One Grave, Two Secrets, One Killer | Miss Marple Sleep Stories

Welcome, dear listener. Draw a little nearer to the fire. The kettle is on, the curtains drawn against the frost, and tonight I have a story to tell you, quiet as a snowfall, sharp as a winter slate. It begins, as all our best English stories do, in a village, with a grave. One grave, two secrets, one killer. A Miss Marple mystery. Section 1. the wreath that was not for her. The churchyard of St Mary Mead lay, on the second Tuesday of February, beneath a weight of frost, so still that the small creatures in the hedgerows held their breath as if listening. Three rooks had descended on the great yew by the lich gate, and were perched in a black triangle, scarcely moving. Snow had fallen in the night, a thin white veil, and now, in the

late morning, it had refused to melt. lying between the graves like a sheet of paper, waiting for its first words. Villagers in their good dark coats made their slow procession from the lich gate to the freshly turned earth. Behind them the bells of St Mary's had fallen silent. The Reverend Septimus March stood at the head of the open grave, his prayer book open but unheld, his breath a pale cloud.

He had read the committal, he had thrown the earth, he had lifted his hand in benediction. and now he stood aside, very still, while the mourners passed one by one and looked down into the hole that had received Mrs. Lavinia Doon. It had been a respectable funeral, the kind the village counted as one of its small, well-attended civic events.

Colonel Melchett had come out of respect, although he had seldom spoken with the deceased in life. Mrs. Bantry was there, dressed in dove grey, her husband at her side, and their niece Dolly leaned a little forward on her crutches to peer at the mound of loose earth, the colour of wet chocolate. Dr Ambrose Fitzhugh, in his frock coat, stood at the foot of the grave and bowed slightly as each mourner turned away. The undertaker's men were already folding their trestles. The sexton, Josiah Graves, was sweeping white pinches of frost from the marble ledger stone. Lavinia Dune, 1878 1956, Beloved Mother of Henry, and brushing the small pile of immortelles which the son, Mr Henry Doon, had placed there. And just behind the grave, in the path's edge,

half concealed by a clump of dried sedge, Miss Jane Marple stood with her hands folded on the handle of her umbrella, looking not at the coffin, or the sexton, or the vicar, but at the marble. 1878 Miss Marple murmured, almost to herself. 1878 Sir Henry Clithering, dear, she had said an hour earlier, when her old friend had come up the path from the vicarage. I wonder if you noticed.

Lavinia's birthday was in March, she often told me so. The 18th of March. I remember because it is my own aunt's, also. You think the date is wrong? said Sir Henry. I never think anything of the sort, my dear. I only wonder. It was a small thing, that discrepancy. Two years' difference. Nothing to trouble anyone. And yet Miss Marple, who had been at Lavinia's christening in 1880 in this very church, knew exactly when it had been, because Lavinia's mother, her oldest friend Miriam, had sent her a small sprig of clematis in a fold of notepaper the morning of the birth, and it had been in the same year Queen Victoria's reign had entered its forty-fourth winter. The date on the stone was wrong, but this was not Miss

Marple's chief concern at the funeral. The chief concern was the second grave that had already been measured out, three paces to the east of the first, a rectangle of yellow string where the snow had been cleared and the ground below was softer and darker. That was where Hyacinth Belk was to be buried on the morrow. The Reverend March had explained at the close of the committal, in his careful vicar's tone, Hyacinth was Lavinia's first cousin, they had decided, after a search through the parish records. At least, that was the polite village fiction. And since Lavinia had wanted her cousin to rest beside her, the family plot would receive them both. Two boxes, one plot, head to head if you could imagine such a thing. Or rather,

side by side. The villagers had nodded. It seemed decent. Miss Marple walked to the second measured grave. The earth there was already cut through, as if a spade had bitten once and twice. The sexton, Josiah, was standing near it, breath in plumes, hands shoved deep in his pockets. Josiah, said Miss Marple. Lavinia wasn't particular to hyacinth in life. No, ma'am.

He didn't turn his face, but the colour in his cheeks, already high from the cold, edged towards red. In fact, my dear, I remember Lavinia telling me on more than one occasion, and you will know the way she had of putting it, that Hyacinth had the temperament of a wet hen crossed with a climber. No, Lavinia would not at all have chosen Hyacinth for the family plot. The plot has been reserved for her sister Miriam for forty years.

