Murder Behind St. Dominic's… Miss Marple Investigates

Death on the lane behind St Dominic's, a Miss Marple mystery, runned. Section 1. The lamp that went out. Homefield woke to its ordinary music on that September morning, the clink of Ernie Piggott's milk bottles, the starlings quarrelling in the vicarage elms, the slow groan of Mr Bunce's shutter coming up on the butcher's shop, and it was precisely this ordinariness that made the scream, when it came, seem to tear the very fabric of the world. It came from the lane behind St Dominic's Church, that narrow, high-hedged passage the village called the Dead Lane, though nobody remembered why. Ernie Piggott, who had taken the shortcut with his last two bottles as he had taken it every morning for eleven years,

was the man who screamed. He was seventeen, and what he saw by the lich gate turned him, in one instant, into an old man. Afterwards, when he had been given brandy in the vicarage kitchen and had stopped shaking enough to speak, He said the same thing over and over, and the curious thing was that it was not the body he spoke of first. The lamp's out, he kept saying.

The lamp in the church. It's gone out. I could see through the window. The little red light wasn't there. And then I saw her, lying by the gate. Her was Mrs Adelaide Vane of Homefield Court, Mrs Vane who presided over the Flower Guild and the Women's Institute and the Harvest Festival Committee, and, indeed, over most of the moral life of the village. Mrs. Vane, who had been seen alive at half-past nine the previous evening, walking up the lane toward the church with her missile under her arm to check the flowers for Sunday. Mrs. Vane, who now lay on her side in the dew with her grey hair loosened and one gloved hand flung out, as though she had been reaching for something just beyond her grasp.

Her reticule lay open beside her, her brooch was gone, and in the church behind her For the first time in forty-one years, the sanctuary lamp, the small crimson flame that burned before the altar of St Dominic's day and night, tended like a heartbeat, had gone out. The news reached the laurels at twenty minutes past eight, borne by Dora, the Fane's little parlour maid, who was Ernie Piggott's second cousin, and therefore better informed than the police.' Oh, ma'am!' Dora gasped, bursting into the breakfast room with the marmalade still in her hand. They found Mrs. Vane dead in the dead lane, and the church lamp gone out, and Ernie says her face was... Oh, I daren't say what Ernie says her face was. Mrs. Harriet Vane, who had been buttering toast,

set down her knife with the air of a woman bracing herself against a wave. She was a handsome, weather-beaten widow of sixty-five, who had buried two husbands and outlived all capacity for astonishment. Dead, she repeated. Adelaide Vane. but I played bridge with her on Tuesday. She took every trick and lectured me about my discards. She looked across the table at her guest. Jane, you're not eating. Miss Jane Marple, who had been staying at the Laurels for the past fortnight, a visit timed, as she said, to coincide with the Flower Festival, though her friend Harriet suspected it was timed to coincide with Harriet's loneliness, looked up from her egg with mild china-blue eyes. She was a small, fluffy old lady with soft white hair and pink cheeks,

and she had been following the account with the gentle attention she might have given to a sermon of moderate interest. How very sad, Miss Marple said. Poor Adelaide. She was so very much alive. That is sometimes a dangerous thing to be, you know. Very much alive in a small place. Dangerous? Harriet stared. Jane, the woman's been murdered in a lane, and you talk as though she'd caught a chill. Did Dora say murdered? Miss Marple inquired mildly. Dora, still frozen in the doorway with the marmalade, found her voice. Ernie says her head, oh, ma'am, struck, he says. And the police are there already, Inspector Rudge up from Market Lavington, and they've roped off the lane, and Mrs. Tighe at the post office says it was robbery because her brooch

is missing. That diamond sunburst she wore everywhere, showing off, begging your pardon. That will do, Dora, said Harriet. The marmalade, if you please, and then you may go and tell the kitchen, which is what you're longing to do. Dora went, reluctantly, like a prophet dismissed. Harriet pushed back her chair and walked to the window, which looked down over the garden wall to the rooftops of the village and, beyond them, the squat grey tower of St Dominic's rising out of the mist. From the window of the laurels one could not see the lane. The lane hid behind the church.

Between the churchyard wall— and the high blackthorn hedge of the court's kitchen garden. But one could see the little police van, drawn up by the west door, and two or three figures in helmeted stillness. Forty years I've lived in this village, Harriet said, with her back to the room. Nothing has ever happened in Holmfield. Nothing. And now this, under our noses, behind the church. She turned. Her face had done something odd. The weather-beaten ease had cracked, and beneath it was fear. Not of the murderer, Miss Marple noted with interest, but of something vaguer, something to do with the village itself. It's the lamp that frightens me, Jane.

Isn't that absurd? She's dead, and I keep thinking about the lamp. The sanctuary lamp, Miss Marple said. It's burned in that church since before I was born. Cannon Ransom endowed it. Adelaide's father. You've seen the plaque. In memory of the daughter who died. The light shineth in darkness, it says. Harriet's hands moved restlessly along the windowsill. They call it the Eleanor Light. Children in the village leave pennies for it. Tom Brabazon has trimmed that wick every morning of his life since he was a boy. He's seventy-two now. And last night it went out. The same night.

She sat down again, heavily. People will talk, Jane. Not just about murder. About what it means. What does it mean? Miss Marple asked gently. That's just it. I don't know. Harriet picked up her cup and put it down again. Adelaide ran this village. I don't think you quite understood being a visitor. She ran it the way her father ran it, and he was vicar here for thirty years.

The court, the church, the institute, the school. She knew everything about everyone. She had a way of knowing things, and of letting you know she knew, with a little smile. Harriet stopped, as if she had said more than she intended. She was not an easy woman, but one doesn't expect, one doesn't want. No, said Miss Marple. One doesn't. She folded her napkin with precise, unhurried fingers, and her eyes, which were as blue and guileless as a baby's, rested thoughtfully on her friend's face. Adelaide had a nephew staying, did she not? Gerald. A charming young man, he danced with the Curzon girl at the flower show. Gerald Vane. Yes, her heir. He... Harriet hesitated. There was talk of trouble between them. Money. There usually is with Gerald. He came

down from London a week ago, and the whole village heard them at it on the terrace on Sunday, after church. Adelaide's voice carries. She frowned. And there's the companion, Miss March. Meek little woman, been with her three years, and Lettice Crow at the organ, who hated her. Well, that's too strong.

Lettice served her. There's a difference, I suppose, though I'm not sure Adelaide ever noticed it. Harriet gave a short, unhappy laugh. Listen to me. The woman isn't cold, and I'm drawing up a list of her enemies. It is what one does, said Miss Marple placidly. It is quite natural. When someone is killed, the mind goes back over every conversation, looking for the place where the thread changed colour. It is like knitting, in a way. You do not notice the wrong stitch when you make it. You notice it three rows later, and then you must go back. She picked up her work basket. She was never without it.

that capacious basket of wool and needles and innocent tangled skeins, and settled it on her lap. You say the lamp has burned for forty-one years. Without fail? Without fail. It is the one thing in Holmfield that has never failed. And it is kept, Miss Marple said, in memory of the daughter who died. Eleanor. Eleanor Ransom. She drowned. Oh, long ago, before the First War. She was Adelaide's elder sister.

Adelaide never spoke of her. But the lamp burned, and the plaque shone, and the pennies came. Harriet rose again, unable to be still, and began to gather the breakfast things onto the tray, in abrupt, clattering movements. Tom Brabazon will take it hard. He was a gardener's boy at the court in those days. He remembers her. He once told me, she stopped, tray in hand. Yes, nothing, an old man's nonsense. He once told me the lamp kept her alive, somehow. that as long as it burned she wasn't quite dead. Harriet shook her head at herself and set the tray down. Foolish. But it went out, Jane.

On the night Adelaide died, it went out. The morning was drawing itself together over the village now. The mist was lifting off the church tower, and somewhere below, in the lane behind St Dominic's, men in plain clothes were moving about their grim work with tape and cameras and low voices. Miss Marple sat very still by the window.

Her small white hands folded on her knitting, and her eyes, which people were so often surprised to find were not foolish at all, dwelt on the squat grey tower with a long, quiet attention. Harriet, she said at last, yes? I was wondering about the lamp. Miss Marple's voice was soft, apologetic. the voice of an old lady asking about the weather.

If it has burned for forty-one years and never failed, why did it go out, do you think, on that night of all nights? Section 2 What the Village Said The lamp. Harriet stared at her, the tray still between her hands. The sanctuary lamp? Jane, a woman has been killed, and you are wondering about a lamp. But she set the tray down, because after fifteen years of friendship, she had learned that when Jane Marple wondered about a small thing in a soft voice, the small thing was seldom small.

I don't know why it went out. Oil, I suppose. A draft. Tom will know. Why does it matter? It probably does not matter at all, said Miss Marple, placidly, drawing out a length of pale blue wool. That is the interesting thing about it. She began to cast on, her needles clicking in a gentle, steady rhythm, like a clock that knows the time, but is in no hurry to tell it. Forty-one years, you said. No draft has blown it out in forty-one years, and no lack of oil.

And then, on the one night, yes. Well, we shall see. I think, Harriet, if it is not too much trouble, that I should like to walk down to the village this morning. The fresh air, you know. And I want a card of that grey silk for my embroidery, if Mrs. Tighe has it. Harriet looked at her for a moment, and then, despite everything, despite the police van and the roped-off lane and the woman lying in the mortuary at Market Lavington, she nearly laughed. Grey silk, she said. Very well, Jane, grey silk. The village, when they came down into it at half-past ten, was in the full flower of its grief, which is to say, in the full flower of its excitement.

Homefield had not had a murder in living memory, and it rose to the occasion the way a congregation rises to a hymn it knows by heart. Outside the post office a knot of women stood with their marketing baskets, speaking in the hushed, rapid voices of people who are enjoying themselves very much and are careful not to show it. Mrs. Tighe, the postmistress, a little round woman with a face like a worried robin, dispensed information across the counter with her stamps. Robbery.

she was saying firmly, as Miss Marple and Harriet came in. That's what I said from the first. Her brooch is gone, that diamond sunburst, worth hundreds, and her bag opened and the money out of it. There's tramps on the roads, that camp down by the river. I said to my husband only last week, I said, something will happen one of these days, walking up that dark lane at night.

And now it has. Her eyes, bright and tragic, found Harriet. Oh, Mrs. Fane, and to think she was in here Tuesday buying stamps, as large as life, larger. She complained about the price of the aerograms. Adelaide complained about the price of everything, said Harriet. It was her one economy. Ah, well, we mustn't speak ill. Mrs. Tighe sighed, with immense satisfaction, and turned to weigh a parcel. Old Mrs. Wexford, who was eighty, and had been waiting half an hour to deliver her theory, delivered it. It's my belief, she announced, thumping her stick, that she knew something and was silenced. Adelaide Vane knew things.

She came to tea with me last month, and she let fall. She was very clever at letting things fall, like a cat with a vase, that she knew about the church accounts. The restoration fund. There's money gone astray there, mark my words, and the vicar's been putting off the audit since Easter. I said to my granddaughter, there's a reason Septimus Dale looks like a man with a toothache.

and it's not his teeth. There was a little silence, of the kind that follows when someone has said aloud what everyone has been carefully not saying. The vicar, the Reverend Septimus Dale, was a kindly, anxious man of fifty, who had buried two wives and raised four children in that parish, and was loved, in the vague way one loves an old coat. That the restoration fund was in trouble, everyone knew. That Adelaide Vane had known it too, and had smiled about it. That, until this moment, no one had said. The vicar, said Mrs. Tighe at last, was at the choir practice until half-past nine. Fifteen people saw him.

