Again the teeth flashed in that wide lazy smile.

‘Oh I know, Edgar, but I suddenly thought it would be nice if I came along. I’ll take her with me and you can wait and bring her cases up.’

She slammed the door on Miss Marple, ran round to the other side, jumped in the driving seat, and they purred swiftly out of the station.

Looking back, Miss Marple noticed Edgar Lawson’s face.

‘I don’t think, my dear,’ she said, ‘that Mr Lawson is very pleased.’

Gina laughed.

‘Edgar’s a frightful idiot,’ she said. ‘Always so pompous about things. You’d really think he mattered!’

Miss Marple asked, ‘Doesn’t he matter?’

‘Edgar?’ There was an unconscious note of cruelty in Gina’s scornful laugh. ‘Oh, he’s bats anyway.’

‘Bats?’

‘They’re all bats at Stonygates,’ said Gina. ‘I don’t mean Lewis and Grandam and me and the boys — and not Miss Bellever, of course. But the others. Sometimes I feel I’m going a bit bats myself living there. Even Aunt Mildred goes out on walks and mutters to herself all the time — and you don’t expect a Canon’s widow to do that, do you?’

They swung out of the station approach and accelerated up the smooth surfaced empty road. Gina shot a swift sideways glance at her companion.

‘You were at school with Grandam, weren’t you? It seems so queer.’

Miss Marple knew perfectly what she meant. To youth it seems very odd to think that age was once young and pigtailed and struggled with decimals and English literature.

‘It must,’ said Gina with awe in her voice, and obviously not meaning to be rude, ‘have been a very long time ago.’

‘Yes, indeed,’ said Miss Marple. ‘You feel that more with me than you do with your grandmother, I expect?’

Gina nodded. ‘It’s cute of you saying that. Grandam, you know, gives one a curiously ageless feeling.’

‘It is a long time since I’ve seen her. I wonder if I shall find her much changed.’

‘Her hair’s grey, of course,’ said Gina vaguely. ‘And she walks with a stick because of her arthritis. It’s got much worse lately. I suppose that — ’ she broke off, and then asked: ‘Have you been to Stonygates before?’

‘No, never. I’ve heard a great deal about it, of course.’

‘It’s pretty ghastly, really,’ said Gina cheerfully. ‘A sort of Gothic monstrosity. What Steve calls Best Victorian Lavatory period. But it’s fun, too, in a way. Only of course everything’s madly earnest, and you tumble over psychiatrists everywhere underfoot. Enjoying themselves madly. Rather like Scout-masters, only worse. The young criminals are rather pets, some of them. One showed me how to diddle locks with a bit of wire and one angelic-faced boy gave me a lot of points about coshing people.’

Miss Marple considered this information thoughtfully.

‘It’s the thugs I like best,’ said Gina. ‘I don’t fancy the queers so much. Of course Lewis and Dr Maverick think they’re all queer — I mean they think it’s repressed desires and disordered home life and their mothers getting off with soldiers and all that. I don’t really see it myself because some people have had awful home lives and yet have managed to turn out quite all right.’