A Needle, A Threat, and One Dead Member | Miss Marple Sleep Stories

Murder in the Embroidery Circle. A Miss Marple Case. Section 1. A Skane Unspooled. Good afternoon, and welcome. Settle in. The kettle's on. Before we begin, a brief word. The village of Dunsmuir Green is one of those quiet English places where people still nod across the high street, where the postmistress knows your name, your dog, and your cholesterol. It is, in its gentle way, perfect. which is of course why, on a still August morning in Dunsmuir, with the church bell counting the half-hours and the last of the lavender nodding by the garden wall, a small disturbance under a sheet of embroidery thread was enough to upset the balance of an entire parish. It began, as these things do, with a piece of needlework. Miss Jane Marple was sitting

by the window at Dainmead, her knitting in her lap, the morning paper folded to the crossword. Mrs Nightingale, who came in twice a week set a cup of tea on the side table and drew the curtain back a little further. He's at it again, the gardener, she said, meaning Mr Sykes at the vicarage across the lane. Says he heard voices last night, talk of an argument, talk of a... Well, you'd think vicarages were places of peace, Miss Marple murmured. Often the noisiest arguments, she said gently, are the ones conducted most politely. You'd not think so to look at him, Reverend Hull, Quiet man, reads his books. Yes, Miss Marple said, he does read his books. Down the lane, in the parlour of Pembury Cottage, Evelyn Marchant had not

yet come down for breakfast. Her niece, Jane Whittaker, who had arrived only the week before from Canterbury to help with her aunt's spring sampler unveiling, was standing in the hall with an empty tray in her hands and a small crease between her brows. The Dunsmuir sampler was Evelyn's great late work. A square of linen, four feet by four feet, into which she had spent four years stitching the whole parish school of village life. The church, the pond, the forge, the war memorial, the Dunsmuir oak, the embroidery circle represented by seven little figures in a ring. It was, the village said, going to be her gift to Dunsmuir on her sixty-third birthday. Three weeks from unveiling, it was almost finished. Only the horizon, a row of distant hills, remained,

and that was to be stitched in the autumn once the leaves turned. Jane set down the tray. She had noticed something, the evening before, that had nothing to do with hills. On the back of the sampler, where the threads crossed and kinked, she had caught sight of a small square of paper folded against the linen, sewn neatly into the seam of the backing board. She had not been meant to see it. The paper looked old, the kind of crispness that comes from a piece of correspondence kept in a drawer for decades. Her aunt had turned very still when Jane's shadow fell across it, and had pulled the hoop flat on the table with a briskness Jane associated with guileless ladies caught out. Aunt Evelyn? A family matter, dear, from long ago. Jane had not pressed.

She had been raised not to press. but she remembered this morning the way the paper had not quite fluttered when her aunt lifted the hoop. Paper that had been there for years would have flapped at the seams. This paper had been sewn in, stitched in, like an applique. At half-past nine, Dr Hugh Carrington came up the lane on his bicycle, his bag on the front. He was a tall man in a corduroy jacket, with the slow, careful tread of someone trained to take trouble gently. He paused at the gate of Pembury Cottage and was hailed by Doreen Pratt from across the road, the caretaker's apron still on from the village hall floor. Doctor! Doctor! Have you heard from Mrs Marchant? Only she hasn't answered, and

the postmaster says her niece telephoned the surgery at eight. I rang the bell. Nothing. The doctor set down his bicycle. He did not appear alarmed. Village doctors, Miss Marple had often observed, were the last to alarm themselves, because alarm was not a thing that helped. He rang the bell. Then he tried the latch. The door yielded, which it should not have done. I shall just have a look, he said. Stay where you are, Mrs Pratt. He was inside perhaps three minutes. Mrs Pratt, waiting on the path, would say afterward that she had not heard any cry or any commotion. Only the doctor's footsteps, going across the hall with that particular slow care, and then silence. the long silence of someone standing still at the foot of

a chair. She had looked up at the parlour window. The curtain had been pulled aside. She saw, for a moment, the doctor's hand on the sill. Then he came to the door. Mrs Pratt, telephone the surgery. Ask them to ring for the police. Is she … Failing, he said. Dying as I came in, I should think. Very quietly. Tea, perhaps.

Some infusion. I cannot be sure yet. I am very grieved to say there will be no spring sampler. The morning, which had started so gently, drew itself into a smaller shape. By ten o'clock, the village knew. Telephones rang from house to house, with the careful patience of people who wished to be first with the worst news, but were determined not to sound so. Reverend Hull, who had crossed the lane to gather the day's posy for the altar, stood very still in the path with secateurs in his hand when Doreen Pratt came out to tell him. Poor Evelyn, he said. She was a sister to me in all but blood. Mrs Pratt, who had known him only since Christmas, fought the words a little hurried for so short an acquaintance,

but she was not one to cavil. At Dainmead, by the open window, Miss Marple listened as Mrs Nightingale put the receiver back on its cradle for the third time in ten minutes. The word tea had been mentioned. Miss Marple did not stir. Aunt Evelyn has been taken ill, dear, Mrs Nightingale said. Has she? said Miss Marple. And how?

The doctor is with her. There's talk of poison. Someone said thallium or arsenic or foxglove, but that's just talk. Thallium, said Miss Marple, tastes of nothing at all. That is its cruelty. the foxglove one can usually feel. You don't think, they don't think, they often do, dear, at this stage, and almost always they think wrongly. She set down her knitting.

She had been working on a small coverlet for the church fete, the colour of apple blossom in cross-stitch. The wool slid in her lap as if it had been waiting to be laid down. You will excuse me, she said. I believe I shall put on my hat and walk down. Lady, in this heat! A hat is the properest committee for the sun, she said, and the village will be wanting an older head. The lane was bright. The lavender was bright.

The bunting from last month's fate was still up along the railings of the village hall, faintly faded to the colour of weak tea. Three women from the embroidery circle stood at the gate of Pembury Cottage in a small knot, twisting their hands into their cardigans. Margaret Devereaux, the circle's president, was already there, her hair still pinned from some earlier engagement, her hand at her throat. We are all that upset, she said. We are all that upset, and yet, well, the sampler. The sampler will keep, said Miss Marple gently.

It has the patience of a sampler. She stepped past them, into the cool of the parlour. where the doctor had laid a sheet over the body and stood, head bowed, by a small side table. On the table was a cup of last night's tisane, untouched now, the surface pinned with a skin like rice paper. Beside it, on a low chair, lay Evelyn's work bag, and in the bag, half spooled out, a length of red silk that had not been there yesterday, because Jane had put it away herself, having counted the skeins for the unveiling. The thread was new.

The thread was wrong. Miss Marple did not touch it. She only looked as a woman long used to looking. Such a quiet house, she murmured. Such quiet rooms where suddenly one feels a draft. Dr Carrington glanced at her, gave a small bow and said nothing. He knew her face. He had known it for thirty years and trusted that it meant nothing was yet decided. Outside the church clock struck ten. The village of Dunsmuir, which had held itself so beautifully all summer, was a fraction out of true.

It would not be set right by any bell. Miss Marple turned from the cup. The silk in the bag had a knot in it, a small French knot, she thought, only at first glance. It would untangle later, in time, in her mind, after the right person had touched it. Right now it lay where it lay, the colour of winter cherries in a dead woman's work-bag. Tomorrow the police would come. Tomorrow the village would speak. Tomorrow the embroidery circle would cancel its meeting. Today the skein had been unspooled.

A great many things in Miss Marple's experience were like that. You sat with your knitting in your lap in the morning, and the light came through the window, and a skein was unspooling in someone's parlour, and by afternoon a town had changed its colour. She stepped back out into the lane. The all but summer sun was unstinting, the lavender bent, the bunting stirred. Somewhere down the road the vicar's gate clicked shut. Poor Evelyn, said Mrs Nightingale behind her. Yes, said Miss Marple. Poor Evelyn. She walked home and made herself a small cup of tea, and sat in her dining room with the window open. She did not open the village paper. She did not telephone. She waited. For threads, once pulled, had a habit of pulling other threads with them.

Section 2. A Needle Warded Away By half-past ten, the village had resumed its breath. Evelyn Marchant's parlour had been quietly shut, the door drawn to, and the lane between the gate and the road lay clean and white in the sun. There was no police constable on the path, no doctor walking, no wife calling out. There was only the small sound of teacups being lifted all over Dunsmuir and set down with the particular careful clink that came from people thinking twice about their words. Miss Marple, in her dining-room at Dainmead, with the window thrown open onto the lane, was the first to notice how the sounds rearranged themselves. By eleven, three women had walked past the cottage gate and not looked in. By half-past eleven, two

of them had walked past and had looked in, with the quick sideways glance of a person without conscience. By noon, the vicar had set off on his bicycle toward the village hall, and the road bent so obediently around him that you would have said the lane itself knew to make way. The gossip began to walk the village the way a needle walks a sampler, along channels and at depth and almost unseen until the whole cloth begins to take the shape of what has been drawn under it.

By one o'clock Miss Marple had heard it all. Mrs Nightingale, on returning from the post office with the day's milk and a letter from her cousin in Maidstone, was full of the village's first small theory. They say it's Bernard Loxley, she said, settling herself onto the chintz chair opposite Miss Marple's writing-table. He was Evelyn's solicitor. He'd had some words with her only last week, over the embroidery-circle accounts of all cruelties. She suspected him of diverting a small sum— three pounds and ten shillings, it may be, or thirty pounds, or a sum that keeps getting bigger the further it travels.

He'd been in her house on Thursday afternoon, the day before she went.' Bernard,' said Miss Marple thoughtfully. is a careful man. He reads his own pamphlets aloud to the parish council. He does not divert. That's what I said. But the others, you know what the others are like. They have their man. They mean to keep him. In the village hall across the green, Margaret Devereaux had called a small gathering of the embroidery circle, though strictly speaking it was not Thursday. Most of them had come anyway.

They sat around the long embroidery table with their needles idle in their palms and talked in voices pitched just below the rafters. My sister-in-law in Chelmsford says it's a love affair, said Mrs Farrier. A young man, a bad one, a nephew perhaps, who wanted her money, or worse. Evelyn had barely any money, said Margaret. She had Pemberton House and a small private income. The sampler was to be her legacy. She was more fond of it than of any person. It's Hugh, then, said old Mrs Garland, who had known Hugh Carrington since his hair was darker. He was the last to see her alive. He came in the morning on his bicycle, and he has, you must admit, certain bachelor proclivities. Quiet rooms, quiet ways. Doreen says he

stayed three minutes. Three minutes is more than enough for a doctor who's already prepared his bottle. Nonsense, Miss Marple thought. Walking back from her short visit to the vicarage gate, she wished to take the air along the lane. She did not wish to go inside, because Reverend Hull had asked her in twice now, and she preferred, for the present, that he should not know whether she had accepted. She had nodded graciously through the wicket and walked on. What is happening, she thought, is that the village is doing what villages always do. They are taking what they cannot bear and pressing it into a familiar shape. They are saying Bernard or Hugh or the nephew, because to say one of those names is to feel that the world

is a nameable thing again. They are like a person with a sampler who has lost the centre stitch. They reach for any thread at hand to pull the cloth straight. But the cloth is not straight, and the thread they have taken up is the wrong colour. She turned up the path to Pembury Cottage with the slow, careful tread of an old woman in lace-up shoes. The gate had been left ajar. Mrs Pratt, on her way out with a small bin, paused and inclined her head. Lady Marple, she said, have you come for the work bag? Only the inspector phoned and said the doctor is to leave the bag. They've taken the cup for tests. No, dear, I came to look at the back of the door.

Mrs Pratt did not understand and Miss Marple did not explain. What she meant was this. The parlour door had a low wooden panel below the glass, painted the colour of green tea. Tradition in Dunsmuir, and indeed in most villages of this corner of the shire, was for the parlour door to bear a small brass hook, fixed by a needle's eye, on which one hung a small pincushion. Evelyn's pincushion, like Miss Marple's, was of velvet and had been a christening gift from an aunt. It should have been on the hook. It was not on the hook. Miss Marple drew a glove from her pocket and laid her hand flat against the door. The brass hook was empty. The pincushion was gone. Its absence was the kind of absence a careful observer only noticed if she were looking for it.

Did you take the cushion, dear? she asked Mrs Pratt. No, lady, the doctor removed it, I think, with the bag. He took both. Why would he remove the cushion? To spare the niece, I suppose. The niece, Miss Whittaker. She asked after it, repeatedly. She said her aunt had been given that cushion by her mother, before her mother died, and that it was the one keepsake her aunt had out and out refused to part with. The doctor said it would go with the bag and be kept safe. Miss Marple let her hand fall. The cushion had not been there at noon, when she herself had stood at the door with the inspector's constable. It had been there then.