But she said it without conviction, and her hand, as she reached for the grey silk Miss Marple inquired after, was not quite steady. Miss Marple bought her silk, and admired a new tea-cloth, and asked after Mrs. Tighe's lumbago, and all the while her mild eyes moved about the little shop like bees in a garden. resting nowhere long.

She heard the tramp theory, and the silenced witness theory, and, from a red-faced farmer by the door, the nephew theory, uttered in the comfortable tones of a man who has never owed money in his life. Young Gerald, the farmer said, that's where your police will look, and right enough. Up to his ears in debt, they say, and she held the purse-strings tight as wax. Heard them myself, Sunday, going at it on the terrace like carters. You'll not touch a penny of my money till I'm in my grave, she says. And he says, the farmer lowered his voice, though it carried to the street, he says, Then I wish you joy of a long life, aunt, for I'll get none of it. Laughing-like. But it wasn't a laughing matter,

was it? Not now. People say many things when they are angry, said Miss Marple gently, from the tea-cloths. Especially the young. It is rather like thunder, it sounds very terrible, and usually nothing is struck, she paused. Usually, outside, in the street, the autumn sun had burned the mist away, and the lane behind the church was closed off with a rope and a young constable who was clearly the proudest and most miserable man in England. People were going out of their way, Miss Marple noticed this with interest, not to look at the lich gate and then looking at it. She herself stood for a moment and looked at it frankly, the little peaked roof of the gate, the worn flagstones, the blackthorn hedge beyond it, hung already

with the hard, dusty sloughs of autumn. On the gate-post there was a smear of something dark that might have been paint and was not. She looked at it for a long moment, and then she looked up at the church windows, the dark, ruby-tinged glass of the little lamp-room window above the vestry.' I think,' she said to Harriet,' that we are expected at the vicarage for tea. Did not Mrs. Dale, the present Mrs. Dale, say Thursday, and this is Thursday?' How fortunate that one always knows where one is with Thursdays. The vicarage tea was a sombre affair that pretended not to be. The vicar sat with his hands wrapped around his cup, as though it were the only warm thing in the world, and said, over and over, that it was dreadful, dreadful, and that he

had known her all his ministry, and that they had had their differences. He had had differences with everyone, he added, with a faint, unhappy smile. It was the condition of a parish. but that he had respected her, oh yes. His wife, a brisk, kind woman, pressed cake on everyone and spoke of the funeral. Lettice Crow, the organist, sat bolt upright by the window, in her best black. She had been in black within four hours of the news, someone murmured, as though she had had it laid out ready, and answered questions about the choir in a voice as dry and precise as the turn of a metronome. She had played for St Dominic's for thirty years. She had been— Mrs Wexford had once said, the only person in

Homefield who could make Adelaide Vane sit down. She came to the church last night, Lettice said, in her dry voice, when the talk turned, as it could not help turning to the evening. I was practising until eight, she looked in with her missile. She said, the flowers for Sunday were not to her liking and she would come back after dark and rearrange them, if you please, because she did not trust anyone's eye but her own. A thin, bleak smile moved across Lettice's face and was gone. That was Adelaide. Even the delphiniums were afraid of her. And the lamp, Miss Marple asked, softly, into her teacup. Everyone looked at her. It was the thing no one had mentioned, and it had been there, under everything, the whole time.

The lamp was burning at eight, Lettice said, after a moment. I saw it. It was always burning, her hands thin and strong. a musician's hands, turned her cup in its saucer. Tom will be heartbroken. He, the lamp was his whole. She stopped. It was unlike Lettice Crow not to finish a sentence. It was then that Miss March came in.

She came in quietly, as she did everything. Adelaide Vane's companion, the little grey woman whom the village had known for three years without ever quite knowing. She had come to sit with the vicar's wife, she said, in her soft, apologetic voice. in case there was anything, any letters, any arrangements, anything a woman could do that men could not. She was perhaps sixty, perhaps older. She had a gentle worn face and soft grey hair drawn back under an old-fashioned little hat, and she wore, even to a vicarage tea, a look of having apologised for existing. Harriet made room for her. The vicar's wife poured her tea. She took the cup with both hands, and Miss Marple, whose needles had never once paused, saw what everyone else had not

troubled to see, that the first two fingers of Miss March's right hand were bandaged, neatly and recently, under the edge of her grey sleeve. You have hurt your hand, my dear, said Miss Marple kindly. Miss March started, very slightly, one would have had to be watching closely to see it. Oh, it is nothing. I burn it on the kettle this morning.

So stupid of me, she smiled her small, fading smile. There has been so much. One is not quite oneself. No, said Miss Marple gently. One is not. And she looked at the little grey woman for a moment longer, with her kind, blank baby's eyes. and then she looked down at her knitting, and the talk went on, and the afternoon wore itself away toward evening. But she had seen two things, had Miss Marple, and she laid them side by side in her mind, like two stitches picked up on a needle, a flame that had burned for forty-one years and had gone out, and a woman who had burned her fingers that morning on a kettle. On the way home, in the September dusk, with the rooks settling in the elms, Miss Marple walked very slowly, leaning a

little on Harriet's arm, An old lady tired after her outing. You are very quiet, Jane, said Harriet. I was thinking, said Miss Marple, that I should like to see the church tomorrow. The inside of it, if the police have finished. She paused on the hill and looked back at the tower, black against the last of the light. And I should like to meet Tom Brabazon, the verger. He has trimmed that wick every morning for forty-one years, you said. Think of that, Harriet. Forty-one years of mornings. She stood a moment, a small, soft, fluttering figure in the dusk. He must know more about that lamp than anyone living, she said.

Or almost anyone. Section 3. The Verger's Hands Almost anyone, Harriet turned to look at her, there on the hill in the gathering dusk. Jane, what can you possibly mean by almost? Nothing, dear, nothing at all. Miss Marple resumed her gentle progress down the lane, a small, contented figure in the autumn twilight. and would say no more, except to observe that the evenings were drawing in, and that she feared the dahlias would be caught by an early frost. Harriet, who knew that tone, held her peace. But she noticed that her friend turned once more at the gate of the laurels to look back at the darkening tower of St Dominic's, and that her eyes, in the last of the light, were not vague at all, but very bright

and very thoughtful, like a bird's. The police finished with the church the following morning, and by eleven o'clock Miss Marple was standing in the cool, dim interior of St Dominic's, her embroidery bag over her arm, breathing in the ancient smell of stone and beeswax and dying flowers. The church was very old, Norman at its heart, the vicar was fond of saying, though the rest of it had been pulled about by every century since, and it had that particular stillness of churches that have been prayed in for a long time, a stillness that is not empty but full.

The sun came through the east window in shafts of dusty red and gold. The flowers for Sunday stood in their vases by the altar, white and copper-coloured chrysanthemums, and they had not been arranged well. Miss Marple, who knew a great deal about flower arrangement, noticed this at once, and with surprise, because Adelaide Vane had been famous for her flowers. Near the little side door, on a stepladder, an old man was polishing brass. He worked slowly, with infinite care, as though the brass were alive and could be hurt.' Mr. Brabazon,' said Miss Marple, gently. He turned.

He was a small, bent man of seventy-two, with a face like an old hedge, all weather and thorn, and his eyes were red-rimmed. He had been crying, she saw, and was not ashamed of it.' I hope I do not disturb you,' said Miss Marple.' I am staying with Mrs. Fane at the laurels. I only wish to see the church.' It is a beautiful church. Beautiful enough, said Tom Brabazon, and turned back to his brass. His hands, she noted, were a gardener's hands still, though he had not gardened these thirty years, brown, knotted, with earth so long in the seams that no washing would shift it. You'll be the lady that's staying with Mrs. Fane. Miss Marple, he said it without interest. The village had told him. The

village told everyone everything. Yes, said Miss Marple. How wise of you! She seated herself in a pew, as though she had come expressly to sit, and took out her knitting. I was so sorry to hear about the lamp. The polishing stopped. It was, she had calculated, the thing he could not resist, not the murder, not Mrs. Vane, but the lamp. He came down the stepladder slowly, cloth in hand, and looked at her, and she looked back at him with mild, sympathetic attention. It burned forty-one years, he said.

Forty-one years, I trimmed her every morning, winter and summer. I was never but once away, when my wife was dying, and I left the oil measured and the wick ready, and young Mr. Dale, the curate he was then, did it for me, and wrote me a letter to say it was done. His voice was low and steady, and full of a grief that had nothing to do with Adelaide Vane. She never went out. Not once, she never failed.

It is most remarkable, said Miss Marple. She didn't fail the other night neither, He said it suddenly, roughly, as though it had been tearing at him. That's what I told the inspector, and he wrote it down, but he didn't heed it. She didn't fail, Miss Marple. She was put out. Put out? Miss Marple's needles paused. How very strange.

How do you know Mr. Brabazon? He hesitated, and she saw the old, deep caution of a man who has spent his life among the gentry, and learned when silence is safest. Then something in the soft, pink, woolly old lady in the pew, the supreme insignificance of her, perhaps, decided him.' The oil,' he said.' I fill her every Sunday, full, and she burns down to Wednesday, near enough, before she wants more. When I came Thursday morning and found her dark, I thought first I'd forgotten, me, that never forgot, and I took her down to fill her, and she was full, full to the brim, miss.' Not two days burned. And the wick, his hands moved, demonstrating. The wick was wet and black and bent. A wick that's burned down is

dry and white at the end, like ash. This one was drowned, Miss. Someone put their fingers to her, or blew her out, when she was full of oil and meant to burn a week. I see, said Miss Marple softly. Thank you. That is very interesting. She looked up at the little lamp where it hung again above the altar.

Lit once more. He had relit her at dawn. he told her, and the red glow showed small and steady against the stone. She burns again now. Aye, I relit her. He picked up his cloth again. It seemed fitting, whatever's happened. He did not look at the chancel carpet where the dustman's powder and the photographer's chalk still marked the floor.

He looked only at the flame. She was lit for the dead, see. Seems wrong she should be dark when there's new dead. The plaque, said Miss Marple. says she was lit for one particular dead. Miss Eleanor Ransom. The cloth stopped again, and this time when he turned, his old face had closed like a door. Forty years ago and more, he said. Before your time here, miss. Before anyone's time. That's left. But you remember her? I was a lad in the gardens at the court. He climbed his stepladder again, and his voice came down dry and final.

I remember her. There's nothing to tell. She was beautiful. and she was kind, and she died, and the cannon her father lit the lamp for her, and that is all there is. He rubbed at the brass until it flamed in the window light. That is all there is, he repeated, and Miss Marple, watching his bent shoulders and the hands that trembled very slightly on the brass, knew that he was lying, and that the lie was forty years old, and that it had become a kind of truth.

She thanked him and went out into the sunlight, and at the lick gate she met Inspector Rudge. He was a solid, comfortable-looking man, with a sandy moustache, and the patient, slightly aggrieved air of a man who has interviewed the same village twice. He knew who she was. The Chief Constable's wife had been at school with somebody, and he suffered her questions with the resigned courtesy of a man humouring the gentry.' The lane, madam, yes. She was struck from behind, sometime between half-past nine and ten. A heavy object.' The stone coping of the churchyard wall is loose just there.

And it fits. We're satisfied it was that. Her bag was rifled and the brooch taken. A diamond sunburst. Very valuable. Very well known. We've the ports watched and every fence in the county. He rocked on his heels. Myself, I look nearer home. I won't conceal it from you, madam. There's a young gentleman at the court with debts as long as your arm, who was heard to quarrel with his aunt on Sunday. and who cannot account for half-past nine on Wednesday evening to my satisfaction. Mr. Gerald Vane.

