The Mirror Crack 'd from Side to Sic
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
The ABC Murders
The Adventure of the
Christmas Pudding
After the Funeral
And Then There Were None
Appointment with Death
At Bertram's Hotel
The Big Four
The Body in the Library
By the Pricking of My Thumbs
Cards on the Table
A Caribbean Mystery
Cat Among the Pigeons
The Clocks
Crooked House
Curtain: Poirot's Last Case
Dead Man's Folly
Death Comes as the End
Death in the Clouds
Death on the Nile
Destination Unknown
Dumb Witness
Elephants Can Remember
Endless Night
Evil Under the Sun
Five Little Pigs
4.50 from Paddington
Hallowe'en Party
Hercule Poirot's Christmas
Hickory Dickory Dock
The Hollow
The Hound of Death
The Labours of Hercules
The Listerdale Mystery
Lord Edgware Dies
The Man in the Brown Suit
The Mirror Crack'd from Side
to Side
Miss Marple's Final Cases
The Moving Finger
Mrs McGinty's Dead
The Murder at the Vicarage
Murder in Mesopotamia
Murder in the Mews
A Murder is Announced
Murder is Easy
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd
Murder on the Links
Murder on the Orient Express
The Mysterious Affair at Styles
The Mysterious Mr Quin
The Mystery of the Blue Train
Nemesis
lq or M?
One, Two, Buckle My Shoe
Ordeal by Innocence
The Pale Horse
Parker Pyne Investigates
Partners in Crime
Passenger to Frankfun
Peril at End House
A Pocket Full of Rye
Poirot Investigates
Poirot's Early Cases
Postern of Fate
Problem at Pollensa Bay
Sad Cypress
The Secret Adversary
The Secret of Chimneys
The Seven Dials Mystery
The Sittaford Mystery
Sleeping Murder
Sparkling Cyanide
Taken at the Flood
They Came to Baghdad
They Do It With Mirrors
Third Girl
The Thirteen Problems
Three-Act Tragedy
Towards Zero
Why Didn't They Ask Evans
Novels under the Nora de Plume of
'A4ary Westmacott'
Absent in the Spring
The Burden
A Daughter's A Daughter
Giant's Bread
The Rose and the Yew Tree
Unfinished Portxait
Books under the name of
Agatha Christie Nlallowan
Come Tell me How You Live
Star Over Bethlehem
Autobiography
Agatha Christie: An Autobiography
AGATHA CHRISTIE
THE MIRROR CRACK']
FROM SIDE TO SIDE
HarperCollins/d//she
HarperCollinsPubl/shers
77-85 Fulham Palace Road,
Hammersmith, London W68JB
This paperback edition 1993
3579864
Previously published in paperback by Fontana 1965
Reprinted fifteen times
First published in Great Britain by
Collins 1962
Copyright © Agatha Christie Limited 1962
ISBN 0006169309
Set in Plantin
Printed in Great Britain by
HarperCollinsManufacturing Glasgow
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be
reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted,
in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording or othenvise, without the prior
permission of the publishers.
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not,
by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or
otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent
in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it
is published and without a similar condition including this
condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
To MARGARET RUTHERFORD
in admiration
Out fiew the web and floated wide;
The mirror crack'd from side to side:
"The curse is come upon me, "cried
The Lady of Shalott
ALFRED TENNYSON
CHAPTER ONE
Miss Jane Marple was sitting by her window. The window
looked over her garden, once a source of pride to her. That was
no longer so. Nowadays she looked out of the window and
winced. Active gardening had been forbidden her for some
time now. No stooping, no digging, no planting - at most a little
light pruning. Old Laycock who came three times a week, did
his best, no doubt. But his best, such as it was (which was not
much) was only the best according to his lights, and not
according to those of his employer. Miss Marple knew exactly
what she wanted done, and when she wanted it done, and
instructed him duly. Old Laycock then displayed his particular
genius which was that of enthusiastic agreement and subse-quent
lack of performance.
'That's fight, missus. We'll have them mecosoapies there
and the Canterburys along the wall and as you say it ought to
be got on with first thing next week.'
Laycock's excuses were always reasonable, and strongly
resembled those of Captain George's in ThreeMen in aBoat for
avoiding going to sea. In the captain's case the wind was always
wrong, either blowing offshore or in shore, or coming from the
unreliable west, or the even-more treacherous east. Laycock's
was the weather. Too dry - too wet - waterlogged - a nip of
frost in the air. Or else something of great importance had to
come first (usually to do with cabbages or brussels sprouts of
which he liked to grow inordinate quantities). Laycock's own
principles of gardening were simple and no employer, however
knowledgeable, could wean him from them.
They consisted ora great many cups of tea, sweet and strong,
as an encouragement to effort, a good deal of sweeping up of
leaves in the autumn, and a certain amount of bedding out of
his own favourite plants, mainly asters and salvias - to 'make a
nice show', as he put it, in summer. He was all in favour of
syringeing roses for green-fly, but was slow to get around to it,
and a demand for deep trenching for sweet peas was usually
countered by the remark that you ought to see his own sweet
peas! A proper treat last year, and no fancy stuff done
beforehand.
To be fair, he was attached to his employers, humoured their
fancies in horticulture (so far as no actual hard work was
involved) but vegetables he knew to be the real stuff of life; a
nice Savoy, or a bit of curly kale; flowers were fancy stuff such
as ladies liked to go in for, having nothing better to do with
their time. He showed his affection by producing presents of
the aforementioned asters, salvias, lobelia edging, and summer
chrysanthemums.
