It was, Miss Marple thought, a somewhat cruel epitaph on Major Palgrave. Farther down the beach Gregory Dyson had come out of the sea. Lucky had turned herself over on the sand. Evelyn Hillingdon was looking at Lucky, and her expression, for some reason, made Miss Marple shiver.
“Surely I can’t be cold—in this hot sun,” she thought.
What was the old phrase? “A goose walking over your grave—”
She got up and went slowly back to her bungalow.
On the way she passed Mr. Rafter and Esther Walters coming down the beach. Mr. Rafter winked at her. Miss Marple did not wink back. She looked at him disapprovingly. She went into her bungalow and lay down on her bed. She felt old and tired and worried.
She was quite certain that there was no time to be lost—no time to be lost . . . It was getting late. . . . The sun was going to set. The sun, one must always look at the sun through smoked glass . . . Where was that piece of smoked glass that someone had given her? . . . No, she wouldn’t need it after all. A shadow had come over the sun blotting it out. A shadow. Evelyn Hillingdon’s shadow. No, not Evelyn Hillingdon—The Shadow (what were the words) the Shadow of the Valley of Death. That was it. She must—what was it? Make the Sign of the Horns—to avert the Evil Eye—Major Palgrave’s Evil Eye. Her eyelids flickered open—she had been asleep. But there was a shadow—someone peering in at her window.
The shadow moved away and Miss Marple saw who it was. It was Jackson.
“Impertinence—peering in like that,” she thought—and added parenthetically “Just like Jonas Parry.”
The comparison reflected no credit on Jackson.
Then she wondered why Jackson had been peering into her bedroom. To see if she was there? Or to note that she was there, but was asleep. She got up, went into the bathroom and peered cautiously through the window. Arthur Jackson was standing by the door of the bungalow next door. Mr. Rafter’s bungalow. She saw him give a rapid glance round and then slip quickly inside.
Interesting, thought Miss Marple. Why did he have to look round in that furtive manner. Nothing in the world could have been more natural than his going into Mr. Rafter’s bungalow since he himself had a room at the back of it. He was always going in and out of it on some errand or other.
So why that quick, guilty glance round? “Only one reason,” said Miss Marple, “he wanted to be sure that nobody was observing him enter at this particular moment because of something he was going to do in there.”
Everybody, of course, was on the beach at this moment except those who had gone for expeditions. In about twenty minutes or so, Jackson himself would arrive on the beach in the course of his duties to aid Mr. Rafter to take his sea dip. If he wanted to do anything in the bungalow unobserved, now was a very good time. He had satisfied himself that Miss Marple was asleep on her bed, he had satisfied himself that there was nobody near at hand to observe his movements. Well, she must do her best to do exactly that.
Sitting down on her bed. Miss Marple removed her neat sandal shoes and replaced them with a pair of plimsolls. Then she shook her head, removed the plimsolls, burrowed in her suitcase and took out a pair of shoes the heel on one of which she had recently caught on a hook by the door. It was now in a slightly precarious state and Miss Marple adroitly rendered it even more precarious by attention with a nail file. Then she emerged with due precaution from her door walking in stockinged feet.
With all the care of a Big Game Hunter approaching up-wind of a herd of antelope, Miss Marple gently circumnavigated Mr. Rafter’s bungalow.
Cautiously she manoeuvred her way around the corner of the house. She put on one of the shoes she was carrying, gave a final wrench to the heel of the other, sank gently to her knees and lay prone under the window. If Jackson heard anything, if he came to the window to look out, an old lady would have had a fall owing to the heel coming off her shoe. But evidently Jackson had heard nothing.