Dear me, said Miss Marple. And the lamp, Inspector. The lamp, madam. He looked at her as one looks at a spaniel that has brought a stick of the wrong shape. The verger's lamp. The old fellow mentioned it. A draught, I expect. These old churches are full of draughts. No doubt, said Miss Marple, though I believe it had not gone out in a draught in forty-one years. Then it was overdue.

said Inspector Rudge comfortably, and touched his hat, and went on down the lane toward his car and his certainties. Miss Marple stood for a moment by the lich gate. On the gate-post the dark smear had been photographed and measured, but she looked at it again, and then at the loose coping-stone of the wall, an ugly, heavy wedge of stone, streaked where it had been handled, and then at the little window above the vestry where the lamp-room was, and she thought of a flame full of oil, and meant to burn a week, put out by fingers or breath in the dark of the night, while a woman lay dying by the gate below. Robbers, she reflected, do not generally stop having killed to put out lights. Robbers want

light put out before they kill, if at all. And tramps, the comfortable, mythical tramps of Mrs. Tighe's imagination, do not trim wicks or measure oil, and would not know a sanctuary lamp from a gas bracket. Whoever had stood here on Wednesday night had killed, and then, after, had put out the lamp. That was the order of it. First the blow, then the flame. The flame was not precaution, it was conclusion. It was, she thought, rather like signing a letter. She walked home slowly up the village street, nodding to the women at their doors, a harmless old lady with her embroidery bag, and her mind went round and round the thing the way her needles went round the blue wool, patiently, stitch by stitch, a woman who

ruled a village, dead at the gate of her father's church, a flame in memory of a drowned girl put out on the same night. an old gardener who lied about the past with tears in his eyes, a nephew with debts, a vicar with a hole in his accounts, an organist in ready black, a companion with a burned hand, burned, she thought, on a kettle. On Thursday morning, when there had been so much, and one was not quite oneself, Kettles, said Miss Marple aloud, to the astonishment of a passing labourer, are very hot things, but so, I fancy, is a glass chimney that has burned all night. and she went in to lunch. Section 4. The Nephew Luncheon at the Laurels was a quiet meal, but it had barely been cleared away when the world arrived at the door in

the person of Gerald Vane. He came without ceremony, shown in by a flustered Dora, with the words, Mr. Vane, ma'am, and a look that said the whole village would know of it by tea-time. He was a tall young man of twenty-eight, dark and loosely put together. with the sort of handsome, careless face that has never had to be careful, and he was at this moment very far from careless.

He was frightened, and trying not to show it, which made him loud. Mrs. Fane, I do beg your pardon, barging in. I didn't know where else to come. Aunt Adelaide was fond of you, or as fond as she ever was of anyone, and I— They're watching the house, Mrs. Fane. There's a man at the lodge gates, pretending to mend a bicycle. My bicycle has never been mended in its life— and he's been at it for an hour. Sit down, Gerald, said Harriet, and stop being dramatic. Dora, coffee. Now then, why shouldn't they watch the house? They watch everyone. They watch the vicar's hens, Dora tells me, on the grounds that a hen might have seen something. It's not funny, said Gerald. But he sat, and some of the noise

went out of him. He ran a hand through his hair. They're going to say I did it. Rudge as good as told me so this morning. He asked me where I was at half-past nine on Wednesday, and I... He stopped. And you, said Harriet. I was walking. He looked at the carpet. I went out after dinner. I'd had a row with Aunt Adelaide at dinner. Another one, about money, they're all about money. And I went out to cool off, and I walked. Up the chalk hill, and along the ridge.

I didn't see a soul. That's the trouble. I walked for two hours, alone, and no one saw me. And I can't prove a word of it. and when I came back at eleven the house was dark and I thought she'd gone to bed. She hadn't. She was lying in the lane, and I was walking on the hill like a fool in a poem, and no one saw me.

He lifted his head, and his voice cracked into a sort of angry laughter. It's perfect, isn't it? If I'd planned an alibi I'd have made a better one. That's what they'll say. They'll say it's so bad it must be true. Miss Marple, who had been knitting quietly by the window, spoke for the first time. Your aunt refused you money that evening, she asked. She'd been refusing me money all week. He turned to her, the famous old lady who solved things, Dora had told the kitchen, and the kitchen had told the village, and he looked at her now, with the shameless hope of the drowning. I owed three hundred pounds, Miss Marple, cards and a horse that wasn't. Aunt Adelaide had paid my debts twice before, and sworn she never would again. On Sunday, on the terrace,

half the parish heard us. She said I could go to prison and welcome, it might make a man of me. I said, I said things. His jaw worked. On Wednesday at dinner I tried again. I was civil, I swear I was civil. And she said, it was odd, she wasn't even angry. That was the worst of it. She was almost gentle. She said, my dear boy, you will have to learn, as we all learn, that other people's patience is not a crop that comes up every year.

and she looked so strange when she said it, tired, as if I were the least of her worries. And then she picked up her missile and went off to her everlasting flowers, and I poured myself a drink and went out. What time was that? She went out about a quarter past nine. I left. Oh, twenty minutes later.

Half past, perhaps. The stable clock was striking as I crossed the yard. And you did not pass the church? No. I went the other way, across the home paddock to the hill. Why would I go to the church? He looked from one woman to the other. You believe me, don't you? Oh, God, why should you? Nobody else does.

I believe you, said Miss Marple placidly, because it is a very bad story, and because you told it badly. People who lie, Mr. Vane, generally lie better. They have taken trouble. You have not taken trouble. Her needles clicked. Also, you said your aunt was almost gentle at dinner, and that she looked tired. A young man who had killed his aunt in a rage would not remember, two days later, that she looked tired. He would remember that she had been cruel. We are all cruel in the stories we tell about the people we have wronged. It makes the wronging easier. Gerald stared at her and his eyes filled, to his own obvious fury, with tears. She wasn't cruel, he said thickly. That's the hell of it. She was

hard and she was proud and she liked her own way like a drug. but she wasn't cruel, and she was all the family I had, and everyone in this village thinks I... He got up and went to the window and stood with his back to them, shoulders heaving once, twice, and then still. There is also the brooch, said Harriet quietly, to give him time. If they think Gerald took it, let them look for it. It hasn't been sold. It can't be sold. It's too well known, and until it turns up, it will turn up, said Miss Marple. They both looked at her. I beg your pardon, dear? I only meant that things put somewhere for a purpose generally do turn up, when their purpose is ripe. That is rather what things are for. She counted stitches under her breath. Four, five, six,

and looked up mildly. Mr. Vane, your aunt was a woman who knew things about people. Harriet says she had a genius for it. Had she lately learned something? Was there anything she knew, this last week or two, that she had not known before? Anything she let fall. Your aunt, I understand, was very clever at letting things fall, like a cat with a vase. It was so exactly Adelaide that Gerald, in mid-misery, almost smiled. She was always letting things fall, he said. This last fortnight, he frowned, thinking.

She was odd. Ever since, well, there was the business with the vicar's accounts, she was on about that, the restoration fund, she was going to force an audit, and she said a queer thing at lunch one day. We were talking about Miss March, her companion, and I said something flip, you know, about the poor little grey mouse.

And Aunt Adelaide looked at me over her glasses and said, There are no grey mice, Gerald. There are only people who have decided that being overlooked is safer. He rubbed his forehead. I didn't think anything of it. She was always saying things like that. Arrows into the air. You never knew who they hit. Did she not? said Miss Marple softly. How very interesting. She told you that people choose to be overlooked, and this was about Miss March.

About Miss March, yes. The meekest woman in England. Been with us three years. Reads aloud. Does the flowers. Did the flowers. Writes the letters. Aunt bullied her, I suppose. The way she bullied everyone. But Miss March never seemed to mind. She never seemed to feel anything much. Even yesterday, at the house, with the police everywhere, she went round closing curtains, and her hands were shaking. and she apologised to the curtains. He gave a short, bewildered laugh. You'd think she'd be relieved. Aunt Adelaide was a tartar to her some days, but she just looks extinguished, a host of like a candle gone out. There was a little silence.

The word hung in the room, small and grey and quite dreadful, though Gerald, who had spoken it, plainly heard nothing in it at all. Extinguished, said Miss Marple. It's just a word. Yes, dear. Words usually are. It is the people who choose them that are interesting. She rolled her knitting with small, deliberate movements and laid it in her lap. You have been very helpful, Mr. Vane. Go home now and drink the tea your Miss March will make you, and do not run away to London. whatever that inspector of yours says or does not say. Running away is the one thing that would make you look guilty, and you are not guilty. You know that, he turned from the window, and there was something raw and young and desperate in his face. How can you know that?

You don't know me. No, said Miss Marple. But I knew a young man very like you once, in St Mary Mead. He was accused of stealing the church plate, because he had been seen near the vestry, and owed money to his tailor. He was entirely innocent. He was seen near the vestry, because he was meeting the sexton's daughter, and he owed his tailor, because he had bought a coat to impress her. She looked at him with her mild blue eyes. You went up the hill on Wednesday night to be alone and miserable, and you have not said so, but I expect you smoked a great many cigarettes and thought a great many thoughts about a young woman. Not, I fancy, the Curzon girl, whatever the flower show may have suggested. The truth is always so much more embarrassing

than the lie. That is why innocent people have such bad alibis, Mr. Vane, and murderers such good ones. Gerald went, walking lighter than he came. At the door he turned and said, awkwardly, If anything, if I can do anything, and Harriet said, You can stay out of that inspector's way. And he was gone, and the house settled. Harriet poured the coffee Dora had long since brought, and looked at her friend, who had resumed her knitting with an air of perfect contentment. You know something, Harriet accused, or you suspect something, N. Jane, I have watched you do this for fifteen years. You sit there like a pink-and-white tea-cosy, and you turn the village over like a compost heap, and I never see the fork move, What did you

see in the church this morning? What did old Tom tell you? Tom Brabazon told me, said Miss Marple, that the lamp was full of oil, and did not fail, and was put out, put out by hand, Harriet, on the night after the deed, and I saw the flowers. The flowers? The chrysanthemums by the altar. Adelaide went to the church on Wednesday night to arrange them, because no one's eye was to be trusted but her own. They were not arranged by her, Harriet. They were arranged quite differently from her way. loosely, with the tall stems to one side and the little white ones drifting down, in a manner no one has used at St Dominic's for forty years. I asked Mrs Wexford this morning, we met by the fishmongers, and she said, oh yes, that was

how the flowers were done when she was a girl, the old-fashioned way, and she had wondered who had done it, because the last person who arranged flowers like that at St Dominic's was Miss Eleanor Ransom, who died forty-one years ago. Harriet sat very still, the coffee-pot in her hand. Adelaide died beside an altar she had not finished, said Miss Marple gently, and someone finished it for her, in the manner of the dead. Section 5 The Flowers of the Dead In the manner of the dead, Harriet repeated, the coffee-pot came down on the tray with a small, decisive clang. Jane, that is the most ghoulish thing I have ever heard you say, and I have heard you say a great many.

You are telling me that Adelaide Vane was killed, and that the murderer, then, arranged the flowers, tidied up, like a parlourmaid after a guest. Like a parlourmaid, said Miss Marple, or like a daughter, or a sister. She gazed out of the window at the garden, where the michaelmas daisies were coming into their purple, and the light had the clear, cold gold of September. Flowers are very revealing, you know, more revealing than faces. A face can be composed— But when a person arranges flowers, she is not thinking of being watched, she is thinking of the flowers, and her hands do what they were taught to do, long ago, before she learned to be careful. My old friend Caroline Weatherby had a maid, a very superior girl, who turned

out to be the runaway daughter of a dean. Nobody suspected her for a moment until she arranged the altar flowers at the harvest festival, exactly as they are arranged at cathedrals, and the bishop's wife, who was visiting, said at luncheon, where did your little maid learn that? And the whole story came out. Miss Marple sighed, a small, satisfied sigh. Hands remember, Harriet. That is the thing people forget.

