“What was it exactly? Let’s have your recollection.”
“Well—” Esther paused to think. “The trouble is,” she said apologetically, “I didn’t really listen very closely. You see, it was rather like that terrible story about the lion in Rhodesia which used to go on and on. One did get rather in the habit of not listening.”
“Well, tell us what you do remember.”
“I think it arose out of some murder case that had been in the papers. Major Palgrave said that he’d had an experience not every person had had. He’d actually met a murderer face to face.”
“Met?” Mr. Rafter exclaimed. “Did he actually use the word ‘Met’?”
Esther looked confused. “I think so.” She was doubtful. “Or he may have said, ‘I can point you out a murderer’.”
“Well, which was it? There’s a difference.”
“I can’t really be sure . . . I think he said he’d show me a picture of someone.”
“That’s better.”
“And then he talked a lot about Lucrezia Borgia.”
“Never mind about Lucrezia Borgia. We know all about her.”
“He talked about poisoners and that Lucrezia was very beautiful and had red hair. He said there were probably far more women poisoners going about the world than anyone knew.”
“That I fear is quite likely,” said Miss Marple.
“And he talked about poison being a woman’s weapon.”
“Seems to have been wandering from the point a bit,” said Mr. Rafter.
“Well, of course, he always did wander from the point in his stories. And then one used to stop listening and just say ‘Yes’ and ‘Really?’ and ‘You don’t say so’.”
“What about this picture he was going to show you?”
“I don’t remember. It may have been something he’d seen in the paper—”
“He didn’t actually show you a snapshot?”
“A snapshot? No.” She shook her head. “I’m quite sure of that. He did say that she was a good-looking woman, and you’d never think she was a murderer to look at her.”
“She?”
“There you are,” exclaimed Miss Marple. “It makes it all so confusing.”
“He was talking about a woman?” Mr. Rafter asked.
“Oh yes.”
“The snapshot was a snapshot of a woman?”
“Yes.”
“It can’t have been!”
“But it was,” Esther persisted. “He said ‘She’s here in this island. I’ll point her out, and then I’ll tell you the whole story.'”
Mr. Rafter swore. In saying what he thought of the late Major Palgrave he did not mince his words.
“The probabilities are,” he finished, “that not a word of anything he said was true!”
“One does begin to wonder,” Miss Marple murmured.
“So there we are,” said Mr. Rafter. “The old booby started telling you hunting tales. Pig sticking, tiger shooting, elephant hunting, narrow escapes from lions. One or two of them might have been fact. Several of them were fiction, and others had happened to somebody else! Then he gets on to the subject of murder and he tells one murder story to cap another murder story. And what’s more he tells them all as if they’d happened to him. Ten to one most of them were a hash up of what he’d read in the paper, or seen on T.V..”
He turned accusingly on Esther. “You admit that you weren’t listening closely. Perhaps you misunderstood what he was saying.”
“I’m certain he was talking about a woman,” said Esther obstinately, “because of course I wondered who it was.”
”Who do you think it was?” asked Miss Marple.
Esther flushed and looked slightly embarrassed. “Oh, I didn’t really— I mean, I wouldn’t like to—”
Miss Marple did not insist. The presence of Mr. Rafter, she thought, was inimical to her finding out exactly what suppositions Esther Walters had made. That could only be cosily brought out in a tête-à-tête between two women. And there was, of course, the possibility that Esther Walters was lying. Naturally, Miss Marple did not suggest this aloud. She registered it as a possibility but she was not inclined to believe in it. For one thing she did not think that Esther Walters was a liar (though one never knew) and for another, she could see no point in such a lie.