“Very clear,” said Miss Marple, nodding her head in approval. “Very clear indeed. Gentlemen always make such excellent memoranda.”
“You agree with what I have written?” I asked.
“Oh, yes – you have put it all beautifully.”
I asked her the question then that I had been meaning to put all along.
“Miss Marple,” I said. “Who do you suspect? You once said that there were seven people.”
“Quite that, I should think,” said Miss Marple absently. “I expect every one of us suspects someone different. In fact, one can see they do.”
She didn’t ask me who I suspected.
“The point is,” she said, “that one must provide an explanation for everything. Each thing has got to be explained away satisfactorily. If you have a theory that fits every fact – well, then, it must be the right one. But that’s extremely difficult. If it wasn’t for that note -”
“The note?” I said, surprised.
“Yes, you remember, I told you. That note has worried me all along. It’s wrong, somehow.”
“Surely,” I said, “that is explained now. It was written at six thirty-five and another hand – the murderer’s – put the misleading 6.20 at the top. I think that is clearly established.”
“But even then,” said Miss Marple, “it’s all wrong.”
“But why?”
“Listen.” Miss Marple leant forward eagerly. “Mrs. Protheroe passed my garden, as I told you, and she went as far as the study window and she looked in and she didn’t see Colonel Protheroe.”
“Because he was writing at the desk,” I said.
“And that’s what’s all wrong. That was at twenty past six. We agreed that he wouldn’t sit down to say he couldn’t wait any longer until after half-past six – so, why was he sitting at the writing-table then?”
“I never thought of that,” I said slowly.
“Let us, dear Mr. Clement, just go over it again. Mrs. Protheroe comes to the window and she thinks the room is empty – she must have thought so, because otherwise she would never have gone down to the studio to meet Mr. Redding. It wouldn’t have been safe. The room must have been absolutely silent if she thought it was empty. And that leaves us three alternatives, doesn’t it?”
“You mean -”
“Well, the first alternative would be that Colonel Protheroe was dead already – but I don’t think that’s the most likely one. To begin with he’d only been there about five minutes and she or I would have heard the shot, and secondly, the same difficulty remains about his being at the writing-table. The second alternative is, of course, that he was sitting at the writing-table writing a note, but in that case it must have been a different note altogether. It can’t have been to say he couldn’t wait. And the third -”
“Yes?” I said.
“Well, the third is, of course, that Mrs. Protheroe was right, and that the room was actually empty.”
“You mean that, after he had been shown in, he went out again and came back later?”
“Yes.”
“But why should he have done that?”
Miss Marple spread out her hands in a little gesture of hewilderment.
“That would mean looking at the case from an entirely different angle,” I said.
“One so often has to do that – about everything. Don’t you think so?”
I did not reply. I was going over carefully in my mind the three alternatives that Miss Marple had suggested.
With a slight sigh the old lady rose to her feet.
“I must be getting back. I am very glad to have had this little chat – though we haven’t got very far, have we?”
“To tell you the truth,” I said, as I fetched her shawl, “the whole thing seems to me a bewildering maze.”
“Oh! I wouldn’t say that. I think, on the whole, one theory fits nearly everything. That is, if you admit one coincidence and I think one coincidence is allowable. More than one, of course, is unlikely.”
“Do you really think that? About the theory, I mean?” I asked, looking at her.
“I admit that there is one flaw in my theory – one fact that I can’t get over. Oh! if only that note had been something quite different -“