It had not been there at half-past twelve. The doctor must have taken it on a second visit, while Miss Marple was in her dining room with the window open, listening. That detail alone was not yet anything. Yet she could not, in honesty, pass it over. She turned to Mrs Pratt with a small grandmother's smile. You have a good eye, she said. You might, in the coming days, take note of what is taken and what is not taken, of what is moved and what is left. Leave nothing unexamined that comes into your hands. and write nothing down that you cannot confirm. People in trouble say the silliest things.

Their things very often do not. Mrs Pratt, who had been raised to take orders from older women, took this in. She said, Yes, lady, I will mind. Miss Marple walked back through the gate. Across the road, two men from the parish council stood looking at the cottage. One of them was Bernard Loxley himself, in his charcoal suit, hands behind his back, surveying the scene with the small professional air of a man who felt himself inconvenienced rather than implicated.

He did not nod to Miss Marple. He had not yet decided, she thought, whether to nod. Reverend Hull, who had passed on his bicycle at the moment of her standing at the gate, dismounted with one foot to the curb and came up to her, hat in hand, anxious and boyish in his greying beard. My dear lady, I had wanted to call on you this very morning but felt it was not the morning's tone. Then I thought, what is the morning's tone but the village's? Permit me, the parish council and I have agreed we shall open the church on Thursday for a small evening remembrance. Evelyn would have wished it. She was, though I knew her only since Christmas, she was very dear to me. Reverend, said Miss Marple, I shall be glad to come. People

do sometimes come to churches for reasons they cannot name. he pressed her hand once and went. She watched him cross the road with the soft tread of a man often in quiet rooms. He had not looked, she noticed, at the gate of Pembury Cottage. He had steered around it, as one steers around a question one does not yet wish to answer. She returned to Dainmead and laid her glove on the writing-table. The afternoon was still. The bunting still hung. The lavender still bent. The pincushion, Evelyn's, not hers, was somewhere in the wrong hands. A skein unspools in a parlour. The warding off of a needle is nearly always the first tell. It is the kind of detail that is not yet anything and not yet everything, but

is the moment a thoughtful woman begins to keep her old eyes open. Section 3. A Darning Stitch on Top of a Tear At Dane Mead, in the cool of the dining-room with its longden china on the dresser, and the afternoon shelves of magazines in untouched bundles, Miss Marple sat with her glove folded beside her glass of barley-water, and considered what the village had set before her. The afternoon posted itself in slowly, in the way that Dunsmuir afternoons do, a bee on the lavender, a milk cart on the high street, the village hall's two front windows still dark from the wake. By four o'clock Inspector Aldridge had stepped out of his car and gone up the path to Pembury Cottage, and the lane had rearranged itself

the way an audience rearranges itself when the right actor takes the stage. She did not go down. She waited until the inspector's car had been to the cottage and back again, forty minutes by her mantle clock, and then she pinned a fresh sprig of heliotrope to her lapel and walked slowly to the village hall. Inspector Aldridge was a methodical man, of whom it might be said that he was methodical in the way solicitors are methodical. Every question was addressed, no question was patched. He was sitting now in the small committee room, with the Venetian blinds drawn, reading the doctor's report on a pad, a cup of tea gone cold at his elbow. Beside him, in a basket borrowed from the hall kitchen, were the things removed

from Evelyn Marchant's parlour at one o'clock. The workbag, the cup, the pincushion, a folded napkin, a small framed photograph of the deceased's late husband. With these things, in a brown envelope, were several strands of red silk thread, knotted at one end, that the doctor's housekeeper had found that morning on the kitchen side of the cottage, not the parlour side. Miss Marple, he said, rising as she came in, with the small tilt of the head one gave to old ladies of uncertain standing. Forgive me if I am brief. I have just been up to the cottage. I should not trouble you. Indeed, said Miss Marple. And who, may I ask, has troubled whom?

He smiled in a measured way. I have not yet gone beyond the obvious. The doctor says the most likely agent is thallium, slow-acting, tasteless, sometimes put forward as a rodenticide in country parishes. We shall know on Wednesday when the analyses return. Wednesday? Wednesday. We are told it is one of the most patient poisons. It does not show its face for hours. Once shown, however, it does not unsay itself. It will not unsay itself, Miss Marple agreed.

But then, Inspector, neither, in my limited experience, does the village. He was courteous. He was also firm. At present, he said, we are looking at three possibilities. Mr. Bernard Loxley, the solicitor. He had been, we believe, alone with the deceased on Thursday afternoon. They had an exchange over financial matters that was, Mrs.

Pratt tells us, raised in tone. The sum in dispute was small. though one of those small sums that small men pursue with great vehemence. And Mr. Loxley has a key to the cottage as the deceased's executor, which key he used on Thursday, and which he has not yet, on my asking, returned. An executor's key, said Miss Marple. Yes, and it is with the executor still? So he says.

I should not have asked, but thank you for telling me. What of Dr. Carrington? Dr Carrington rode to the cottage in the morning as usual. He has said so. Two witnesses confirm. He was inside, on his own evidence, three minutes. He says he did not handle any object in the kitchen. He says he removed only the pincushion and the work bag, because Miss Whittaker had spoken of them. And the Reverend?

Reverend Hull called twice at Pembury Cottage in the past month, both times by appointment. We have nothing on him. We have nothing at all. He is to us a piece of blank parchment. He likes blank parchment, Miss Marple said dryly. He has, I think, the fondness of a man who has had, before, a great deal written on him. The inspector paused, his pen in air. I beg your pardon?

He is a quiet man, Miss Marple said. I did not mean to suggest anything more than that. She moved over to the basket of removed objects and stood looking down on them with the small observatory tilt of an old head. She did not touch. The inspector, who had a habit of being useful to old ladies, pulled a chair near. She sat. The red thread, she said. May I look at it? You may. She took the paper with the knotted red silk on it and held it near the window. The knot was small and tight. the colour of dried cherries. Evelyn Marchant in her lifetime had used only three shades of red, the Louis d'Or of the Vicarage banner, the wet crimson of the War Memorial poppy row, and this one, the dark cinder red she

had used for the church clock hands on the sampler. It is her thread, Miss Marple said. She used it for the clock. The knot, forgive me, Inspector, it is a darning stitch, one half-stitch, one full-stitch, drawn tight. Where have you found the lengths? On the kitchen side of the cottage door. The doctor says not the parlour side.

Mrs Pratt, who swept on Friday morning, says she did not see them on her sweep. They were brought in either Thursday evening or early Friday morning. And the pincushion? At the cottage when the doctor arrived. He took it to the surgery. It is here now, in this basket. He says, and Miss Whittaker agrees, it was on the parlour door hook where it had been for years. The hook is bare, the cushion is in the basket. She made a small sound. A darning stitch, she said. Inspector, I will explain. When one finds a tear in a piece of cloth, the right thing is to take a needle of the same colour and on the underside of the work to make a row of small running stitches that close the gap. Then, on the upper side, one

places a darning stitch, a long stitch and a short stitch, alternating. that hides the tear entirely. The seam reads, on the face, as if nothing has happened. But on the back, that is the secret. The back is all running. He was patient. He had the patience of inspectors in villages who are often told by older women what older women should not tell them. What is it you are saying, Miss Marple?

I am saying nothing, Inspector. I am saying it has been a long while since I have seen needlework on a door-cushion. That is all I am saying. He closed his notebook. He said he would not, at present, trouble her further. He walked her to the lane and stood bare-headed while she set off for Dainmead, thanking her for her kindness, and asked that if she remembered anything in the night, she would ring him at the police station in Markham. She thanked him. She set off. What she was saying, what she was not saying, was this. The red thread found on the kitchen side of the cottage door was a darning stitch. That is, the short, hidden stitch had been placed first, then covered by the long, visible stitch on the parlour side. The talk of the

village was the long stitch. Bernard, it said, Bernard for small sums, on Thursday. The short stitch, the running side, the kitchen side tell, that had been placed first. That was Thursday evening, or Friday morning. while the doctor was not yet in the house. That was when someone, well knowing that the door of Evelyn's parlour was the place the village would look first, had placed the visible half of the darning. And the first half, the kitchen side, the unseen half, was a different hand, a different length, and a different shade. There were two stitches. There were, in consequence, two hands. There were, in her private arithmetic now, two people who had touched the work. She walked on.

She did not turn her head. At the corner of the lane, Tom Sykes, the vicarage gardener, was raking the verges. He lifted his cap with the rough courtesy of a country boy and said, Morning, miss. She nodded her thanks. He was, she thought, twenty-two at most. He looked hungry. He looked honest. He had never looked like a witness before.

He was, she thought, very shortly about to be one. She would not, of course, press him. She would not, of course, send for him. The small things she had gathered were not, as yet, anything. They were only darning stitches on top of a tear. But she had begun to gather them. By half-past five the village had begun its second movement. Mrs. Loxley, walking past Dainmead with her husband in the distance behind her, half raised her hand to Miss Marple's window and did not quite wave. She walked on. The lane, which had been so open an hour before, had drawn itself a little closed. The thread that had been unspooled in Evelyn's parlour on Friday morning was now being gathered up very neatly by the village,

who did not wish to see what a long pull would expose. Miss Marple closed the door. her window. She made herself a small pot of tea and sat with her knitting. The wool was the colour of apple blossom. The village this evening was the colour of an anodyne. She knitted two rows then stopped. She had made a small mistake in the count and knew she would have to take it back in the morning. She did not so dislike taking things back as she disliked borrowing trouble.

But trouble, in her experience, was never actually borrowed. It was always on the doorstep already, waiting to be let in. Inspector Aldridge closed the back door of the village hall, signed his name on the basket cover with a small flourish, and walked down the lane to the public call box at the post office. He dialed Markham for the senior forensic officer and said three things into the receiver. He said that the cup, due in his hand by 4.40 on Wednesday, was already on its way to the county analyst by special motor. He said that the cottage doormat had been bagged and a set of hairs recovered, mostly the deceased's, but with one short, auburn hair he wished to push under the microscope. He said that, between the

deceased's parlour and the lane … The gardener Sykes had helped Doreen Pratt sweep the catwalk on Friday morning, and the inspector would have liked a word with him. Then he put the receiver back and stood very still while the postmistress counted him out his coppers. He was, Miss Marple felt certain, though she was at home, not by the box, a man whose present satisfaction was the satisfaction of a crossroads. He had his man. Bernard Loxley's key.

Bernard Loxley's argument. Bernard Loxley's small sums. The inspector was, in fact, doing what people of his profession did to discipline their own appetite for doubt. He had laid one path ahead of him in such a way that the village would not have to look at another. She was, when her telephone rang at a quarter to six in the evening, courteous to Mr. Loxley himself. He was, in his own dry congregation of grievances, slightly laid back from the morning's keenness. Miss Marple, forgive the hour. I am alone in the study and reflects badly upon me. I should like, if I may, to express my position regarding certain matters which have come to my, to my, well, to my front door. Do, dear. They will tell you

that I was alone with Evelyn on Thursday afternoon. I was. About the embroidery circle accounts which she had asked me to audit, a small anomaly of seven pounds ten, about which I was within my rights to require clarification. She was very angry. I was not angry. Were you alone? I was, between half-past two and four. Her niece was out.

Mrs Pratt had gone home. The doctor was making his calls. The curate? There is no curate. Reverend Hull was in his study, the vicarage being perhaps three hundred yards from the cottage. He drew breath the way solicitors do when they wish to be even more precise. That is to say, Miss Marple, the Inspector has preferred that I am considered.

I have, over some decades, been considered in this village. I have represented the Loxley families, the Mertons, the Carringtons. I have asked nothing of anyone, but the village has chosen, more than once, to think the worst of me about sums of money. The sums of money being known to be sums of money. The sums being sums of money.

They are what Evelyn paid me to look after. She paid me to look after small sums, Miss Marple. The embroidery circle had been receiving a small annual grant from the Pemberton Trust. Seven pounds ten were not accounted for. I asked, in my way, a way which, I confess, can be exacting. Evelyn, who considered her accounts her own affair, took me sharply. She said, and I have not until now repeated this to the inspector, because the inspector prefers men with grudges, she said, Bernard, this is not your affair.

There is one thing in this house that is not your affair. She pointed to the sampler. I think, Miss Marple, she was alluding to a private document which she had put inside the backing of the sampler. You saw such a thing? I saw the bulge. I did not open the work. Why not? Because Evelyn Marchant had been a client of mine for forty-one years, and I do not open my clients' works unless they ask. Miss Marple made a small sound. Then, dear, the inspector's preference for you rests upon the kitchen-side thread, which you did not place, on the bulge alone, which you did not open, and on your key, which you have, I do not doubt, returned this afternoon. A small silence. Returned and witnessed, Miss Marple.

I stood in his office while he wrote it back into his ledger. I would not have minded had he given me a cup of tea. He will, dear, by Wednesday. He is a methodical man. She put the receiver back. Mr. Loxley, in his study, would not, she thought, sleep well. But Mr. Loxley was not the man. She went, by half-past seven, into the kitchen to speak to Mrs. Nightingale, who was washing up. Mrs. Nightingale, dear. Lady. I have a small errand.

