A Garden of Secrets: Who Killed Her in the Hollyhocks?

Murder Among the Hollyhocks, a Miss Marple Mystery. Section 1. The Hollyhocks by the Vicarage Wall. The bees in St Mary Mead had as always an opinion about the weather, and on this particular Tuesday morning in late June they thought very well of it indeed. The lane that curled past the vicarage lay soft under new sun. The hollyhocks along the wall, pink, cream, and one deep arterial red, leaned in a slow, considering way, as though listening to the gossip of the sparrows. Miss Jane Marple, in a lilac cardigan of impeccable but unobtrusive age, stood at her garden gate with a trug over one arm and a half-finished thought about her nephew Raymond in the other. It was, in short, the sort of morning in which nothing at

all should happen, and it was therefore precisely the sort of morning on which something did. The disturbance arrived not with a scream, but with a small, embarrassed cough. Young Constable Polk, whose helmet always sat a fraction too far back, came round the bend at a pace not quite a run and not quite a walk, and on seeing Miss Marple, lifted his hand as though to touch the brim, and then thought better of it. Miss Marple, he said. Miss Marple, I wonder if, that is, Dr. Hadock did say you were often out early? He glanced past her, at the hollyhocks.

and something in his face flinched.' Constable Polk,' said Miss Marple gently,' what has happened at the vicarage?'' Not the vicarage, miss. The old rectory. Miss Lavinia Price,' he swallowed.' She was found this morning in her herbaceous border. Among the— among the hollyhocks, miss. Dr. Haydock's with her now.' Miss Marple did not, as certain of her more excitable neighbours might have done, exclaim, She set the trug down upon the low stone wall, with the care of one placing a sleeping infant, adjusted her gloves, and said only, Ah, then I had better fetch my other hat. Down the lane the news was already travelling, as such news does, by a route more efficient than any postal service. Mrs Price Ridley had communicated the essentials

to her cook by seven. The cook had spoken to the fishmonger's boy by ten past. the fishmonger's boy had informed the postman, who, being a professional, had informed no one at all and merely bicycled faster. By the time Miss Marple, in her second-best hat, walked with Constable Polk along the lane toward the old rectory, three curtains twitched, one child was hushed, and a marmalade cat took offence at their passing. The old rectory stood a little back from the road, behind a low flint wall. and along that wall a great procession of hollyhocks, Miss Lavinia's pride, the object of village envy at each summer fate, swayed above the coping stones. Miss Lavinia Price, sixty-three, unmarried, formidable

secretary of no fewer than four committees, had been found lying face down where the pink met the cream. Her secateurs lay open at her right hand, around her head, in the pale gravel of the path, someone had, but this was surely a trick of the eye, arranged a small, deliberate spray of the deep, arterial red. Dr. Hadock straightened as Miss Marple approached, and his eyes met hers over the low wall with that particular grave courtesy he reserved for her alone. A blow to the back of the head, he said quietly, with something rounded. Not the secateurs. She had been kneeling. He paused. She would not, Miss Marple, have known. Beyond the wall, the lane had begun its small business. A curtain in the cottage opposite lifted and,

with the swiftness of a conscience, dropped again. Somewhere down towards the blue boar a milk cart bell rang once, then again more thoughtfully, as though the driver had realised, halfway through his round, that the parish had shifted under him without warning. Miss Marple heard it and did not turn.

She had listened over the years to the sound of a village discovering a death, and knew that first bell for what it was. Not surprise, but permission. the moment at which curiosity is at last allowed to lift its head above the hedge and look. Thank God for that small mercy, said Miss Marple, and she meant it, and she did not look away from the hollyhocks. It struck her, and she noted the striking, that the red blooms had been snapped rather than cut. A gardener as fastidious as Miss Lavinia would never have snapped a stem. Someone else, someone in a hurry or a fury, had gathered that spray.

Inspector Slack arrived from much Benham within the hour, red-faced from the drive, and already impatient with the village and its lanes and its opinions. He was accompanied by Sergeant Lake, whose spaniel-eyed steadiness had, over the years, learned to withstand his superior's weather. Slack surveyed the garden, the wall, the neat lawn beyond, and the hollyhocks, and pronounced at once that it was a straightforward matter of an interrupted thief, at which Dr. Hadock coughed. and Miss Marple examined the toe of her sensible shoe with grave attention. He carried, tucked beneath one arm, a black leather folder, and, in the folder, three sharpened pencils and a great many opinions.

Miss Marple, who had known inspectors before him and would know inspectors after, made him a small, respectful movement of the head, which he received without pleasure and without insult, as one receives the weather. Behind him, Sergeant Lake, who had a wife at home with a bad chest and a daughter learning the piano, took his notebook from his pocket with the resigned air of a man who knows that the day will now have very little in it for the piano. There is no sign of forced entry, Inspector, Sergeant Lake said carefully. Then she interrupted him in the garden, Slack said, as one settling a small child. Handbag? On the hall table, said Lake, with three pounds and change.

Slack grunted, which in his vocabulary was a concession. He turned to Miss Marple as though only now becoming aware of her. Miss Marple, is it? Yes, well, nothing here for a lady, I'm sure. Ghastly business. Best to keep to your knitting. Indeed, Inspector, Miss Marple said mildly. One does one's best. He tramped off toward the house. Sergeant Lake lingered a moment, adjusted his notebook, and murmured, without quite looking at her, The niece is inside, Miss Marple.

Miss Diana Price. She came down last night from London. She found her aunt at half-past six this morning. Poor child, said Miss Marple, and she did not say what else she thought, which was that Miss Diana Price had been in St Mary Mead only once before, seven years ago, and had left in tears after a quarrel about a will.

She turned back to the border. The bees continued their opinions, undeterred. Above the pink and the cream, the deep red hollyhocks swayed, and one bloom, quite ruined, lay by Miss Lavinia's outstretched hand, as though she had, at the last, tried to hold it. A gardener does not, Miss Marple thought, snap her own flowers.

There was, Miss Marple observed, something else. Along the flagged path, quite near the fallen figure, a faint print of a shoe, smaller than Miss Lavinia's own, had been half erased by the pass of a broom. Not a garden broom, Mark, but a house broom. the one that stood in the scullery corner. Someone, between the striking and the finding, had come out and swept. The sweeping had been done in haste.

A single soul-mark remained under the edge of a burgenia leaf, where the broom had not reached. Miss Marple looked at it a long moment, and did not point to it. There are, she thought, discoveries one makes for oneself and keeps a little while, as one keeps a warm egg in the palm. Constable Polk, she said. Would you be good enough to ask Miss Diana whether her aunt was expecting anyone this morning, and, quite separately, whether the side gate had been left on the latch? I noticed as we came in that the bolt has been recently oiled.

Constable Pork, who had not noticed anything of the sort, blinked once, wrote it down, and went. Dr. Hadock, closing his bag, said very softly, Jane, already? Miss Marple smiled at the hollyhocks. It is only, she said, that when I was a girl in Little Ambridge, there was a Mrs. Carmody who kept the most beautiful lupins. She was found in them too. It turned out in the end that she had been the one thing standing between two people and what they wanted. It is not, you know, the flowers that are the trouble. It is what one is willing to trample to reach them. She looked down. In the gravel by her shoe, a single deep red petal had settled, bright as a spot of blood on a christening gown. She did not pick it up. Not yet.

Section 2 Tea, Rumours and the First Faulty Theory The petal was still there in the gravel when Miss Marple turned from the border and she left it where it lay. Certain things she had long since learned are best allowed to reveal themselves. A petal that had chosen its own ground was not to be tidied by strangers. She followed the flagged path to the old rectory door, where Sergeant Lake stood aside with a small inclination of the head and stepped into the cool hush of Miss Lavinia's hall.

She paused for the length of one heartbeat upon the threshold of the old rectory. The hall clock ticked with the slow, respectable insistence of a clock that had never in fifty years been permitted. to be a minute fast or a minute slow. Upon the umbrella stand hung a stout, ash walking-stick which Miss Lavinia carried in dry weather, purely for the sake of tradition, and beside it, at an angle that was not Miss Lavinia's angle, stood a slim, mother-of-pearl-handled parasol that Miss Marple did not recognise. She noted the parasol as she had noted the bolt and the gloves, and set the note carefully upon the shelf of her mind where such notes lie until they are needed. The house smelt of beeswax and lavender water, and faintly of

last night's roast lamb. On the hall table lay Miss Lavinia's handbag, exactly as Lake had said. and beside it a pair of gardening gloves so newly laundered they still held the ghost of the wash line. The gloves troubled Miss Marple in a small, definite way. A woman who kneels in a border at half-past six of a Tuesday morning does not put on freshly laundered gloves. She puts on the pair she wore yesterday and left muddy on the scullery hook. Miss Diana Price was in the morning room with her back to the window. so that her face lay in shadow and the light showed only the lift of her hair, which was very fair. She rose when Miss Marple entered. She was slim, thirty perhaps, with the sort of composure that in certain lights looked like

grief and in others like calculation. Miss Marple, she said, Aunt Lavinia spoke of you. She said, she said you were kind. Your aunt was very good to me, said Miss Marple, which was true in a limited sense. Miss Lavinia had been good to the village in the way a bishop is good to a cathedral, which is to say, with a firm hand and no illusions. My dear, you must sit down. Have they brought you tea? I can't, said Diana. I can't drink it. But she sat. Miss Marple sat too, on the low chair by the hearth, and set her gloves neatly upon her lap. Through the window one could see the hollyhocks. From here they looked innocent again. Constable Polk, Miss Marple said, was to ask you two small things. May I trouble you for the

answers now and save him the walk? Diana's eyes, which had been fixed on nothing, flicked to hers. Of course. Was your aunt expecting anyone this morning? Only Mr. Endicott, her solicitor, at eleven. I see. And the side gate, was it on the latch last night? There was a small pause. Diana said, I latched it myself, at ten.

