“You think you know, don’t you?” she said.
“I think I do, yes. I’m fairly sure.”
“Then oughtn’t you to tell what you know—do something about it?”
“Why should I? What good would it do? I couldn’t prove anything. What would happen anyway? People get let off nowadays so easily. They call it diminished responsibility and things like that. A few years in prison and you’re out again, as right as rain.”
“Supposing, because you don’t tell what you know, somebody else gets killed—another victim?”
Esther shook her head with confidence.
“That won’t happen,” she said.
“You can’t be sure of it.”
“I am sure. And in any case I don’t see who—” She frowned. “Anyway,” she added, almost inconsequently, “perhaps it is—diminished responsibility. Perhaps you can’t help it—not if you are really mentally unbalanced. Oh, I don’t know. By far the best thing would be if she went off with whoever it is, then we could all forget about things.”
She glanced at her watch, gave an exclamation of dismay and got up. “I must go and change.”
Miss Marple sat looking after her. Pronouns, she thought, were always puzzling and women like Esther Walters were particularly prone to strew them about haphazard.
Was Esther Walters for some reason convinced that a woman had been responsible for the deaths of Major Palgrave and Victoria? It sounded like it.
Miss Marple considered.
“Ah, Miss Marple, sitting here all alone—and not even knitting?”
It was Dr. Graham for whom she had sought so long and so unsuccessfully.
And here he was prepared of his own accord to sit down for a few minutes’ chat. He wouldn’t stay long. Miss Marple thought, because he too was bent on changing for dinner, and he usually dined fairly early. She explained that she had been sitting by Molly Kendal’s bedside that afternoon.
“One can hardly believe she has made such a good recovery so quickly,” she said.
“Oh well,” said Dr. Graham, “it’s not very surprising. She didn’t take a very heavy overdose, you know.”
“Oh, I understood she’d taken quite a half-bottle full of tablets.”
Dr. Graham was smiling indulgently.
“No,” he said, “I don’t think she took that amount. I dare say she meant to take them, then probably at the last moment she threw half of them away. People, even when they think they want to commit suicide, often don’t really want to do it. They manage not to take a full overdose. It’s not always deliberate deceit, it’s just the subconscious looking after itself.”
“Or, I suppose it might be deliberate. I mean, wanting it to appear that . . .” Miss Marple paused.
“It’s possible,” said Dr. Graham.
“If she and Tim had had a row, for instance?”
“They don’t have rows, you know. They seem very fond of each other. Still, I suppose it can always happen once. No, I don’t think there’s very much wrong with her now. She could really get up and go about as usual. Still, it’s safer to keep her where she is for a day or two—” He got up, nodded cheerfully and went off towards the hotel. Miss Marple sat where she was a little while longer.
Various thoughts passed through her mind. The book under Molly’s mattress. The way Molly had feigned sleep. Things Joan Prescott and, later Esther Walters, had said . . . And then she went back to the beginning of it all—to Major Palgrave.
Something struggled in her mind. Something about Major Palgrave . . .
Something that if she could only remember . . .
23
THE LAST DAY
“AND the evening and the morning were the last day,” said Miss Marple to herself. Then, slightly confused, she sat upright again in her chair. She had dozed off, an incredible thing to do because the steel band was playing and anyone who could doze off during the steel band . . . Well, it showed, thought Miss Marple, that she was getting used to this place! What was it she had been saying? Some quotation that she’d got wrong. Last day? First day. That’s what it ought to be. This wasn’t the first day. Presumably it wasn’t the last day either.