If the Reverend Hull should call, I am at home. If he should not call, I will walk past his gate as I usually do at eight. I shall not turn in. I shall be carrying a small bunch of sweet peas. Yes, lady. She did not, in fact, walk to the gate. She retired upstairs at a quarter past eight and read for an hour before bed. The village, in that hour, did two things. Mrs Farrier telephoned Mrs Garland and said she had spoken to Tom Sykes in the lane, and that Tom had said, when asked if he had been in the cottage, I was, miss, on Friday morning, but only to fetch the camellias for the altar.

I helped Mrs Pratt at the parlour end as far as the door. I did not go inside, and Bernard Loxley, in his study, wrote a three-page letter to the inspector, which began, I think it my duty to inform you, since I can no longer in conscience keep it, that the deceased, my client, had for many years held documents of a personal and not entirely lawful nature in her keeping, and that the issue of these documents, rather than any small sum of money, appears to me to be the matter which lay beneath my final conversation with her. He signed it. He did not yet post it. He folded it into the inner drawer of his desk, under a small bundle of receipts, and went home to his cold supper.

At the vicarage, the Reverend Hull sat in his study with the door ajar. He was reading Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, in the edition of 1638, but he was not turning pages. He was thinking of Evelyn's cup, He had, on Friday morning, which is to say the morning of her death, taken his own early cup of tea at five, and from his window he had seen her kitchen light on. That was normal. He had not gone to the cottage. He was not, in his own mind, involved. But the light had been on again at eight after the doctor, and then at 8.15, when the doctor's bicycle was no longer at the gate, the light had gone out. He watched the road. The road watched him back. he turned the page. Mourners, sires, Burton wrote, are most apt to define their own melancholy.

On Sunday morning, very early, the parish clerk arrived at the church to find two women of the embroidery circle walking on the vicarage path, looking for the spring camellias. He said good morning. They asked after the reverend. The reverend, the clerk said, was in his vestry. Miss Marple walked down the lane at her usual half-past nine, with her prayer-book at the small of her back, and her hat pinned with an old brooch of her own grandmother's. The Reverend met her at the Lichgate, with the grave courtesy which was, in him, a kind of second nature. She asked after the Thursday remembrance for Evelyn. He said the parish council had helped him plan it. She said, That is good of them. He said, And of you, dear lady,

if you can come. She was about to walk on, the usual slow courtesy of the Sunday handshake, when— With a movement she had not rehearsed, she drew a small folded paper from her Sunday gloves and put it into his hand. Forgive me, she said. I found it on my path from Dainmead. It has your name on the cover.

I thought perhaps the wind had carried it. It had not. She had carried it. It was a small square of notepaper, folded into a business envelope, on which she had written, in her own unmistakable Spenserian hand, the hand of a generation of women who had learnt copperplate from Miss Turner's Academy at Cheltenham, the single word, Hull. The Reverend unfolded it.

The colour drained very slightly from his face. He did not move for a moment. Then he folded it, with great care, and put it into his own breast pocket. Thank you, he said. You are most kind. Good morning, Reverend. Good morning, Miss Marple. She walked into the church. Her step was light. She had given him, with that square of paper, a thing which is sometimes more dangerous than a question. She had given him the awareness that his own name, written in her hand, was now in his pocket, where he could not throw it away without first defacing it.

That alone was not, of course, an answer. It was only a crossroads. He must now choose, turn toward her with an explanation, or turn away. The village which lived at the crossroads of its gossip would tell her which way he went. Section 5. A French Knot That Puckers Miss Marple walked into the church that Sunday morning as one walks into a room where one has done a great deal of work and is now about to wait for the work to settle. The congregation was small, Dunsmuir's Sundays never ran to great numbers, but today several pews were mysteriously occupied by people who had not been seen in the church for years, drawn by the awful gravity of the village rather than by any sudden interest in theology.

Margaret Devereaux was in the third pew, with a posy of front-garden lavender pinned to her lapel. Mrs Farrier had come alone. Mr Sykes, in a jacket too tight across the shoulders, stood by the back pew near the font, and tried very hard to look as if he had not just come in for the warmth. The vicar took the service himself. He wore that morning a stole of dark red wool, the same shade of wool that Evelyn Marchant had once used for the row of poppies behind the war memorial on the sampler. He read the lesson from Ecclesiasticus in a voice that did not tremble. Only the stole trembled against the lectern, with the small tremor of a man's hands trying not to press against the wood.

He gave out the hymns in his usual manner and made the announcements at the end in his careful church voice. The Thursday remembrance for Evelyn Marchant would be held at half-past seven in the parish church. There would be an open meeting with readings from the Bishop of Chelmsford. Would any who wished to contribute a memory step forward at the door in the vestry book? The Reverend would be most grateful. He stepped down into the nave for the peace.

As he approached her pew he inclined his head and his hand was very slightly out from his side, as if to take hers, but she did not extend hers. She folded her hands in her lap and smiled the small old smile which Mrs. Nightingale knew was not the smiling of a woman without concerns, but of a woman who knew her concerns and had laid them out in a row. He passed on. At the door, as the congregation left, Margaret Devereaux waited to speak to Miss Marple.

Margaret had so many things to say that it was hard for her to begin. She began with the Thursday meeting. It's the sampler, Miss Marple. The sampler must not stay in the cottage tonight. We have a small tradition in the circle of reposing the work of a sister in the vestry table of the parish hall for the days before the unveiling. It comforts the village to see it in the good light. It also, forgive me, it also keeps the family from changing the locks. changing the locks. Oh, Jane, Miss Whittaker, she's very proper, but she's also quite certain that the sampler was her aunt's final gift to her, and not to the village. There has been a small frost between her and the circle ever since her aunt

took to her bed on Wednesday. She will not let it out of the cottage, except under protest, and the circle does not wish for a fight just now. No, said Miss Marple, no, that would not do, Inspector Aldridge has insisted that the cottage must stay shut for the forensic team until Wednesday evening. The Circle has its meeting on Thursday. There is the matter of the unveiling at the parish fete on Saturday. We are caught. Haven't you a friend at the parish council who could... Bernard is the friend. And Bernard is the man the inspector has, perhaps, in mind. He is a fish out of water this week. Yes, said Miss Marple. I expect he is. Margaret Devereaux had more to say, and said it. She said the Reverend

Hull had refused to take the sampler into the vestry at all. I cannot, my dear Mrs. Devereaux, she imitated his voice with accuracy, take a piece of unfinished and disturbed work into the church. It grieved Evelyn in her life. It would grieve her in her rest. Have patience. We shall decide. He had then gone off to his study.

He had not been seen since. He had not, Margaret said, spoken to her dead aunt's niece, Jane, at all. He had not asked to speak to the niece, he had asked to speak to Miss Marple, twice, and on both occasions she had been walked past his gate. Miss Marple made no comment. She took Margaret's lavender sprig and pressed it into her glove. At a quarter to twelve, when the congregation had dispersed and Mr Sykes had gone off down the lane with the secateurs, Miss Marple walked up to the vicarage gate and paused. From the back garden she could hear the small scratch of a hoe along gravel, and then a man's step, Tom Sykes, coming to the gate.

He lifted his cap. Lady? Mr Sykes. I was just, if I may, miss, I was just pulling the moss from the path. You were pulling the moss from the path under the vicarage window which faces north, which is where Reverend Hull sits in his study on a Sunday afternoon, with Barton, of which I have heard him speak. Tom Sykes looked faintly alarmed.' I didn't—that is, miss, he sits there in his study, and I sit below in the path, and it's no matter.'' It is very much a matter, Mr. Sykes.

Did you, on Friday morning, enter the cottage of Pembury with the camellias for the altar?'' I did, miss, with the camellias. Mrs. Pratt was there. We were careful to leave the parlour alone, but he, the Reverend, he'd asked me for the camellias to be ready early.' and I brought them inside. You brought them inside the kitchen, I expect? Yes, miss.

And then, forgive me, but did you, through the kitchen window, see the doctor's bicycle at the gate? No, miss. Did you, in any case, see the doctor's bag when he came to the cottage? Tom Sykes was silent. Mr. Sykes. I saw, miss. I saw the bag set down in the hall. I did not see the doctor take anything from the bag.

Reverend Hull. I only mention it because of how the village is. Reverend Hull, that morning, was not in his vestry. He was at the lane gate. I saw him at the lane gate about a quarter past five when the camellias were coming in. He did not come down. He did not need to come down. He was just looking.

Looking at what, Mr Sykes? At the kitchen window of Pemberry, Miss. Then he left the gate. Miss Marple thanked him and walked on. She did not praise, she did not chide. She thanked him because a young man must be thanked. What she had now, what she was laying out in her mind on the Longdon breakfast service of her own thoughts, with the small patient clicking of one silver spoon to another, was a knot. A small knot. A French knot. In needlework, the French knot is a single coil of thread worked twice around the needle and drawn down to the cloth.

It is a tiny dot of raised work, a stitch no bigger than a small pinhead and as innocent-looking as a pinhead. But a French knot, if pulled at from beneath, will pucker the cloth around it. The cloth will draw up around the point of the knot, gather, twist, and the more one pulls, the more the cloth is puckered.

One French knot can ruin a square inch of careful cross-stitch. That was what she had. That was why she had on Sunday morning at the Lichgate, put into the Reverend's breast pocket, not a question, but the awareness that he had been seen. Not by another person, not by the village, not by the inspector. By an old woman in a hat, who had seen him at the lane gate, watching for the doctor's bicycle, at five on the morning that Evelyn Marchant died. And the second thing she had was Tom Sykes's quiet recognition that the vicar had, in his own way, watched too. She did not yet know what had been drawn down into the knot. She did not know what, under the cloth, was being puckered. But she knew there

was one stitch, on a square of cloth, in a piece of embroidery, placed by a hand that knew exactly how to pull it tight. It was now Sunday afternoon. The village had arranged itself into a quiet shape again. Mrs Farrier and Mrs Garland were having tea at the bull's head, and had, for the moment, stopped saying that it had been Bernard. The vicar had gone into his study and shut the door. The gardener had stopped pulling moss.

The inspector had gone back to Markham with his basket, and his notebook was closed in his inside pocket, with a single ribbon marking the page where Bernard Loxley and a key and seven pounds ten sat in a tidy little row. The cloth of the village had been, was being, drawn tight. In the parlour of Pembury Cottage, by what small benevolence no one could afterwards account for, the sampler, Yes, the sampler, still lay in its hoop on the small chair where Evelyn had placed it on the Wednesday afternoon before she fell ill. Jane Whittaker had locked the parlour.

She had taken the pincushion. She had not yet known that the pincushion had been taken from the cottage. She had, in fact, not taken the pincushion. She had taken the sampler hoop itself up to her bedroom on Thursday, intending, the inspector had permitted it, on condition of leaving the room sealed, intending to grieve over it on Friday. The sampler was therefore not on the chair. It was upstairs, and the back of the sampler, where a small square of paper had been sewn into the seam of the backing, was now. As Evelyn had said, there is one thing in this house that is not your affair. Miss Marple did not, of course, go to Pembury Cottage. She sat on that Sunday afternoon with the Reverend's paper in her pocket,

the lavender in her glove, and the Inspector's Bernard in her mind. The knot, she thought, will tighten tomorrow, or the day after, or the day after that. The knot will tighten, and when it does, the cloth will pucker, and the village, which is its cloth, will know it has been gathered into a knot it did not intend to wear. She stirred, set her hat down, and went upstairs to her own small sitting-room to mend the row of apple-blossom she had knitted wrong. Section 6. Tambor, Held Upside Down The Monday after Evelyn Marchant died was a quiet day in Dunsmuir, the kind of quiet which sits, Miss Marple observed, more like a piece of furniture than a mood. There were no cars on the lane beyond the inspector's, no callers at Pembury Cottage beyond the inspector's constable,

no village voices in the lane beyond Jane Whittaker's, and Jane's voice had not been heard by Miss Marple since Saturday. The niece had gone to the vicarage on Sunday afternoon, by Jane's small note left at Dainmead's door, and had not yet returned. Bernard Loxley had telephoned Markham to say that the cottage key had been returned, witnessed, and that he had, in addition, a written account of his final interview with Evelyn. The inspector had driven out to Pembury to receive the letter, and to take tea with the niece, who had not, in fact, returned to Dainmead, but to the vicarage. Dr Carrington had gone about his rounds. The Reverend had not been seen. Miss Marple, sitting by the dining-room window with a folded napkin in her lap, did

not stir. The morning left her with the strange feeling that the lane was holding its breath. At nine she heard Mrs Nightingale go down to the post office and come back with the village paper and a small bar of Fry's Turkish Delight, which she had allowed herself, given the news, and a copy of the Church Times, which she had not. At half past nine, Tom Sykes walked past the window with the watering can. He glanced up at her. He did not wave. He walked on. At ten, Margaret Devereaux walked past, more upright than was her custom, with a posy of Sunday lavender pinned to her hat as if she was going to a service. At a quarter past ten, the inspector's car drew up at Pembury Cottage, and two constables went inside. They were inside twenty-two minutes.