The mind can be taught to forget anything. The hands remember. But Eleanor Ransom has been dead for forty-one years, Harriet said. Who is left whose hands would remember her way with flowers? Tom Brabazon was a garden boy. Lettice Crow is a newcomer. Thirty years is nothing. The vicar came after. The village that knew her is dead or doddering. There's Mrs. Wexford and Tom and... She stopped. And... And Adelaide herself, Harriet said slowly. Her sister, who is dead, she put down her cup. And Miss March, she said, and her voice changed.

Who does the flowers at the court? Who has done them for three years? Jane, are you saying that little grey woman... I am saying nothing at all, dear. I am only sitting here knitting, and wondering. Miss Marple's needles went in and out, in and out, in the sunny silence of the morning room. But I do think I should like to know a little more about Miss March.

Where she came from, three years ago. Who gave her her references. Who, in fact, engaged her. These things are always so interesting, and nobody ever asks. Adelaide engaged her, said Harriet, through an agency in London, I believe. She came with beautiful references from a lady somebody in Shropshire.

I remember because Adelaide made a great point of it. Not one of your village girls, Harriet. A lady who has known better days. She paused. I could write too. No, I don't know the agency. But Jane, the vicar's wife, will know. Adelaide told Septimus everything about the household in the way of a patroness. And the vicarage keeps letters.

Septimus never throws anything away. It is one of his crosses. Then, said Miss Marple, rising with the slow deliberation of an old lady who has decided to be active, we shall call on the vicarage again. How fortunate that it is nearly tea-time. They found the vicarage in disarray. The present Mrs. Dale, brisk, kind, and at this moment flustered, met them in the hall with her hat on. You'll forgive me, Mrs. Fane, Miss Marple.

I'm off to the Mrs. Pritchard, who have taken the news very hard and sent for me twice. Septimus is in his study, poor man, with the auditor. She lowered her voice. It has come out, as things do. The restoration fund is short by nearly two hundred pounds, and the audit Adelaide forced. She pressed her lips together. Well, you knew it was coming. Everyone knew. Septimus didn't take it.

Of course he didn't. But it went astray under his nose, and that is nearly as bad for a clergyman. He is in there with Mr. Hargreaves, going through books that go back to before the war. Do go in, coffee's in the pot, and he needs taking out of himself. The study was a small, lined, dusty room, smelling of tobacco and old sermons, and Septimus Dale sat at his desk among the ruin of his accounts, like a general on a lost field. He was a tall, loose-jointed man with a kind, harrowed face, and he rose with the automatic courtesy of a man who has been a host for thirty years and could do it in his sleep. Mrs. Fane, Miss Marple, Forgive the... he gestured at the ledgers. Mr.

Hargreaves has just gone. It is... he sat down again. It is very bad. I will not pretend to you. A hundred and eighty pounds of the parish's money, gone in small sums over four years, and my signature on the dockets. I signed what was put before me. One does. One trusts. He passed a hand over his face. Adelaide knew.

She had known for a month. She gave me until Michaelmas to find it out myself. before the diocese finds it out for you, Septimus. And now she is dead, and Michaelmas is a fortnight off. And there is a man in my parish who has been robbing the church roof to mend his own, and I do not even know his name. You have a suspicion, though, said Miss Marple gently. I have forty suspicions, and every one of them is a man I have christened, or married, or buried.

The vicar looked up at her, and his eyes were those of a tired dog. You are Miss Marple, Harriet's friend, they say. Forgive me. They say you see things. I will tell you what I see, Miss Marple. I see a village I have loved for twenty-three years, and since Wednesday night I cannot walk down the street without wondering which of them killed Adelaide Vane, and which of them robbed me, and whether it is the same man, and whether I deserve it. And the lamp, said Miss Marple.

He went very still. The lamp, he repeated. The sanctuary lamp. It went out on Wednesday night. Did you know— Tom, yes, Tom told me. It was put out. The vicar's hands moved among the papers blindly. You will think me a superstitious fool. I have been vicar here twenty-three years, and I have trimmed that lamp myself more times than I can count, when Tom was ill or away. It is only a lamp, Miss Marple, oil and wick and glass, and yet when I heard it had gone out, on that night, I felt, he stopped, and when he went on, his voice was lower. The cannon ransom lit it for his daughter. I never knew her, but I have read the burial register and the old letters in the parish chest, and I will tell you something I have never told

a soul, because it has weighed on me and because you are a stranger, and strangers are safe. When Eleanor Ransom died, drowned, in the mill-pond at the court, in the winter of 1904, her father did not light that lamp in grief, he lit it in fury. There is a letter in the chest, from the canon to the bishop, and in it he writes— I can see the words.

I will keep a light for her in this church until the truth comes to it, though I wait all my life. The truth, Miss Marple, not comfort, not memory, truth. He believed his daughter had not died by accident, and he died himself two years later, waiting. Septimus Dale raised his head. Forty-one years the light has burned, and no truth came. And on Wednesday night, when Adelaide, her sister, was killed at the gate— The light went out, put out, by a human hand. What do you make of that?

The room was very quiet. Outside, in the vicarage garden, a robin was singing its thin autumn song, and somewhere a door closed, and the ordinary sounds went on, indifferent. I make of it, said Miss Marple at last, very softly, that someone could not bear it any longer. The lamp, I mean. Burning, shining, forty-one years shining, in memory of the daughter who died, and not, you see— In memory of the daughter who lived, she folded her hands in her lap. Tell me, vicar, the letter from the canon to the bishop. It is still in the parish chest?

It is. Then, with your kind permission, I should very much like to read it. Miss Marple's blue eyes were as mild and blank as ever. But her voice had changed. It had, Harriet thought suddenly, an edge like a needle. And the burial register. And the letters, all of them, whatever is there. I am an old woman and I have nothing to do, and old papers are my hobby, and I am afraid I am going to be a very great nuisance to you. Septimus Dale looked at her for a long moment. Then he rose and took down an iron key from behind the row of commentaries and unlocked the oak chest that stood under the window and lifted out a tin box green with age. Be a nuisance, he said. God knows somebody in this parish should be.

The letters were few and dry and devastating. Miss Marple read them slowly, sitting by the vicarage window in the last of the afternoon light, with Harriet beside her and the vicar gone to his evensong. The mill-pond, the ice, the inquest, accident, always accident, the cannon's handwriting bitter as gall, the lamp endowed, the plaque cut, the light shineth in darkness, and in the last letter, in a hand that had begun to tremble, a single sentence that Miss Marple read twice— and then sat looking at for a long time, while the light died in the window and the robin stopped singing.' Harriet,' she said at last, and her voice was very gentle and very grave.' I was wrong about one thing, and I am glad of it, because it

means the poor young man on the hill was telling the truth. But I am afraid, I am very much afraid, that I was right about the flowers.' Section 6. The Letters in the Chest' Right about the flowers?' Harriet said, in the dim study. And wrong about? Jane, what were you wrong about? What does that letter say? She leaned forward, but Miss Marple had folded the paper with small, careful fingers and returned it to the tin box, and she closed the lid as one closes the door on a sleeping child. It says, said Miss Marple, what I have been afraid of since Thursday morning, and some things, Harriet, should be said only once, and at the proper time, and to the proper people. It is not spite— It is that words, once they are out, cannot be put back,

like feathers out of a cushion. She rose and smoothed her skirt. We must go home. Dora will be waiting, and I have kept you from your dinner, and the vicar will want his study. But I should be obliged, very much obliged, if you would do three small things for me tomorrow. Harriet, who knew better by now than to argue, fetched her coat. They walked home through the village in the blue dusk, past the lit windows of the post-office, and the dark windows of the butcher's, past the lich-gate with its rope and its patient constable, up the hill to the laurels, and all the way Miss Marple talked pleasantly of other things, of the Michaelmas daisies, of a recipe for slow gin, of a nephew's boy who had won a scholarship, and Harriet answered mechanically, and

all the while the sentence in the letter burned between them, unread by one of them, like the lamp that had burned unread above the altar. The three things, said Harriet at last, as they turned in at the gate, since you will not tell me the rest. What are they? First, said Miss Marple, counting on her fingers in the porch light, you will write to that nice canon of yours in Salisbury.

You have a canon, have you not? Everyone has a canon. And ask him, quite casually, what became of the family of the old sexton at St Dominic's who died in 1905. There is always a sexton in these stories, you know, and they always die at the interesting moment, and nobody ever asks what became of their families. Second, you will find out from Mrs. Tighe, she will know, the post-office knows everything, whether Miss March receives letters, and from where, and in what hand. And third, she paused, with her hand on the door, and the porch light made two small bright moons of her glasses, third, you will ask Lettice Crow to tea on Tuesday, and I shall drop in, by accident. at half-past four. Lettuce? Why lettuce? Because, said

Miss Marple, opening the door, Lettuce Crow has played the organ at St Dominic's for thirty years, and the organ loft looks down into the church, and organists, like cats, are always there when no one thinks they are, and see everything, and say nothing. It is what they are for, and she went in to her dinner, and ate it with appetite, and talked of the slow gin, and was, to all appearances, the serenest woman in England. But the village that weekend was not serene. It is a strange thing, the way a small place behaves under suspicion. Homefield had held together for the first two days on the strong wine of sensation, the tramp, the nephew, the robbery. But by Saturday, the wine had turned. People had begun to count.

The police had been seen at the court again, and at the station at Market Lavington with a photograph of the brooch, and a man from the County Herald had knocked on eleven doors, and been fed at nine of them, and lied to at all eleven. At the Women's Institute, which met on Saturday afternoon in the village hall, Mrs.

Tighe proposed a collection for a wreath, and the proposal passed, and then nobody could agree on the flowers. Chrysanthemums, said old Mrs. Wexford. She always had chrysanthemums. She had chrysanthemums, said Mrs. Tighe with meaning, because she ordered them. There's a difference. It was a small thing, but it was the first unkindness said aloud. and it went through the hall like a draft. And then, because unkindness, once started, feeds itself, the stories began. Small, respectable, miserable stories. How Adelaide had stopped the miller girl's engagement to the chemist's son by a few well-chosen words to the chemist's wife.

How she had known about the restoration fund for a month, and held it over the vicar like a whip, and why. He had never crossed her except once. over the churchyard wall. How she had dismissed a housemaid in 1938 for a brooch that was later found in her own drawer and never apologised. How she kept Miss March like a dog. No, worse than a dog, because dogs at least are noticed.