To bury Hyacinth in it would mean disturbing Miriam. Yet you have not disturbed Miriam, so the plot for Hyacinth is a new one, freshly cut. Josiah stared at her. Mrs. Doone's will directed it. In what words? She wrote to the vicar not a fortnight ago. And you have this letter? It is locked in the vicarage strongbox. Josiah, dear, said Miss Marple, in that voice which always made him lower his eyes. If Lavinia's will directs the burial, why is the date on the stone wrong? It's not for me to say, ma'am. Of course not, dear. It is for me to wonder. He turned and walked off, his shoulders a little hunched. The bell began to toll again, not for the dead, but for Sunday. The mourners made their slow way out of the churchyard, leaving only the rooks.

Miss Marple lingered. She looked at the first grave, at the second measured plot, at the yew tree at the gate, and at the small clematis that wound, in this cold season, its dry, pale seed pods around the iron cemetery rail at the family plot's eastern edge. The same dry clematis that Lavinia had worn in the brooch at her throat every day for forty-five years, a silver filigree mounting a pressed sprig of the flower, mounted on a black velvet ribbon, its whereabouts now wholly unknown. She had been buried without it.

A small disturbance arrived then. The doctor's bicycle, propped against the lich gate, gave a sudden thin ring as the wind moved it. Miss Marple looked. She saw, on the path between the gate and the doctor's bicycle, just visible in the half-melted snow, a single footprint. Then another. Two prints in a single file of a man's small shoe with the clean diamond pattern of new rubber heels. The doctor's bicycle was nearly always in the same place. The doctor nearly always wore the same shoes. But these were new.

And at the lich gate, an envelope lay tucked into the ironwork, addressed in a hand Miss Marple did not know. Mr. H. Doone, Esquire, Glevering Hall. There was no postmark. Someone had slipped it in by hand this morning. Miss Marple looked at the envelope. She looked at the bicycle. She looked at the measured grave where Hyacinth was to be buried. And she walked very slowly back to herself, folded her hands on her umbrella, and waited for the next person along the path. For the village that winter, the equilibrium of years was about to be broken. Yet it would break, as such things always do in Miss Marple's experience, not with a shout, but with a long absence of the things one had counted on. The bells would still ring on Sunday. The

dogs would still bark at the gypsies. The soup at the mother's meeting would still be too thin. But somewhere, in the measured rectangles of that churchyard, the stones and the seeds and the letters— were already beginning to speak in a language no one else was reading. And in the quiet of her own parlour that evening, Miss Marple would begin to read them. It was precisely twenty-two minutes past four on that Tuesday afternoon when Miss Marple sat down at her card-table, drew her spectacles from their case, and said to the parlour maid, Hannah dear, please bring me the parish magazine, the teapot, and the slender blue notebook that lives in the second drawer of the writing desk. Yes, ma'am.

And Hannah, the vicar came up the path at 3.15 today, did he not? He did, ma'am. Did he look heavy-hearted when he called? He looked tipsy, ma'am, if you'll pardon. No, ma'am, he is a teetotaller, but heavy, quite heavy. Thank you, dear. The notebook, please. When Hannah had gone, Miss Marple took off her gloves and laid them, as she always did, in two careful pledges on the arm of the chair.

She opened the notebook to the page marked with a violet ribbon. She had marked it in 1922 and wrote at the top, Re. L. D. Then she put down, in her very upright copper plate, the dates she remembered. Lavinia's birth in March of 1886. Lavinia's marriage to Alfred Dune in 1904. Her widowhood in 1917. Her son's first birth record entry at the registry office in Sissingham on the 23rd of June that year, although Henry had been christened in the church three days earlier. Old letters kept in lavender paper. Three had been laid by. Two she had not opened. As Hannah set down the teapot, Miss Marple said, There is to be an inquest, dear. Is there, ma'am?

Coroner Norwood rang Mrs. Bantry this morning. Mrs. Bantry rang me. Lavinia took badly in the night after a meal at the Blue Boar, that was Friday, and died in her own bed Saturday morning. The doctor signed it natural causes. The doctor has now changed his mind. He rang the coroner this afternoon, in the doctor's usual style, a quarter of an inch too late. What is the doctor's usual style, ma'am?