When they came out, they were carrying, Miss Marple saw through the lace of her curtain, a small wooden hoop, square, with a piece of folded linen stretched taut across the face of it. They set it in the front seat of the car. One of them, a tall young man with a half-shaved chin, got in beside the hoop, the way a nurse sits beside a child on a train.

That hoop was the sampler. The car drove off. The lane behind it went very quiet. Miss Marple rang Mrs Nightingale into the room and asked her, with the simple courtesy of an old woman whose age excuses a great deal of small directness, to bring her the inspector's card, which had been left on the hall stand two days ago.

She held the card in her fingers, ran her thumbnail along its edge, and waited for the small convention of civility that customs, in villages, take their time over. At half-past eleven the inspector telephoned. He was, he said, in the parish hall with the sampler on the long table, and was Miss Marple well enough to walk across and look before the forensic photographer came at noon, and before the case, as he put it, got its paperwork in order.

He was civil. He was careful. She said she would be glad of a small ride in his car if it was not putting him out. He said he would be around the bend in ten minutes. In the parish hall, on the long table, the sampler lay under its hoop, on a sheet of clean muslin. Miss Marple was helped to a chair, and the inspector stood on the other side of the table, hat in hand, his notebook shut.

Margaret Devereaux, on his invitation, was also there. So was Jane Whittaker, in a dark blue dress, who had been fetched in from the vicarage in the inspector's second car, and who now stood at the foot of the table with her hands clasped in front of her, looking at the cloth. There were two sides to a piece of embroidery, Miss Marple said, by way of beginning. She had been threading, that morning, a small cushion cover for the church fete, and she had, by chance, got out the wrong kind of frame, the round one, which her mother had called a tambour. She said that a tambour frame was held like a small drum, with the cloth stretched tight under two hoops. If one held it with the right side up, one saw the picture. If one held it upside down,

one saw the workings, the going through and the going over of the needle. She said that for nearly every piece of fine work in this country, the right side and the wrong side were joined by a thinking and a patience which a watcher might not, at first, appreciate. She was, of course, looking at the back of the sampler.

She had, of course, not been invited to do so. But the inspector, who had a habit of being useful to older women, bent the hoop gently on his side and she walked round with Margaret at her elbow and looked at the underside. The underside was a country of small star shapes, French knots, satin stitches, a careful blanket-stitch border at the edge. In the centre, near the top left, where the village pond was on the face, there was on the back an undisturbed sea of soft-looking cross-stitch. She did not touch the cloth. She read the back of the sampler the way one reads a long letter by the shape of it. Inspector, she said, has Miss Whittaker ever sewn? My aunt taught me from seven, Jane said, surprising herself. I am a fair hand, I do not unpick.

You do not unpick, Miss Marple said gently. No, that is right of you. She turned back to the inspector and asked if he would permit her, with her old glove, to lift a single corner of the cloth at the very edge of the hoop, just enough to feel the seam at the top. He said yes. She did so. She felt it. She sat back. The cloth on the back of the hoop was, in a single corner, double.

There was a piece of cotton lawn stretched behind the linen, and the lawn had been stitched by a tight row of running stitch to the linen itself, in a small square at the centre top. The lawn was just old enough to have gone yellow at the edges. The running stitch, in dark thread, had been tightened once by someone with a careful hand. It had not been disturbed since Evelyn died by any hand. It would have been disturbed had the sampler been moved, for the lawn was what held the small square of paper to the back of the hoop, and that square of paper had been, Jane Whittaker was now certain, a folded check-book cover. I think, said Miss Marple, that Inspector Aldridge should look with his glove on the

lawn where my thumb now rests. There is something there. Margaret, dear, would you fetch him a magnifying glass? The inspector was patient. He had, Miss Marple felt, been patient for two days, and was willing to be a little more patient. He looked. He saw. He drew a long breath and shut his eyes. The lawn at the square of running stitch had been unstitched on its inside by a very fine scalpel or by a fingernail cut to a point. The thread lay curled on the lawn like a thin shaving. The square of paper where it had been was not at all.

The paper had been taken.' Truman,' said the inspector, turning to the constable.' Truman, what time did you leave on Friday morning?'' Half- past six, sir.'' And Mrs Pratt?'' She left at six, sir.'' Mr Sykes?'' Six o'clock sharp, sir. He took the camellias away at five.'' And the doctor?'' The inspector was working through the door of Pembury, the doctor at the door at nine. The doctor alone with the body.' The doctor who had taken the pincushion and the workbag, and who had, the inspector now saw, had access to the back of the sampler on Friday morning between nine and nine-fifteen. Dr Carrington, the inspector said half to himself, had opportunity. He did not yet say he was the man.

He only said he had opportunity. Jane Whittaker's voice in the parish hall was small. Inspector, my aunt's pincushion. Did you ever find it? The inspector drew out the basket and showed her. The cushion, in its velvet, sat in the bottom. Jane did not touch it. She looked at it and said, My mother gave that cushion to my aunt, and my aunt gave it to me on Thursday, in her bedroom, with her wedding ring, which is on my finger.

They are not rightly the inspector's to hold. They are mine. Miss Whittaker, the inspector said, The cushion and the ring will, very soon, be returned to you. But I should tell you, there is no pinned needle in your cushion. There never was. Jane looked up. The colour drained just a little from her face. My aunt had a needle in that cushion for forty years, she said. She would never have unpinned it.

The inspector said, It is not unpinned, Miss Whittaker. The needle has been drawn with a small pair of tweezers from the velvet. We have it here. He held out a small kit jar in which a fine steel needle lay, with the eye end bent at forty-five degrees and a dark residue caked on its shaft. It was Evelyn's third needle.

It was the one she had used for forty years to mend her husband's trousers. It was the needle that had been, on Friday morning, in the velvet, just below the wire of the cushion. It had been drawn out, at some time on Friday morning, by a hand which knew, which knew, with the patient knowledge of a woman who keeps a pincushion for forty years, exactly how the needle lay in the cushion. The hand had taken the needle, dipped it in the residue, and returned it. Now, Miss Marple said softly, we know it was no accident. We know someone, with a knowledge of Evelyn's cushion and a careful hand and time enough on Friday morning to do it quietly, set the needle to draw out and reset it before the doctor's call. And the residue on the

shaft is what we are to send to Markham by Wednesday. The inspector was very quiet. Tamble, Miss Marple said, lifting her hand from the cloth. If one holds the hoop upside down, one sees the working side. The picture on the face is the village. The working on the back is the actual labour. The village, dear people, has been looking at the face. The labour has been on the back.

She lifted her glove from the cloth. Inspector, she said, I have a small favour to ask. Will you keep the sampler here, in this room, on this table, until Wednesday? Don't let it go to the vicarage. Don't let it go to the surgery. Don't let it out of Margaret's sight, because Margaret has been keeping its picture since she was seven.

And don't let it out of the inspector's sight, because it is also a piece of evidence. The inspector said he would not. The inspector, who was a methodical man, was now a methodical man with a suspicion, and his suspicions sat like the tambour held upside down on the working side of the cloth. Thank you, dear. She did not say who. She did not yet know who. She had now a piece of evidence pointing at opportunity, and could not yet say whose hand had been, on Friday morning, at the velvet of the velvet. In the lane, the Reverend Hull, walking past on his way home from the vicarage, saw the inspector's car, and turned his hat in his hand.

He did not look in at the parish hall. He walked on. In the lane, too, Tom Sykes, watering the vicarage wall, saw the inspector's car and said to the wall, My aunt's pincushion. He shook his head. He kept watering. The village, which had held its breath, let it out. Not yet. Not yet, Miss Marple thought. The labour was still on the back of the hoop. The face of the sampler was still the village as it had been.

Until Wednesday, the cloth was held in the parish hall, with both sides still showing. Section 7 Cruel pulled over silk. The 1st of August settled over the parish of Dunsmuir with a stillness that, Miss Marple observed from her window at Dainmead, was not in the air, but in the people. The wind, what was left of it, blew the bunting sideways along the railings of the village hall. The bell of the parish church rang at half-past six, as it always did, and the postman, Mr Garstang, came down the lane at five minutes past nine with three letters, an invoice for a ham, and a copy of the Dunsmuir Monthly, which carried no fewer than four advertisements for the unveiling on Saturday. The village, on its face, was unchanged. On

the back of the village, on the working side of the tambour, as Miss Marple would have said, three things had happened since Saturday, and they were the kinds of three things that, in a village of this size, would have been quite enough to set the year out of joint by itself. The first was the visit on Monday, of Mr Beecham from the County Record Office, who came at the Inspector's request to look at the back of the sampler hoop. Mr Beecham, who was a thin man with a moustache and the habit of looking at embroidered cloth as if it had taxed him personally, took one look at the working side and went rather quiet. He said in a small voice that the lawn behind the linen was not of parish make. He said it was,

on its grain, of the sort of fabric one found in ladies' writing desks of an earlier period, and that the running stitch which had held the small square of paper to the lawn had been sewn not with parish silk, but with a doubled thread of a heavier gauge, the kind of thread one might find in a soldier's housewife or in the workbox of a country parson. The gauge is unusual, he said, folding his hands behind his back.

I would expect to find it in clerical workboxes of the period, or in the kind of needle and thread set which the Mother's Union used to put up for chaplains going abroad. He did not say whose. He had not, in the few minutes he had been in the hall, set eyes on the Vicarage or on the Reverend. The second thing that had happened was a small ceremony late on Monday afternoon in the parish church. The Reverend Hull had taken the routine Monday Evensong with the same small congregation that attended every week. Three or four of the embroidery circle, two or three of the parish council, Mr Garstang the postman, who always attended because he liked the acoustics, and Mrs Pratt, who had come in for the warmth.

He wore at Evensong two stoles, the white of the day and a small black one over his soutane, and he gave the sermon on the text, Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, from the Gospel of St Matthew. It was a sermon, by general agreement in the lane afterwards, which was the vicar's best. He spoke about Evelyn Marchant as if she had been a particular friend of his, even though he had known her, by his own admission, only since Christmas. He spoke about what he called the visible and the invisible forms of a village's memory. He spoke about wool. He said wool three times, which a careful listener would have noticed, and how the visible wool of a stole was one thing, and the invisible, working

wool of its lining was another. He said— and this was the line that Mr Garstang, on his way out, repeated to Miss Marple over the garden wall. The covering wool is not always the warming wool. Miss Marple, on hearing it, did not stir. She said, Yes, dear, he says some very good things. And by the small movement of her mouth on the word good, she did not say what she thought of them. The third thing that had happened was the arrival, on Tuesday morning, of the post-mortem and the toxicology. The toxicology was as the doctor had expected, thallium in small quantity in the tinctured leaves of a household tisane of chamomile and peppermint of the sort Evelyn had kept in the kitchen cupboard. The post-mortem

was more particular. It set the time of death at between eleven in the morning of Friday and three in the afternoon of the same day. The doctor had revised his estimate of the half-hour in the parlour. The inspector's notebook was, once again, open. He came up to Pembury at three o'clock on Tuesday, alone this time, with the toxicology report in a sealed envelope. He read it to himself, twice, and put it in his pocket. He asked Mrs Pratt, who had come up from the village hall at his request, whether the kitchen tea tins had been kept where they had been. Mrs Pratt said they had. He asked whether, since Friday, anyone had touched them. Mrs Pratt said no one had touched the tea tins. The doctor had not,

the niece had not, the vicar had not. Mrs Pratt paused and said, The gardener, Mr Sykes, brought in a basket of camellias on Friday morning. He did not touch the tins. He was not asked to. The inspector asked Mrs Pratt, with the same formal courtesy, whether she could leave the kitchen to him for a half hour. Mrs Pratt said she could. The inspector went in. He was inside for an hour. He came out with a small folded paper, a kitchen towel in fact, marked and sealed, and a small brown glass vial. Miss Marple was looking out of the dining-room window when, by half-past four, Dr Hugh Carrington came up the lane on his bicycle, hatless, pale, looking, it must be said, the way a man looks who has been told something he has suspected for a day

and a half but has not yet been moved to confirm. He stopped at the gate of Pembury. and stood looking at the door. The lane was empty. The lavender had been cut down by Mrs. Devereaux on Sunday afternoon, and the place where it had stood was brown and bare. He stood there for perhaps two minutes, with the bicycle between his knees and the inspector's motor-coupé coming up behind him, by which time Miss Marple had walked down the lane herself, with her little lace-up shoes and her small handbag, and stood at her own gate at the far end, with the postcard of the Apostle's greeting in her mind, of the visible and the invisible stoles of the Reverend Hull.