Aunt Lavinia was particular about that. Yes, said Miss Marple quite gently. She was. She did not add, the bolt is freshly oiled, and one does not oil a bolt that one always latches. One oils a bolt one intends, at some hour, to open in silence. She rose, patted Diana's hand as one pats a young dog of uncertain temperament, and left her to the shadow. Outside, the village had begun to gather at the wall in the manner of starlings on a telegraph wire. Mrs Price Ridley had established a forward position by the lich gate. The vicar, poor Mr Clement, had been dispatched by his wife with the express purpose of bringing back the truth of it and not Mrs Price Ridley's. And Miss Weatherby, black-gloved even in June,

was already explaining to anyone within hearing that she had, only last Thursday, remarked upon the peculiar look in Miss Lavinia's eye. A tramp, said Mrs Price Ridley, with the confidence of one delivering a jury's verdict. Depend upon it. There has been a tramp along the Newton Road these three weeks. He was seen on Sunday at the crossroads with a shifty aspect. A shifty aspect, dear, murmured Miss Marple.

Distinctly shifty. And what, said Miss Marple, does a shifty aspect look like, exactly? I have always wondered. Mrs Price Ridley's mouth opened, considered, and closed. She rallied. One knows, she said, when one sees it. Ah, said Miss Marple, that must be a great comfort. Miss Weatherby, sensing an opening, put in that of course everyone knew about young Mr Carew at Mallard's Farm, who had quarrelled with Miss Lavinia over the right of way, and old Mr Bantry, coming up with Colonel Bantry's stick, said stoutly that whatever anyone said, it wasn't Carew, because Carew's dog would have barked, and Carew's dog had not barked, because Carew's dog had been all night on the vicarage porch, waiting for the vicar's

cat to make a fool of itself. The vicar, arriving damp with the heat and pink with embarrassment, confirmed the dog. Mrs. Price Ridley absorbed this with only a small tightening of her mouth, and passed at once to Mr. Endicott the solicitor, whom, she said, she had never quite trusted, having heard once that his aunt had married a Belgian. He carried, moreover, a small posy of Sweet William from Mrs. Clement, wrapped in a twist of newspaper, which he had entirely forgotten upon his arm, and this posy, being observed by Mrs.

Price Ridley, was at once translated by her into evidence of the vicar's prior knowledge, so that within a quarter of an hour the parish had entertained, and quite rightly rejected, the notion that Mr Clement himself might have crept up the lane in his bicycle clips and dispatched Miss Lavinia between matins and breakfast. Miss Marple did not smile. She only observed, quietly, that a village which could suspect Mr.

Clement of anything at all was a village whose imagination was, that morning, in very high working order. Miss Marple listened. She listened as she had listened for sixty years, as a woman listens who has learned that gossip, though a poor mirror of truth, is an excellent mirror of the gossip. She watched the faces. She watched, in particular, the corners of mouths. Diana Price came out onto the step then, pale and self-contained, and the wall of villagers hushed with the sudden, guilty hush of a schoolroom when the mistress returns.

Diana looked at them and past them and said, quite steadily, Thank you all for coming. My aunt would have been very touched. Which, Miss Marple thought, was not remotely true. Miss Lavinia would have been outraged and would have said so. The gathering shuffled, murmured, dispersed by inches. Only Mrs. Price Ridley, undefeated, moved closer to Miss Marple's elbow. Diana, my dear, she said past her. You were with her only last evening, were you not? I arrived at seven. And you dined together? Yes.

And parted friends? There was the smallest possible pause. Diana said, We always parted friends. Which, Miss Marple thought, was a very careful sentence indeed. It bore the shape of truth without quite touching it. It was the sort of sentence one composed in the small hours in the dark. Inspector Slack emerged from the house then, notebook in hand and theory in eye. He beckoned Sergeant Lake and, in a voice pitched loud enough for the wall to hear, said, Right, Lake, the Newton Road. Anyone answering the description of a tramp Man of middle height, dark coat, seen Sunday. Bring him in. Mrs.

Price Ridley closed her eyes in beatitude. Miss Marple, who had been mildly interested in the state of Diana's hands, which were, she noted, quite clean, but a little too clean, as though scrubbed, said nothing. She walked home slowly, past the hollyhocks along her own wall, and paused. Her own were only pink and cream. She had never cared for the deep red. It always struck her as a colour that had made up its mind too definitely. But there, at the base of one stem, lay a single fresh petal, deep, arterial red, carried perhaps by no more than the wind. Perhaps.

She picked it up this time, held it a moment in her palm, and folded it into her handkerchief. Then she went in to write two letters and to boil, in her particular way, an egg. Section 3 the inspector's straight line. The letters were addressed, the egg was eaten, four minutes exactly, with a pinch of salt, and Miss Marple was drawing on her gloves for a second walk, when Dr. Hadock's Morris drew up at her gate. He came in without ceremony, he had the run of her hall as of few others, and stood a moment in her parlour, looking at the print of Q above the mantelpiece, as though it might have answered a question. Slack has his tramp, he said at last. Already? A man called Jarvis.

He was sleeping in Farmer Coggins's barn. He had a shilling and a bruise, and he denies everything, which is very inconvenient of him, since Slack was hoping for a confession before luncheon. Miss Marple smiled without amusement. And the bruise? On the shin. Farmer Coggins's bull. Ah. Hadock sat down.

He was, she thought, tired in a way that had less to do with the morning than with all the mornings. A country doctor at sixty accumulates a certain private freight. Jane, he said, what do you make of it? The bolt, said Miss Marple, was oiled. The gloves were washed. The niece parted friends. and the hollyhock stems were snapped, not cut.

She lifted the folded handkerchief from her sewing table and opened it upon her palm. The petal lay upon the linen like a small, deliberate wound. Someone gathered these in a hurry, Doctor, and someone laid them, quite deliberately, by her head. A signature? Or a message? Or a mask upon a message? She refolded the linen. Miss Lavinia, you will remember. was on the Fate Committee, the Church Restoration Committee, the Cottage Hospital Committee, and the Village Reading Room Committee.

In three of the four she had quarrelled this year with someone. The fourth she chaired unopposed, which is the sort of thing that breeds a different quarrel altogether. Hadock grunted. Motives, then. Oh, motives grow in this village, Doctor, as freely as bindweed. What is scarce is opportunity. A woman kneels in her border at half-past six. Who is up? Who is out?

Who is unremarked? The milkman, Hadock said, half-smiling. The milkman was late this morning. I heard Mrs Hartnell say so through her window. His round did not reach the old rectory until seven. A pity. He would have made a most reliable witness. Now he is only a most reliable absence. She rose. Let us go and see the inspector's tramp.

They found slack at the police house, red as a poppy and twice as bristly. Jarvis sat on the bench with the resigned patience of a man who has been arrested before, and knows that Tuesdays are usually the worst of it. He had a face weathered to the colour of an old saddle, and eyes that took in Miss Marple with a startled, considering respect. Mr Jarvis, Miss Marple said, I do apologise for troubling you. Would you tell me, where were you at half past six this morning? Jarvis looked at Slack. Slack said, Go on, tell the lady what you told me. Coggins's barn, Mrs. Snoring. His boy come out at six to milk and I was still asleep.

He kicked me out at quarter past. I went down the Newton Road. I'll never come near the rectory. You know the rectory? Everyone knows the rectory. Old lady give me a hunk of bread there in April. Told me to shift on. Not unkindly, mind. And you did not return? Mrs., said Jarvis with dignity. When a lady tells me to shift on, I shift on. It saves trouble. Miss Marple considered him. Slack, unable to contain himself, put in, He was seen Sunday at the crossroads, though. Answer that. Aye, Sunday, said Jarvis. I was there. So was half the choir coming back from Newton. So was the postman's brother. So was that young lady in the blue coat waiting for the bus that don't run Sunday. I said good afternoon,

and she never answered. Some do, some don't. Miss Marple's hands, which had been folded in her lap, unfolded and folded again. The young lady in the blue coat, she said. Was she fair? Very fair, missus. Slim? About thirty? Might have been. Thank you, Mr Jarvis, said Miss Marple, and she rose. To Slack, she said only, Inspector, I do think you will find Mr Jarvis was where he says he was.

Farmer Coggins's boy will confirm it. Slack's jaw set. I'll speak to Coggins's boy in due course, Miss Marple. Meanwhile... Meanwhile... said Miss Marple. Meanwhile is a very dangerous word. It has hanged more innocent men than malice has. She smiled at him kindly. Do give my regards to Mrs. Slack. Out in the lane, Dr. Hadock exhaled. Jane, I know, he does his best. His best is not, at present, quite the point. The young lady in the blue coat sighed.

Miss Diana Price arrived, she says, from London on the evening of Monday, but Mr Jarvis saw a very fair young woman at the crossroads on Sunday afternoon, waiting, one presumes, for a bus that does not run on Sunday. That is a curious thing to do, Doctor, unless one is waiting for something else, or someone. They walked on in silence a little way. A yellow hammer sang from the hedge.

