“That is really not a very good simile, dear Raymond,” said Miss Marple briskly. “Nothing, I believe, is so full of life under the microscope as a drop of water from a stagnant pool.”
“Life—of a kind,” admitted the novelist.
“It’s all much the same kind, really, isn’t it?” said Miss Marple.
“You compare yourself to a denizen of a stagnant pond, Aunt Jane?”
“My dear, you said something of the sort in your last book, I remember.”
No clever young man likes having his works quoted against himself. Raymond West was no exception.
“That was entirely different,” he snapped.
“Life is, after all, very much the same everywhere,” said Miss Marple in her placid voice. “Getting born, you know, and growing up—and coming into contact with other people—getting jostled—and then marriage and more babies—”
“And finally death,” said Raymond West. “And not death with a death certificate always. Death in life.”
“Talking of death,” said Griselda. “You know we’ve had a murder here?”
Raymond West waved murder away with his cigarette.
“Murder is so crude,” he said. “I take no interest in it.”
That statement did not take me in for a moment. They say all the world loves a lover—apply that saying to murder and you have an even more infallible truth. No one can fail to be interested in a murder. Simple people like Griselda and myself can admit the fact, but anyone like Raymond West has to pretend to be bored—at any rate for the first five minutes.