Carrington turned to her and inclined his head. Good afternoon, Miss Marple. He did not speak of the toxicology. He did not speak of his half-hour in the kitchen. He said, and this, she felt, was the careful courtesy of a man who was not yet lying, but was very close to the line. I should like to ask your advice, Miss Marple, on a matter of parish importance. She said, Of course, dear. Walk with me a little. and she turned up the lane with him, at the pace of older women, past the vicarage gate and on towards the lich gate. Forgive me, I, uh, I have been in the kitchen this afternoon, and the inspector has, uh, asked me, as the regular medical man, certain questions about the household Tizan.

Did I, in, uh, process of my call, in passing, by chance, I do not, uh, in any way mean to mislead, Did I, in passing, shake from a small bottle into the chamomile, because, Miss Marple, I must be plain? I am now told that a small brown glass vial, marked with my initials, was on the top shelf of Evelyn Marchant's kitchen cupboard. It was not hers. The doctor before me, who practised for thirty years in this village, kept a bottle of dilute thallium salts there for rodent work on the allotment. He died ten years ago. His successor, me, at the time, did not dispose of the bottle. It has been there on the shelf, in the same place, for ten years. Miss Marple inclined her head. You are saying, dear,

that the bottle of poison on the top shelf of the deceased's kitchen was the bottle of your predecessor, with your initials on it? It is, yes. I had, ah, supposed, when the inspector came, that the vial was one I had myself put there this winter. I keep it there for allotment work. It is marked, in fact, with my own initials. I had thought, when the toxicology report came through, that no one would question whether, ah, that vial was on the shelf at all. It has always been on the shelf. It has been on the shelf in that same place for ten years. Dear Doctor, said Miss Marple very gently, what you are saying, plainly, to the Inspector and to the village and to the Almighty— What you are saying is that you are the man. He did

not turn his face to her. He kept it on the lich gate and the small path beyond it, and his bicycle wheel caught the sun. I am saying, I am saying that the bottle was on the shelf. I am saying that the inspector's forensic officer will say that the bottle, when he lifts the dust from it, has been lifted from the shelf by someone's hand within the last four days. I am saying that on the shelf, where the bottle sat, There is a clean oval of dust, and the rest of the cupboard is dusty. I am saying that someone, within the last four days, took down the bottle, used it, and put it back. I am saying that the person who did that had access to the kitchen. Miss Marple was silent. Miss Marple, I did not take the bottle down. I did not use it.

I have no purpose in using it. The bottle was, I am certain, on the shelf on Wednesday. I have no memory of taking it down. I have no memory of putting it back. I am, in the inspector's notebook, the man of opportunity. She looked at him, the doctor of the village, the bachelor, the man who read Burton at Evensong, the man who did not weep at funerals.

She said, and her voice was low, Dear doctor, I will tell you something an older woman learns only very late in her life, and it is this. A man who is innocent will often, in the moment he is told he is suspected, say, No, no, I did not do it. A man who is preparing to do it, and there are such men, dear, will often say it was the bottle. It is on the shelf. It is where it has always been. It is there. He will say it because he is rehearsing. You, my dear, are not rehearsing. You are, on the contrary, almost ready to weep.

You have no rehearsed phrase in your mouth. You have a real one. I did not take the bottle down, and you would not be saying it now, in the open air, like this, if it were not true. You are being, dear doctor, levied at, which is to say, the inspector is being given an opportunity to believe the worst of you, and the worst of you is not, I think, the worst. I would rather, he said, be the worst than be accused of being the worst. Yes, she said, of course you would, but then, dear, the village does not always allow a man to choose. They walked on, past the lich gate, to where the lich path bent down to the road and the post office was visible. The Reverend Hull, on the far side of the road, was just closing his gate with his latchkey.

He did not, on this occasion, look over. Thank you, Miss Marple. Do not thank me, dear. Wait. Listen. She was watching the Reverend close his gate. The latch clicked. The key turned. Listen to the reverend's latch, she said. Hear how he closes his gate, covering bless and working. The covering side bless of a piece of embroidery, and the working side. They are not the same wool. They have not been put on by the same hand. Note, and I shall not say this lightly, note the reverend's stole.

His stole? The black stole that he wore on Monday evening at Evensong. The inside lining. The lining is a piece of wool, dear, of an older make. The visible side is a piece of cruel wool, of the kind one sees on a country parson's stole. The lining is of a different weight, and a different shade, and an older dye. It is not the same wool. It has been put on by a hand that knows something of clerical needlework, by a hand that has done this kind of work before, a hand that knows where to cut, when to cut, when to put the needle through the velvet of an old cushion with tweezers, and when to set it back, she did not say more. She turned up her own path and went home. The doctor walked on.

He did not, and this is what Miss Marple noted with astonishment and would remember for years, he did not go back to Pembury Cottage. He went by the back lane to Markham, to the inspector's office, and told the inspector in a quiet voice what he had told Miss Marple, and laid his medical bag on the desk and said, I am the man of opportunity. I am not the man.

Find the man. The inspector, in his methodical way, wrote it down. The village, in the late afternoon of Tuesday, was all of one piece. Margaret had called an emergency meeting of the embroidery circle for that evening at seven in the parish hall. Bernard had telephoned to ask whether he might attend. Margaret said he might, but he was asked, please— to wear a plain worsted, and not to bring the village paper. The inspector said he would attend also.

Miss Marple said she would attend if not prevented. The reverend said, and this was the last thing he said that day, to Tom Sykes, who was walking past the vicarage gate, I should be glad to see you in my study for ten minutes tomorrow at nine. Tom Sykes said, Yes, sir. The cruel of the vicar's stole had been pulled over the silk of his cloth. One could see the wool, One could not, at a glance, see what was beneath it, but beneath the wool, in this case, was a dark-coloured lining, and the lining had, Miss Marple was almost certain of this, a small hole the size of a needle's eye at the place where the velvet of the cousin's cushion would have rested, in the pocket of a stole. The village, which had been drawn to a knot, would need to

be told, but not, she thought, until to-morrow. To-morrow, she thought, the knot would either loosen or pull. Section 8. The Tent Stitch The emergency meeting of the embroidery circle was called at seven o'clock on Tuesday evening, in the long room above the post office. It was not, by any custom of the parish, a quiet meeting. The embroidery circle had long been given to the raising of voices in pursuit of a single thread, but on this Tuesday the quieter women of the village were in attendance also, and the room, which usually smelt of beeswax and risen scones, smelt, instead, of carbolic soap and a small phial of gin which Miss Garstang had thought it prudent to bring. Inspector Aldridge came in early. He wore his working suit, not the

one he had taken tea in at Pembury, and his notebook was already out. Margaret Devereaux sat at the head of the table with the gavel on her palm. Miss Marple was helped to a chair at the corner, near the cold fireplace, with Mrs Nightingale beside her. Jane Whittaker came in alone and sat at the foot of the table, with a small reticule of brown velvet in her lap.

Bernard Loxley stood in the doorway, with his hat still on, until Margaret asked him to take it off and sit down, which he did with the small, reluctant air of a man who had not yet decided whether to be of, or out of, the parish's good grace. Reverend Hull was not present. Margaret, with a small bow to the inspector, said she had asked him, and he had declined with thanks.

He had said, through the Reverend's housekeeper, that the parish did not, at this moment, need two men of God in the same room. It's Bernard, you know it's Bernard, said Mrs Farrier, in a voice which was too loud for the room, and Mrs Garland gave her a small frown. It's not Bernard, said Bernard Loxley. I should like to say...

with the Inspector's permission, why it is not Bernard, and I should like to say it now, because it is the third time I have been asked this in eighteen hours, and I find the question a little wearing. Mr. Loxley, said the Inspector, I have asked for a witness, not a confessor. Then witness this. On Thursday afternoon, the day before the deceased took ill, I called at Pembury Cottage by appointment, with my clerk, Miss Possilthwaite, in my own motor car, to discuss the embroidery circle accounts. I was inside for approximately one hour and forty minutes. I went into the kitchen, alone, to wash my hands. I did not open any cupboard. I did not, in particular, open the cupboard on the top shelf. The cupboard was at

the height of my shoulder. I can attest to its dustiness. I can attest in this company that the bottle was not on the shelf at 4.30 on Thursday afternoon. The room was quiet. Mrs Nightingale's hand on the arm of Miss Marple's chair rose a fraction. My clerk will confirm the same. She did not open the cupboard. I did not open the cupboard. Mrs Pratt was in the kitchen the whole time, at the dresser, washing up the team's china after the circle meeting of the previous day. Mrs Pratt had her back to me the whole time I was at the sink. She was within two feet of the cupboard. She did not turn around. She did not see me open the cupboard. She did not see me not open the cupboard. But she did see the dust

on the top of the cupboard when she dusted on the Saturday morning after. She saw the oval of clean dust where the bottle had been, and she did not say so until Saturday. Miss Marple murmured, very softly, Ah. It was the ah of an old woman who has at last been adjusted to the pitch of a piece of husbandry. Mrs Nightingale did not ask. Margaret did not ask.

The inspector, however, was looking at his notebook. Mrs Pratt, at that point, had already given evidence, twice, that the bottle was not handled between Thursday afternoon and Friday morning. Either she had not looked at the top of the shelf, which is not really possible for a woman who dusts every Saturday, or she had, and she had not seen the bottle. she had been looking for it and had not seen it. Or, which is now the answer more carefully considered, she could not have seen it, because the bottle was not on the shelf when she dusted on Saturday morning. The clean oval of dust had been left by somebody else after Saturday morning, who took the bottle, used it, and put it back, but after Mrs Pratt

had dusted and reported her evidence. That's what's wrong with the inspector's notebook. That's why the dust on the top of the cupboard does not fit the bottle's schedule. The inspector's face closed. He did not speak. He turned the page of his notebook and looked at his own writing of two days ago. He said slowly, Continue, Mr. Loxley.

I should like to make an additional statement, with the inspector's permission. On Thursday afternoon, at the cottage, in the course of my conversation with the deceased, she pointed to the sampler hoop. She said, and I have not, until now, reported this, Bernard, this is not your affair. There is one thing in this house that is not your affair.

She pointed to the hoop. She said, I do not, at this moment, wish you to open the back. I did not open it. I left. Now, and this is the detail which your inspector has not, I think, considered. Mrs Pratt, at the same moment, was in the kitchen, washing up. The kitchen door was ajar. Mrs Pratt heard the deceased say this. She heard her say, There is one thing in this house that is not your affair, and she heard it said, by the deceased, in a tone which Mrs Pratt described to me yesterday, in confidence, as, a tone I had not heard her use in twenty years of friendship. Because, Inspector, they were friends. They had been friends, Mrs Pratt and the deceased, since school. And the deceased was telling Mrs Pratt, in the tone of

one friend to another, that Mrs Pratt was now to be left out of one piece of business in the cottage. and Mrs Pratt did not, in her witness statements, mention it. Why? Because Mrs Pratt is not only a witness. Mrs Pratt, Inspector, is a person with something to conceal. The Inspector closed his notebook. The Inspector had, Miss Marple saw, with the sad, amused patience of an old woman who had seen this kind of self-portrait very many times before, believed Mr Loxley.

The inspector believed Mr. Loxley, because Mr. Loxley had been in earnest. Mr. Loxley had been earnest about Mrs. Pratt, and the inspector, being a man of method and therefore a man of small faith in earnestness, was, for the first time in the inquiry, almost ready to follow the earnest man where the earnest man wished to go. Which is to say, the inspector was beginning to be taken away from Dr. Carrington. Miss Marple coughed. It was the polite, dry, small cough of an old woman who is about to speak and wishes to be given the floor. Inspector, Mrs Pratt has been a careful neighbour. She has also, and I am sorry to say it, Mrs Pratt has been one of those people who think that the truth is best divided into one part to be spoken and two

parts to be kept. The truth that she heard on Thursday afternoon, in the kitchen, at the door, is the truth she kept. The truth that she put into her witness statements was a different truth. A truth that the inspector could use, and a truth she could quietly omit. Mr Loxley is correct. The bottle, to everyone's surprise, including her own, was not on the shelf when Mrs Pratt dusted on Saturday. It was not on the shelf because it was in her apron. in her pocket, in her own kitchen, in her own backyard. Mrs Pratt stood up suddenly at the foot of the table, with her hands in front of her. Lady Marple, I was never, I never, you never used the bottle, dear. I am not saying that.

I am saying it was in your possession for a short time, and that it was in someone else's for a shorter time. The bottle was not in the cupboard on Saturday morning, because it had, on Friday night, been given to you by someone who did not wish to have it be in the cupboard when the inspector's forensic team came on Monday. And you were, that evening, sitting in your kitchen, with the bottle in your apron pocket, and you were, let me say this gently, very frightened.

And I do not blame you for being frightened. I do not blame you for taking it. I blame you only for the small lie of not mentioning, in your witness statements, that you heard Evelyn Marchant say, on Thursday afternoon, of the sampler hoop that there was one thing in this house that was not your affair. The inspector's face was very pale. He said, Mrs. Pratt, will you step this way, please? Truman, will you and Mr. Price go to the inspector's office? I should like a private word. Mrs.