To be a quarter of an inch too late for almost everything, said Miss Marple, and a mile past the point of no return for the things that matter. She poured her tea. Hammer? Ma'am? If a person we loved were to be killed by another person, dear, supposing it should come to that, in what way would we expect them to be killed? I beg your pardon, ma'am? Not a knife, not a blow, not a chambermaid's cloak over the head, said Miss Marple, in that voice which always meant she was rehearsing something she knew rather than something she was asking. Not a pistol, my dear, too loud, too foreign. The murdered in our village would be killed the way a grouse is killed in the pot and the pill is killed in the cupboard. By a small

lot of poison, in something warm, administered in a place where an Englishwoman of her station would not refuse. Their own broth, if my memory of Lavinia's habits serves. Hannah was used to Miss Marple's small lectures on the manners of murder. She replied, as she always did, Shall I close the curtains, ma'am? In a moment, dear. Let the Kirk see the vicar going home. I want to know if his arm is in his wife's. He wasn't with Mrs. March, ma'am. Dr.

Fitzhugh was with him. Indeed. He was carrying the doctor's arm-bag. My, said Miss Marple, but what an arm-bag it must be, carrying it out of the vicarage instead of leaving it in the dispensary at the surgery. She watched the carriage drive past. Set the screens, my dear. I'll be going up to the Blue Boar in a moment to take a small luncheon of broth, if Mistress Gladish can spare it.

At the Blue Boar Inn two streets over, the landlord's wife, Flory Gladish, was already busy with Wednesday's deep clean. She had not heard Miss Marple's approach. She was at the long deal table at the back, scrubbing with the bottle brush, the kettle pushed to one side, and a circle of bone china laid out for inspection. There were five cups.

One had been set aside. Flory marked it on her list. Glover Vickers' wife moved. Then there were six, the doctor's own pewter mug. Your inn seems busy, Miss Marple said at the door. Flory raised a hand. Miss Marple, a sad week. A very sad week, my dear. I have come for a small tureen of broth. Just like Lavinia's, for her, it always cheered a winter evening, she would say.

Lavinia had the Friday broth, ma'am. The Wednesday I never saw her take. The Thursday is to be the graves. But you would lay it on for me, my dear, just as it is served to her. Flory paused for a moment, then went through. She set the small tureen before Miss Marple in the window nook. Miss Marple sat.

She sipped. She lifted the spoon to the light, then set it down. She thanked Flory and asked for the reckoning. You have not finished, ma'am. I have tasted, dear, what I needed to taste. Outside, the churchyard had closed its gate. The bell of St Mary's rang, not for absolutions, but for the mother's meeting at five. The vicar's wife, Margaret, was seen crossing the cobbles, fresh-faced and crisply pinafored. her husband's heaviest coat over her arm. She walked with Dr Fitzhugh, whose arm-bag she carried in her left. In her right she held a small package, ceramic, a sealed jam-jar glinting with a green glass leaf. Miss Marple, from her window, took the tin-opener from her reticule. She knocked three times

on the kitchen door. Margaret, dear. Miss Marple, how lovely. I see you are carrying Dr. Fitzhugh's bag. He has so entrusted you this afternoon. Might I be permitted to relieve you of one small item as we take turn? The Countess of St. Cyr always said she felt she was made to bear only one parcel at a time.

It's the doctor's pot of dried herbs. Herbs, my dear, indeed. I see you are being made into a herbalist's assistant. Won't you come tomorrow and bring me a few sprigs of clematis? I have lost all my winter ones to the frost, and I should so like to bring them indoors, for a small vase by the fire to cheer the parlour.

