The Murder at the Vicarage quotes

I was inclined to agree with her. My wife’s name is Griselda—a highly suitable name for a parson’s wife. But there the suitability ends. She is not in the least meek.

I have always been of the opinion that a clergyman should be unmarried.

Why I should have urged Griselda to marry me at the end of twenty-four hours’ acquaintance is a mystery to me.

“She’s the worst cat in the village,” said Griselda. “And she always knows every single thing that happens—and draws the worst inferences from it.”

Griselda, as I have said, is much younger than I am. At my time of life, one knows that the worst is usually true.

“Well, don’t expect me in for tea, Griselda,” said Dennis.

I was not surprised at Lettice coming in this way, but I did a little resent her attitude.

If you come to a Vicarage, you ought to be prepared to find a Vicar.

She came in and collapsed in a crumpled heap in one of my big armchairs. She plucked aimlessly at her hair, staring at the ceiling.

I shook hands all round and sat down between Miss Marple and Miss Wetherby.

Miss Marple is a white-haired old lady with a gentle, appealing manner⁠—Miss Wetherby is a mixture of vinegar and gush. Of the two Miss Marple is much the more dangerous.

“We were just talking,” said Griselda in a honeysweet voice, “about Dr. Stone and Miss Cram.”

Miss Marple always sees everything.

Gardening is as good as a smoke screen, and the habit of observing birds through powerful glasses can always be turned to account.

“She mentioned it, yes,” I admitted.

“My dear young man, you underestimate the detective instinct of village life. In St. Mary Mead everyone knows your most intimate affairs.

There is no detective in England equal to a spinster lady of uncertain age with plenty of time on her hands.

”

… Dennis’s age a detective story is one of the best things in life, and to find a real detective story, complete with corpse, waiting on one’s own front doorstep, so to speak, is bound to send a healthy-minded boy into the seventh heaven of enjoyment.

Death means very little to a boy of sixteen.

Griselda came back in about an hour’s time. She had seen Anne Protheroe, having arrived just after the Inspector had broken the news to her.

“You’re laughing, my dear,” said Miss Marple, “but after all, that is a very sound way of arriving at the truth. It’s really what people call intuition and make such a fuss about.

Intuition is like reading a word without having to spell it out. A child can’t do that because it has had so little experience.

But a grown-up person knows the word because they’ve seen it often before. You catch my meaning, Vicar?”

And the woman who took it didn’t want it in the least and wasn’t by any means a thief. She simply hid it in another woman’s house and told the police she’d seen this other woman take it. Spite, you know, sheer spite.

It’s an astonishing motive⁠—spite. A man in it, of course. There always is.

”

I looked at him. What feelings were at work under that impassive demeanour. Were there things that he knew and could have told us?

There is nothing so inhuman as the mask of the good servant.

“Is there anything more, sir?”

And an imp in my brain replied: “Because she’s a very beautiful and attractive woman. That’s why.”

There is, as Miss Marple would say, a lot of human nature in all of us.

Raymond West waved his cigarette.

“I regard St. Mary Mead,” he said authoritatively, “as a stagnant pool.”

He looked at us, prepared for resentment at his statement, but somewhat, I think, to his chagrin, no one displayed annoyance.

He looked at us, prepared for resentment at his statement, but somewhat, I think, to his chagrin, no one displayed annoyance.

“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.

“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—”

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.

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.

“I’d—I’d do anything for Lettice.”

“Very few of us can do anything for anyone else,” I said. “However much we wish it, we are powerless.”

“I wish I were dead,” said Dennis.

Poor lad.

Calf love is a virulent disease.

I forebore to say any of the obvious and probably irritating things which come so easily to one’s lips. Instead, I said goodnight, and went up to bed.

“But surely,” I cried, “you don’t think that that silly young woman could have anything to do with the crime?”

“It’s awfully easy to appear silly, Mr. Clement. It’s one of the easiest things in the world.”

“No, I don’t. Honestly, I don’t. What I do think is that that girl knows something—or might know something. I wanted to study her at close quarters.”

“You must understand that I heard this on the best authority.”

In St. Mary Mead the best authority is always somebody else’s servant.

“You can’t tell me who told you?”

“You won’t let the police cross-question me, will you?” said Miss Wetherby, pathetically, as she clasped my hand in both of hers. “I do shrink from publicity. And to stand up in court!”

“In special cases,” I said, “they let witnesses sit down.”

There was still Mrs. Price Ridley to see. That lady put me in my place at once.

“It’s quite true, sir, I heard a sneeze. And it wasn’t an ordinary sneeze—not by any means.”

Nothing about a crime is ever ordinary.

The shot was not an ordinary kind of shot. The sneeze was not a usual kind of sneeze. It was, I presume, a special murderer’s sneeze.

And each time, from different parts of the church, a kind of sighing gasp went up.

Mass emotion is a strange and terrible thing.

I finished up with those beautiful and poignant words—perhaps the most poignant words in the whole Bible:

Of all the ladies in my congregation, I considered her by far the shrewdest. Not only does she see and hear practically everything that goes on, but she draws amazingly neat and apposite deductions from the facts that come under her notice.

If I were at any time to set out on a career of deceit, it would be of Miss Marple that I should be afraid.

What Griselda called the Nephew Amusing Party started off at a little after nine, and whilst I was waiting for Miss Marple to arrive I amused myself by drawing up a kind of schedule of the facts connected with the crime.

“So that was it!” I exclaimed.

There is always some perfectly good and reasonable explanation for Miss Marple’s omniscience.

“And so,” she continued, “I just came round to see if I could be of any use.”