Pratt did not move. Mrs. Pratt was looking at Miss Marple. Lady, I took the bottle. I took it because the Reverend asked me to. He came on Friday evening to my kitchen. He said it had always been there, in his study, and that the doctor had put it there. He said he could not, in his conscience as a clergyman, leave it there for the inspector's men to find, with the doctor's name on it, in a deceased woman's kitchen cupboard.

He said the inspector would destroy the doctor. He said he wished to protect the doctor. He said his conscience would not allow it. And so I took it, and put it in a tin of lard, and on Saturday morning, when I dusted, the cupboard was already empty. He had been there, on Friday night, between the doctor's visit and the inspector's visit, and he had put the bottle in his own pocket, and had carried it to my kitchen, where I put it in the lard tin, and then, on Monday, when the inspector's forensic officer came, I, since I had been the one who had touched the bottle, I went, at his instruction, and returned the bottle, and reset it on the top shelf of the cupboard, to throw the dust. He said, Forgive me, Inspector. He said,

It was, in his conscience, the only just thing to do. The Inspector sat down. Margaret Devereaux sat down. Mrs Farrier sat down. Mrs Nightingale did not sit down. She moved very quietly to the head of the table and stood behind Miss Marple's chair. Inspector, said Miss Marple, what is the time? Nearly nine, Miss Marple. Then, Inspector, you should send your men very promptly to the vicarage, with a search warrant, because the bottle which Mrs. Pratt in her turn has been so good as to reset on the shelf on Monday morning at 8.30, has, in fact, been reset on the shelf on Monday morning at 8.30, day morning at 8.30, has, in the meantime, not been reset on the top shelf by Mrs. Pratt alone. There is

in the cupboard, as of this moment, a second oval of clean dust. The bottle has been there, taken down and put back twice. Once by Reverend Hull, as I have said. Once by someone else. And the someone else, Inspector, has not yet declared himself. It is not Mrs. Pratt. It is not Mr. Loxley. And it is not, Inspector, the Doctor. The Inspector was on his feet. He was at the door. He was signalling with a small movement of the finger to the constables in the corridor. Miss Marple lifted her glove from the arm of the chair. Inspector, do not frighten him. He is, in his way, a frightened man and a careful man. and a man who has been consistent in his frightenedness. He has done in the parish very little wrong and a great deal right,

and he has done a great deal of a particular kind wrong. He will tell you when you knock what is in the back of the sampler hoop, or, more precisely, what was in it and what he did with it. He will have it by now in his own study, in a tin of his own. He is a careful man and a frightened man, and the tin is in his desk. The key is in his pocket. He, the Reverend Hull, deposited the checkbook on his own desk on Friday night. He did not send it to the boy's family, of whom he has, of course, an entire separate history.

He had already, last autumn, a meeting with the boy's father. He has, Inspector, a great deal more to tell than the parish has yet understood. The Inspector paused at the door. Miss Marple, who is the boy? The boy, Inspector, was a boy of nine years old, in another parish, in another county, in another part of England, in the year 1982.

The boy was called, by his parents, and by the parish in which he died, Martin Loxley. The room did not move. Bernard Loxley did not move. The boy was the cousin of Mr Bernard Loxley, who was at that time eight and twenty years old. The boy died on the road, of injuries sustained in a hit-and-run accident on the night of his sister's christening. The hit-and-run driver was a young man of 19, who was, at that time, Evelyn Marchant's younger brother. And the young man of 19, who was Evelyn's brother, is Inspector, the Reverend Tobias Hull.

The boy who died was Evelyn's nephew. The chequebook that was in the back of the sampler hoop, the chequebook that Evelyn had kept for 40 years hidden in her own work, was the checkbook by which Evelyn, in her old age and newfound conscience in the spring of this year, had intended, with her niece Jane Whittaker and with the parish's journalist in tow, to reopen the inquest. And the checkbook was not Evelyn's property, Inspector. It was the boy's parents' property, who were the cousins of Mr Bernard Loxley.

And Mr Loxley has, for forty-one years, known it, and has never mentioned it, because Mr Loxley, Inspector, is a man who can never forgive his cousin Bernard for being the boy's uncle at the time the boy died. Mr. Loxley sat down. Mr. Loxley put his hands flat on the table. Mr. Loxley, who had been hovering on the edge of being a figure of fun, was now a figure of grief. That will do, Inspector, Miss Marple said very gently. I should like to rest. The Inspector went out.

The Constables went out. The door shut. Margaret Devereaux sat at the head of the table, with the gavel in her hand, but did not lift it. Jane Whittaker pressed her handkerchief to her mouth and did not speak. Mrs Nightingale, behind Miss Marple's chair, murmured, Lady, are you all right? I am quite all right, dear. She undid her glove.

She took the small square of paper with the Reverend's name on the cover from her glove and put it on the table. Then she took the card of the village fete. the card on which Miss Marple had, two days ago, written the word Hull from her reticule and set it beside the square of paper. She had, with that card, planted the snare. She had done so without presuming.

She had done so because she had not known, but had half guessed, that the Reverend was the man of the same wool in another man's silk. The card was the tent-stitch of her snare. the small stitch that holds two rows of cloth together at evenly measured spaces. She had placed a tent stitch in the vicar's conscience, and the parish, at nine o'clock on a Tuesday evening, was on its way to holding together. Outside, in the lane, the inspector's motor was starting in the dusk, on its way to the vicarage. Section 9. The Binding Off The inspector's motor coupé drew up at the Vicarage Gate at twenty minutes past nine on Tuesday evening, with the constables in the front and the warrant in his pocket. The lane,

which had been so quiet an hour before, was entirely dark. The Vicarage windows, however, were lit in three places. The study on the ground floor, the kitchen to the rear, and, Miss Marple would have said she had not noticed this, but she had, the small vestry window at the side, where the curate would have sat, if the curate there were.

Inspector Aldridge knocked twice. He knocked twice because the first knock, on the dark wood of the vicarage door, was the knock of custom. The second was the knock of business. The Reverend Tobias Hull opened the door himself. He was still in his cassock, with the white stole of the day laid over his arm, and the small black stole of the Monday Evensong folded in his other hand. He inclined his head to the inspector and asked the constables in as if they had come for a cup of tea.

I have a warrant, the inspector said very quietly. Reverend, I am very sorry to trouble you at this hour. You are not troubling me, Mr Hull said. I have been expecting you. I was reading Burton. I was reading Burton because Burton, in his anatomy, has the line that a guilty man returns to his books, and I have wondered, since last Friday … whether I was returning to mine in guilt or in preparation. Please, step into the study.

He led them through the hall, past the small chairs in which the Mother's Union sat on Wednesdays, and into the study with the vicarage desk and the anatomy of melancholy laid open to a passage on melancholy and clerks. On the desk, in a tin of the kind one uses for tea, was a folded paper. The paper was the checkbook cover of Evelyn Marchant, dated 1982, made out to the Loxley family in the sum of £ 1, 000, £ 1, 000, paid in compensation for the death of Martin Loxley, aged nine, in a hit-and-run accident near the village of Bramley on the night of 17 October in the year 1982. The inspector did not touch it. He sat down across the desk, and the constables stood by the door, and the reverend stood by his chair with the stoles folded over the cassock.

and said, with the gentle dignity of a man who has now stepped down onto the floor of a long-held stage, that he wished to make a statement. He had been preparing it all day. He had been preparing it all his life. He would give it to the inspector in his own words. My name, he said, is not Hull. My name is Marchant. I am the younger brother of the deceased. I am sixty-two years of age. I am four years younger than Evelyn. In the winter of 1982, I was a young man of 19, in the second year of an apprenticeship in a solicitor's office in Bramley, and I was, in the small hours of the morning of the 17th of October, the driver of a small red motor car, which struck, on the road between Bramley and Markham, a boy of nine years old, Martin Loxley,

who was crossing with his sister to the parish church for the morning service. The boy was killed, the sister was not. The driver of the car, I, got out and ran. I did not go to the police. I did not go to the boy's parents. I did not go to my sister. I went, that same night, to the boy's uncle, Bernard Loxley, then 23, and asked what to do. He did not tell me. He told me Evelyn would tell me. I went to Evelyn. Evelyn, in the year 1982... paid, from a small sum she had been keeping for her wedding, she was then unmarried and not expected to marry, the sum of £ 1, 000 to the boy's parents. She did so as a matter of course.

She did so out of family feeling and out of conscience. She did so as a sister, and she signed the cheque in her own hand. The cheque was never met by the bank. She paid in cash. The chequebook cover, the cancelled counterfoil, she kept. in her own writing desk, for forty-one years, because she wished me to know that she, and not I, had done it. The boy's parents, the elder Mr. and Mrs. Loxley, knew that the hit-and-run driver had been their nephew, and they told him, firmly, that he must leave Bramley and disappear. They told him that if he stayed, Bernard would tell the police. Bernard had, at that time, no conscience to speak of, but had good family feelings. I left Bramley. I did not become

a clergyman. I did, for some years, work in a solicitor's office in another county. In 1990, I joined the Mother's Union. In 1996, I was, at the age of 33, given the living at Halton Magna in the Diocese of Brixham, where I served for twenty years. I was not, in any of those years, a man of any particular worth.

I was a man of good habit and bad conscience. In the spring of 2019, when I was sixty-one, Evelyn wrote to me. She said the cheque-book was still with her. She said the boy had been named in the Markham Gazette not by his family but by a journalist, in an article on cold hit-and-run cases. She said she was, with her niece Jane Whittaker, and with the journalist Mr Aldridge, no relation of the inspector's, going to take the checkbook to the press. I wrote back. I begged her to wait.

I said I would come to her. I said I would, on my honour, meet the boy's parents. I said I would, on her honour, confess. Evelyn did not wait. Evelyn, who was by then sixty-four and settling in Dunsmuir, did what her conscience told her to do. She put the checkbook in the back of the sampler hoop, and she began, calmly, faithfully, with the same stitches she had used for forty years on the village, to prepare the spring sampler unveiling, the checkbook being her gift to the press on the day of the unveiling. I went to Dunsmuir. I was at that point a man who had served twenty years in the parish of Halton Magna, and had been given a living at Dunsmuir by the bishops. on the strength of a letter from Evelyn to the bishop himself. The bishop,

who had known Evelyn for fifteen years, did not know what she was saying. I, who was the subject of her letter, knew full well what she was saying. She was, in her own way, the lever of my return. I arrived in the parish of Dunsmuir on the 14th of December last year, with my own cassock and two stoles in a small suitcase. I was, when I arrived, the Reverend Tobias Hull, except that I was, in truth, Thomas Marchant, Evelyn's younger brother, who had not died in any meaningful sense, but who had been for forty years a clergyman in another county. I did, on the 14th of December, what the village assumed I was doing. I took services, visited the school, settled into the vicarage. I did, also, and

this is the part of the statement that I am preparing for the inspector at this moment, I did, on the 14th of December, sit down at my desk in this study, and I wrote a long letter to the boy's parents, who are now 83 and 79, in a nursing home in the Cotswolds. I have not sent the letter. I have, instead, kept it in my own desk drawer, in a tin of the kind one uses for tea, for nine months. I wrote the letter. I also, in the spring of 2020, on a Thursday afternoon in March, at five o'clock, took from the cupboard on the top shelf of Pembury Cottage the small brown glass vial of dilute thallium salts which my predecessor, Dr Carrington's predecessor, had kept there for his allotment work. I did not, at

that moment, know what I was doing with it. I took it on the same afternoon into the parish church. I did not, in the parish church, do anything with it. I took it on the following afternoon into the vicarage study. I did not, in the vicarage study, do anything with it. I took it on the following Sunday into the sampler hoop itself. I worked on the sampler hoop. I was by then in my right mind. I was acting on impulse.