Margaret's colour came up. Clematis, ma'am? My dear, every Englishwoman knows that clematis dried in October takes a household's cold water pipes through the winter. I shall ask the doctor's clerk to dry me a few. He is so very competent. He is, ma'am. Margaret clutched the bag. It is very late. We will talk tomorrow. In the Blue Boar's parlour that same hour, the coroner's officer, Mr Sloane of the Constabulary, had been making small notes on the Friday broth. The fridge notes. Broth served between 4.30 and 6.15. Lavinia had ordered between 4 and 4.15. The receipt for that night's porridge salt, Sissingham salts, two pounds LB, was entered as usual at quarter to five, but there had been a brief six-minute gap in service at the bar windows. Flory

had stepped out to thread her needle. She had returned, the broth had been made, and the kidney tray had been wiped with a damp cloth. The wipecloth was on the line by the vestry door. Mr Sloane took the sample of broth for analysis. In her own parlour that night Miss Marple sat with the parish magazine open, the thumb of her right glove a little raised, and a single sprig of last summer's dried clematis from a vase by her elbow. She had placed a sheet of blotting paper under the bag's printed schedule of Lavinia's last day in the village. The bag, she had noticed at the kitchen door, had a fresh grease spot. In the spot was a small seed, violet and dry. Outside, the doctor's bicycle was propped in its accustomed place. The chain was unloosed.

Snow had begun to fall again, silent, settling into the print of his shoes on the path that he had taken at the funeral, and filling them for a second time. Section 3. The Ledger of Mr Sloane Late on Tuesday morning, the postbag from Sissingham slithered through the slot at the constabulary office with a damp, worn sound. Inspector Polk arrived, in his neat brown bowler, and Mr Sloane, the coroner's officer, laid what he had before him. The Blue Boar's Friday broth sample, sealed in glass, was on his desk, the tube marked LD. Sloane tugged at his moustache. He had been a man of some habit for forty years, and he did not believe that Lavinia Doon had died of her supper. It was Sloane's habit, when first handling a

death in the country parishes, to give the dead woman's lamp a turn. He did not, on this visit, go to Glevering Hall. In a village the size of St Mary Mead, that would have been stop-press by evening. He sent his wife, Martha, who brought back a small pressed clematis from a silver filigree brooch that had been laid on the dresser, not at the throat. She was buried without it, said Martha. The undertaker told me it was locked in the doctor's medical bag. Sloane had not opened the bag on Sunday. The brooch in the bag was the first piece of the puzzle Sloane had touched with his own hands. He held up the parish certificate of death.

The cause was cardiac failure following gastric spasms and agitation of the heart. No mention of poison. No mention of probably arsenic. which had been Mrs Gladish's first thought, nor of thallium, which had been the chemist's second. Sloane had set aside the certificate for one minute's reading at breakfast and one minute's reading at tea. He had not yet spoken to the doctor. Miss Marple had rung Sloane's wife that morning with a small, polite inquiry. Had the doctor, on Sunday, returned the clematis brooch to the hall? Martha had not known. Sloane knew who else to ask. Now he sat with the chemist. The chemist was Mr Laird, a Scotsman of some little trimness, who set all his specimens in five rows and read off the percentages like

a choir. He said, It is what it is. It is thallium. It has been in the broth in a small quantity. It has been masked behind the salt. The Saturday morning wash-water showed it on the lip of her cup again. Thallium, Sloane repeated. drawing the syllables out as if they were boiler-pipe lengths. Yes, my dear, God bless me. Thallium.

A pest rodent's salt. Three weeks ago we had a complaint from the farmer at Great Sissingham that the grain store had been licked at. He said three of his terriers had taken the sickness. Did we send someone? Did we trouble? No, sir. No, we did not. So the rodenticides have been with us some while, and a rat, God willing, has gone up to the blue boar of an evening and and has nibbled through the broth salt tin and died. And the salt tin has gone on, sir, have a care, to be tipped, in part, into the broth.

Into one broth only, the chemist? Into one broth only, in our present evidence. Sloane, you have a wife. If your intended dose of salts had been eight times greater than her physician would have ordered, would she know? She would not, sir. Three winters passed, she ate the camphor. She was quite happy about the camphor. Make a note.

A thief, if there is a thief, did not come at the salts from a side pocket of cold purse cuteness. He came, Mrs. Gladish will mind this, to the broth itself. He stood, if you will, in the kitchen door. He tipped. He left. The whole of Mrs. Doone's weekly Friday broth had been, a polite word, seasoned, sir. Sloane wrote in a clear hand, Phallium rat, seed in broth, one Friday, one tin, one poisoner. Then he paused, looked, and wrote, or, or, or.

