Agatha Christie – A Murder Is Announced

‘Delicious Death,’ said Phillipa with a shudder.

‘Yes—yes, it was rather like that…she tried to give her friend a delicious death…The party, and all the things she liked to eat, and trying to stop people saying things to upset her. And then the tablets, whatever they were, in the aspirin bottle by her own bed so that Bunny, when she couldn’t find the new bottle of aspirin she’d just bought, would go there to get some. And it would look, as it did look, that the tablets had been meant for Letitia…

‘And so Bunny died in her sleep, quite happily, and Charlotte felt safe again. But she missed Dora Bunner —she missed her affection and her loyalty, she missed being able to talk to her about the old days…She cried bitterly the day I came up with that note from Julian—and her grief was quite genuine. She’d killed her own dear friend…’

‘That’s horrible,’ said Bunch. ‘Horrible.’

‘But it’s very human,’ said Julian Harmon. ‘One forgets how human murderers are.’

‘I know,’ said Miss Marple. ‘Human. And often very much to be pitied. But very dangerous, too. Especially a weak kindly murderer like Charlotte Blacklock. Because, once a weak person gets really frightened, they get quite savage with terror and they’ve no self-control at all.’

‘Murgatroyd?’ said Julian.

‘Yes, poor Miss Murgatroyd. Charlotte must have come up to the cottage and heard them rehearsing the murder. The window was open and she listened. It had never occurred to her until that moment that there was anyone else who could be a danger to her. Miss Hinchcliffe was urging her friend to remember what she’d seen and until that moment Charlotte hadn’t realized that anyone could have seen anything at all. She’d assumed that everybody would automatically be looking at Rudi Scherz. She must have held her breath outside the window and listened. Was it going to be all right? And then, just as Miss Hinchcliffe rushed off to the station Miss Murgatroyd got to a point which showed that she had stumbled on the truth. She called after Miss Hinchcliffe: “She wasn’t there…”

‘I asked Miss Hinchcliffe, you know, if that was the way she said it…Because if she’d said “She wasn’t there” it wouldn’t have meant the same thing.’

‘Now that’s too subtle a point for me,’ said Craddock.

Miss Marple turned her eager pink and white face to him.

‘Just think what’s going on in Miss Murgatroyd’s mind…One does see things, you know, and not know one sees them. In a railway accident once, I remember noticing a large blister of paint at the side of the carriage. I could have drawn it for you afterwards. And once, when there was a flying bomb in London—splinters of glass everywhere—and the shock—but what I remember best is a woman standing in front of me who had a big hole half-way up the leg of her stockings and the stockings didn’t match. So when Miss Murgatroyd stopped thinking and just tried to remember what she saw, she remembered a good deal.

‘She started, I think, near the mantelpiece, where the torch must have hit first—then it went along the two windows and there were people in between the windows and her. Mrs Harmon with her knuckles screwed into her eyes for instance. She went on in her mind following the torch past Miss Bunner with her mouth open and her eyes staring—past a blank wall and a table with a lamp and a cigarette-box. And then came the shots—and quite suddenly she remembered a most incredible thing. She’d seen the wall where, later, there were the two bullet holes, the wall where Letitia Blacklock had been standing when she was shot, and at the moment when the revolver went off and Letty was shot, Letty hadn’t been there…

‘You see what I mean now? She’d been thinking of the three women Miss Hinchcliffe had told her to think about. If one of them hadn’t been there, it would have been the personality she’d have fastened upon. She’d have said—in effect—“That’s the one! She wasn’t there;” But it was a place that was in her mind—a place where someone should have been—but the place wasn’t filled—there wasn’t anybody there. The place was there—but the person wasn’t. And she couldn’t take it in all at once. “How extraordinary, Hinch,” she said. “She wasn’t there”…So that could only mean Letitia Blacklock…’