She gave her a dress, said somebody, for Christmas. Her own old grey one, turned. She gave her a home, said somebody else, unexpectedly. It was the doctor's wife, a quiet woman. when the Shropshire lady died and left her nothing. I nursed the Shropshire lady's sister. Miss March was companion there eleven years, and was left five pounds a year, and the furniture of her room. Five pounds a year, and she was fifty-six, and had nowhere in the world to go, and Adelaide Vane took her in, and made her pay for it every day, said Mrs. Tighe, in the coin of being grateful. There was a silence after that, the kind that comes when somebody has said the thing that is exactly true, and should not have been said,

and the tea was poured rather hastily, and the talk turned to the FET. Miss Marple was not at the Institute. She was sitting, that Saturday afternoon, in the window of her bedroom at the laurels, looking down over the village with her knitting in her lap, and her eyes half closed, like an old cat in the sun. But she was not asleep. She was doing what she had done all her long life, in St. Mary Mead and a dozen other villages— She was laying the people of Homefield out in her mind beside the people she had known, the way one lays out wool of different shades, and waiting for the colours to match. Adelaide Vane, who ruled and knew and let things fall like a cat with a vase, she was Mrs Saunders of the manor, all over again,

who had known about the curate and the choir girl, and had died, in the end, of not being able to stop herself saying so. Gerald, with his debts and his hill-walking, He was young Dennis, who had been innocent and looked guilty, as the innocent so often do. The vicar, signing dockets with his kind, tired eyes on something else. Oh, the church was full of vicars like that. Men too gentle for the money side of God. Lettice Crow, thirty years at the organ, seeing everything, saying nothing. like the organist at Muchbenham who had watched an elopement, a theft, and a christening from her loft in one week, and never turned her head. Tom Brabazon, with his oil and his wick and his forty-year lie, crying for the lamp

and not for the mistress. And Miss March, the grey mouse. There are no grey mice, Adelaide had said, and Adelaide, who let arrows fly into the air, had aimed that one. There are only people who have decided that being overlooked is safer. Safer, Miss Marple thought, looking down at the village, at the smoke going up from the chimneys in the still September air, at the Tower of St Dominic's with the rookeries black around it. Safer than what? She thought of a woman of fifty-six with five pounds a year, and the furniture of her room taken in out of charity and fed on gratitude for three years. She thought of a hand burned on a kettle, on a glass chimney that has burned all night. She thought of chrysanthemums

arranged loosely, with the tall stems to one side and the little white ones drifting down, in the manner of a girl who had died in 1904. She thought of a lamp full of oil, meant to burn a week, put out by hand in the dark. The light shineth in darkness. I will keep a light for her, until the truth comes to it. And she thought of the last letter in the tin box, the one she had read twice, in the old, trembling hand. My daughters walked together by the pond that evening, and only one came back, and the one that came back has never once, in all the years since, spoken her sister's name, the one that came back, Adelaide. The child who came home dry, and grew up to rule a village, and never spoke her sister's name, and tended, no, the father tended, the lamp.

The lamp was the name, the lamp was the speaking of the name, by a father who had no other way to say it, for forty-one years, through his own death, into his old verger's hands. A flame of accusation burning above an altar, tended like a heartbeat, in memory of the daughter who died. Not in memory, in accusation. And everyone in the village had read the plaque, and seen only the memory, because a plaque on a church wall is only a wall, and nobody reads it, after the first year, at all. The light was going. Down in the lane behind the church the constable's lantern moved along the rope. Miss Marple sat on in the dusk, and her needles had stopped, and her face, in the last of the light, was not serene at all, but very

old and very sad. Poor Adelaide, she said aloud to the empty room. Poor, proud, guilty Adelaide. And poor, she did not finish. She got up and lit the gas, and rang for her tray. And when Dora brought it, the old lady was knitting again, pink and white and harmless. And Dora went down and told the kitchen that Miss Marple, at least, wasn't afraid. And the kitchen took comfort from it, which was, in its way, a kind of lie. And Miss Marple, who had engineered it, knew that it was, and was sorry. Section 7 The Second Blow On Monday morning Tom Brabazon fell down the vestry stairs, and the village, which had been holding its breath, let it out in a scream. He was found at half-past seven by the baker's boy, lying at the foot of the narrow stone

stair that led down from the lamp-room, with his oil-can beside him, and his left leg under him, and he was alive but not conscious, and the doctor, who was called from his breakfast, looked grave, and used the words fracture and shock and at his age. They carried him to the cottage hospital at Market Lavington, on the ambulance that was kept, until that day, mostly for confinements, and by nine o'clock the village had it that he was dying, and by half-past nine it had it that he was dead, and by ten it had it that he had been pushed.

That last, for once, was the truth. He was pushed, said Inspector Rudge, standing in the morning room of the laurels at noon, with his hat in his hands, addressing, out of some instinct he did not examine, not Harriet, but Miss Marple. There's no doubt of it this time, madam. The stair's steep, but he knew it blind. He'd been up and down it forty years, and there's dust on the rail where his hand didn't catch it. And, this is not to go further, madam, the lamp-room door was locked when the baker's boy came, and the key was on the inside, and Tom Brabazon had no key on him.

Somebody let him up those stairs, madam, locked the door on him, and waited at the top. He wiped his moustache. Somebody who knew he'd be there at half-past seven to trim the lamp, same as he's been there every morning of his life.' The lamp,' said Miss Marple. Her hands were very still on her knitting.' Was the lamp—'' Burning, madam, burning as pretty as you please, with a man lying dying under it. That's what I can't stomach, if you'll forgive me. First Mrs. Vane, dead by the gate.' and the lamp out. Now Tom, near dead under the lamp, and the lamp lit. It's as if the damned thing, he caught himself. Forgive me, madam. It's as if it were mocking us. It is not mocking, said Miss Marple quietly.

It is being used. That is a different thing, and a worse one. May I ask, does anyone know how the old man came to the church at all this morning? I understood his son comes down from Coventry on Sundays, and stays till the Monday train.' Would his father not have waited and gone up with him, as I am told he always does on Mondays? Rudge stared at her.

That's— As a matter of fact, madam, that's just it. The son did stay, and he says his father had a note. A note came to the cottage last evening, by hand, no stamp. Tom read it at supper and said little. But he said this, that there was someone would meet him at the church before the morning, about the lamp, and it was private, and he'd go up early.

The son thought nothing of it. The old man had his ways. The inspector's voice flattened. The note's gone, madam. We turned the cottage over. There's no note. No, said Miss Marple. There would not be. She was very quiet after Rudge had gone. A small, erect figure in the window-chair, looking down at the village. And Harriet, watching her, felt for the first time a touch of fear. Not of the murderer. Of her friend. Jane, she said. This changes things.

doesn't it? This breaks it. He was the one who told you about the oil and the wick. He was the one who lied about the past. And now someone has silenced him. She stopped, hearing herself use Mrs. Wexford's word. Then he knew. He knew something about Wednesday night, and the murderer knew he knew, and Jane, it proves it, doesn't it? The lamp, the letters, the old story, whatever it is, it's all one thing. It was always one thing, Yes, said Miss Marple, it was always one thing. Then this morning narrows it. Who knew Tom would be up that stair at half-past seven? The whole village, but the note, the note knew, the note arranged it, and whoever wrote the note, Harriet was pacing now, the way she had

paced on the first morning, knew his habits, knew his cottage, knew the sun would be there and would think nothing of it. It's someone inside, Jane, it was always someone inside. Not Tramps. Not, she turned, not Gerald. Gerald couldn't get near the court on Wednesday without half the parish watching, and he's been watched since, and he'd no reason on earth to touch Tom Brabazon. The police will say he did it to stop Tom saying something, but Jane, it's nonsense.

Gerald doesn't plan. Gerald falls into things. This morning was planned. It was planned like, like a service. The note. The hour. The locked door. The key on the inside. She shivered. The lit lamp. Who lights a lamp, Jane, and then pushes the man who tends it down the stairs under it? There was a long silence. Down in the village a bell was ringing. The baker's cart, ordinary as bread, going its rounds as though the world had not split open twice in five days. Harriet, said Miss Marple at last, and her voice was odd. You said a strange thing on the first morning. You said it was the lamp that frightened you, not the murder, and I have been thinking about why you were right. Because it was the lamp,

you see, that was the point. Not Adelaide's death, I don't mean that. Her death is the thing itself, the blow, the blood, but the meaning of it, the message of it, all lay in the lamp, out, then lit. The murderer is not hiding from us, Harriet. The murderer is talking to us, has been talking all along, in the only language she has left Miss Marple's needles began to move again, very slowly. And this morning she said something new. This morning she said, Not him. Not the man who tends the flame. Whatever else I am, I am not that.

She pushed him. Yes, she had to. He had begun to talk, to me, in the church, about the past, and she could not risk the past. But she made very sure he lived. She made sure. Harriet stared. he fell down a stone stair. Down a stair he had climbed forty years, at an hour when the baker's boy comes past the vestry door at half-past seven exactly, as regular as the sun, with a loaf for the vicarage, and ears like a hare. She pushed him where he would be found in minutes, Harriet. She locked the door with the key inside, so that he would not be blamed for his own fall, though why she cared for that?

Miss Marple stopped. Her needles stopped. For a long moment she sat with her eyes half-closed, and Harriet did not speak, because she had seen that stillness before, in St. Mary Mead. and it was the stillness of a woman reading a letter that is not there. Though why she cared for that, Miss Marple repeated softly, is the whole of it. She cared, Harriet.

That is the thing I had not understood until this moment. She pushed an old man down the stairs, and she was careful, careful, that he should not die of it, and that he should not be blamed for it. She has killed once, in hatred forty years old, and she cannot bring herself to kill again, even to save herself.

especially to save herself. She opened her eyes. Do you know what that means? It means that Adelaide's death was not the beginning of something, it was the end. It was a debt being paid, not a scheme being protected. And it means, she drew a long breath, that when I am right, and I am nearly sure now that I am right, there will be no running, and no violence, and no denial. There will only be a very tired woman and a confession, and the worst part of all of it which is that one will understand exactly why she did it, and one will not be able to forgive her, and one will not be able to blame her, either. She, said Harriet. You keep saying she. Yes, dear, Miss March.

I have not said so. You don't have to. Harriet sat down suddenly, as though her knees had given. The grey mouse, the meekest woman in England, who burned her hand on the— Oh, Jane! Not on a kettle. On the lamp. on the glass chimney, putting it out. On Wednesday night, after, she put her hand to her mouth.

But why, why? She had nowhere to go. Adelaide took her in, the doctor's wife said, eleven years in Shropshire, and left with five pounds a year. Why would she kill the one person who, tomorrow, said Miss Marple, is Tuesday. You will have your tea, and Lettice Crow will come, and I shall drop in at half-past four. And tonight, Harriet, if you love me, You will not repeat one word of this, not to the canon, not to the cook, not in your sleep, because there is one thing more I must know before I am sure, and if the village gets hold of it first, it will run through that poor woman's life like fire through thatch, and she has been burned enough. She would say no more. She sat by the window through the long September afternoon, knitting

and resting her eyes, a picture of old lady innocence, and the village beyond the glass went about its frightened business. and the light in the little window above the vestry of St. Dominic's burned on and on over the hospital road, lit at dawn by a dying man for the dead. And at dusk Miss Marple put on her hat and her gloves and her second-best coat, and took her umbrella though the sky was clear, and walked down alone to the village and up the lane behind the church, where the rope was down now and the constable gone, to the lich-gate, and stood there for a long time in the falling dark, looking at the worn stones where a woman had reached out her gloved hand for something just beyond her grasp, and at the blackthorn hedge with its hard,

dusty sloughs. Slow gin, she said aloud, to no one, in the voice of an old woman talking to herself. They say the sloughs must be pricked all over before they are bottled, or the flavour cannot get out. Every one of them pricked and left in the dark for a year, and the gin turns the colour of she looked up at the little window, where the lamp glowed red.

The colour of that. Exactly the colour of that. Blood and wine and fire. And the longer it stands, the stronger it gets. Forty-one years, Harriet would say. A very strong brew. Then she turned and walked home, and dined, and played three rubbers of bridge with Harriet and the doctor and the doctor's wife, and played them badly, and apologised, and said she was tired and would go up, and did.

and sat, fully dressed by her bedroom fire until midnight, thinking, with her knitting idle in her lap, of a girl who had drowned in 1904, and a sister who had never spoken her name, and a father who had lit a lamp like a curse, and a grey woman who arranged chrysanthemums in the manner of the dead. Section 8.