We must ask if there were seven other tinned salts in the kitchen, and only one had been fingered. We must ask if the Friday broth had been of a different season to the Thursday broth of the previous week. We must ask if Mrs. Doone was the only guest that Friday who had taken broth. Aye, sir. Three good oars.

He picked up the next paper. It was a printed blank from the doctor's dispensing ledger, dated 1922, with a four-petalled flower at its head, a clematis. Sloane set it down. Dr. Fitzhugh had handed him, when called, the ledger, a refuge to which he had had recourse in tracing receipts for Pollard's pills and and had produced a single page torn loose, saying that the page concerned Mrs. Doone's thallium intake as it had been measured over the autumn. Sloane had noted the symbol at the head of each column, the same four-petalled flower, on stationery older than the parish, on a ledger page which the doctor's great-grandfather had begun in 1879.

Sloane had crossed himself, an old country habit, at the sight of two generations of the same family stamp. He set it with care on his desk. He said to Laird, It is not often, laddie, that we come upon a villainy that writes in a watermark. He went to the village. He found Colonel Melchett's wife picking blackcurrant cuttings from the pantry, and Mrs. Bantry's niece Dolly in the garden, beating moths.

To both he showed broad courtesy. He listened. He learned a small parish fact. Mrs. Lavinia Doon had been for some years past the doctor's patient, her chart having three notations which had since been altered, her chart being held only at his surgery. When he came back from Dolly's garden, the day's freeze had risen to a small thaw, and the lich gate had been left faintly ajar by a slipshod sexton. At the gate he found a folded sheet, the doctor would not know who had laid it so, with a smudge of green resin at the edge of the seal. The wax had been pressed firm. Sloane slit it with his thumb and let it fall. He read, My dear Mrs. Doone, the clematis cut should, of course, be quite free of thallium, but I have compared it

twice at your brother's tree, for he being, in the village phrase, your second cousin, and the cut is clean in every part about the meadow. Yours, in faithful friendship, A.F. Sloane took a long, bewildered breath and folded the paper into his notebook He had not, at this moment, the machinery of knowing. He had merely the natural instinct to gather.

He set off for the doctor's door. At the doctor's door, where the bicycle stood, a small pot of pressed clematis heads, twelve of them in a row, drying on a piece of blotting paper, lay flat on the doorstep. Sloane would have walked over it, but a small black seed had rolled from one of the heads to his boot, and he paused. He picked it up. He put it in his waistcoat pocket. Then he waited at the bell. The bell was answered an age later by the doctor's housekeeper, Mrs Plum, who had the soft voice of a holy woman and a small basket of herbs on her hip.

She told Sloane, without prompting, that the doctor was out on his bicycle in the lane past the church. Sloane walked back up the lane. The sun was lowering. The doctor's green bicycle was propped against the cemetery rail, and the doctor was inside the lich gate, alone, on his knees in his dark trousers, with his medical bag opened flat beside him. He was digging with a small trowel at the dry seed pods of the clematis that clung to the cemetery rail at the eastern edge of the Dune family plot. He did not hear Sloane until Sloane's boot struck a loose stone. Doctor? Fitzhugh stood. He had a sprig of dried clematis in his palm. His brow was pale. Sloane? I'm sorry to interrupt. Not at all.

The chemist has set down a small fact on the broth. Mrs. Doon's broth. He would like to discuss with you at your convenience. My convenience is now, Fitzhugh said. He closed the bag. Sloane noticed with a small prick. that the bag was unusually heavy for a Saturday's empty trip, and that the catch of the bag, when closed, gave a very faint rattle of metal. Fitzhugh mounted his bicycle. He turned towards the vicarage then, with a small, polite hesitation, towards the lane, and the clematis in his palm was transferred, with a gentle gesture Sloane would not forget, to the lapel of his greatcoat. For the cold of it, the doctor murmured. in that voice which had been his winter way with half the village. Sloane took out his notebook

and wrote, Doctor went past the vicarage 1420 with Clematis. The Lichgate's small bolt clicked behind them. Sloane glanced at the dune plot. The earth at the east edge had been disturbed again in a fresh, thumb-shaped print, and at his left ear he heard, very faintly, the rustle of a blackbird in the yew. Section 4. Mr. Henry Doone returns.