Miss Marple thought about the freshly oiled bolt and the freshly laundered gloves and the sentence, We always parted friends, that had been composed in the dark. At the stile by the water meadow, Miss Marple paused and set her hand upon the top rail as though for balance, though her balance was, as usual, entire. She was thinking of a young woman standing at a crossroads waiting for a bus that did not run, and of what such a young woman might have been doing there waiting, not for a bus, but for the sight of the woman she meant presently to meet, taking, perhaps, the measure of a face before knocking at its door. It was a thought, she reflected, that did not sit easily. But sit it did, and refused to be shown out. At the corner of

the Vicarage Lane they met young Mr Carew of Mallard's Farm, who had been fetched by Constable Polk on the strength of Miss Weatherby's memory of the right-of-way quarrel. He was a big, brown, honest young man, quite pink at the ears with indignation. Miss Marple, he said, halting, I am to be interviewed by the inspector, it seems, on account of my having called Miss Lavinia an interfering old... Well, in April, ma'am. In April, and in the King's arms, and in front of witnesses. More shame to me. You did apologise, Mr Carew? I did. She accepted with a coldness, ma'am, that made me feel a worm. And where were you at half-past six this morning? Milking, Miss Marple. My man Higgs will tell you. Also the cows, if you can

find a language. I do not need to find a language, Mr. Carew. I know Higgs. She patted his arm. Do not fret. The inspector will make a small noise and pass on. But Mr. Carew, one thing. Have you seen, in the lanes these last days, a fair young woman in a blue coat who does not always answer good afternoon? He frowned.

On Sunday, ma'am. Coming up from the crossroads. I gave her a lift as far as the King's Arms. She said her name was Diana Price and she had come to see her aunt. On Sunday. On Sunday, ma'am. Thank you, Mr. Carew. He tramped on toward the police house, muttering to himself about interfering old, and stopping short each time upon the word. Dr.

Hadock watched him go. Two days early, he said quietly. Two days early, said Miss Marple, and in a blue coat, and silent when spoken to, and the bolt has been oiled. She looked at the sky, which was innocent, and at the hedges, which were not. The inspector, dear doctor, is drawing a straight line. Straight lines are so seldom what one wants in a garden. Section 4. A Convenient Suspect Straight lines, as Miss Marple had observed, are seldom what one wants in a garden. But Inspector Slack loved them dearly, and by the time she and Dr. Hadock had walked as far as the churchyard … the inspector had drawn one straight through the middle of Mr Carew of Mallard's Farm.

It was, considered as a line, a masterpiece. It began at the right-of-way quarrel in April, passed through the King's Arms and the fray's interfering old woman, went by way of an unlocked gate to Mallard's Farm, and terminated, very tidily, at the base of the Hollyhocks. The village, being fond of tidiness in others, took to the theory at once.

By tea-time, Mrs Price Ridley had settled it, Miss Weatherby had improved it. Even the vicar, poor Mr Clement, had been heard to say, in a voice of great distress, that he had always thought there was something not quite settled about young Carew, and had immediately felt so guilty that he took himself off to visit an old woman in Lower Barnstock who did not want visiting. Miss Marple, having eaten a small, deliberate luncheon of cold ham and beetroot, put on her gardening hat and went to call at Mallard's farm. The lane to the farm was deep with cow parsley and older than the Doomsday Book. She met, at the gate, Higgs the cowman, whose right eye was a cheerful blue and whose left had, for reasons never explained,

closed at the age of twelve and stayed shut. He touched his cap. Mr Carew in, Higgs? In the milking parlour, missus. Fair-fashed he is, says the police think he done it. And what does Higgs think? Higgs thinks, said Higgs slowly, that Mr Carew was in this here parlour at half-past six of a morning, on account of I was with him, and so were forty-two head of cow, and if the police want a statement from all forty-three of us, they can start with the Friesian in the corner, only she kicks. Higgs, said Miss Marple, you are a comfort to the King's peace. Ma'am, said Higgs, and moved aside. She found Mr. Carew sitting on an upturned churn with his head in his hands, and the young man rose so quickly at her entry

that he almost overturned the churn and himself with it. Miss Marple. Sit down, Mr. Carew, and do try to breathe. Anger does not become a large young man. It makes him look apoplectic. Now, when did Miss Lavinia first speak to you about the right of way? Last October. She wrote a letter. A civil one? Civil. Cold. And when did she next speak of it? In April, ma'am, she stopped me outside the post office and said that if I did not move the gate she would be obliged to go to law. And you replied? I said what I said, in the king's arms, that night. I regret it.

I did not kill her, Miss Marple. No, said Miss Marple, you did not. Now attend, Mr. Carew, for this is important. Between April and now, did Miss Lavinia speak to you of the matter? He frowned. Only once, three weeks ago. She stopped at the gate as I was mending it, and she said, she said a curious thing, ma'am. She said, It is not the gate I mind, Mr. Carew, it is the principal, and there is another principal in this village that I intend, before Michaelmas, to see honoured. And then she went on. Another principal? Her word, ma'am. Miss Marple was silent for a long moment. Higgs's Friesian shifted in the corner and looked at her with a large, sceptical eye. Behind the Friesian, in the shadow of the beam,

a swallow's nest held four small, unafraid heads that opened, hopefully, at each footfall and closed again upon disappointment. The parlour smelt of new hay and old iron, a kettle whistled distantly from the farmhouse kitchen, and, further off, a rook considered the morning with the sort of judicial gravity that a country rook reserves for occasions of murder. Mr. Carew, having been forbidden by Miss Marple to be apoplectic, was now merely miserable, which was, in a large young man, a great improvement. Mr. Carew, Miss Marple said at last, thank you. She rose. At the door she turned. When the inspector comes, as he will, tell him about the Friesian and about Higgs. Do not mention the other principal.

It is not, I think, ready to be spoken of yet.'' Yes, ma'am,' said Mr. Carew, obedient as a schoolboy, and Miss Marple went out into the sunlight. She did not go home. She went by the field-path to the old rectory, entered through the kitchen door where she had a small standing with the cook, and asked, with the mildness of one asking for a recipe, whether Miss Lavinia had, in the last three weeks, received any letters from London.' Cook, whose name was Mrs. Bunting, and whose loyalty had survived thirty years and two rectors, considered. Two letters, Miss Marple, both in a small hand, both on cream paper. She burned them. Both? Both, ma'am.

She burned the first in the drawing-room grate on the 29th of May. She burned the second in the study grate on the 11th of June. I found the corner of the second in the ash-pan. It said only, Not a penny more. Not a penny more. said Miss Marple softly. That was all, ma'am. And Miss Diana, had she and her aunt corresponded? Miss Diana wrote at Christmas, ma'am, and on her aunt's birthday, and on no other occasion for the seven years I have been here. Not a penny more, said Miss Marple again, and she thanked Mrs. Bunting for the information, and for the very small piece of shortbread that had been pressed upon her, and went out through the scullery. In the scullery, upon the hook where a muddy pair of gardening gloves ought to have hung, there

hung nothing. The line outside, above the beds of savoy cabbage, held a wooden peg where those gloves might, that very morning at some hour before six, have been pegged in a hurry to dry. Ah, said Miss Marple quietly to the cabbages. She walked home the long way by the water meadow in order to think. The path took her past the low field where, twenty years before, poor Mrs.

Trumper's second daughter had at last been discovered by the parish, sitting on a stile eating a windfall apple, and quite untroubled by having been, for eleven years, a secret. Miss Marple remembered the child's face, and the mother's, and how the mother, seeing her secret unmasked, had cried not with grief, but with an odd relief, as one who has long borne a stone and is at last allowed to set it down. Not every unmasking, Miss Marple reflected, was a punishment.

Some were, in their strange way, a mercy. It remained to be seen which sort this one would prove. There were, she saw, at least three people in St Mary Mead who had reason to be relieved that Miss Lavinia Price was no longer at the head of a committee, and at least two who had reason to be relieved that Miss Lavinia Price was no longer at the head of a family. That the police were about to arrest Mr Carew was a great convenience to all five of them, including, though he did not know it, Mr Carew himself, whose loud, red-faced innocence would exhaust the inspector's patience long before it exhausted the truth. A convenient suspect, Miss Marple thought, is very like a scarecrow. He keeps the crows off the corn,

He does not, however, tell you which of the crows would have eaten it. At her own gate she paused and looked at her hollyhocks, pink and cream, pink and cream, and one, she had not planted it and could not think when it had rooted, one deep arterial red at the very end of the row, half hidden by a spire of larkspur. It had opened since morning a single flower.

she stood a long time looking at it. Then she went in, put the kettle on, and wrote a third letter, this one to a friend in Somerset House. Section 5. The Petal in the Prayer Book The letter to Somerset House was in the post by six, the kettle boiled, and Miss Marple, having composed her thoughts as one composes a bunch of sweet peas, by length and shade rather than by preference, put on her Sunday hat, though it was only Tuesday, and walked to the vicarage to speak to Mr Clement. Poor Mr Clement was writing his sermon in the study, with the air of a man being pursued through it by an angel with sharper opinions than his own. He rose with real gratitude when Miss Marple was shown in. Miss Marple, you will save me. I

am on original sin, and I have said everything I ever thought about it in nine minutes, and Sunday requires twenty. Pad, dear vicar, pad. St. Paul is very good for padding, and no one will ever check. Bless you, he sat down heavily. You have come about Miss Lavinia. I have come about her prayer book. Mr. Clement blinked. Her prayer book?

She left it, I believe, in the vestry on Sunday. She was rotoclark for the flowers this month, and I remember her putting it down on the vestry table while she counted the vases. She meant to come back for it. She did not. It will still be there. Will it? said Mr Clement doubtfully. But he rose, took his keys, and led the way through the churchyard to the vestry.

The yews stood dark and civil. A blackbird considered them from the lich gate. The vestry was cool and smelt of stone and old hymnals. And on the table, where Miss Marple had said it would be, lay Miss Lavinia's prayer book, black-bound, gilt-edged, and closed upon a ribbon. Miss Marple lifted it, weighed it in her hand, and opened it at the ribbon. Between the pages of the order for the burial of the dead, pressed flat and quite dry, lay a single hollyhock petal, deep, arterial red. Mr. Clement made a small sound. Yes, said Miss Marple, quite. She turned the leaves. On the fly-leaf, in a hand she did not know, but that had once been young, was written, To Lavinia, upon her confirmation, with love. E.P. 1892 Below,

in Miss Lavinia's own upright hand, a later note. For my niece Diana upon mine, L.P. Miss Marple, said the vicar, what does it mean? It means, dear vicar, that Miss Lavinia had, in her orderly way, been putting her house in order. It means that she intended to give her prayer-book to her niece. It means that she pressed a petal in it, on Sunday afternoon, from a flower she had cut. Cut, mark, not snapped. and that she intended a message by it, though whether to Diana or to herself, I do not yet know. A message, said Mr Clement.