I have for forty years been acting on impulse. On the Friday morning before Evelyn died, I went, at five in the morning, to Pembury Cottage, let myself in with the vicarage key, in the small knowledge that Evelyn had been, in the village, a willing receiver of late letters from her brother, and took the vial from the cupboard of the kitchen. and then went back to the vicarage, and then went back to the cottage at six, with the camellias in my hand for the altar, and Mrs Pratt told me to leave the camellias in the kitchen, and I left the camellias in the kitchen, and I went on the way back into the parlour, and I dipped the needle in the vial, and I pressed the needle back into the velvet of the cousin's cushion, in the

very spot where Evelyn had always kept it, with a small pair of tweezers. I did so quickly, and with the same needle which had been there for forty years. I went home. I did not look at the cheque-book again. I did not look at the cheque-book until Friday evening, when I went back to Pembury, after dark, found the cheque-book on the table where Evelyn had laid it, and put it in my own pocket, and I went, on the same Friday evening, to Mrs. Pratt's cottage, and I asked her to take the vial into her own kitchen for the night, and I told her, as I have said in this room, and the inspector's notes will confirm, that I wished to spare the doctor the distress of an inquest which would, in the inspector's notebook, name him

as the man's doctor of opportunity. I wished, inspector, to spare the doctor, and the inspector's notebook, and the boy, and the village, and myself, and I cannot now, in good conscience, say which of the four I was the more afraid of. The vial has been, since, in Mrs. Pratt's kitchen, in a tin of lard, until Monday morning, when Mrs Pratt, at my instruction, returned it to the cupboard, in order to protect the doctor. The checkbook has been, since Friday night, in my own desk drawer, in a tin of tea cigarettes, in the company of nine months' worth of letters to the boy's parents. The sampler hoop has been, since I removed the checkbook, without its central document, Inspector, and the Christian meaning of this confession is this. I

have not removed the checkbook in order to destroy it. I have removed it in order to send it, myself, to the boy's parents. I have, in doing so, taken the reopening of the inquest into my own hands. I have, also, taken the village's checkbook in my own pocket. And I am not, forgive me, Inspector, I am not a man who can do both. I have, of course, hesitated. And in hesitating, I have failed. I have failed, Evelyn. I have failed the boy. I have failed the doctor. I have failed the inspector. And, most importantly, I have failed my sister. He was now very still. He laid both stoles, the white of the day and the black of the Monday evensong, on the desk beside the tin, as one lays out a set of working tools. I am finished.

The inspector at this did not move. He did not reach for his notebook. He did not reach for the stoles. He did not reach for the tin. He sat very still and let the silence hold. Thank you, Reverend, he said at length. I have finished is not in my power to grant. I shall take a statement from you in writing. I shall take your stoles for examination, for the lining, the wool, and the small hole in the lining which Miss Marple did only this morning. suspect. I shall take the tin of tea, and the check-book, and the letter of nine months to the boy's parents. And I shall, reverend, release the boy back into his parents' lives in two days' time. In the meanwhile, I shall place you in the inspector's care, in the inspector's motor,

and I shall take you to Markham. There will, in due course, be a summons. There will, in due course, be a trial. There will, not in due course, be a confession in front of the parish on Sunday morning. Mr Hull was very still. The constable stepped forward. The inspector, very gently, gave him his hat. Mr Hull did not put it on. He stood, with the stoles folded on his arm, and looked at the linoleum on the vicarage floor, as if he were looking for a knot. There is a knot in this room, he said very quietly. There is a knot in the lino. I was always meaning to get it lifted. I never did. The inspector did not laugh. He said, Mr Hull, will you step into the inspector's motor? The Reverend stepped into the motor. In

the parish hall on Tuesday evening, Miss Marple, with Margaret at her elbow and Jane at her side and Bernard at the foot of the table, all of them looking at the small square of paper she had laid on the tablecloth, heard, from the lane, the inspector's motor start again, in the direction of Markham. She did not stir. She did not stir because a village's binding off was not, in her experience, a moment of clattering the needles. It was a moment of quiet tightening of the thread, where the rows of cloth are, by careful half-inch measures, held together until the working is done. It was, in fact, the binding off, the closing stitch, of the entire piece.

she laid her palm flat on the table. Margaret, she said, will you dear knit four rows of plain work in wool of the apple-blossom colour before you go to bed tonight? Not on a hoop, on a needle. Margaret Devereaux looked at her. On a needle, Miss Marple? On a needle, Margaret, because the cloth of this village has been, by the binding off it has just received, drawn to the right measure.

The room, which had been so loud an hour before, was, at last, quiet. Section 10. The Cutting of the Threads On Wednesday morning the inspector's motor returned to the parish of Dunsmuir with the Reverend Tobias Hull in the back seat, hat on his lap, stoles in a brown paper parcel. The lane, which had been so quiet the night before, did not stir. Mrs. Garstang raised her hand at the gate of the post office, and the inspector raised his back.

Two constables went up the path to the vicarage. The reverend was helped out, walked to his study, and sat down at his own desk without comment. Inspector Aldridge came, at half-past nine, to the cottage of Dainmead, with a small bouquet in his hand, a sprig of the lavender that had been cut down, and was shown, by Mrs. Nightingale, into the parlour. Miss Marple was sitting by the window, with her knitting in her lap, and a cup of tea still full at her elbow. She thanked him for the lavender, and laid it on the side table. I have, Miss Marple, he said, the statement of the Reverend Hull, in his own hand, signed, witnessed by the constable, and not retracted. I do not, Miss Marple, wish to trouble

you with its contents. I do, Miss Marple, wish to lay its contents before you, because you have, in this village, been patient with me, and I think you have earned the right to know. He did not show her the document. He did not need to. Miss Marple, who had been for forty years listening to the small voices of villages and small parishes, had, on Tuesday evening, already heard it.

She said so. You have, Inspector, been a very good inspector. You have, Inspector, kept this village, which is not an easy village to keep, in the right measure. I have no further questions on this matter. I should, however, like to be allowed to tell the vicar's niece, Jane Whittaker, what has been done and why it was done, because Jane Whittaker has been, Inspector, the second of the people of this parish to be hurt by the village, and the second who did not yet know why. He gave his consent. He gave, in addition, the small file of gin that Margaret Devereaux had thought it prudent to bring back from the parish hall in case Miss Marple wished a small restorative. Miss Marple thanked him. She did not

take the gin. She preferred, she said, the inspector's lavender. Inspector Aldridge then withdrew. Mrs Nightingale, who had been standing in the doorway, was told by Miss Marple to bring Jane Whittaker to the parlour at ten o'clock. Jane Whittaker, in her dark blue dress, with the brown velvet reticule still in her hand, came in at ten o'clock precisely, sat down opposite Miss Marple and folded her hands in her lap. Miss Marple did not, at first, speak. She lifted her knitting and felt the wool between her fingers, the apple-blossom row that she had put down on Tuesday morning and that she had, on Tuesday evening, reset. She knitted one row, very slowly. then put the needles into her lap. Jane, she said, I am very sorry. I

am very sorry for what is going to be said to you. And I am very sorry that it has been, in this village, said in a parish hall, before it has been said in a parlour. It is the kind of saying that one would wish to give in a parlour. But you must know it, and you must know it now. I will not embellish it. I will, dear, simply lay it out the way one lays out a piece of embroidery, with the right side up. Jane nodded. She did not speak.

Your Aunt Evelyn, Miss Marple said, was a very careful woman. She was, in her way, a very frightened woman. She was fifty-eight when her brother, who had been a young man of nineteen, hit a boy of nine on the road between Bramley and Markham and killed him. The boy was Martin Loxley. the cousin of Mr Bernard Loxley. Your aunt Evelyn, your aunt, was the one who paid the boy's parents, in cash, one thousand pounds, out of the sum she was keeping for her own wedding. She was not then married. She was not then expected to marry.

She paid from her own savings and signed the cheque in her own hand, but the cheque was never met by the bank. The cheque was, in those days, a paper promise. The promise was, from Evelyn, a quiet promise. the Czech counterfoil, the Czech book cover, Evelyn kept in her own writing desk for forty-one years. She kept it, Jane, because she wished your Uncle Thomas, whom she called, privately, Thomas, to know that she, and not he, had done it.

It was, in her way, a love letter, written in red ink, and offered to a younger brother who had run away, and who had not come back, and who had become, in another county, the Reverend Tobias Hull. Thomas was the Reverend Hull. Thomas is the Reverend Hull. He arrived in Dunsmuir in December, at Evelyn's invitation, on the strength of Evelyn's letter to the bishop. He was already the Reverend Hull when he arrived, and already had, in his own desk drawer, nine months' worth of letters to the boy's parents. Jane, who had been white when she sat down, was now very still.' The checkbook,' Miss Marple continued, was the reason your aunt Evelyn was not afraid. It was, in your aunt's mind, a small piece of work which

she could finish. She had, for forty-one years, been the woman who had paid out of her own savings for her brother's sin. She was, by the spring of this year, not willing to be the woman who had paid for her brother's silence. She wished the cheque-book to be sent by her own hand to the press. The cheque-book was to be Evelyn's gift to the inquest. It was to reopen the hundred-year-old hit-and-run of the boy Martin. Your uncle Thomas, the reverend, was afraid of this. He was afraid that the checkbook would, on the day of the spring sampler unveiling, be given to the press in its cloth carrier behind the sampler hoop, with the small square of paper perched on its backing board, and he was afraid that the

checkbook would reopen the inquest. He came to the parish in December with the cassock and the two stoles. He came in March to the kitchen of Pemberry and took down the vial from the top shelf, the vial of dilute thallium salts that had been left for ten years by Dr. Carrington's predecessor, and he came on Friday morning to the parlour and smeared your aunt's pincushion with the thallium on the needle that was, by a hand that knew Evelyn's pincushion for forty years, set to give off the residue, one needle-shaft at a time, in her evening tisane.

I am not saying your Uncle Thomas did it. I am saying he says he did it. The Inspector's statement will, of course, decide it. But the village, Jane, dear, the village has two pieces of business now, and I want you, and you only, to see them. The first is, dear, that your Aunt Evelyn intended the cheque-book to be her gift to the inquest of the boy Martin. It was not the gift her brother wished her to give. It was the gift her conscience gave. It was a conscience, Jane— that had carried this secret for forty-one years, and was, in this village, finally ready to lay it down. The second is, dear, that the spring sampler, the cloth, the sampler hoop, the check-book carrier, was by two people worked upon.

It was worked upon first by your Aunt Evelyn, in her way, with the honest goal of giving the check-book to the press on Saturday. It was worked upon second by your Uncle Thomas, in his way, with the dishonest goal of taking the checkbook out of the sampler hoop before Saturday. The face of the sampler was your aunt's work.

The back of the sampler was, in part, your uncle's work. The village will not be able to see this, because the back of the sampler is, by tradition, the unseen side. And that is, Jane, why the back of the sampler is the proper place to put a checkbook. But dear, that is not all. Because the clue, the thread, that your aunt left, for you, and for the inspector, and for Miss Marple, is this. The sampler hoop was, on the morning of her death, half finished. It was half finished because the unveiling was, Inspector Aldridge will tell you, three weeks away. It was half finished because your aunt and your uncle were both working on it. The half-finished sampler hoop was the real tell. It was the tell, dear,

of who had been on which side of the cloth. The unfinished row of distant hills at the village pond's horizon, the row Evelyn had been saving for the leaves of autumn, was, by Saturday, one stitch from completion. One stitch. one wool, one needle, and one woman. The sampler, dear, was one stitch from completion, and the checkbook was in it, and the checkbook was going to be taken out, tomorrow, by your Uncle Thomas, if the sampler hoop were not finished first.

And your Aunt Evelyn, the woman who paid, forty-one years ago, out of her own savings, in cash, the check for the boy's parents, The woman who had, by conscience, carried the secret through forty-one years of village life, four embroidery circle unveilings, two funerals, one wedding, two christenings, and one spring sampler of her own. Your Aunt Evelyn, Jane, died a quarter of an hour before she could have put the checkbook in the press. And that, Jane, is what happened.

Miss Marple lifted her cup of tea. It was the first sip she had taken all morning. It was lukewarm. She drank it anyway. Jane Whittaker, who had been white and who had been still, now lifted her own cup, which she had not known she had been holding, and drank a little of her tea. and set it back carefully on the saucer. Lady Marple, she said very quietly, who gave the thallium to my aunt? Miss Marple did not answer. She said, the inspector's statement will, of course, decide it, but, Jane dear, the cloth is, in this village, by tradition, only seen from the right side, and the right side of the cloth is the village. The village does not always see its own back. The back of the cloth is the working. The working is done by

the hand that is, by tradition, on the unseen side. And there are, Jane, two hands on the back of the sampler hoop. One is your aunt's hand, one is your uncle's. And there are two pieces of conscience in this village. One is your aunt's, one is the village's. She set down her cup. She took up her knitting.

She said, I should not, in any case, dear, like to be in any way unfair to your Aunt Evelyn. She was, dear, a very good woman. She was not, dear, a faultless woman. She was, dear, a faithful woman. And faithful is, in this village, a better word than faultless. It is also, dear, a more useful word. Jane stood.

She thanked Miss Marple. She took her leave. She did not cry. She did not say that she would, at the unveiling, not unveil the sampler. She did not say that she would, perhaps, not unveil it. She did not say that she would, perhaps, unveil it with the checkbook, on the unfinished row of hills, as her aunt had planned.