The London train on Wednesday morning was ten minutes late into Sissingham, and Mr. Henry Doone stepped down from the third-class carriage with the precise, pinched gait of a man in mourning for someone else. He had come down two days early for the interment of his mother, as the vicarage had explained. He would have a day of business at the lawyer's in Sissingham, and a tea with his cousin.

At his mother's gate the sexton would set him down. He had, when he came, the look of one who has been for many nights at his lodgings, with the curtains drawn and the gas turned low. In his left hand was a slender box of papers. In his right, half obscured by the cuff of his overcoat, hung a plain gold ring, of his father's, of Alfred's, wedding ring, which he had not, on his father's death in 1917, been old enough to bear. He had been waiting thirty-nine years to wear it. He was wearing it now, indoors or out, like a small, unlit lantern. The lawyer's office in Sissingham, Mr. Boreham and Sons, solicitors, was a half-timbered building with two clerk's desks, an inner door, and the particular smell of parchment in winter. Boreham himself sat behind

a thick ledger and a pair of silver-framed spectacles. He was given to a long, careful pause before answering any question of consequence. Henry, slowly divesting his coat, asked, Is there a will, Mr. Boreham? Your mother made a will in 1949. And where, sir, is her brother, my uncle? Your mother had no brothers surviving in 1949, Mr. Doone.

Your father had a brother, who is deceased. There is no surviving Doone in the direct line except yourself, sir. The residue of the estate passes to you. There is a small annuity to your cousin. There is a bequest of household effects to the parish. There is a present to one parish officer for care during her last illness.

The doctor? A small sum, generous in its time, in recognition of twelve years of attention. The will is in this envelope. The bequest is the only clause which I am directed to read aloud in your presence. Henry took the envelope. Boram's eye, which had been on him the whole reading— was kaleidoscopic with the slow weight of evidence.

Boreham knew, had known for thirty years, that Henry was not Lavinia's son. He did not intend to speak it. But Henry had not been told. Henry took the envelope without remark. Boreham waited. Henry said, The household bequest. The comet brooch. My mother's clematis brooch. The will directs the brooch to be returned to the family it originally came from. Mrs.

Doone's sister, Lady Belk, died of scarlet fever in 1912. The brooch is therefore to be retained by the estate, in trust, for the lawful heirs of Lady Belk and held at the parish chest. There is no other disposition of the brooch. In trust? For whose heirs? For the two surviving Belks, Hyacinth Belk in person and on her death to her nephew, William Belk of Folkestone. Hyacinth died in her sleep last week, Henry said. She has not yet been buried. The lawyer in Folkestone rang me Monday.

Boreham for once set his pen down. It was a small, soft sound, like a small piece of furniture being moved at night. I am sorry to say, sir, you are in error. Hyacinth Belk, by my correspondent in Sissingham, has been dead these fourteen days, struck by a reversing car on the Chichester Road, and will be interred tomorrow in the dune plot at St Mary's. The information reached the vicarage on Tuesday. Who told him, sir, to inter Hyacinth in our plot at St Mary's? Your mother. My mother?

By a letter to the vicar dated a fortnight past. The letter is locked in the vicarage strongbox. Henry took off his gloves, slowly. He placed them precisely on the chair arm. He said, Mr. Boreham, I have not seen my mother's handwriting for twelve years. Twelve years ago I left her house, and she let me. I am, I now understand, no longer able to say with certainty that the letter in the strongbox is hers. Have you seen it?

I have not. The vicar is unwilling to show it. Why? He says it would distress you. Boreham, sir, who else has the keys to the strongbox? The vicar and the vicar's clerk. And the doctor? The doctor has had, on occasion, access. Henry stood. I shall go to the hall first. I shall then go to the vicar. I shall then go to the doctor's surgery. If the clematis brooch, which my mother wore every day for forty-five years, has been moved by the doctor's hands from her throat, Mr. Boreham, the parish shall charge him with that theft. But first, and I beg your pardon, first I must say to my Aunt Dolly, who is my only living relative at hand.

