Agatha Christie’s Marple. Anne Hart
to encourage the rumours!’
Mr Golden, the baker, had a van as well as a delivery boy; in ‘The Case of the Caretaker’ its door was taken off to serve as a stretcher for the murder victim. Mr Golden also had an ambitious daughter, Jessie, who left St Mary Mead to work as a nursery governess and married the son of the house, who was home on leave from India.
Barnes, the grocer, was a favourite of the old guard and, much to Miss Marple’s relief, his shop was to remain unchanged for the next thirty years. ‘So obliging, comfortable chairs to sit in by the counter, and cosy discussions as to cuts of bacon, and varieties of cheese.’ The greengrocer, however, was another story. In The Murder at the Vicarage we find that he was ‘not behaving at all nicely with the chemist’s wife,’ which was not surprising, considering that the chemist’s shop always seemed to be in a state of marital upheaval.
The chemist, whose wife enjoyed the attentions of the greengrocer, rejoiced in the name of Cherubim. One of Mr Cherubim’s predecessors, a Mr Badger, was recalled by Miss Marple in The Body in the Library. He ‘made a lot of fuss over the young lady who worked in his cosmetics section. Told his wife they must look on her as a daughter and have her live in the house.’ So infatuated did Mr Badger become that he spent a lot of his savings on a diamond bracelet and radio-gramophone for the girl, until he discovered that she was carrying on with another man. Despite this setback Mr Badger seems to have gone from strength to strength, for we next hear of him as a supposed widower in ‘The Herb of Death’ with:
‘… a very young housekeeper – young enough to be not only his daughter but his granddaughter. Not a word to anyone, and his family, a lot of nephews and nieces, full of expectations. And when he died, would you believe it, he’d been secretly married to her for two years?’
The wool shop was run by Mrs Cray, who was ‘devoted to her son, spoilt him, of course. He got in with a very queer lot.’ The paper shop was run by Mrs Pusey, whose nephew ‘brought home stuff he’d stolen and got her to dispose of it … And when the police came round and started asking questions, he tried to bash her on the head.’ Longdon’s, the draper’s, was where Miss Marple had her curtains made up; Mrs Jameson, who ‘turned you out with a nice firm perm,’ did her hair; and Miss Politt, who lived above the post office and was a principal in ‘Tape-Measure Murder,’ was her dressmaker.
St Mary Mead also had a builder named Cargill who ‘bluffed a lot of people into having things done to their houses they never meant to do’; an automobile mechanic named Jenkins who was none too honest over batteries; and a vet, Mr Quinton, whose peccadilloes, if any, have gone unrecorded.
One of the most venerable institutions in the village was Inch’s Taxi Service. It had been started by Mr Inch many years before in the days of horse and cab and, though it had long since graduated to motorcars and other owners, it always retained the name of Inch. The older ladies of St Mary Mead invariably referred to their journeys by taxi as ‘going somewhere “in Inch”, as though they were Jonah and Inch was a whale.’
The post office stood at the crossroads on a corner opposite the church. The postman was absent-minded and so was the postmistress. Griselda once teased her husband:
‘Oh! Len, you adore me. Do you remember that day when I stayed up in town and sent you a wire you never got because the postmistress’s sister was having twins and she forgot to send it round? The state you got into, and you telephoned Scotland Yard and made the most frightful fuss.’
Wrote the Vicar gloomily, ‘There are things one hates being reminded of.’
The afternoon arrival, more or less precisely at two-thirty, of the Much Benham bus at the post office was one of the events of the day in St Mary Mead. Mrs Blade, the postmistress, could be counted on to hurry out to meet it, thus leaving the public telephone unattended for some four minutes, an important fact that helped Miss Marple solve the ‘Tape-Measure Murder:’
On the other side of the crossroads stood the village pub, the Blue Boar. The first landlord we learn of was Joe Bucknell. ‘Such a to-do about his daughter carrying on with young Bailey,’ Miss Marple once recalled. ‘And all the time it was that minx of a wife of his.’ Just when the Bucknells left St Mary Mead is uncertain, but their most memorable successors were the Emmotts. Tom Emmott, ‘a big burly man of middle age with a shifty eye and a truculent jaw,’ was a bit of a blackguard in Colonel Melchett’s opinion. Like Joe Bucknell, he had family problems. His pretty, wayward daughter, Rose, came to an untimely end in the river just below the Mill.
