He sat in a deck chair provided for him by an energetic Bunch, just on her way to a Mothers' Meeting, and, well protected with shawls and a large rug round her knees, Miss Marple sat knitting beside him.
The sunshine, the peace, the steady click of Miss Marple's knitting needles, all combined to produce a soporific feeling in the Inspector.
And yet, at the same time, there was a nightmarish feeling at the back of his mind.
It was like a familiar dream where an undertone of menace grows and finally turns Ease into Terror... He said abruptly,
"You oughtn't to be here."
Miss Marple's needles stopped clicking for a moment.
Her placid china blue eyes regarded him thoughtfully. She said,
"I know what you mean.
You're a very conscientious boy.
But it's perfectly all right.
Bunch's father (he was vicar of our parish, a very fine scholar) and her mother (who is a most remarkable woman - real spiritual power) are very old friends of mine.
It's the most natural thing in the world that when I'm at Medenham I should come on here to stay with Bunch for a little."
"Oh, perhaps," said Craddock. "But - but don't snoop around...
I've a feeling - I have really - that it isn't safe."
Miss Marple smiled a little.
"But I'm afraid," she said, "that we old women always do snoop.
It would be very odd and much more noticeable if I didn't.
Questions about mutual friends in different parts of the world and whether they remember so and so, and do they remember who it was that Lady Somebody's daughter married?
All that helps, doesn't it?"
"Helps?" said the Inspector, rather stupidly.
"Helps to find out if people are who they say they are," said Miss Marple.
She went on:
"Because that's what's worrying you, isn't it?
And that's really the particular way the world has changed since the war.
Take this place, Chipping Cleghorn, for instance.
It's very much like St. Mary Mead where I live.
Fifteen years ago one knew who everybody was. The Bantrys in the big house - and the Hartnells and the Price Ridleys and the Weatherbys...
They were people whose fathers and mothers and grandfathers and grandmothers, or whose aunts and uncles, had lived there before them. If somebody new came to live there, they brought letters of introduction, or they'd been in the same regiment or served on the same ship as someone there already.
If anybody new - really new - really a stranger - came, well, they stuck out - everybody wondered about them and didn't rest till they found out."
She nodded her head gently:
"But it's not like that any more.
Every village and small country place is full of people who've just come and settled there without any ties to bring them.
The big houses have been sold, and the cottages have been converted and changed.
And people just come - and all you know about them is what they say of themselves.
They've come, you see, from all over the world. People from India and Hong Kong and China, and people who lived in France and Italy, in cheap places and quaint islands.
And also those who made some money and could retire.
But no one knows any longer who's who.
Somebody can own Benares Bronze objects and speak of 'tiffin' and 'chota Hazri' - or own statues from Taormina and speak of their english church there - as Miss Murgatroyd and Miss Hinchcliffe.
He may come from the Orient or the South of France.
And everybody accepts the newcomers without hesitation.
They don't expect, for the first visit, to first receive a letter from a friend, saying that so-and-so is a charming person, a childhood friend, etc..."
And that, thought Craddock, was exactly the source of his trouble.
He didn't know.
They were all just faces and personalities vouched for by rationing and I.D. cards... well - printed but without photographies or fingerprints.
You could get an I.D. for the asking - and partly due to this the subtle ties that hold the structure of the rural society together were loosening.
In a city nobody knows their neighbours; neither in the country, but sometimes you have the illusion that you do.
Thanks to the tampered door, Craddock knew that one of the occupants of the living-room of Little Paddocks wasn't the good neighbour he or she pretended to be... And so he was afraid of what could happen to Miss Marple, who was so frail and old, even if she was so clever...
"Up to a point," he said, "we can check the past lives of these people..."
But he knew that this what harder than it seemed.
India, China, Hong-Kong, South of France... much harder than it would have been fifteen years ago.