The Test Tuesday came up fine and pale, with a sky like washed muslin and a smell of wood-smoke from the cottages. and at half-past three Harriet Fane's best tea service was set out in the drawing-room at the Laurels, and at four o'clock Lettice Crow arrived, in her black, carrying her gloves and her thirty years of music like a folded umbrella. She was a thin, upright woman of fifty-five with a face that had forgotten how to expect pleasure, and she took her tea standing until Harriet made her sit, and she answered questions about Tom Brabazon's condition, a shade better, the hospital said, and he had spoken once one word which the nurse had not caught, in the dry, precise voice that turned the pages of other people's lives without

creasing them. The whole village is at sixes and sevens, Harriet said, pouring. They want to hang someone by Friday. The county herald man is staying at the George and drinking too much, and Mrs. Tighe has told him the tramps did it, and he has told her, I am sorry to say, that the police know better.' Lettice, you see everyone, from that loft of yours. Who do you think?

I think, said Lettice Crow, that I am an organist, and not a detective, and that the dead are dead, and the living should be careful. She took her cup. It was, Harriet thought, a curiously final little speech, like a chord resolved. And then the door opened, and Dora announced, in the special voice she kept for the occasion, Miss Marple, and Miss Marple came in, pink and white and apologetic, with her embroidery bag and her air of having wandered into the wrong room and decided to stay. Miss Crow, how nice. I have heard you play, you know, on Sunday week, and I have been longing to tell you how beautiful it was. The bark. It is not everyone who dares bark on that organ. The old one at St.

Mary Mead was quite different, so breathless, poor thing, like an elderly lady climbing stairs, but yours has such depth. You must know it very well after thirty years.'' I know it,' said Lettice.' Thirty years.' Miss Marple settled herself, and took the cup Harriet gave her, and smiled across the room like a child offered cake.' Then you would have been there. Oh, but of course you were, through all the years of Mrs. Vane. Such a loss. Though I dare say a small vague laugh. One may say, to another musician, that she was not always easy in musical matters.' Mrs. Fane tells me she had strong views about the hymns. She had strong views about everything, said Lettice, and she expressed them during the voluntary, but the edge

had gone off her voice. It is very hard to be dry with someone who admires your Bach. She even, after a while, talked about the organ and the choir and the difficulty of tenors, and Miss Marple listened with her head a little on one side and her needles going, and made, every so often, a small appreciative sound. and the afternoon drew on and the light turned gold, and it was all so pleasant and so ordinary that Harriet, watching, could hardly remember that this was an ambush. It came at a quarter to five, and it came so gently that Harriet, who was waiting for it, nearly missed it.

You were practising on Wednesday evening, Miss Crow, said Miss Marple, in exactly the same soft, social voice, counting a stitch. Until eight, I think you said, at the vicarage, the choir-anthem, Such a beautiful thing, that anthem. Lord, thou hast been our refuge. And then you went home, I suppose, through the churchyard, as you always do. As I always do, said Lettice. And the lamp was burning when you left.

You saw it. Miss Marple smiled at her. You told us so. It was always burning. Such a comfort. That little light. One saw it from so far, on a dark night. I saw it myself on Tuesday, from the garden at the laurels. Harriet, do you remember? We stood at the window, and I said... She turned back, and her voice did not change at all. But of course one could not see it on Wednesday. After eight o'clock.

Because when you looked back at the church, as you went through the lich gate, one always looks back. It is a habit, like crossing oneself. It had already begun to go out, had it not. The room was utterly silent. How strange, said Miss Marple, into the silence, in a voice like falling snow. that you should have told us it was burning when you watched it go dark. Lettuce Crow sat very still with her cup halfway to her lips.

The colour came up slowly into her thin face and then went away again, leaving it grey, and she set the cup down with a small, precise click, like a note. I looked back, she said at last, at half-past eight, and the lamp was burning. I have said so to the police, and it was true. At half-past eight, said Miss Marple gently. But you did not leave the church at eight, Miss Crow. You said so at the vicarage, and I wondered at the time, because the anthem takes a deal of practice. But the choir did not come that night. The tenor's child was ill, Mrs. Tighe told me, and the practice was put off. And yet you stayed, alone in the dark church, until what hour? No, no, as Lettice half rose. Do not distress yourself. I am

not the police. I am an old woman, and I am curious, the way old women are, about the little things, about why a woman sits alone in a church in the dark for an hour and a half, on the night a woman is killed below her window. and says she went home at eight. The needles had stopped. And about what she saw from the loft. Because you were in the loft, Miss Crow, were you not? The organ loft looks down into the church, and out through the little window, over the lane, over the lick gate. Lettice Crow's hands lay in her lap, the strong musician's hands, and they were trembling, and she looked at them as though they belonged to someone else. And then she looked up, and her face had aged ten years, and she said,

in a voice like dust. I should have told. I have not slept. I want you to know that I have not slept. No, said Miss Marple. I did not think you had. The practice was cancelled, said Lettice. But I went. I often go, in the evenings, when the church is empty. One can play, then for oneself, not for Adelaide Vane, for oneself. The bitterness in the word Adelaide was thirty years deep and as dry as the rest of her. I was in the loft at nine.

The lamp was lit. Mrs. Vane came at a quarter past, with her missile, and her flowers. She pushed the door. I heard it, and I heard her moving below, taking the Sunday vases, muttering, the way she did. No taste, no taste in the parish. Lettice's voice had taken on, horribly, the echo of the dead woman's. And then, at half past, the church door opened again, very quietly, and someone came in. Who?

I could not see. The loft is high, and the church was dark but for the lamp and the candle she had lit at the altar. Whoever it was stayed down by the west end, in the shadow, by the font. I thought, she stopped, I thought it was the nephew. I will be honest. Everyone knew of the quarrel. I thought, he has followed her, and there will be a scene, and I shall be trapped up here like a hen in a coop while they scream. I sat still. One does.

And then, she stopped again, and this time the silence went on so long that Harriet moved and Lettice flinched. Nothing happened, she said. That is the thing I cannot. Nothing happened, Miss Marple. Mrs. Vane finished her flowers and took her missile and went out. I heard her footsteps go down the lane, and the other one, the one by the font, did not follow. Not then. Waited. A minute, two minutes, and then went out, very softly, and I heard the steps go the other way, down the path by the hedge, and I sat in the loft and thought, well, that is a strange thing, a follower who does not follow, and I was not easy, and I looked out of the little window, and the lane was empty, and the lamp was burning, and everything was ordinary, and I went

home at a quarter to ten. Her voice dropped to a whisper, and at a quarter to ten she had been dead twenty minutes, not two hundred yards from where I sat. and the person by the font had gone the other way, round by the hedge, which comes out, you know, Miss Marple, by the far stile, which comes out on the lane, ahead of her, in front of her, waiting for her. The room was very still. Outside, the rooks were coming home to the elms in the early dusk, and their crying filled the silence like something spilled. You saw no face, said Miss Marple, no face, no height even, the dark, and the pillar, A shadow. A small shadow, I would have said, but the dark makes everything small.

Lettuce Crow drew a long, shaking breath. And one thing more. I have turned it over and over, and it is why I have not slept, because I do not know what it means, and I am afraid of it. When Mrs. Vane went out, before the other one moved, the church was quiet a moment, and I heard her stop, just inside the door, and she said something, aloud, to no one, in the dark, empty church. She said, Lettice closed her eyes to get it exact. Then she said, You needn't wait, Eleanor.

I shan't be long. Harriet made a small sound. She said it quite calmly, said Lettice, in an ordinary voice, the way one speaks to someone in the next room, to her sister, to the dead. And then she went out, and the door shut, and twenty minutes later she opened her eyes. Now you know why I have not slept.

I sat above a murder and heard a woman speak to a ghost. and I told the police I went home at eight, because I was afraid, I was afraid of being in it, of the newspapers, of the court. I am a coward, Miss Marple, I have always been a coward. It is why I have been an organist for thirty years, and never a wife or a mother or anything with edges. And now Tom Brabazon is dying in the hospital, and if it is because he knew what I know, then I have killed him with my cowardice, and I shall have to live with that, and I do not know how. She put her face in her musician's hands, and sat very straight, and did not weep, which was somehow worse than weeping, and Miss Marple rose and crossed the room, and sat down beside her, and

took one of the trembling hands in both her own small soft ones, and held it. There, my dear, she said, as though Lettice Crow were seven years old, there, you have told it now, and it was not cowardice, it was only the habit of a lifetime, of sitting high up and looking down and not being part of things.

Habits are very strong. They are almost as strong as guilt. She patted the hand. And you are quite wrong about Tom. Tom was not pushed because of what he saw. He was pushed because of what he said, to me, in the church, on Friday morning. And what he said was only this, that the lamp did not fail, and was put out. So you see, your silence saved no one, and endangered no one, and you may put it down.

She held the hand a moment longer, and her blue eyes were over Lettuce's bent head, met Harriet's, and there was in them something Harriet had never seen there before. Not triumph, not even pity, but a great, weary, bottomless sadness. You needn't wait, Eleanor, Miss Marple repeated softly. I shan't be long. She knew, you see. She knew she was followed.

She knew by whom. She had known all week, perhaps, ever since the flowers, ever since the arrow she shot at lunch about grey mice. and she went up the lane all the same, in the dark, alone, at half-past nine, to meet it. She looked down at the worn, proud head beside her. Poor Adelaide, she said, for the second time.

She was not running away that night. She was going to keep an appointment, forty-one years old. Section 9. The Threads Draw Together After Lettuce Crow had gone, she refused brandy, and accepted, in the end, only a glass of sherry. and Miss Marple's assurance that she would go to Inspector Rudge herself, and that it would be better so, and kinder.

Harriet sat down opposite her friend, and looked at her for a long time without speaking.' Jane,' she said at last,' enough. I have been patient for six days, and I have written to the Canon, and I have gossiped with Mrs. Tighe, and I have had Lettice Crow to tea to be ambushed, and now you will tell me, all of it, the letter in the chest, the flowers—' What Adelaide said to the empty church. All of it. The canon wrote back, asked Miss Marple. This morning. I didn't tell you. There was the news about Tom. Harriet went to her desk and brought the letter. The old sexton at St Dominic's.

Josiah March, he was called. He died in 1905, the year after the drowning. Had a wife who died before him, and one child. A daughter. Who would have been? Harriet's finger found the line. a girl of about twelve or thirteen at the time of his death, and was taken in, it is believed, by an aunt in Shropshire. Shropshire, Jane.

And her name? Harriet's voice was not quite steady. The sexton's daughter's name was Mercy. Mercy March. Yes, said Miss Marple. You knew? I guessed, when Mrs. Tighe told me, this morning you were out, that Miss March receives a letter every month from Shropshire, in a very old-fashioned hand, from a great-aunt who is ninety-one, and that the letter last week was heavier than usual and registered, and that Miss March, who never has twopence to spend, insured it. Miss Marple laid down her knitting. A registered letter, Harriet, from a woman of ninety-one. One does not register gossip. One registers documents, or money, or both. And there is this, too, from her embroidery bag, from beneath the blue wool and the needles,

and the innocent tangle of silks, she drew a small folded paper. I asked Mrs. Tighe, very casually, whether she remembered the drowning. She was a girl in the village, they were all girls together, and she told me something that no one else thought to mention, because no one else is old enough, and the ones who are, are silent.

