Miss Marple got out of the train at Market Kindle station. A kindly fellow passenger handed out her suitcase after her, and Miss Marple, clutching a string bag, a faded leather handbag and some miscellaneous wraps, uttered appreciative twitters of thanks.

'So kind of you, I'm sure… So difficult nowadays not many porters. I get so flustered when I travel.' The twitters were drowned by the booming noise of the station announcer saying loudly but indistinctly that the 3.18 was standing at Platform 1, and was about to proceed to various unidentifiable stations.

Market Kindle was a large empty windswept station with hardly any passengers or railway staff to be seen on it. Its claim to distinction lay in having six platforms and a bay where a very small train of one carriage was puffing importantly.

Miss Marple, rather more shabbily dressed than was her custom (so lucky that she hadn't given away the old speckledy), was peering around her uncertainly when a young man came up to her.

'Miss Marple?' he said. His voice had an unexpectedly dramatic quality about it, as though the utterance of her name were the first words of a part he was playing in amateur theatricals. 'I've come to meet you - from Stonygates.' Miss Marple looked gratefully at him, a charming helpless-looking old lady with, if he had chanced to notice it, very shrewd blue eyes. The personality of the young man did not quite match his voice. It was less important, one might almost say insignificant. His eyelids had a trick of fluttering nervously.

'Oh thank you,' said Miss Marple. 'There's just this suitcase.' She noticed that the young man did not pick up her suitcase himself. He flipped a finger at a porter who was trundling some packing cases past on a trolley.

'Bring it out, please,' he said, and added importantly, 'for Stonygates.' The porter said cheerfully: 'Rightyho. Shan't be long.' Miss Marple fancied that her new acquaintance was not too pleased about this. It was as if Buckingham Palace had been dismissed as no more important than 3 Laburnum Road.

He said, 'The railways get more impossible every day!' Guiding Miss Marple towards the exit,' he said: 'I'm Edgar Lawson. Mrs Serrocold asked me to meet you. I help Mr Serrocold in his work.' There was again the faint insinuation that a busy and important man had, very charmingly, put important affairs on one side out of chivalry to his employer's wife.

And again the impression was not wholly convincing it had a theatrical fiavour.

Miss Marple began to wonder about Edgar Lawson.

They came out of the station and Edgar guided the old lady to where a rather elderly Ford V. 8 was standing.

He was just saying 'Will you come in front with me, or would you prefer the back?' when there was a diversion.

A new gleaming two-seater Rolls Bentley came purring into the station yard and drew up in front of,, the

Ford. A very beautiful young woman jumped out of it and came across to them. The fact that she wore dirty corduroy slacks and a simple shirt open at the neck seemed somehow to enhance the fact that she was not only beautiful but expensive.

'There you are, Edgar. I thought I wouldn't make it in time. I see you've got Miss Marple. I came to meet her.' She smiled dazzingly at Miss Marple, showing a row of lovely teeth in a sunburnt southern face. 'I'm Gina,' she said. 'Carrie Louise's granddaughter. What was your journey like? Simply foul? What a nice string bag. I love string bags. I'll take it and the coats and then you can get in better.' Edgar's face flushed. He protested.

'Look here, Gina, I came to meet Miss Marple. It was all arranged…' 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'lltake 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 rnarrered!' 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 Believer, of course. But the others. Sometimes I feel /'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 acceler-ated 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. Enjoy-ing 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.'

'I'm sure it is all a very difficult problem,' said Miss Marple.

Gina laughed, again showing her magnificent teeth.

'It doesn't worry me much. I suppose some people have these sort of urges to make the world a better place.

Lewis is quite dippy about it all - he's going to Aberdeen next week because there's a case coming up in the police court - a boy with five previous convictions.'

'The young man who met me at the station? Mr Lawson. He helps Mr Serrocold, he told me. Is he his secretary?'

'Oh Edgar hasn't brains enough to be a secretary. He's a case, really. He used to stay at hotels and pretend he was a V.C. or a fighter pilot and borrow money and then do a flit. I think he's just a rotter. But Lewis goes through a routine with them all. Makes them feel one of the family and gives them jobs to do and all that to encourage their sense of responsibility. I daresay we shall be murdered by one of them one of these days.' Gina laughed merrily.

Miss Marple did not laugh.