My Uncle Alfred was a worthy man. I wish to confirm with her a small fact from my childhood, before the parish goes further with its inquiry. He walked out. Boreham waited. The parish clock struck. At the hall, Henry met Dolly Bantry, in the drawing-room that was still fragrant with his mother's favourite blend of lavender water. He sat in her favourite chair by the door. He did not understand her answers. Dolly, who had been a child when her aunt had died, was subdued, deferring to her cousin's small formality. She answered him only one question at first, which was his only question. Aunt Dolly, Was the clematis brooch my mother's birth gift from my grandmother? Or was it my grandmother's? It was my grandmother's, Dolly said quietly.

It was Miriam's. Then it is a belk brooch and not a dune brooch. The will is correct, Henry said. Yet my mother, by her letter to the vicar, has arranged that it shall be buried with her in the dune plot. Is that so? It is what the village believes, sir. I have not, in fact, opened the strongbox. Then I must open it, said Henry. He went to the vicarage.

At the vicarage the vicar was at his desk, his hands clasped over a thin pile of brown paper parcels. He had been told on the street that Henry would call. He was trembling, very slightly, with the policy of churchmen in small places. He did not wish to be of the world, and yet the parish was gently insistent. My mother wrote you a letter, Henry said. She did, sir.

The letter instructs you to bury Hyacinth Belk in the Dune plot at St Mary's. It does, sir. Have you read the letter to Mrs Dune? No, sir. The letter is private. Has any person between you and your clerk opened it? No, sir. Has any person in your presence or in your clerk's handled the letter? The doctor has, sir, the vicar said, in his medical capacity, been permitted to see it. He asked to see it on Tuesday before the funeral. He was, I am, perhaps, simple in this, a guest. Has the letter been disturbed since? Not by me. Not, sir, by the clerk. But on Sunday morning, when I went to my study, I found the seal on the floor.

I am almost certain there is a grey carpet. The seal had been carefully reset. By the doctor? By the doctor, sir, said the vicar. with the gentleness of one who has been gently warned. And I am sorry to say, when I went at once to the chest to look again, there was a faint indentation in the wax, in the shape of a small flower with four petals. I think it is not my mother's seal, sir. I think it is the doctor's family seal, which he has in his surgery, and which I have seen once before. Henry Rose thanked the vicar, walked out into the cold, and decided that he would not, on that day, return to the doctor's surgery.

His palm was almost cold to the bone. He would need, in this parish, a witness who had no particular stake in whose grave the clematis sprig belonged. He walked through the frost to Miss Marple's gate. Section 5 The Cordial Bottle The afternoon of Lady Day, which the village kept in the old way as the first day of spring, Miss Marple walked homeward from the lich gate. She carried a small wicker trug from the Hall of Glevering, which Dolly Bantry had pressed into her hand with a gentle word and a half-embarrassed apology. It contained three items— a copy of the parish magazine, a small notebook in lavender paper bound by a blackened thong, and a cordial bottle, unstoppered, which Dolly had found in a cupboard at the back

of the pantry and which had been hiding, she thought, since the previous Wednesday. It was a stiff green glass with a thin gilt band at its lip. The maker's mark was for the village chemist, the late Mr Gladish, who had died in 1923 and whose shop was now the post office and the undertaker. Old-fashioned, particular to the village.

The contents were still warm to her thumb and smelled of wintergreen. Miss Marple, who had a faculty for the labelled cup, held the bottle up to the light. It was almost empty. The cork had been replaced. The cork was still moist, with a small smear of a darker green on its inside surface. Miss Marple had not smelled thallium in her life, but she had smelled, in a long career of small honesties, the odour of the chemist's strong cup, of which her late mother had been in the habit. There was something else in there. Hot, metallic, sweet.

She set the cordial bottle in her trug. She went through the bracken gate. Hannah was waiting on the garden path with the teapot ready and the curtains drawn but not yet crossed. Miss Marple set her reticule at the door and asked Hannah to fetch for her a small cup from her grandfather's cabinet. Hannah, dear, the cabinet, draw three. Yes, ma'am.