A hollyhock, in the language of flowers, signifies ambition. A red hollyhock, in some older books, signifies ambition unrestrained. Fecundity too, but I do not think Miss Lavinia was thinking of fecundity. She closed the prayer book and stood, looking at the plain iron cross upon the vestry wall. Mr. Clement, may I keep this a few days? Of course. Say nothing to anyone, not to your wife, not to the inspector.

not to Mrs. Price Ridley, especially not to Mrs. Price Ridley, and not to Miss Diana. I shall not say a word, Miss Marple. Good man, said Miss Marple, and she put the prayer-book into her basket beneath a cloth. and covered the cloth with a bunch of parsley she had picked from the vicarage bed on the way in. Miss Marple had discovered, over sixty years, that a bunch of parsley discouraged curiosity in a way that a plain cloth did not.

Outside the lich gate she met Mr Endicott, the solicitor from Muchbenham, an elderly gentleman of narrow shoulders and precise umbrella. He raised the umbrella an inch in salutation. He had, she saw, the small, careful shave of a man who has slept ill, and the umbrella he carried in fine weather betrayed him. A solicitor with settled news carries his umbrella loosely, as an ornament. A solicitor with unsettled news grips it, at the middle, as though it were the balance of a difficult argument. Mr. Endicott was gripping his at the middle. Miss Marple, I had hoped to meet you. Mr. Endicott, you were to have called on Miss Lavinia this morning at eleven. I was. I had come down last night to Newton and stayed at the George. She had asked

me to bring certain documents. A new will? He hesitated. Then, with the smallest of professional inclinations, he said, A codicil, Miss Marple, executed in my office three weeks ago, to be witnessed here today by, I believe, Dr. Haydock and Mrs. Bunting. And its effect? I may not, of course. Of course.

He looked at her over his spectacles. There was in his old face the ghost of a smile that had once, forty years before, been mischievous. I will say only, Miss Marple, that the codicil substantially altered the disposition of the residuary estate. In favour of the niece, or against? Against. Ah, in favour of the cottage hospital, in its entirety. save for certain small bequests, including one to Mr Carew of Mallard's Farm, in acknowledgement, as she put it, of an unjust letter.

Mr Carew, said Miss Marple, how very like her, how very like her indeed. The codicil was not, of course, executed. She died before the witnessing. So the previous will stands. The previous will stands, and Miss Diana Price inherits the old rectory, the London property, and the residue, less certain small legacies. I see. Mr. Endicott, one further question. Did anyone besides yourself and Miss Lavinia know that the codicil was to be witnessed this morning? He considered. She said, when she wrote to me, that she had informed one person only. Whom? She did not say. She said only, I have told the person concerned so that no shock may come of it. I owe that much. Miss Marple stood still in the lane. The bees had, at some hour,

changed their opinion of the weather. There was a thickness in the light now, a warning of thunder later. Somewhere a woodpigeon uttered its slow, complacent trouble. In the hedge beside her a small brown moth mistaking the afternoon for evening, blundered out and back and out again, and settled at last upon her sleeve, and she did not brush it off, but stood with it there, unregarded, while she assembled the last of what she had. A codicil unwitnessed, a niece two days early, a young woman in a blue coat, silent when spoken to, a bolt oiled in secret, and gloves washed in a hurry, and a petal pressed in the order for the burial of the dead. Some debts, Miss Lavinia had said, one cannot pay in money, and

yet one must find a currency. What Miss Marple had begun to fear was that Miss Lavinia had, on Sunday, chosen her currency, and that the choice had cost her more than she was ever to know. Mr. Endicott, she said, thank you. Would you be so kind as to keep this conversation between ourselves for one day only? I shall not ask longer. One day, Miss Marple. He raised his umbrella and passed on towards the police house to make his statement to Inspector Slack. Miss Marple walked home with the prayer book in her basket and the parsley over it and the petal pressed between the pages of the burial of the dead. Ambition unrestrained, she thought. and I have told the person concerned so that no shock may

come of it. I owe that much. At her own gate, the deep red hollyhock at the end of the row had shed one bloom onto the path. She stooped and picked it up, and set it with a small private grimness beside the petal from the prayer book in her handkerchief drawer, where she kept certain other things she was not yet ready to explain. Then she went to her writing-desk and sat for a long time, looking not at anything in the room but at a memory of Miss Lavinia Price, three summers ago, standing at this same gate and saying, with a fierceness that had puzzled Miss Marple then and did not puzzle her now, Some debts, Miss Marple, one cannot pay in money, and yet one must find a currency. Section 6. Old Debts and New Faces The currency, then,

was the question. and Miss Marple, having sat with it as one sits with a difficult child, decided to seek the counsel of her oldest and most useful book, which was not the Bible, though she loved it, nor Mrs Beaton, though she respected her, but the small red address book in which, over the years, she had noted the names, cousinships, disappointments, and small dishonours of a great many people who had once lived, or once been unhappy, in St Mary Mead.

Under P, she found what she had come to find. Price, Lavinia, Old Rectory. Price, Edmund, Brother. D, 1919, Passchendaele. Price, Diana, Niece. Only child of Edmund. Mother, Elsa Vane, of Ipswich. Married E.P., 1913. Died childbed, 1919. And beneath, in her own faint pencil, Elsa Vane, Twin sister Ada Vane, actress, married R. Sturgis of Ipswich in 1921. Trouble over an inheritance, 1934. Twin sister.

Miss Marple set the book down softly. Twin sister. And the young woman on the crossroads on Sunday afternoon, silent when spoken to, fair in a blue coat, and the niece in the morning room, composed against the light. Two women, possibly, or one woman, twice. She was still considering this when there was a knock at the door, and Mrs. Bunting the cook was shown in, twisting her apron and pink to the ears. Miss Marple, I hope you'll forgive it.

I couldn't rest. Sit down, Mrs. Bunting. Betsy, bring in the tea. Mrs. Bunting sat, and would not touch her tea, and after a fashion of small distresses at last put it out. She had, that morning, at a quarter to six, opened the scullery door to bring in the milk, and had seen, she thought, a figure at the side gate.

A figure, Mrs Bunting? A woman's figure, ma'am. Fair-haired, no hat. She had the gate open, ma'am, and she saw me, and she … She smiled, Miss Marple. It wasn't a friendly smile. And then she went on into the garden, and I thought, Miss Diana is up early, and I went back to the range and put the kettle on.

and then, at half-past, I heard the mistress cry out. Cry out? One word, ma'am, only one. She said, she said, you. Just that, and then nothing, and I thought, she is angry with the gardener's boy, and it will pass, and I did not go out. God forgive me, ma'am, I did not go out. Mrs. Bunting, you could not have known.

And when at last I did go out, ma'am, It was Miss Diana coming in from the front, and it was Miss Diana who screamed, and... And by then, she could not finish. Miss Marple laid a hand on hers. You will tell the inspector this. He will say I am foolish, ma'am. He will say a woman in a blue coat. He will not. He will say it to himself, but he will not say it to you. And you will tell him what you told me. that the figure smiled and that the smile was not a friendly one.

Mrs Bunting nodded and, more calmly, drank her tea. When she had gone, Miss Marple sat with her small red book open at P and thought about smiles. There are, she reflected, so many kinds. There is the smile of the child who has taken the jam, the smile of the bride at the church door, the smile of the man who has decided to lie. the smile of the woman who has, at last, remembered where she saw you before. Mrs.

Bunting had known Miss Lavinia thirty years, and had never in that time known the mistress to cry out one word. You. It was the smallest of syllables. It was very heavy indeed. She was still turning this over when the bell rang a second time, and Dr. Hadock entered, with the small, folded expression that in him did duty for excitement. Jane, there is news. Slack has released Mr. Carew, You may thank Higgs's Friesian and Mr Endicott's statement, and he has arrested no one. Meanwhile, however... Meanwhile, said Miss Marple, again? Meanwhile, a boy from the George at Newton has come in to say that a young lady in a blue coat took a room there on Saturday and paid, in cash, for two nights, and left in the morning without her breakfast,

and has not been seen since. She signed the register D. Sturgis, Ipswich. Miss Marple closed her small red book. Ah, she said, the vain twin's daughter. The what? Miss Diana Price's cousin, Doctor, her only cousin, on her mother's side. There has been, I gather, a long unpleasantness over some money left by their grandmother, and now, if I am not mistaken, there is a further unpleasantness attached to it, which brought this young woman to St Mary Mead on Saturday, quite unknown to us, and to the crossroads on Sunday. and to the side gate at a quarter to six on Tuesday morning.

Then it was she. Perhaps, or perhaps not. A woman's figure, fair, no hat. Doctor, if you had a cousin who looked so exactly like you that the parson mistook you at Christmas for one another, and Mrs Bunting has told me before that the mistress used to laugh at exactly that of her sister-in-law and her twin, how would you use that likeness? He whistled softly. Not well. Not well. Now.

Diana Price came down, she says, on Monday evening. I should like to know where Miss D. Sturgis of Ipswich passed the night of Sunday and the day of Monday. I should also like to know, and this you can help me with, whether Dr. Newby of Ipswich still practices and would remember a set of twins born to a Mrs.

Vane in the summer of 93. I can telephone him. Do. He went to her hall and she heard the small crank of the telephone. and his patient, doctor's voice, and while he was engaged, she opened Miss Lavinia's prayer book again, and read once more the note upon the fly-leaf. For my niece Diana, upon mine. L. P. Upon mine, Miss Marple thought, upon her confirmation. Which niece had been confirmed?

