griffith, "only -"
He stopped, and I chimed in quickly.
"Quite so," I said. "Only is the word!"
"The trouble is," he said, "that this sort of thing, once it starts, grows."
"So I should imagine."
"It's pathological, of course."
I nodded. "Any idea who's behind it?" I asked.
"No, I wish I had. You see, the anonymous letter pest arises from one of two causes. Either it's particular - directed at one person or set of people, that is to say it's motivated, it's someone who's got a definite grudge (or thinks he has) and who chooses a particularly nasty and underhand way of working it off. It's mean and disgusting but it's not necessarily crazy, and it's usually fairly easy to trace the writer - a discharged servant, a jealous woman, and so on. But if it's general, and not particular, then it's more serious.
"The letters are sent indiscriminately and serve the purpose of working off some frustration in the writer's mind. As I say, it's definitely pathological. And the craze grows. In the end, of course, you track down the person in question - (it's often someone extremely unlikely) and that's that. There was a bad outburst of that kind over the other side of the county last year - turned out to be the head of the millinery department in a big draper's establishment. Quiet, refined woman - had been there for years.
"I remember something of the same kind in my last practice up north. But that turned out to be purely personal spite. Still, as I say, I've seen something of this kind of thing, and, quite frankly, it frightens me!"
"Has it been going on long?" I asked.
"I don't think so. Hard to say, of course, because people who get these letters don't go round advertising the fact. They put them in the fire."
He paused.
"I've had one myself. Symmington, the solicitor, he's had one. And one or two of my poorer patients have told me about them."
"All much the same sort of thing?"
"Oh, yes. A definite harping on the sex theme. That's always a feature." He grinned. "Symmington was accused of illicit relations with his lady clerk - poor old Miss Ginch, who's forty at least, with pince-nez and teeth like a rabbit. Symmington took it straight to the police. My letters accused me of violating professional decorum with my lady patients, stressing the details. They're all quite childish and absurd, but horribly venomous." His face changed, grew grave. "But all the same, I'm afraid. These things can be dangerous, you know."
