about you at the Yard.” He smiled, “It seems
you’re fairly well known there.”
“I don’t know how it is,” fluttered Miss
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Marple, “but I so often seem to get mixed up
in things that are really no concern of mine.
Crimes I mean, and peculiar happenings.”
“You’ve got a reputation,” said Inspector®
Neele.
“Sir Henry dithering, of course,” said
Miss Marple, “is a very old friend of mine.”
“As I said before,” Neele went on, “you
and I represent opposite points of view. One
might almost call them sanity and insanity.”
Miss Marple put her head a little on one
side.
“Now what exactly do you mean by that, I
wonder. Inspector?”
“Well, Miss Marple, there’s a sane way of
looking at things. This murder benefits
certain people. One person, I may say, in
particular. The second murder benefits the
same person. The third murder one might
call a murder for safety.”
“But which do you call the third murder?”
Miss Marple asked.
Her eyes, a very bright china blue, looked
shrewdly at the Inspector. He nodded.
“Yes. You’ve got something there perhaps.
You know the other day when the A.C. was
speaking to me of these murders, something
that he said seemed to me to be wrong. That
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was it. I was thinking, of course, of the
nursery rhyme. The king in his countinghouse, the queen in the parlour and the maid
hanging out the clothes.”
“Exactly,” said Miss Marple. “A sequence
in that order, but actually Gladys must have
been murdered before Mrs. Fortescue, mustn’t she?”
“I think so,” said Neele. “I take it it’s quite
certainly so. Her body wasn’t discovered till
late that night, and of course it was difficult
then to say exactly how long she’d been dead.
But I think myself that she must almost
certainly have been murdered round about
five o’clock, because otherwise …”
Miss Marple cut in. “Because otherwise
she would certainly have taken the second
tray into the drawing-room?”
“Quite so. She took one tray in with the tea
on it, she brought the second tray into the
hall, and then something happened. She saw
something or she heard something. The question
is what that something was. It might have
been Dubois coming down the stairs from
Mrs. Fortescue’s room. It might have been Elaine Fortescue’s young man, Gerald
Wright, coming in at the side door. Whoever
it was, lured her away from the tea-tray and
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out into the garden. And once that had
happened I don’t see any possibility of her
death being long delayed. It was cold out and
she was only wearing her thin uniform.”
“Of course you’re quite right,” said Miss
Marple. “I mean it was never a case of ‘the
maid was in the garden hanging out the
clothes.’ She wouldn’t be hanging up clothes
at that time of the evening and she wouldn’t
go out to the clothes line without putting a
coat on. That was all camouflage, like the
clothes peg, to make the thing fit in with the
rhyme.”
“Exactly,” said Inspector Neele, “crazy.
That’s where I can’t yet see eye to eye with
you. I can’t—I simply can’t swallow the
nursery rhyme business.”
“But it fits. Inspector. You must agree it
fits.”
“It fits,” said Neele heavily, “but all the
same the sequence is wrong. I mean the
rhyme definitely suggests that the maid was
the third murder. But we know that the
Queen was the third murder. Adele Fortescue
was not killed until between twenty-five-past
five and five minutes to six. By then Gladys
must already have been dead.”
“And that’s all wrong, isn’t it?” said Miss
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Marple. “All wrong for the nursery rhyme—
that’s very significant, isn’t it?”
Inspector Neele shrugged his shoulders.
“It’s probably splitting hairs. The deaths
fulfil the conditions of the rhyme, and I
suppose that’s all that was needed. But I’m
talking now as though I were on your side.
I’m going to outline my side of the case now,
Miss Marple. I’m washing out the blackbirds
and the rye and all the rest of it. I’m going by
sober facts and common sense and the
reasons for which sane people do murders.