Diana had been confirmed in the parish church at Ipswich in 1913. Miss Lavinia had spoken of it once, with disapproval of the Ipswich vicar, Who had, she said, no chin. And this note had been added later, in Miss Lavinia's own hand, but it did not say when. The doctor returned. He was, for him, pale. Newby remembers. There were twins.

Not two little girls, Jane. One little girl and one little boy. Elsa and Edwin. The boy died at three days old. The girl grew up to marry your Edmund Price and to bear Diana. There was no Ada. No vain, sister. Your entry is wrong. Miss Marple was silent so long that Dr. Hadock leaned forward. Jane? Then, said Miss Marple slowly, either Diana Price is the niece we believe her to be, and there is no cousin, and the young woman at the George is someone else altogether, using an old family name to muddy the water, or … Or? Or my entry is not wrong at all, and Dr Newby was, as country doctors sometimes are, kindly misled forty years ago by a family that had reasons of its own to conceal a second daughter. It has happened. Consider Mrs Trumper

of Little Ambridge. She had a second daughter for eleven years, and no one in the village knew. Hadock said, Jane, that is a great deal of theory. It is, said Miss Marple. I am not fond of theory. I prefer facts. Very well. FACTS. A young woman in a blue coat signing herself D. Sturgis of Ipswich was in Newton on Saturday, at the Crossroads on Sunday, at the old rectory side gate on Tuesday morning at quarter to six. FACT. She smiled at Mrs Bunting. FACT. Miss Lavinia's last word spoken to someone in her garden was, YOU! An exclamation, Doctor, of recognition. Not of a stranger. of a person known. Now, whom did Miss Lavinia recognise? The niece she had breakfasted with the evening before? Or a face, a face she

had last seen, perhaps, in a photograph, or across a crowded room, or in a courtroom twenty years ago? Miss Marple. I am not, she said, folding her hands, fond of theory, doctor, but I am, at times, obliged to it. Tomorrow I hope to be obliged less. She stood up. Somewhere over the downs, at last, the thunder that had been promising all afternoon began, very softly, to keep its promise. Section 7 The Second Shock The thunder kept its promise through the night, and by the small hours St Mary Mead lay under a soft, insistent rain that drenched the hollyhocks and beat, upon Miss Marple's pain, a rhythm so precise she woke twice to consider it. In the morning the village was clean and bright and slightly stunned, as villages

are after storms, and by nine o'clock, when Miss Marple had finished her toast and was drawing on her gloves for the daily walk, the second shock arrived. It arrived, as such shocks do, by the mouth of a small boy, Billy Perkins, the postman's youngest, breathless from the run. Miss Marple! Miss Marple, ma'am! There's another! At the George. The lady in the blue coat. Dr. Hadock's there, and Constable Pork and Inspector Slack, and the boots at the George, says she never touched her breakfast Monday, nor her tea yesterday, nor nothing today, and when they went in this morning, she, she...

Sit down, Billy. Breathe. Have a piece of shortbread. Now, she what? She were dead in the bed, ma'am, said Billy, awed. Doctor says a great while dead. Since Monday, they reckon. Miss Marple sat down herself. It was, she thought afterwards, the first time in a great many years that she had done so in the middle of putting on a glove.

Since Monday, she said. Since Monday, ma'am, that's what he said. Thank you, Billy. Run to Dr. Haydock and say that I shall be at the George in twenty minutes, and would he be good enough to keep the boots away from the register in the meantime? Billy ran. Miss Marple finished her glove and put on the other, and stood a moment at her window. Since Monday. The lady in the blue coat had been dead since Monday. Then she had not been at the side gate at a quarter to six on Tuesday morning. She had not been at the crossroads on Sunday afternoon. No, there she had been, for Mr. Carew had given her a lift and Jarvis had seen her. Sunday afternoon. Alive. Saturday night at the George. Alive.

Suntime Monday. Dead. Tuesday morning at the side gate. Impossible. Yet Mrs. Bunting had seen a woman's figure, fair, no hat, smiling. And Miss Lavinia had cried out, You! Ah, said Miss Marple to her window, I see. The George at Newton was a low, kindly, ill-plumbed inn with pigeons in the eaves. Dr.

Hadock met her in the courtyard, his face very grave. Jane, it is Miss Sturgis right enough. She has been dead since Monday afternoon, so far as I can judge. There is a bottle of chloral by her bed and a glass. There is also, I would like your eye on this before Slack has it, a note. He led her upstairs.

Constable Polk stood at the door and stood aside. Inspector Slack was within, red as ever, and, for once, quiet. Miss Marple did not look at the bed. She looked at the small, cheap writing table by the window. on which lay a sheet of the Georges' own paper, and read, in a hand that was fine and rapid and educated, I have done what I came to do. My conscience is my own affair. Do not trouble to find me.

I have already gone. D. She read it twice. Then she said mildly to Inspector Slack, Inspector, has anyone else seen this? The Boots, Dr. Hadock, myself. then I should be grateful if it did not for the moment travel further. Miss Marple, Inspector, I ask you a small favour, which will cost you nothing and may spare you a great embarrassment.

The letter was not written here. Do you see where the writer laid her wrist? There is no smudge of the George's ink, which is that peculiar and rather runny violet you will find in every inkwell in the place. This ink is Stephen's blue-black, from a good pen. Where is Miss Sturgis's pen? Where is her inkpot? And where, this is important, is the wet or the drying blot?

The paper is quite dry and quite fresh. It was written elsewhere and laid here. Slack's mouth opened and closed and opened and stayed open. Furthermore, said Miss Marple gently, Observe the signature. D. It is initial only. Miss Sturgis signed her name in the register D. Sturgis in full. A woman under her own hand when writing a note of confession will very seldom abbreviate. She may be shy.

She is not evasive with herself. This D is the signature of someone who wishes to be Diana and does not wish, quite, to be caught being her. Miss Marple, said Slack, and this time it was not an interruption, but the first note of a conversion. Yes, Inspector? Ma'am, if you would, if you would put your view of the matter... Presently, said Miss Marple. Presently, Inspector. First, some small things. Sergeant Lake, you have, I hope, the register? Here, Miss.

Would you compare the writing here... D. Sturgis, Ipswich, with the writing on this note? They compared. It took only a moment. The register was in a broad, honest hand, forward-leaning and unhurried. The note was rapid, small and elegant. Not the same hand, said Lake. Not the same hand, said Miss Marple. Now, when was Miss Sturgis last seen alive? Monday, ma'am, half-past two. She left the George on foot with a small bag, saying she would be back for tea. She did not come back for tea. The chambermaid found her in bed Wednesday morning, this morning, when the boots were sent up on account of the smell of chloral. And her room was locked? Locked from within, ma'am. Key on the inside table. Miss Marple looked at the window. She

looked at the little iron balcony beyond, and beneath it, the flat roof of the coach house. A person of moderate agility, she thought, and reasonable nerve, might well have come out of the window and dropped to that roof, and thence to the yard, at any hour of Tuesday night, and returned, again, at any other hour, a key having been arranged. She said none of this to Inspector Slack.

She said, instead, Inspector. Would you send Constable Pork to the old rectory at once, and request Miss Diana Price to come here to Newton with him? Say only that Dr. Hadock wishes her to identify her cousin, and that it will not take long. Her cousin? said Slack. Yes, said Miss Marple, quite calmly. Her cousin. Miss Diana Price is not, I think. an only child of an only child, nor, in the light of the last hour, is she quite the woman she believes herself to be. Miss Marple. Send for her, Inspector. He sent. In the hour that followed, Miss Marple made two very quiet inspections. She looked in Miss Sturgis's bag and found, as she had expected, a folded photograph of two small girls, alike as chestnuts, in

white confirmation dresses, taken by a photographer of Ipswich. and a second, older photograph of a young woman with the very hair of Miss Diana Price, taken in 1912, and, most interestingly, a folded letter, unfinished, in a hand not the writer of the confession and not the register. Dear Aunt, You have said you will settle it. I am glad.

It is not the money, it is the truth. Yours in some hope, D. Miss Marple folded the letter again and laid it back precisely as it had been. To Dr. Haydock, at the window, she said only, Doctor, the confession note is not in Diana Price's hand either. He looked up sharply. Whose then? That, said Miss Marple, is the small remaining question. Now, here is Constable Polk in the yard, and here is Miss Diana. It will be interesting to see whether she faints, and if so, at what precise point. Below, in the sunlit yard, a slim, fair woman in a grey travelling coat was being handed down from the trap by Constable Pork.

She looked up at the window. Her face, framed by the fair hair, was very calm. She did not faint, but her right hand, ungloved, closed once upon the trap's edge with such sudden force that the knuckles went white as a bone. Miss Marple saw it, and turned away from the window, and folded her hands and said softly to Dr. Hadock, There. Section 8. Miss Marple sets a small snare. Diana Price came up the stairs of the George with an unhurried step, and Miss Marple, waiting on the landing with her hands folded upon her reticule, was for a moment struck, as she was so often struck by young women in trouble, by the extreme tidiness of her hair. Grief, in Miss Marple's experience, was a great disarranger.

and Miss Diana's hair was as neat as though a maid had done it that morning, with pins and a prayer. Miss Marple, Diana said. She did not offer her hand. Miss Price, this will be very short. Dr. Hadock only needs a word from you, that this poor lady is, or is not, someone you have known. She stood aside.

Diana passed her into the room. She looked at the bed. She looked at the hair upon the pillow. She looked, for a longer moment, at the pale hand upon the counterpane. I do not know her, she said. Dr. Haydock, from the window, said quietly, Miss Price, this lady signed the register of this inn, D. Sturgis, Ipswich. You have no relation of that name. I have no relation of any name save my aunt. My mother was an only child.