Eleanor Ransom did not go to the Mill Pond alone that evening in 1904. She went with her sister Adelaide, and with her greatest friend, they were all three of an age, fifteen, sixteen, the Sexton's daughter, Mercy March. Miss Marple's voice was very quiet. Three girls on the ice, Harriet, in the winter dusk. And one came home dry, and one came home dead, and one, the Sexton's daughter, whose father buried the dead girl. and lit the candles at the funeral, and died himself within the year, of grief or drink or knowledge, one was sent away, sent away within the fortnight, to an aunt in Shropshire, and was never spoken of in the village again. Mrs. Tighe had forgotten her name. She remembered her only as the little

March girl, that Eleanor was so fond of. The drawing-room was very still, the fire had burned low, and the curtains were not yet drawn, and beyond the windows the September evening lay over the village like a hand. And three years ago, said Miss Marple, the companion in Shropshire, the meek little grey woman who had served a lady for eleven years and been left five pounds a year, came to Holmfield Court, engaged through an agency, by Adelaide, Who made a great point of her references? Who had not, I asked Gerald this morning, by a note, and he scribbled back on the back of a bill, the young are so careless, who had not so much as interviewed another candidate. She chose Miss March off a list, Gerald writes,

without seeing her. I remember because I said it was odd, and Aunt said, Miss Marple unfolded the paper and read, in her soft, level voice. And Aunt said, It is not odd, Gerald, I know exactly who she is. The fire settled with a small crash of coals. She knew, Harriet whispered. Adelaide knew. From the beginning. She brought her back.

The girl who was sent away. She brought her back. And kept her. And fed her on gratitude. For three years. Why, Jane? Penance? Or her voice rose? Or worse? To have her there. To watch her be grateful. To own her? Because that is what it sounds like. It sounds like Adelaide, at her very worst. It sounds like a cat that has brought a mouse into the house. There are no grey mice, Gerald.

She said it to Gerald, about her, and she smiled. Harriet stopped. Oh God! She was tormenting her. For three years, in little ways, with little smiles and little arrows, and her own old dress turned for Christmas, she was tormenting the woman who knew, the one person alive who knew what happened on the ice in 1904. Yes, said Miss Marple, and that is where you are wrong, there, about the mouse.

She got up and went to the window, and stood looking down at the village, at the lights coming on one by one in the dusk, at the small red spark above the vestry of St Dominic's. Because a mouse would have run, Harriet, or bitten, long ago, in some small mean way, Miss March did neither. For three years she arranged the flowers and wrote the letters, and closed the curtains and apologised. and wore the turned grey dress, and was grateful, genuinely, terribly grateful. Miss Marple turned, and her face in the firelight was very grave, because she was waiting, you see. Gratitude was the disguise, meekness was the disguise, the burned hand, the small shadow by the font, the follower who does not follow but goes round by

the hedge to wait by the far stile. None of it was a mouse, Harriet. It was a woman who had waited thirty-eight years to come back, and three more to choose her moment, and who chose it on the night the restoration fund and the audit and all Adelaide's little whips came to a head. No. She stopped. She corrected herself, with the scrupulousness that was the core of her. No.

Not chose. I will not say chose even now. It chose itself. It had been chosen in 1904, on the ice, and every year since was only the gin standing in the dark, getting stronger. Then Wednesday. Wednesday. said Miss Marple. I shall tell you tomorrow, when I tell everyone. Not before. Because there is one thing left that I do not know, and until I know it, I may be wrong about the worst part. And if I am wrong about the worst part, I would rather be wrong in private. She came back to the fire, and stood with her small soft hands out to the warmth. And she looked, Harriet thought, suddenly and dreadfully old. The brooch is missing. The diamond sunburst.

Rudge thinks it is the key to a robbery, and I think it is the key to everything, and they are not the same thing. Where does a woman hide a brooch she has taken from a corpse, Harriet? A woman with nowhere of her own in the world, whose whole kingdom is a bedroom she does not own, and a gratitude she has to wear like the turned grey dress.

Where does she put it that it will not be found, and that it will do its work? She stared into the fire. Things put somewhere for a purpose, I said to Gerald. They turn up when their purpose is ripe. I think, I am nearly sure, that the brooch was the purpose, not the money. Adelaide's death was the debt, but the brooch was the message, and I cannot read it yet, and until I can read it, I am only a woman with a story, and the story may have the wrong ending. She was silent so long that Harriet thought she had finished. Then she said, very low, almost to herself, I will keep a light for her in this church until the truth comes to it. Forty-one years.

And on Wednesday night the truth came, and the light went out, put out by the hand of the truth itself. And on Thursday morning Tom Brabazon lit it again, because he could not bear her to be dark. He loved her, you know, the garden boy. He has loved her for fifty years, Eleanor, the drowned girl, and he lit her lamp again the morning after her friend, or her murderer, put it out. There is a whole other tragedy there, Harriet, burning away like oil in a wick, and no one will ever even see the smoke of it. She pinched out the flame of the candle on the mantle with her finger and thumb, absently, as one who has done it ten thousand times, and the room went down to firelight.

Go to bed, my dear. Tomorrow I shall want the vicar, and Inspector Rudge, and Gerald, and Lettice if she will come, and one other, in the drawing-room here, at eleven, and tonight I shall sit up a little, and think about a brooch, and about what a woman says to a corpse when she takes the sunburst from its coat and looks at it, in the dark, by the light of a lamp she is about to put out. Jane. Harriet stood in the doorway, and her voice was rough. Whatever she did, whatever happened on that ice, she pushed Tom Brabazon down the stairs. Yes, said Miss Marple, carefully, so that he would live, and so that he would not be blamed. She looked up, and the firelight made her eyes very bright. Think what it cost her, Harriet, to

do that much harm, and no more. Think how hard she had to hold the reins, on the top of that stair, in the dark, with the lamp lit below, and forty-one years screaming in her ears, to hurt him, just enough to stop his mouth, and not enough to kill him. A murderer does not do that. A monster does not do that. Only one kind of person does that.

She turned back to the fire. A person with a conscience, she said. The very worst kind of killer. and the very saddest, go to bed. And Harriet went, and left her sitting small and straight by the dying fire, with the blue wool idol in her lap, turning a diamond sunburst over and over in her mind, in the dark, by the light of a lamp she could not yet see.

Section 10 The Truth in Daylight They came at eleven, as she had asked. Inspector Rudge, solid and sceptical, with a notebook he did not expect to open, the vicar, grey-faced, his hands never still, Gerald, defiant and miserable, who had not been told why he was wanted and assumed the worst, Lettice Crow, in her black, who sat by the window with her eyes on her folded hands and seemed to be listening to a music no one else could hear, and Harriet, by the fire, who had not slept. Miss Marple sat in the wing-chair with her knitting, small and pink and white, and utterly composed, and she let Dora bring the coffee and pour it and go, and then she said, in her gentle, elderly voice, Thank you all

for coming. I am afraid I have a rather long story to tell, and it is not a pleasant one, and I must ask you to let me tell it in my own way, which is the way of an old woman, round about, and with a great deal of seeming nonsense in it. But I will begin with the lamp, because the lamp, you see, is the whole of it.

And she told them. She told them about the winter of 1904, and the three girls on the ice of the mill-pond at the court, Eleanor Ransom, the vicar's daughter, beautiful and kind and fifteen, her sister Adelaide, thirteen, proud and passionate, and, even then, a ruler, and Mercy March, the sexton's daughter, Eleanor's dearest friend. She told them what the letters in the parish chest had said, and what they had not said, and what old Mrs. Tighe had remembered without knowing what she remembered. The inquest said accident, said Miss Marple. The ice, and the dusk, and a girl's foot through it, and the pond. But the cannon her father never believed it, and he lit a lamp, not in memory, vicar, as you found, but in fury,

until the truth comes to it. And he died waiting, and the village forgot, and the lamp burned on into other hands, and the truth, the truth as truths do, went away and grew in the dark. Because here is what happened on the ice, and it is not what anyone has thought, and it is the saddest thing I know.

There was no quarrel, there was no malice. There was a game, the three of them, sliding on the black ice by the far bank where the sallows grow, and a dare, as there always is, and Eleanor went too far out, laughing, the way she did everything, and the ice went, and Mercy March, who loved her, went in after her, fifteen years old, and she went into black water after her friend, and got her to the shelf at the bank, and held her, and screamed for Adelaide, Adelaide, who was on the bank, Adelaide, thirteen years old, who could have run for the rope by the boathouse, forty yards, and who stood. She stood, on the bank, in the dusk, with her sister's hands on the ice, and her sister's friend's voice, screaming her name, and she did not run,

and she did not come, and she did not move, because she was afraid, that is all, that is the whole of the horror. She was a child, and she was afraid, and for two minutes, the two minutes that are forty-one years, she stood still, and by the time she moved and screamed, and the men came with the rope, the ice had taken them both, and only Mercy March came out of that water alive. The room was utterly silent.

Gerald had gone white. The vicar had his face in his hands. And then, said Miss Marple, the village did what villages do. Adelaide was the vicar's daughter. Mercy was the Sexton's. The cannon, mad with grief, did the mad, sane thing. He could not accuse his living child of his dead child's death, but he could not look at her either. And he could not look at Mercy, who had failed where a miracle was needed, and who was the living reminder of the two minutes. So Mercy was sent away, within the fortnight, to Shropshire. A girl of fifteen, who had done the bravest thing anyone in that village has ever done, sent away in shame to carry it alone, so that the vicar's daughter could grow up innocent. And Adelaide,

Miss Marple's voice did not soften, but it slowed. Adelaide grew up and ruled, and never once, in all the years after, spoke her sister's name. Her father spoke it every day, with his lamp. Adelaide never spoke it at all. Think of those two silences, burning side by side, above that altar for forty years. The light shineth in darkness, and the darkness comprehended it not. She looked round the room, from face to face, gentle and relentless. Three years ago, the lady in Shropshire died, and left her companion five pounds a year, and Adelaide Vane, who never did anything by accident, saw a name on an agency list, and knew it, and she sent for her. Now, why did she send for her? I have asked myself that for

four days, and I will tell you what I believe, and I believe it because it is the only answer that is like Adelaide. Not penance. Adelaide did not do penance. Not kindness. She sent for Mercy March to have her, to own the one person who knew, to keep her close, and keep her grateful, and keep her grey, because as long as Mercy March was a grey mouse at Holmfield Court, dependent, aged, with nowhere to go, the two minutes on the ice belonged to Adelaide. She had been paying blackmail to her own conscience for forty years, and this was cheaper. There are no grey mice, Gerald. She said it to you at lunch, and she smiled. She was not afraid of Mercy, you see. That was her mistake, and it was the mistake of her whole life. She thought fear was a

thing that stayed down, once you had your foot on it. She was thirteen when she learned it stayed down. She never learned it comes back. Inspector Rudge had his notebook open now, and his pencil was still. And then, this autumn, said Miss Marple, two things happened. The registered letter from Shropshire, the great-aunt of ninety-one, dying and putting her affairs in order, and sending mercy the one thing she had left to send, the papers, her father's papers, the Sexton's, and among them, Mrs.

Tighe remembered, when I asked, that old Josiah March was known in his day as a man who kept a diary, among them, the diary, with the entry for the 14th of December, 1904, with what the Sexton saw, or what his daughter told him, in the year of his death, the truth, in writing, at last, and the lamp, you remember, was lit until the truth should come to it. Her needles were quiet in her lap. And the second thing, the audit. Adelaide's little whip over the vicar, the restoration fund.

Adelaide had been letting things fall all autumn, harder and faster. About the accounts, about the church, about everyone's small shames. Because she was frightened, and when Adelaide was frightened, she struck first. She knew the diary had come. Mercy told her, no. Mercy showed her. On Wednesday, at dinner, she was almost gentle, Gerald said, and tired, and she told him that other people's patience is not a crop that comes up every year.

