and the tea table was Miss Elaine Fortescue, her step-daughter. She states that as she left
the room Mrs. Fortescue was pouring herself
out another cup of tea. Some twenty minutes
or half-hour later Miss Dove, who acts as
housekeeper, went in to remove the tea-tray.
Mrs. Fortescue was still sitting on the sofa,
dead. Beside her was a tea cup a quarter full
and in the dregs of it was potassium
cyanide.”
“Which is almost immediate in its action, I
believe,” said Miss Marple.
153
“Exactly.”
“Such dangerous stuff,” murmured Miss
Marple. “One has it to take wasps’ nests but
I’m always very, very careful.”
“You’re quite right,” said Inspector Neele.
“There was a packet of it in the gardener’s
shed here.”
“Again very convenient,” said Miss
Marple. She added, “Was Mrs. Fortescue
eating anything?”
“Oh, yes. They’d had quite a sumptuous
tea.”
“Cake, I suppose? Bread and butter?
Scones, perhaps? Jam? Honey?”
“Yes, there was honey and scones, chocolate
cake and swiss roll and various other
plates of things.” He looked at her curiously.
“The potassium cyanide was in the tea. Miss
Marple.”
“Oh, yes, yes. I quite understand that. I
was just getting the whole picture, so to
speak. Rather significant, don’t you think?”
He looked at her in a slightly puzzled
fashion. Her cheeks were pink, her eyes were
bright.
“And the third death. Inspector Neele?”
“Well, the facts there seem clear enough, too. The girl, Gladys, took in the tea-tray,
154
then she brought the next tray into the hall, but left it there. She’d been rather absentminded
all the day, apparently. After that no
one saw her. The cook, Mrs. Crump, jumped
to the conclusion that the girl had gone out
for the evening without telling anybody. She
based her belief, I think, on the fact that the
girl was wearing a good pair of nylon stockings
and her best shoes. There, however, she
was proved quite wrong. The girl had obviously remembered suddenly that she had
not taken in some clothes that were drying
outside on the clothes line. She ran out to
fetch them in, had taken down half of them
apparently, when somebody took her
unawares by slipping a stocking round her
neck and–well, that was that.”
“Someone from outside?” said Miss
Marple.
“Perhaps,” said Inspector Neele. “But
perhaps someone from inside. Someone
who’d been waiting his or her opportunity to
get the girl alone. The girl was upset,
nervous, when we first questioned her, but
I’m afraid we didn’t quite appreciate the
importance of that.”
“Oh, but how could you,” cried Miss
Marple, “because people so often do look
155
W. if
te.- I
guilty and embarrassed when they are questioned
by the police.”
“That’s just it. But this time. Miss Marple,
it was rather more than that. I think the girl
Gladys had seen someone performing some
action that seemed to her needed explanation.
It can’t, I think, have been anything very
definite. Otherwise she would have spoken
out. But I think she did betray the fact to the
person in question. That person realised that
Gladys was a danger.”
“And so Gladys was strangled and a clothes
peg clipped on her nose,” murmured Miss
Marple to herself.
“Yes, that’s a nasty touch. A nasty, sneering
sort of touch. Just a nasty bit of
unnecessary bravado.”
Miss Marple shook her head.
“Hardly unnecessary. It does all make a
pattern, doesn’t it?”
Inspector Neele looked at her curiously.
“I don’t quite follow you. Miss Marple.
What do you mean by a pattern?”
Miss Marple immediately became
flustered.
“Well, I mean it does seem–I mean,
regarded as a sequence, if you under156
stand–well, one can’t get away from facts,
can one?”
“I don’t think I quite understand.”
“Well, I mean–first we have Mr. Fortescue.
Rex Fortescue. Killed in his office in the
city. And then we have Mrs. Fortescue, sitting
here in the library and having tea. There
were scones and honey. And then poor Gladys
with the clothes peg on her nose. Just to point the whole thing. That very charming Mrs.
Lance Fortescue said to me that there didn’t
seem to be any rhyme or reason in it, but I