I have been told so all my life. So you have, said Miss Marple very kindly. So you have. She stepped forward. She was, one would have said, a small, lilac-coloured woman of no consequence, offering solace. From the low table by the bed she took up the folded photograph, the two small girls in their white confirmation dresses, and, holding it not as evidence but as one holds a picture one wishes to share, presented it to Diana Price. Do you know these children, my dear? Diana looked. There was a very small silence. Not, Miss Marple noted, a silence of shock, a silence of calculation. No, she said. Ah, said Miss Marple.

I only wondered because, is it not curious, the child on the left has a small mole at the outer corner of her left eye. You have one too, Miss Price. Exactly there. I noticed it yesterday, in the morning room, when the light caught you. Diana's hand rose in a small, involuntary way and touched her cheek and fell. A coincidence, she said evenly. Very likely, said Miss Marple, and took the photograph back and set it down and lifted from beside it the unfinished letter. And this, my dear? Do you know this hand? Diana looked. This time the silence was different. It was the silence of a person hearing, in a distant room, a door being tried. No, she said. Ah!

It is only that it is signed D, and it says, Dear Aunt, you have said you will settle it. I am glad. It is not the money, it is the truth. You will forgive me, my dear, but I think you have used those exact words to me in your own drawing room. Only yesterday, when you said, Do you remember that your aunt had promised to set the record straight before Michaelmas, and that you were glad, and that it was not the money? Diana said nothing. Now this, said Miss Marple, with the same soft, almost apologetic voice, is a note the inspector found on the table. She held out the confession. Diana looked. Her eyes did not widen, they narrowed very slightly at the signature. I do not know that hand either, she said. Nor do I, said

Miss Marple, yet, but we shall. It is a good hand. A schooled hand, the hand, I think, of a person accustomed to writing quickly for others to read, a secretary, perhaps, or a professional witness of some kind. Not, in any case, a country lady's hand. Diana turned away and made as though to go to the window. Miss Marple, mild as milk, moved her small self one half-step so that her lilac cardigan was, quite gently, between Diana and the window, and Diana stopped. Miss Price, Miss Marple said, there is one further small thing. Would you look, please, at your gloves?

My gloves? Yes, the pair you have on. Would you take off the right one? Diana Price took off her right glove. The hand beneath was very white, very slim, and quite steady. Upon the third finger, however, there was, very faint, very old, a shallow scar. no more than a whitened line running across the knuckle. It was the sort of scar left by a child's attempt to reach a jar over her head. Miss Sturgis, said Miss Marple softly, had such a scar. On the same finger. On the same hand. It is mentioned by the doctor at Ipswich in the Certificate of Confirmation, which I have taken the liberty of asking for by telegram this morning. I have not yet received it. I expect it this afternoon. Diana Price put her glove back on. You are mistaken, she said.

Her voice was quite level. I am Diana Price. I was born at Ipswich in 1900. My mother died when I was three days old. I have no cousin. This poor woman is a stranger to me. Very well, my dear, said Miss Marple, and she stepped aside from the window and let Diana pass. Diana did not go to the window. She went to the door and out of it and down the stairs and into the yard and did not look back. Dr. Hadock at the window said, Jane, she never blinked. No, said Miss Marple, she never blinked. That is because, Doctor, she was not lying. She is Diana Price.

She was born at Ipswich in 1900. Her mother died when she was three days old. She has no cousin. All of that is quite true, and she was quite prepared to say it. Then, then the woman on the bed is not her cousin. The woman on the bed, I think, is her sister. He turned from the window. Twins, he said. Twins, said Miss Marple. Twins born in 1900 at Ipswich. Separated within the week for reasons I do not yet know but suspect. A small scandal. An unmarried aunt.

An easier arrangement. And never reunited by their family, but never forgotten by one of them. The one who kept the family name. The one who did not. And the aunt? The aunt knew, or came in these last weeks to know. She was a woman, remember, who put her house in order. She had drawn a codicil. She had said, I have told the person concerned so that no shock may come of it. I owe that much. That was not written to Diana. That was written to me, or would have been had she lived. But it was said, first, to a young woman in a blue coat at a crossroads on a Sunday afternoon. and that young woman came to St Mary Mead, full, I think, of hope, and was killed on Monday in this bed with a bottle of chloral,

and had a note laid beside her on Tuesday morning, in a hand not her own, and a signature abbreviated in a way she would never have used. Jane. Diana killed her sister. I do not, said Miss Marple softly, yet know that. I know only that Diana Price did not blink at a scar upon her own hand, and did not blink at the sight of her sister upon a bed. That is either very great innocence, or very great wickedness, and in my experience the two are not always as far apart as we like to pretend. She turned to Constable Polk, who had been standing, forgotten, at the door. Constable, would you be so kind as to see that Miss Price is driven safely to the old rectory, and once she is there, would you ask Sergeant Lake

to set a very quiet watch upon the side gate? the same gate, mark you, whose bolt was so freshly oiled from now until midnight. Yes, ma'am. Thank you, constable. She stood a moment longer at the little window of the George, looking down at the yard where Miss Diana Price was, with unhurried grace, stepping up again into the trap.

Beyond the yard, the lane climbed towards St Mary Mead. Beyond the lane, the downs, wet and shining. And in Miss Marple's reticule, folded quite flat between two receipts and a shopping list, lay a single deep red hollyhock petal, which she had picked, that morning, from the base of a plant she had not planted, and did not remember rooting at the far end of her own garden. She would set the snare again, she thought, not here, there, at the old rectory, to-night, where the gate had been oiled.

Section 9 The Quiet Assembly The trap took Diana away up the lane, and Miss Marple, having thanked the boots at the George with a shilling and the chambermaid with two, was driven back to St Mary Mead by Dr. Hadock in his Morris, which smelt, as it always did, of iodine and pipe tobacco. They did not speak until they were past the crossroads, at which Miss Marple looked with a certain grave courtesy as one might look at a battlefield. Jane, said Dr. Hadock at last, tell me what you have.

I have, said Miss Marple, nearly everything. I do not yet have the how of the second death, I do not yet have the why of the pattern of hollyhocks, but I have the shape, Doctor. And when one has the shape, the rest is only patience. The Shape The shape is this. There were two children. One was kept and named Diana Price. and grew up in Ipswich in her Aunt Lavinia's shadow, and came, at last, into an expectation.

The other was given away, quietly, before the christening, and she grew up under another name, in another town, with another aunt, a Mrs Sturgis of Ipswich, I think, who was some connection of the girl's mother's. She was told she was an orphan. She was not told she had a sister. How did she learn? I do not know.

Perhaps a letter from a dying aunt or from a solicitor. Perhaps a photograph seen by chance. In any case, some weeks ago she wrote, Do you remember Mrs. Bunting's corner of an ashy paper? Not a penny more. That is not the letter of a woman asking for the truth. That is Miss Lavinia's reply, quoted back at her in her own hand. Someone else had been demanding money, and had been refused. Diana Price, my dear doctor. Not the stranger.

Diana had been asking Miss Lavinia for money for some time, and had been told, at the end of May, not a penny more. Then Diana. Diana had spent her small fortune. Diana lived, as we have all seen at the flower show, a little too well. Diana had, I think. been already in London, borrowing at rates that would have made her aunt weep, and had come down to persuade Aunt Lavinia to lend her one more sum. In this she failed, and had been failing. Meanwhile the other sister, call her Dorothy Sturgis of Ipswich, had come, by whatever chance, upon her own history, and had written to Miss Lavinia. Miss Lavinia, in her orderly way, had been shocked, and then softened, and then resolute. She would set the record straight. She

would divide the estate more justly. Better, she would give the London property to her lost niece, and leave Diana the old rectory and enough to live upon. And the codicil? The codicil, Doctor, was a further step, done in anger. Miss Lavinia had told Diana of her intention, you remember. I have told the person concerned so that no shock may come of it. I owe that much. And Diana, we may guess, had said something in reply so ugly that Miss Lavinia went the next day to Mr. Endicott and drew up a codicil disinheriting her entirely in favour of the cottage hospital, save for the small kindness to Mr. Carew.

She then repented. or partly, and arranged that the codicil should be witnessed at the old rectory on Tuesday morning at eleven, to give Diana one last chance to see reason. She did not know that Diana had already seen reason of a quite different kind. Diana killed her aunt to prevent the codicil Diana killed her aunt to prevent the codicil, yes, but she also killed her sister to prevent the truth.

That is why the second death, doctor. That is why the note. If the sister had lived, she would have said, I wrote to Miss Lavinia. She was going to acknowledge me. She said she had told the person concerned. And then all eyes would have turned to that person concerned. So the sister had to die first, on Monday afternoon, in a locked room from which a slim young woman could, without difficulty, drop to the coach-house roof, and thence back later by an arranged key. And the aunt had to die second, on Tuesday morning, in her own border, before eleven o'clock, before the witnessing. And Mrs Bunting's figure, the fair woman smiling at the gate, was Diana Price, not a stranger, her own niece. Mrs Bunting knew Miss Diana

only from Christmas photographs. She has been in the house seven years, but has met her twice. And in the half-light of a quarter to six, a fair woman at the gate becomes, to a startled cook, a stranger. Miss Lavinia's, you, was not directed at a stranger. It was directed at Diana. She was surprised, surprised, Doctor, and quite unafraid, because she had not expected Diana to be out in the garden at that hour, and had assumed her still in bed.