She was not speaking to Gerald, she was speaking to herself. She had read the diary, or she knew it was in the house, and she knew that the woman she had owned for three years had stopped being owned, and she did the thing she had been walking toward for forty-one years. She picked up her missile and and she went up the dark lane to the church to meet it.

You needn't wait, Eleanor, I shan't be long, she said it to the lamp, Miss Crow. To the flame, she had been saying it for forty-one years without ever saying it aloud. Lettice Crow made a small sound and pressed her hands together, and Mercy March followed her, said Miss Marple. Not to kill her, I believe that, I shall believe it to the end, but to give her the diary, there, in the church, before the lamp. where it had all begun, to finish it. She waited by the font while Adelaide did her flowers, and Adelaide left them half done, for the first time in her life. Did you notice that? Adelaide, who trusted no one's eye but her own, left her flowers and went out into the lane, because mercy had gone out before her, round by the hedge, to the

far stile, to wait. And there, on the dark lane, behind the church her father had filled with a burning accusation, It came to its end. I do not know what was said. I think Adelaide said the things she had said in a hundred drawing rooms. The arrow, the smile, the little cruelty that keeps the other person grey. And I think that Mercy March, who had been grey for forty-one years, who had been sent away for being brave and brought back for being harmless, who had in her bag her father's diary and her whole stolen life, I think she picked up the loose coping stone of the churchyard wall and she stopped the voice. Once. She did not strike twice. I have seen the stone. It was struck once. She is not a violent woman. She is

a woman who was violent once, in forty-one years, and the once was the size of all of it. The vicar was weeping, silently, without shame. Gerald sat like stone. And then, said Miss Marple, she did the thing that told me who she was, before I knew anything else. She arranged the flowers. She went back into the church.

She had the whole night— Who would question her? And she knelt down, and she finished Adelaide's flowers, in her own way, in the old way, in Eleanor's way, the way the three of them had learned as girls at that altar. Because Adelaide was dead, and the debt was paid, and there was no one left to arrange flowers for but the dead. And then she took down the lamp, full of oil, meant to burn a week, and she put it out, with her fingers. That is how she burned them, not on a kettle. on a glass chimney that had burned all night, above a woman lying dead by the gate. She put out the accusation. The light that had shone in the darkness for forty-one years, until the truth should come to it, the truth had come,

she had brought it. So she put the lamp out. Miss Marple's voice was almost a whisper. And if that is not the saddest thing I have ever said in a room, I do not know what is. But the brooch, said Rudge. His voice was rough. The brooch, madam. The diamond sunburst. If it wasn't robbery. Ah, said Miss Marple.

The brooch. I thought about the brooch all night. Where does a woman put a thing taken from the dead? A woman with nothing of her own. No room she owns. No place on earth that is hers to hide a pin in. And then I understood that I had it backwards. She did not take the brooch to have it. She took it to return it. The sunburst, Inspector. Diamonds. A sun.

A blazing, shining thing that Adelaide wore everywhere, showing off. Mrs. Tighe said. It was her mother's, was it not? It was the ransom sunburst. It had shone at every fate and every service for forty years, on the breast of the daughter who lived. Miss Marple looked up, at the window, toward the tower. There is one place in this parish that belongs to the daughter who died, one place that is Eleanor's, and no one else's. It has been burning for her for forty-one years, and I think that if you take down the sanctuary lamp of St. Dominic's, Inspector— Gently.

It is very old. And look inside the oil. You will find the diamond sunburst of Adelaide Vane, sunk like a stone in a pond, giving back to the dead girl the light that the living one wore. Rudge was on his feet. And Tom Brabazon? said Harriet in a whisper. Tom had begun to talk about the past. To me, she could not allow the past, not yet, not until she had. Miss Marple paused. She is not cruel, she said.

that is the worst of it, and I shall say it once, and then I will not defend her again, because there is a woman dead, and an old man broken, and the law must have her, and it is right. But she pushed him down a stair she knew, at an hour she chose, under a a lamp she had lit herself at dawn. She lit it again, did you know, on the Thursday. Before Tom could, she relit the accusation herself for Adelaide. She is the only person in this story who understood that both things were true, that the lamp must go out for Eleanor and burn for Adelaide, and she pushed him carefully so that he would live, and she locked the door with the key inside so that no one would call it an old man's carelessness and take his lamp from him. She protected his pride

while she broke his leg. If you want to understand her, Inspector, there it is, entire. She spent forty-one years learning to be grey, and she never once, even at the worst, learned to be small. Miss Marple folded her hands over her knitting and looked round the silent room. and her eyes were as mild and blue and merciless as the sky.

She is at the court, she said. She will be packing, though she has nothing to pack. Five pounds a year and the furniture of a room she does not own. She will not run. Go gently, Inspector. She has been gone from the world since she was fifteen years old, and she has only this week come back to it, and it is a great deal older and colder than the one she left. Section 11 the lamp burns on.

They found the brooch where Miss Marple had said it would be, sunk in the oil of the sanctuary lamp, its diamonds dulled and golden, like light seen through pond water, and they found Mercy March at the court, in her small room under the eaves, with her one bag packed. It took her, the constable said afterwards, no more than ten minutes, because after three years everything she had fitted into it and left room to spare, and she came downstairs quietly, and she asked, before they took her away, only one thing. She asked whether Tom Brabazon would live, and when they told her he would, she said, Thank you, in her soft, apologetic voice, and went out through the hall of the house that had never been hers, past

the flowers she had arranged that morning. They were arranged loosely, with the tall stems to one side, and nobody in Holmfield ever learned what that had meant, except one old lady in a wing-chair, and she did not look back at anything except, once, at the tower of the church. She confessed at Market Lavington that evening, fully and clearly, in a voice the sergeant said he had to lean forward to hear, and the confession was exactly as Miss Marple had said, with one thing added, one thing no one could have known. She said that at the end, on the lane, Adelaide had not struggled, and had not screamed, and had not, this was the thing, seemed surprised. She said that when she raised the stone, Adelaide looked at

her and said, in the ordinary voice of a woman commenting on a sermon, so it is you then, I have wondered, all these years, which of us it would be. And those were the last words of Adelaide Vane, and Mercy March carried them into the dock at the Assizes, and said them aloud there, in her grey dress and her grey voice. And the court was very still, and the judge, who was not a sentimental man, took a long time over the sentence. It was manslaughter, in the end, the diary helped. old Josiah March's diary, which the canon in Salisbury read with tears running down his face, and forwarded to the defence. And Tom Brabazon helped, for when he could speak, in the hospital, the first full sentence he managed was not about his fall but this. She

went into the water after her. I saw it, from the sallows, I was a lad and I hid, and I have been ashamed fifty years, and she went in after her, and the other ones stood on the bank. he would not sign a word against her. He said only that he had been pushed, that he had not seen who pushed him, and that if the law wanted more than that, the law could whistle for it. Seven years, the sentence was, and everyone in Holmfield understood that she would not serve the half of it, and that it did not matter, because the prison she was leaving was forty-one years deep, and the one she was going to had a door with a date on it. The village, being a village, healed in the way villages heal. not by forgetting, but by absorbing. The county herald man filed

his story and went away, and was forgotten by Christmas. The restoration fund was made good by an anonymous subscription that everyone knew was Gerald Vane selling his car, and the roof was mended, and the vicar, who had been aged ten years by the autumn, seemed to grow younger under it, as men do when the thing they dreaded has finally happened and the world has not ended. Lettuce Crow played at the funeral. and it was noticed that she played the Bach she had played the week before the murder, and played it for herself, and it was very beautiful, and she never again told anyone she had gone home at eight. The funeral of Adelaide Vane was very large and very correct, and the wreath from the Women's Institute was chrysanthemums because Mrs. Wexford had her way,

and because, as she said, thumping her stick, she always had chrysanthemums, and if we cannot speak well of the dead, we can at least be accurate about their flowers.' She was buried in the churchyard, not far, though this was an accident of the sexton's plan, and no one remarked on it except one, from the worn stone of her sister, Eleanor Ransom, beloved daughter, and below it, after forty-one years, the stone-cutter had had to renew the lettering, and the new letters were brighter than the old, and it looked, Harriet said once, as though the name had been waiting to be read. Tom Brabazon came home from the hospital in the spring, lame but whole, and he climbed the vestry stair again, slowly, one step at a time, and

the first thing he did was trim the lamp. He had been told everything by then. The village had nothing left to tell him. The past was out of its box at last, like feathers from a burst cushion, and had settled everywhere, and could not be put back, and was, in the end, only the past. He was asked, once, by the new young curate, whether he did not think, in the circumstances, that the lamp might be allowed to Whether it might not be time to, the young man floundered, and Tom Brabazon looked at him with his old, weathered, thorn-hedge face, and said, It was lit until the truth came.

The truth came. It burns now because it burns. And the curate, who was very young, wrote it down, thinking it profound, when it was only an old gardener saying that some things, once tended for fifty years, are tended for love and not for reasons. Miss Marple stayed on at the laurels until the first frost, and on her last morning she walked down through the village alone, leaning a little on her umbrella, saying her goodbyes. To Mrs. Tighe, who pressed a card of grey silk on her, and would not take payment. To old Mrs. Wexford, who told her the whole story of the murder in the version the village had now settled on, which was wrong in nearly every particular, and was told with great enjoyment. To

Dora's second cousin, Ernie Piggott, who had gone back to his milk round and was beginning, already, to tell the story of the scream with a certain professional pride. She went last to the church. It was empty and very still and full of the ancient smell of stone and beeswax, and the morning sun came through the east window in shafts of dusty red and gold. The flowers by the altar were Michaelmas daisies now, purple and white, arranged, she noticed.

and smiled her small sad smile, loosely, with the tall stems to one side, in the old way, in the manner of the dead, for Lettuce Crow did the flowers now, and Lettuce had watched for thirty years from the loft, and hands remember. Miss Marple sat for a while in a pew, an old lady resting, and looked at the small red flame that burned above the altar, steady and small and patient, the colour of slow gin, the colour of blood and wine and fire, the light shineth in darkness.

It had been lit in fury, and tended in love, and put out in the moment of its answering, and lit again by an old man at dawn, because he could not bear her to be dark. It had outlasted the cannon's rage and Adelaide's silence, and Mercy's forty-one grey years, and it burned now, Miss Marple thought, for all of them, for the girl on the ice, and the girl on the bank, and the girl in the black water, and the old women they had become— or had never been allowed to become. A flame is a very small thing to hold a whole village's guilt and grief and love.

But then, she reflected, rising and settling her embroidery bag on her arm, so is the human heart, and it manages. She went out through the lych gate, where the worn stones gave no sign of what they had seen, past the blackthorn hedge hung with the hard, dark slows of autumn, pricked and bottled, and standing in the dark somewhere now, turning slowly the colour of the lamp, growing stronger. Up the hill the sun was warm, and Dora would have packed, and there would be a glass of sherry before the train. Villages, said Miss Marple aloud, to the rooks, in the voice of a woman stating a discovery she had made long ago, and had never found any reason to revise, are very peaceful places. That is why one must never, ever trust

the quiet of them. And she walked up the hill to her sherry. a small, fluffy, pink and white old lady with kind blue eyes, and behind her the village went about its business in the sun, ordinary as bread, and the lamp burned on above the altar of St. Dominic's, day and night, in memory of the daughter who died and the daughter who lived. and the long, long dark between them, in which the truth had stood, and waited, and grown strong. The End

Murder Behind St. Dominic's… Miss Marple Investigates | Miss Marple Sleep…

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