‘He hadn’t the faintest idea he knew anything to blackmail her about,’ said Inspector Craddock. ‘He knew that he was quite a personable young man—and he was aware by experience that personable young men sometimes can get money out of elderly ladies if they tell a hard-luck story convincingly enough.
‘But she may have seen it differently. She may have thought that it was a form of insidious blackmail, that perhaps he suspected something—and that later, if there was publicity in the papers as there might be after Belle Goedler’s death, he would realize that in her he had found a gold mine.
‘And she was committed to the fraud now. She’d established herself as Letitia Blacklock. With the Bank. With Mrs Goedler. The only snag was this rather dubious Swiss hotel clerk, an unreliable character, and possibly a blackmailer. If only he were out of the way—she’d be safe.
‘Perhaps she made it all up as a kind of fantasy first. She’d been starved of emotion and drama in her life. She pleased herself by working out the details. How would she go about getting rid of him?
‘She made her plan. And at last she decided to act on it. She told her story of a sham hold-up at a party to Rudi Scherz, explained that she wanted a stranger to act the part of the “gangster”, and offered him a generous sum for his co-operation.
‘And the fact that he agreed without any suspicion is what makes me quite certain that Scherz had no idea that he had any kind of hold over her. To him she was just a rather foolish old woman, very ready to part with money.
‘She gave him the advertisement to insert, arranged for him to pay a visit to Little Paddocks to study the geography of the house, and showed him the spot where she would meet him and let him into the house on the night in question. Dora Bunner, of course, knew nothing about all this.
‘The day came—’ He paused.
Miss Marple took up the tale in her gentle voice.
‘She must have spent a very miserable day. You see, it still wasn’t too late to draw back…Dora Bunner told us that Letty was frightened that day and she must have been frightened. Frightened of what she was going to do, frightened of the plan going wrong—but not frightened enough to draw back.
‘It had been fun, perhaps, getting the revolver out of Colonel Easterbrook’s collar drawer. Taking along eggs, or jam—slipping upstairs in the empty house. It had been fun getting the second door in the drawing-room oiled, so that it would open and shut noiselessly. Fun suggesting the moving of the table outside the door so that Phillipa’s flower arrangements would show to better advantage. It may have all seemed like a game. But what was going to happen next definitely wasn’t a game any longer. Oh, yes, she was frightened…Dora Bunner was right about that.’
‘All the same, she went through with it,’ said Craddock. ‘And it all went according to plan. She went out just after six to “shut up the ducks”, and she let Scherz in then and gave him the mask and cloak and gloves and the torch. Then, at 6.30, when the clock begins to chime, she’s ready by that table near the archway with her hand on the cigarette-box. It’s all so natural. Patrick, acting as host, has gone for the drinks. She, the hostess, is fetching the cigarettes. She’d judged, quite correctly, that when the clock begins to chime, everyone will look at the clock. They did. Only one person, the devoted Dora, kept her eyes fixed on her friend. And she told us, in her very first statement, exactly what Miss Blacklock did. She said that Miss Blacklock had picked up the vase of violets.
‘She’d previously frayed the cord of the lamp so that the wires were nearly bare. The whole thing only took a second. The cigarette-box, the vase and the little switch were all close together. She picked up the violets, spilt the water on the frayed place and switched on the lamp. Water’s a good conductor of electricity. The wires fused.’