She was not afraid, because Diana was her niece. She had time enough only for the program. and then Diana struck her from behind with, I should suppose, the stone weight from the scullery scale, which is round and smooth, and, we shall find, has been most recently washed. The petals. The petals were a small, cold thought. Diana knew that the village would notice a stranger. She wished, therefore, to write Stranger upon the garden. A deep red hollyhock snapped in a hurry, a scarlet woman, as it were, sketched crudely at her aunt's head, invited the village to say at once, a woman, and by the afternoon, when the young woman in the blue coat should be discovered at the George, indubitably dead by her own hand, with a

note confessing, the village would say, the woman. Diana had, you see, planned to place the note at the George on Monday night, and to have her sister found on Tuesday morning at the very hour her aunt was being examined. She was undone in this by two small pieces of ordinary bad luck. The boots at the George does not go up to Miss Sturgis's room on Tuesday, because Miss Sturgis had said she would sleep late, and the note in the wrong ink and the wrong hand and the wrong signature is not laid there until, we shall find, sometime Tuesday night. In the meantime, the village finds Miss Lavinia at the wrong end of the pattern, and the second body does not turn up until Wednesday morning, and the pattern is spoiled. Miss Marple. Yes, Doctor. You are certain?

I am certain enough, said Miss Marple, to set my snare. I do not think I am wrong, but I would like, you understand this, to be quite, quite sure before we speak the word. They had come to her gate. She got down. She turned. She said, Tonight, Doctor, at ten o'clock. at the old rectory. I have arranged with Inspector Slack that he and Sergeant Lake shall be quietly within the drawing-room, and Constable Polk within the scullery, and you and I within the morning-room. I have arranged also that Mr. Endicott shall arrive at nine, in his umbrella, with the papers of the estate. And I have arranged, this is my part, that Miss Diana shall, at half-past nine, receive a note.

It will say only this. The other letter has been found among my aunt's things. E. It will not be signed by Mr. Endicott. It will not be signed by anyone she knows. But she will read it as from Mr. Endicott, and she will act. And the other letter? The other letter, Doctor, is one I shall write this afternoon at my own desk in the hand of a stranger, and place in Miss Lavinia's writing-case in the drawing-room after Mrs. Bunting has gone up to bed. It will be found by Diana at some point after ten. It will say what Miss Lavinia would have said to her lost niece, had she lived to say it. It will be a very kind letter.

It will also be quite untrue. But we shall not need it to be true, Doctor. We shall need it only to be believed for the space of one minute by one woman. Jane, that is a great deal of stage management. It is, said Miss Marple. I do not, as a rule, care for it. But there is a young woman in a bed at the George, and there is an old woman in a border under the Hollyhocks, and I do not, upon the whole, feel very kindly towards the person who arranged both. and I am willing, this once, to arrange something in return. She stood a moment, small and lilac at her gate. The hollyhocks, still wet from the storm, hung heavy along her war. At the end of the row, the deep red bloom she had not planted lifted its head, unrepentant, into the sun. And besides, doctor,

she said more gently, Miss Lavinia was fond of me, and I was fond of her, and she was, in her way, honourable. She would not, I think, wish us to be less. She went in. The kettle sang. At six she wrote the letter, in a hand not hers, upon paper of a make that could be bought in Ipswich, but not in St Mary Mead. At seven she ate a small piece of cold chicken. At eight she walked, through the last of the light, to the old rectory, and slipped the letter into Miss Lavinia's writing-case. beneath a bill from the coal merchant, as she had said she would.

At nine she was in the morning room, with Dr. Hadock beside her, and the door open a hand's breadth, and Mr. Endicott's voice audible in the hall as he greeted Miss Diana. At half-past nine Constable Pork delivered the note. At ten the snare was set, and Miss Marple folded her hands in her lap and waited. Section 10 The Reveal Among the Hollyhocks The house at ten o'clock was very still. Somewhere upstairs a clock made its cousinly inquiries of another clock, and was answered. In the kitchen Mrs. Bunting, having been told by Miss Marple that she must go to bed and stay in it, was faithfully in it, and awake. And in the morning room, behind a door open a hand's breadth, Miss Marple and Dr. Haydock sat,

and Inspector Slack and Sergeant Lake, behind the drawing-room door opposite, sat, and Constable Pork in the scullery sat, and no one at all upon this earth appeared to breathe. They heard, presently, Miss Diana come down the stairs. She came down softly. She was in her grey travelling coat, and she carried over her arm a small leather bag. She went not to the front door, but to the drawing-room, where she paused, and Miss Marple threw the crack. saw her face lifted, listening.

Then she crossed to the writing-desk and lifted the lid of Miss Lavinia's writing-case, and put her hand in and withdrew the letter. She read it standing. Miss Marple, who could not see the letter but knew it very well, followed the reading upon Miss Diana's face. My dear child, whom I have wronged these thirty years, I have this day set my affairs in order. and named you in my will, that no shock may come of it. I have told the person concerned. Come to me, if you will, on Tuesday at eleven. Mr. Endicott will be with me, and we shall put the record straight. Your Aunt Lavinia Price Miss Diana finished the letter. For a long moment she did not move. Then, still without a sound, she folded the letter. Not roughly, not tenderly, but with a small,

business-like crease along its middle, and put it in her pocket. She closed the writing-case. She walked, unhurried, to the fireplace, and knelt, and struck a match, and set fire to the folded letter, and watched it burn upon the hearthstone. While it burned, she said aloud, quite distinctly, though there was no one in the room to hear, No, aunt, not this time. Miss Marple's hand tightened upon Dr. Hadock's wrist.

Miss Diana rose, she turned. She walked with the same slow, unhurried grace to the little occasional table by the window, and lifted from beneath the aspidistra a small, oiled cloth bundle, which she had, at some earlier hour, put there for keeping. She unrolled it upon the table. Within lay a stone weight from a scullery scale, freshly washed, and a bottle marked Chloral, half full, and a pair of gardening gloves rinsed to a curious paleness at the fingertips. She looked at these things without emotion as a woman looks at the items in her sewing basket. Then she said in the same distinct voice, There is only Marple now, and she is old. Miss Marple opened the door. She did not open it dramatically. She opened it with the mild

social movement of a woman entering to say she has heard the maid go to bed. and is worried about the range. She said, quite kindly, Diana, my dear, would you come and sit down? Diana Price turned. Her face, the same face that had not blinked at the sight of her sister on a bed, that had not blinked at a scar upon her own hand, did not blink now.

But something behind the face, something very deep and cold and small, altered. You, she said. I, said Miss Marple. Do come and sit. Mr. Endicott is in the drawing-room, and Inspector Slack, and Sergeant Lake, and Dr. Hadock is here beside me, and Constable Polk is in the scullery. It will be much easier for us all if we do it, my dear, in one room. Diana looked at the oiled cloth. She looked at the door. Then, with a small, courteous inclination of the head, one might have thought her accepting a chair at a fate, she came into the morning-room and sat where Miss Marple pointed. upon the low chair by the hearth. The others came in.

They did not speak. They arranged themselves like a small congregation. Mr. Endicott stood behind Miss Marple's chair. Dr. Haydock closed the door. Inspector Slack, for once wordless, sat where he was put. Miss Marple laid her hands, palms down, upon her lap. Diana, she said gently, I shall tell you the story I know.

and you may correct me if I am wrong. It will be much easier than my asking questions. You have, and here her voice softened further, had a great many questions in a great many rooms in these last days. Miss Diana said nothing. You were, Miss Marple began, one of two girls born at Ipswich in the summer of 1900.

Your mother died within the week. Your father was already at the war. Your Aunt Lavinia, unmarried and much occupied, made an arrangement that in those days was not uncommon. She kept one child and gave the other to your mother's connection, Mrs Sturgis. I have written this afternoon to the parish at St Peter's, Ipswich, and had my answer by wire. Mrs Sturgis was a widow of small means and great kindness, and she raised your sister as her own and told her nothing. Your Aunt Lavinia kept you and told you nothing either. It was a piece of Victorian tidiness which she came, in later life, to think a wickedness. But she was not the woman to unpick a knot merely because she had come to dislike the knot.

She would unpick it only if the knot began to press upon another life. This spring it began to press. Your sister Dorothy, for so she was called, wrote to her, having discovered by some accident her true parentage. Your aunt was appalled, and then softened, and then resolute. She sent for Mr. Endicott. She drew a new will. She wrote to your sister and named a day. She had, meanwhile, been telling you, in a sequence of small conversations, of which I have gathered fragments from Mrs Bunting and Mr Carew, that a certain injustice was to be set right, before Michaelmas.

And you replied to those conversations with such fury that she went at last to Mr. Endicott and drew, in anger, a codicil disinheriting you altogether, a codicil she then softened, arranging for it to be witnessed at eleven o'clock on Tuesday, in the hope that you would relent. Diana said. She would never have relented. She would have, said Miss Marple quietly.

She loved you. That is the pity, my dear. She loved you very much. She would have signed the previous will in the end, and split the estate three ways, and forgiven you your debts, and made a place at her table for a sister you had never known. She would have been happy in it, Doctor. She would have grown almost sentimental. Only you did not believe it. You believed only what you had always believed. that she was hard and unbending, and that you were the injured party.

And so, on Monday afternoon, you went by a bicycle from Newton. Mr. Endicott's clerk saw you at the crossroads, but did not, then, know why he was noticing, to the George, and up the back stair to your sister's room, which she had opened for you because she believed you were her sister, come at last. And you gave her a glass of what she believed to be sherry, and left her sleeping, and you locked the door, and you dropped from the balcony to the coach-house roof, and thence to the yard. And you returned in the small hours of Tuesday morning, by the same route, with a note in a hand you had, over some weeks, taught yourself to write. The hand, I think, of a lady's maid you knew in London, and you laid it upon her table. Yes?