'Been doing some work at them new houses over at the
Development. Want their gardens laid out nice, they do. More
plants than they needed so I brought along a few, and I've put
'em in where them old-fashioned roses ain't looking so well.'
Thinking of these things, Miss Marple averted her eyes from
the garden, and picked up her knitting.
One had to face the fact: St Mary Mead was not the place it
had been. In a sense, of course, nothing was what it had been.
You could blame the war (both the wars) or the younger
generation, or women going out to work, or the atom bomb, or
just the Government - but what one really meant was the
simple fact that one was growing old. Miss Marple, who was a
very sensible lady, knew that quite well. It was just that, in a
queer way, she felt it more in St Mary Mead, because it had
been her home for so long.
St Mary Mead, the old world core of it, was still there. The
Blue Boar was there, and the church and the vicarage and the
little nest of Queen Anne and Georgian houses, of which hers
was one. Miss Harmell's house was still there, and also Miss
Hartnell, fighting progress to the last gasp. Miss Wetherby had
passed on and her house was now inhabited by the bank
manager and his family, having been given a face-lift by the
painting of doors and windows a bright royal blue. There were
new people in most of the other old houses, but the houses
themselves were little changed in appearances since the people
who had bought them had done so because they liked what the
house agent called 'old world charm'. They just added another
bathroom, and spent a good deal of money on plumbing,
electric cookers, and dishwashers.
But though the houses looked much as before, the same
could hardly be said of the village street. When shops changed
hands there, it was with a view to immediate and intemperate
modernization. The fishmonger was unrecognizable with new
super windows behind which the refrigerated fish gleamed.
The butcher had remained conservative - good meat is good
meat, if you have the money to pay for it. If not, you take the
cheaper cuts and the tough joints and like it! Barnes, the grocer,
was still there, unchanged, for which Miss Harmell and Miss
Marple and others daily thanked Heaven. So obliging, comfortable
chairs to sit in by the counter, and cosy discussions as to
cuts of bacon, and varieties of cheese. At the end of the street,
however, where Mr Toms had once had his basket shop stood
a glittering new supermarket - anathema to the elderly ladies of
St Mary Mead.
'Packets of things one's never even heard of,' exclaimed Miss
Hartnell. 'All these great packets of breakfast cereal instead of
cooking a child a proper breakfast of bacon and eggs. And
you're expected to take a basket yourself and go round looking
for things - it takes a quarter of an hour sometimes to find all
one wants - and usually made up in inconvenient sizes, too
much or too little. And then a long queue waiting to pay as you
go out. Most tiring. Of course it's all very well for the people
from the Development-'
At this point she stopped.
Because, as was now usual, the sentence came to an end
there. The Development, Period, as they would say in modern
terms. It had an entity of its own, and a capital letter.
9
Miss Marple uttered a sharp exclamation of annoyance. She'd
dropped a stitch again. Not only that, she must have dropped
it some time ago. Not until now, when she had to decrease for
the neck and count the stitches, had she realized the fact. She
took up a spare pin, held the knitting sideways to the light and
peered anxiously. Even her new spectacles didn't seem to do
any good. And that, she reflected, was because obviously there
came a time when oculists, in spite of their luxurious waiting-rooms,
the up-to-date instruments, the bright lights they
flashed into your eyes, and the very high fees they charged,
couldn't do anything much more for you. Miss Marple
reflected with some nostalgia on how good her eyesight had
been a few (well, not perhaps a few) years ago. From the
vantage-point of her garden, so admirably placed to see all that
was going on in St Mary Mead, how little had escaped her
noticing eye! And with the help of her bird glasses - (an interest
in birds was so useful!) - she had been able to see - She broke
off there and let her thoughts run back over the past. Arm
Protheroe in her summer frock going along to the Vicarage
garden. And Colonel Protheroe - poor man - a very tiresome
and unpleasant man, to be sure - but to be murdered like
that - She shook her head and went on to thoughts of Griselda,
the vicar's pretty young wife. Dear Griselda - such a faithful
friend - a Christmas card every year. That attractive baby of
hers was a strapping young man now, and with a very good job.
Engineering, was it? He always had enjoyed taking his
mechanical trains to pieces. Beyond the Vicarage, there had
been the stile and the field path with Farmer Giles's cattle
beyond in the meadows where now - now...
The Development.
And why not? Miss Marple asked herself sternly. These
things had to be. The houses were necessary, and they were
very well built, or so she had been told. 'Planning,' or whatever
they called it. Though why everything had to be called a Close
10
she couldn't imagine. Aubrey Close and Longwood Close, and
Grandison Close and all the rest of them. Not really Closes at
all. Miss Marple knew what a Close was perfectly. Her uncle
had been a Canon of Chichester Cathedral. As a child she had
gone to stay with him in the Close.
It was like Cherry Baker who always called Miss Marple's
old-world overcrowded drawing-room the 'lounge'. Miss
Marple corrected her gently, 'It's the drawing-room, Cherry.'
And Cherry, because she was young and kind, endeavoured to
remember, though it was obvious to her 'drawing-room' was a
very funny word to use - and 'lounge' came slipping out. She
had of late, however, compromised on 'living-room'. Miss
Marple liked Cherry very much....
PanavPaul