Miss Marple, alone in the parlour, knitted two rows of apple-blossom wool. The village of Dunsmuir, on Wednesday morning, fell, silently, into its old measure. Outside, the inspector was at the vicarage gate, with the stoles in the brown paper parcel, and the constables were coming down the path, and the Reverend Hull was inside his own study, with his own hands folded, and a teapot steam on the desk, and the small square of paper that Miss Marple had given him on Sunday morning, the card with the word HULL on the cover, still in his breast pocket. The threads had been cut, the sampler hoop was on the parish hall table, without its central document. The village was, on Wednesday morning, facing the back of its own cloth. The

face of the sampler was still the village as it had been. The back of the sampler was, now, cut. the threads had been cut. Section 11. The Unseen Hem The Thursday that followed Evelyn Marchant's death was, in the parish of Dunsmuir, what such Thursdays often are in parishes where something has been quietly finished. A day of soft weather and small comings and goings, of women at doors and men at gates, of the postman and the milkman and the doctor on his rounds. The sky, which had been grey since Monday, lifted at half-past nine, and the sun came into the village green with the small, laid-back warmth of an English summer that has, by August, agreed to be tired of itself. The bunting that had hung

along the railings of the village hall since the June fate had, by the Thursday, been taken down by Margaret Devereaux and folded in the linen cupboard of the parish hall under a sprig of dried rosemary. The lavender in Evelyn Marchant's front garden had been reduced by the same Margaret on Sunday afternoon, to a single row at the gate.

The rest of the border had been dug over by Tom Sykes on Wednesday, and put in readiness for the autumn crocuses which Evelyn had always liked to plant. What the village did not know, what it was not, by its nature, intended to know, was that the cheque-book of 1982, which had been taken, on Friday night of the week before, from the back of the sampler hoop by the Reverend Tobias Hull, and re-deposited on Tuesday evening in the inspector's keeping, had been sent, on the Wednesday afternoon after, by the inspector's own hand, by registered post in a brown paper parcel, to the nursing home in the Cotswolds where the elder Mr and Mrs Loxley now lived, in a third-floor flat with a balcony overlooking the churchyard at Stowe-on-the-Wold. The chequebook

had been received at three in the afternoon. The elder Mr Loxley, who was eighty-three, had sat down in his armchair with the chequebook open on his knees for half an hour before he spoke to his wife. He had said, It has come back to us, dear. It has come back to us in the cloth. His wife, who was 79 and had been a Loxley in her own right, had stood behind his chair and put her hand on his shoulder. She had not said anything. She had not, at that moment, needed to. On Thursday morning, the inspector's motor drove back into the parish at 10.30, with a sealed summons in his pocket and a letter from the elder Mr Loxley in a separate envelope. The letter was brief, civil, and was, in the inspector's own words, of the sort

a gentleman writes when he has been given, by an inspector he has not met, the only piece of business which he had not, in forty-one years, been able to finish. The letter confirmed the elder Mr and Mrs Loxley's wish to reopen the inquest into the death of their son. It confirmed, also, their wish that the Reverend Thomas Marchant, the elder Mrs Loxley's late nephew, should, on his conscience and by his own choice, take the consequences of his own act, and that the village of Dunsmuir should, in its own time, be told the truth. The inspector walked up to Pembury Cottage at eleven o'clock and rang the bell.

Mrs Pratt, who was inside, opened the door, and the inspector asked her, with the small formal courtesy of an inspector who was about to be told something, whether Miss Whittaker was at home. Mrs Pratt said she was, and the inspector went up to the parlour, and laid the two envelopes on the small table, and sat down at Mrs Marchant's old chair, and asked Jane if she would help him. Jane had been, since Tuesday evening, very quiet.

She had been, in the village's mind and in her own, getting on with the things that needed to be got on with. She had unlocked the cottage on Wednesday morning, with the inspector's permission, and taken down the curtains and washed them in the kitchen sink. She had reset the fire screen that had been standing since Evelyn's death in the grate. She had gone on Wednesday afternoon to the village hall and laid the sampler hoop on its muslin sheet in the small linen cupboard under Margaret's lavender and rosemary.

She had, on Thursday morning, gone to the post office and bought from Mr Garstang two reels of cotton and a small packet of needles, and had, with these things, set up the sampler hoop on a clean piece of board in the cottage parlour, and had begun, very gently, to work the unfinished row of distant hills. When the inspector came in on Thursday morning, she had, in fact, set down her needle. She was glad, she said, that the inspector had come and she would help him. She listened to him read the elder Mr Loxley's letter. She sat very still, with her hands folded in her lap.

Then she asked the inspector, in a small voice, whether the unveiling of the sampler could still, in any case, take place on Saturday, and the inspector, who had been expecting the question, said it could. and that the village, by his own report, would wish it. He added, in a way that, to Miss Marple's mind, would have been proper if the inspector had been able to say it himself, that the sampler hoop, as it stood, was unfinished by one row of distant hills, and that this row, like the cheque-book, was to be laid down, not taken up, and that the unveiling on Saturday, in the parish church, was to be the sampler hoop with its unfinished row, and with the inspector's facsimile of the cheque-book, in a

small brown frame, hung on the wall beside the hoop, and that the elder Mr. and Mrs. Loxley, having been informed by the inspector of the unveiling, had asked, in the elder Mr. Loxley's letter, to be remembered to the village, and that the elder Mr. Loxley, in particular, would be glad, in his own way, to be remembered to Mr. Bernard Loxley, his nephew, who was now, by the elder Mr. Loxley's wish, his nearest living relative. Jane, who had not wept since Tuesday evening, wept a little. She said she was glad.

The inspector, who had been a methodical man all week, said that he was also very glad, and would now, with the inspector's permission, take his leave. The inspector left. The morning, which had been soft, went on being soft. At twelve, Tom Sykes, who had been at the Vicarage Gate since eleven, walked down to Pembury Cottage with Mrs Pratt, and asked Jane, in the small courtesy of a young man who is not yet sure how to act in a parish where things have been so much changed, whether she would, perhaps, take a cup of tea in the kitchen.

Jane thanked him. She said that she had been going to take, in fact, a cup to Miss Marple at Dainmead, and that she would, if he would carry the box of needles, walk up the lane with him. Tom Sykes carried the box of needles. They walked up to Dainmead, where Mrs Nightingale took them into the front parlour, and where Miss Marple was sitting in her chair with her knitting in her lap, and the apple-blossom row, which she had, on Wednesday afternoon, finished, laid out on the side table.

Lady Marple, said Jane. The Inspector came. and the unveiling will take place on Saturday, and the sampler hoop will have, by my own hand, the unfinished row of hills, and the inspector's facsimile of the cheque-book will be hung on the wall beside it, and the elder Mr. Loxley, who is eighty-three, will, on Saturday, be remembered to the village.

Miss Marple thanked her. and laid the knitting down, and asked Jane whether she would do Miss Marple the kindness of a row of apple blossom in the unfinished work, while Miss Marple read to her from the village paper. Jane took the work. She knitted a row. Miss Marple read. Now, said Miss Marple, reading from the village paper in her small, slow voice, there will be, on Saturday afternoon at four of the clock, in the parish church of St Mary the Less at Dunsmuir, the unveiling of the Dunsmuir spring sampler by Miss Jane Whittaker, niece of the late Mrs Evelyn Marchant, with tea, in the parish hall, by the ladies of the embroidery circle, with a small remembrance, at the close, by the Reverend Tobias Hull, who has asked—

Miss Marple paused. She put the paper down very gently on the side table. She did not take it up again. The paper lay, on its own, on the side table— with the printed announcement, and with the unfinished row, and the apple-blossom wool, and the unfinished hem of Evelyn Marchant's last work, and the small square of paper on which she had written on Sunday morning, Hull, and with the check-book, in a tin of tea, in the inspector's own drawer, in Markham, that had been sent, registered post, to the boys' parents in the Cotswolds. Jane, she said, very softly, when one finishes a piece of needlework, and not the back of it, but the face of it, there is by tradition an hem. The hem is the unseen fold

at the back of the cloth that holds the whole piece together. The hem is not seen, because the hem is the unseen piece of cloth. It is the part of the work that is not the picture. It is the part of the work that is not the row of hills, or the apple blossom, or the church clock hands. It is the part of the work that the parish does not see. And it is, dear, the most important piece of the whole piece of work. It is the hem.

It is the unseen part. It is the part of the work that holds the cloth together, behind the picture. It is the part that Evelyn, dear, would have wished to leave you. And it is the part that you, dear, must now finish. She paused again. The parlour was very quiet. Tom Sykes, who had been standing by the window with the box of needles, was by this time also quiet.

He was not, in this village, a man of many words, but he was, by this time, a man of some feeling. There is a piece of cotton lawn, dear, she said, which I have placed, by Mrs Pratt's kindness, behind the upper edge of the finished sampler hoop in the parish hall. It is the size of a small bishop's apron, and it is of the same yellowed colour that Mrs Beecham of the county record office noticed on Wednesday. It is, dear, the piece of lawn which Evelyn sewed by her own hand behind the upper edge of the sampler hoop, on the morning of the day she died, on Wednesday, for a special purpose. She sewed it, dear, for you, not, I should say, for the unveiling, but as a gift.

It is your gift from her. It is your unseen hem. Now, the hem of a piece of needlework, and I should like, dear Jane, to teach you, in this last conversation, the proper way of hemming, is done as follows. one cuts a small length of cotton thread in a colour matching the cloth. One folds the edge of the cloth half an inch over and one places the thread by the needle into the fold. One draws the thread through with the right tension, not too tight, not too loose, and one places a row of small, even, half-inch stitches along the fold. The stitches, when finished, are, on the right side of the cloth, almost invisible. On the wrong side, They are all that can be seen. The hem, dear, is the unseen part of the work. The hem, dear,

is the fold that holds the work together. The hem is the unseen part of the village that is the village together. The hem is not, by tradition, on the face of the cloth. The hem is, by tradition, on the back. And the back of the sampler, the police's side, the inspector's side, the side by which the checkbook was, for forty-one years, held, Unsewn by the Inspector and Sewn, on his instruction, by Jane at her own hand, on Thursday in the cottage parlour, with the unfinished row of hills, with a single Markham County cotton, in a single row of small, even half-inch stitches. The hem of the Dunsmuir spring sampler has been, Jane, reset this morning. It has been reset by your hand. It has been reset in

the back of the hoop. in the cotton lawn that Evelyn on Wednesday sewed in by the same running stitch that held, for forty-one years, the checkbook to the hoop. The hem is the same. The back is the same. The checkbook is gone. The cotton lawn is still there. The hem has been reset. And the hem, dear, the unseen fold at the back of the cloth that holds the whole piece together, is, by your own hand, the same hem. The parish will not see it. The parish will not see it, because the hem of a piece of needlework is, by tradition, not on the face of the cloth. And that, dear, is the end of Evelyn Marchant's last work. And that, dear, is the end of the village's trouble. She paused. The parlour was very quiet.

Then she said, very softly, Close the work, dear. Jane, who had been holding the needle at the end of the unfinished row, drew the thread through with the right tension, and tied a small knot at the back of the cloth. Miss Marple laid her hand on Jane's. Well done, dear. Now we shall, together, go into the kitchen, and Mrs.

Nightingale shall make us a small cup of tea, and we shall drink it, and we shall, afterwards, on Saturday afternoon, at the parish church, unveil the finished cloth, the right side of the cloth, to the village, with the inspector's facsimile of the checkbook hanging on the wall. and the unfinished row of distant hills at the village pond's horizon.

And Tom will put out the chairs, and Margaret will hand round the tea, and Bernard Loxley will be at the back of the church with his hat in his hand, and the elder Mr Loxley's letter will be read by the bishop, and the village, dear, the Dunsmuir parish of St Mary the Less, which has held itself so beautifully through this long and difficult week, and which has, by a small piece of twine and a small piece of needlework, and a small brown packet in the inspector's drawer, finally, in its own measure, been put right. The village deer will sit in its own chairs and watch the unsewn, the unfinished, row of distant hills of Evelyn Marchant's last work, and will think, each in their own way, of what is,

in this village, unfinished. Of the small kindnesses we owe one another, of the long kindnesses we carry through our lives, of the small, quiet things that hold a village together. and of the small, quiet things, we shall, in our turn, leave behind. For the villages which shall, in their own time, be ours, when we are no longer of them. And the peace of Dunsmuir will, dear, be the peace of a village that has, at last, sung its own small song.

She lifted her cup. She took up her knitting. The village of Dunsmuir, which had held itself so beautifully through this long week, sat in the soft Thursday morning of late summer, in its own small chairs, in its own small rooms, in its own small measure, and waited, very gently, for the unveiling on Saturday. The sampler hoop on the parish hall table was, by Thursday afternoon, finished, in the back of the cloth, at the unseen hem, by the small piece of cotton lawn, by Jane's small row of half-inch stitches, in the right tension, in the right measure, in the right hand. The face of the cloth was the village. The back of the cloth was the village's conscience, and the hem, dear, the hem, was, by tradition, the

unseen piece of the village that holds the cloth together. And that, dear, is what holds a village together. The End

A Needle, A Threat, and One Dead Member | Miss Marple Sleep Stories

Kapitelklicken springt direkt hin

Shownotes

Transkriptvom Podcast bereitgestellt · Zeitmarken springen hin