Diana said nothing, but her mouth had thinned. That was all. Then, in the small hours, you went home to the old rectory, and slept some, I dare say. and rose at a quarter past five, and dressed, and went out through the side gate, the bolt of which you had, some evenings before, quietly oiled, and you went round to the front lane, and re-entered through the front gate, and you went into the garden, and Mrs. Bunting saw you from the scullery, and thought you a stranger, and you smiled at her, my dear, in a way that no woman ever smiles at a woman she does not intend to injure, and your aunt was in the border, kneeling, You came upon her from behind. You had in your hand the stone weight of the scullery scale, that same weight which sits,

at this moment, in oilcloth upon the table over there, and she heard you, and she turned, and she saw you, and she said, You, meaning, my dear, you are early, and you are here, and you will kiss me now and end this quarrel, and a hundred other things she had no time to say. You struck her once. You picked up her secateurs and let them fall in her hand as though she had dropped them. You broke, you were in haste and did not think, three stems of the deep red hollyhocks she loved best, and you laid them about her, and you left a single bloom under her outstretched fingers, and you went in through the scullery door and up the back stairs, and you were in bed and heard, quite clearly, poor Mrs. Bunting scream in

the garden at half-past six. Miss Marple's voice had grown, if anything, quieter. I know all this, my dear. I know it because you did not blink at your sister's scar, because you burned this evening a letter that offered you your aunt's forgiveness, because you spoke aloud, No, aunt, not this time, and because you have brought down to this room, in an oiled cloth, the scale weight and the chloral and the pale gloves that you rinsed with such care.

It is not that you are wicked, Diana. It is that you are, and always have been, terribly, terribly afraid. Afraid of the codicil, afraid of the sister, afraid of the truth. And you have killed two women rather than face what your aunt, in her last week, had at last found the courage to face herself. There was a very long silence. Then Diana Price lifted her head and looked at Miss Marple, and she smiled, a small, bright, terrible smile. It was the smile of the child who has taken the jam and does not, now, mind being seen.

And what, she said, if I had killed her before she wrote me that pretty letter of forgiveness? You did, my dear, said Miss Marple. She never wrote it. I did. This afternoon. In a hand not her own. On paper bought in Ipswich. Diana Price's smile did not fade. It became fixed. And then... Quite slowly, as ice breaks upon a pond, it fell. Inspector Slack rose. The hollyhocks outside the window moved gently in the night air. Section 11.

After the Hollyhocks The hollyhocks moved gently in the night air, and Inspector Slack, being no fool when finally shown the shape of a thing, did what he had to do with a quietness Miss Marple had not previously credited to him. There was no cry, no scene. Diana Price rose from the low chair by the hearth, with the same slow, unhurried grace with which she had come down the stairs, and put on the glove upon her right hand, and said only to Miss Marple, You are a great deal less kind than you look, and to Sergeant Lake, who had opened the door for her, thank you. She went out between them into the hall, and out of the hall into the night, and Miss Marple did not watch her go. She sat looking at the hearthstone, upon which

the ashes of a burned letter, her own letter, lay, and she was, for that first moment, very tired. Dr. Hadock put a hand upon her shoulder. He said nothing. There was nothing to say that would not have been an interruption of a private, small grief, and he had known her long enough to know it. Mr. Endicott, folding his umbrella beside him though he was indoors, said at last, with the softness of a man reading a lesson, Miss Marple, I do not think in forty-two years I have ever seen a case brought to a point with so little noise. Noise, Mr. Endicott, said Miss Marple, is very seldom useful. It only frightens the birds and makes the neighbours interested. She smiled at him, a tired smile. Do sit a moment. Mrs. Bunting will

be down. She will insist upon tea, and we shall need it. Mrs. Bunting was indeed down, having heard through her open door what she had heard, and she made tea, and she cried a little into the caddy in a private way, and she brought the tray with the same steady hands with which she had brought Miss Lavinia her breakfast for thirty years, and it was, they all felt, the most difficult tray of her life, and the most important.

They sat then in Miss Lavinia Price's morning-room, and drank her tea. Nobody spoke of Diana. Presently Constable Pork, sent by the inspector, returned to say that Miss Price had made her statement without demur, that she had said only the one further thing, she should have let me alone about the truth, and that she was quiet. Dr. Hadock rose. Jane, I shall walk you home. Thank you, Doctor. They went out through the front hall, past the table where Miss Lavinia's handbag had lain. Mrs. Bunting had put it away now, and out into the lane, where the sky was clear and the stars were as many as they are only in the country. The village slept. The vicarage was dark.

In Mrs. Price Ridley's upper window, a single lamp still burned, from behind which no shadow moved, because Mrs. Price Ridley was pretending, with all the passion of a woman who does not know the essential, to be asleep. At Miss Marple's gate they stopped. Jane, said Dr. Haydock. The letter, the one you wrote, did she really burn it, believing it?

She burned it, Doctor, believing it. For one minute, one minute out of a life she had made so joyless, she believed that her aunt had forgiven her, and that everything might be, in some measure, put right. And she said aloud, No, aunt, not this time. It was the only proof I needed, and it was the only proof I could not otherwise have had. It was also, and here Miss Marple's voice was for the first time that evening, unsteady.

A cruelty. It was a small, precise cruelty. I have done kinder things in my life, Doctor, and I hope, before I die, to do many more. It was a necessary cruelty. Necessary, said Miss Marple, is a word one uses to excuse the things one is not proud of. I did what I did. It brought us the truth. And Miss Lavinia lies quiet, and her lost daughter, for it comes to that at last, Doctor, she was more mother than aunt, lies quiet also at Newton. And the village will have hollyhocks again next year, and my own deep red one at the end of the row will very likely have to be dug up. She looked at it.

In the starlight it was only dark, no colour at all. She put out her hand and touched it briefly. Good night, Doctor. Good night, Jane. He walked back down the lane. She watched him go until the sound of his step had passed the vicarage, and then she went in and shut her door and did not sleep. In the days that followed, the village performed the small, necessary offices of a village that has been shaken. Mr. Clement preached, upon the Sunday, on the text, Judge not that ye be not judged, and did not for once need to pad. Mrs. Price Ridley was, for perhaps ten days, unusually quiet, and then perhaps eleven, and then resumed. Miss Weatherby, black-gloved, wrote to a cousin in Torquay a letter she was compelled, in

the writing, to tear up twice. and eventually posted a third version, which was rather good. Mr Carew of Mallard's Farm walked on the Wednesday to the churchyard, and stood a long time by Miss Lavinia's freshly turned earth, and said aloud, I was a fool, ma'am, and I am sorry, and went home and, upon his own initiative, moved the gate. Mr. Endicott, being a professional, arranged in due course for the estate to go, under the previous will, to a distant cousin at Cheltenham, whom no one in St. Mary Mead had ever seen, and who did not, in the event, come.

The old rectory stood empty for the rest of the summer, its blinds drawn, its garden gone gently wild. Only the hollyhocks kept their appointment, the pink and the cream, and here and there a deep arterial red, which had seeded from the wall as such things do, and could not now be stopped. At the cottage hospital, the matron opened in September a small envelope from Mr Endicott's office. It contained a note in Miss Lavinia Price's own hand, a note that had been kept, unwitnessed, in a drawer for a fortnight before her death. It was a note that willed a small sum, in her private capacity, to be spent on curtains for the children's ward. It had, of course, no legal force. Nevertheless, in early October, curtains appeared, paid for,

the matron never asked how, but from a lilac-coloured envelope pushed under her door at some hour of an evening. The curtains were of a plain, quiet chintz. There were no hollyhocks upon them. Miss Marple, for her part, had one further duty. She went, at the end of that summer, upon the Ipswich train, to the churchyard of St Peter's, and she stood a long time beside a small, flat, weather-worn stone marked simply Dorothy Sturgis, 1900-1926. There was beside it room. she stood and thought about a young woman in a blue coat at a crossroads on a sunday afternoon silent when spoken to and about a sunday afternoon that had been without her knowing it her last chance at kindness and she felt as she had not felt

in some years the small pressure of a very great tenderness for a person she had never met At the parish office she left a sum with the incumbent, and instructions that the stone should be re-lettered before the winter to read Dorothy Sturgis Price, 1900-1926. The loved sister of Diana, niece of Lavinia, long lost, at last acknowledged. The incumbent, a young man with a chin, said, Was she then a Price? She was, sir, said Miss Marple. She always was.

She travelled home. At St Mary Mead she got down at the station and walked the lane, in the low September light, past the hedges and the yellow hammers, and the smell of blackberries beginning, and at her own gate she paused, as she always paused, and looked at her hollyhocks. They had almost done. The pink and the cream were browning at the edges, the seed pods were forming, in the tight, considering way of things that mean, next year, to begin again. Only the deep red one at the end of the row still bore, at its top, a single obstinate bloom. She stood a moment, looking at it. Then, quite deliberately, and with the small, gentle firmness with which a lifetime ago she had put down her trug on

the stone wall of a Tuesday morning in June, she went into the toolshed, and came out with a spade, and dug it up. She carried the plant, root and all, to the compost heap, and laid it there. She washed her hands at the pump, Then she went in and put on the kettle, and cut a slice of the seed-cake she had made that morning, and, having sat some time at the window, watching the last of the September sun upon her ordinary, pink and cream, blameless flowers, she took up her knitting. The village equilibrium, as villages do, resumed.

It resumed a little sadder, a little wiser, a little more inclined, in Mrs Price Ridley at least, to consider before pronouncing. It resumed with a chair empty at the cottage hospital committee, and a stone re-lettered at Ipswich, and a compost heap in Miss Marple's garden, in which one deep red root would, all winter, quietly refuse to rot, and would, one morning in April, put up, despite everything, a new green shoot. Miss Marple would see it. She would nod once. And she would leave it, this time, to grow. Some things, in a garden as in a life, cannot be finally pulled up, and it is not, in the end, the flowers that are the trouble. It is what one is willing to trample to reach them. THE END

A Garden of Secrets: Who Killed Her in the Hollyhocks? | Miss Marple Sleep…

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