The Blue Boar, like so many other landmarks in St Mary Mead, had some atypical uses. It was a good place to have been seen drinking in, for example, at the moment a murder was supposed to have taken place. It was a comfortable home away from home for visiting chief constables and Scotland Yard inspectors. (‘The Blue Boar gives you a first-rate meal of the joint-and-two-vegetable type,’. the Vicar once told Colonel Melchett wistfully.) When the need arose, it was the most appropriate place in St Mary Mead in which to hold an inquest.
The railway station stood at the opposite end of the village on the branch line to Much Benham. Feelings could run high, and alibis could be overturned, if the trains ran late, a not unusual occurrence. To go up to London (the Thursday cheap return was the favourite excursion), one could catch the morning train or have an early lunch and travel by the 12:15. In either case one had to change at the junction at Much Benham. The evening 6:50 was a popular train on which to come home. If one returned after midnight to find the last train on the branch line to St Mary Mead gone, one could take a taxi from Much Benham – but not, one hopes, to one’s death, as did poor Giuseppe, the Italian butler at Gossington Hall.
To be the resident constable at the St Mary Mead police station must have been an interesting posting. Was it vied for, perhaps, as an important advancement, or meted out as a punishment, like being sent to the Russian Front? Whatever the case, Constable Hurst of The Murder at the Vicarage was described as looking ‘very important but slightly worried,’ and Constable Palk of ‘Tape-Measure Murder’ and The Body in the Library seems to have developed a nervous habit of sucking his moustache. One would have thought, looking back, that one of the advantages of the position would have been the opportunity of working closely with Miss Marple, but, ungratefully enough, the first place these constables invariably seemed to have turned for help was the county police headquarters in Much Benham, presided over by Miss Marple’s old antagonist, Inspector Slack. ‘Inspector Slack? Police Constable Palk here. A report has just come in that the body of a young woman was discovered this morning at seven-fifteen’ – and the hunt would be up, and the big guns would start to arrive.
St Mary Mead came into Much Benham’s domain in many other ways as well. It was there that Colonel Melchett, the county’s chief constable, and Dr Roberts, the coroner, had their offices; it was there, at the mortuary, that one went to view unidentified bodies (brandy was available); it was there, if one was taken ill or met with an accident, that one was rushed to the hospital; it was there, if one was Colonel Bantry, that one went to meetings of the Conservative Association; it was there, if one was Mrs Price Ridley, that one bought one’s formidable hats; it was there, if one had old silver to appraise, that one went to ‘a very good man’; it was there, if one was Griselda, that one went secretly to purchase books on Mother-Lore (only to be discovered in the act of doing so by Miss Marple). ‘Our adjoining town’ the villagers called it, but Much Benham, larger and only two miles away, must have privately regarded St Mary Mead as a potential, if somewhat troublesome, suburb.
Besides popping over to Much Benham, running up to London, calling in for tea, dropping by the Blue Boar, or lending a hand with the parish activities, what else did the inhabitants of St Mary Mead do with their apparently plentiful leisure time? If one was so inclined, one could go to the cinema, attend the Bingo Club, or play ‘village bridge’. If one was energetic, one could patronize the golf links or play tennis. If one was more sedentary, one could garden, bird watch, or visit the lending library. But above all, if one was an inhabitant of St Mary Mead, much of one’s time was taken up by crime – as either a perpetrator, victim, or spectator thereof – for it is a fact that, over the years, the number of crimes, particularly murders, committed within the borders of this