And the small cotton string book, draw one. Yes, ma'am. In a moment, dear, set a kettle on the hob. I will be ten minutes. In the parlour, Miss Marple washed her hands at the basin, drew the string of the cabinet book, and laid it open at the page marked, with her own violet ribbon, LD, 1922. She wrote at the head, Lavinia Dune, 1878, correct, 1880, died February 5th, 1956, the cordial bottle. Test of the cordial, found at Glevering Hall in the corner cupboard at the back of the pantry.

behind the salts canister at three inches from the wall. The stopper was loose, but the cork had not been dislodged. The bottle was hot to the touch. The cork was moist. The contents smelled of wintergreen and something else. The contents had been in their glass for some weeks. The cork had been replaced not more than three days since. She paused, and with her glasses low on the bridge of her nose, wrote down, The cordials of Lavinia Doon were, in the village habit of her speech, prescribed by her doctor. She had not been a teetotaller, but she had been, in her last five years, a woman of small spirits, and the cordial was, on the doctor's instructions, a fortnight's allowance.

The bottle was always at the cupboard in front row, and there was, by long custom, on its lip a label. She went and fetched the bottle from the trug. The label was still on its lip. a thin printed rectangle inscribed in the proper pen of a professional chemist, signed at the foot with the small four-petalled stamp of Dr Ambrose Fitzhugh, M.D. Mistress Lavinia Doon. Cordial. To be mixed with hot water at night. Four pennyweights of strong gin to fourteen of cordial. One small cup. For sleep. Miss Marple read it twice. She put the glass down. She said, Hannah dear, leave the teapot. I shall not be drinking.

I shall be a quarter hour in the kitchen. Ma'am? With the tin opener, dear, and one small pair of scissors and a pair of clean kid gloves. Then bring me the magnifying glass. Draw two. In the kitchen, with the green glass bottle laid flat on her grandmother's deal table, Miss Marple cut the cork out clean with a razor blade.

She laid the cork on a saucer. At its inner end, A small ringwood splint held a thin vein of a dark, almost oily matter painted along its grain. She raised the magnifying glass. The vein was the vein of a dried bloom pressed into the cork. She tipped the contents into a porcelain saucer and watched them settle. In the small puddle, drained but still warm, was a crushed fragment of dried clematis, four petals in tatters, a thin smudge of resin on its black hair. She wrote, There are two cordials in the village, made up by the doctor, and they have two motives, and they are two secrets, and they meet in one saliva cup. First motive, the cordial itself. The cordial is mixed with hot water and with grain alcohol.

The thallium in small quantity would be tasteless to a woman who had eaten with the cordial a boiled sweet and say, a violet, every night. The cold-pressed oil of dried clematis in small quantity is toxic. Pressed into the cork of the bottle, it would, on long standing, leach into the cordial and form a slow, small, perfectly vectored dose, which, taken at night in a cup of warm liquid, would appear to the chemist and to the doctor, in a small, urgent post-mortem, as a natural cardiac event in a woman already in her seventy-fifth winter. SECOND MOTIVE The cork and the clematis are not accidental. The doctor's seal is the clematis.

His dispensing ledger uses a clematis watermark. His surgery has a dozen pressed heads drying. His great-grandfather built up the family stamp in 1879. His great-uncle was the steward at the hall, and was, by the rural whisper of the time, Henry's natural father. Lavinia's brooch, which she wore every day, was the birth gift of her sister Miriam, whose child died in 1909 and who took her own life four and twenty years later by thallium in 1933 in a hotel in France. Now, the brooch in 1933 became the doctor's, not by theft, by inheritance. The steward had died in 1932, the doctor's family took the brooch as heirloom, the brooch was pressed into the family seal, and the seal, in 1955, was placed by the doctor at the wax of the

vicarage letter. So they have both secrets, the doctor and Lavinia, and the only person at large who knows both is the doctor. And the doctor, my dear, in a parish where two secrets meet in one grave, is not the same as the doctor who was at the funeral with his head low and his eye on the vicar's wife.

She reached for the tin opener. In the bottom of the saucer, where the cordial had rested for a quarter hour, the small fragment of dried clematis had begun to release very faintly an oily film. It was a colour she had been familiar with since 1933, in a hotel in a French village near Sissingham. She went to her cabinet.

She wrote in the violet ribbon of LD 1922, The two secrets in the one grave are these. First, the marble is wrong. Lavinia falsified her birth and her brother's to inherit a great-uncle's legacy. which had properly been for Hyacinth Belk. The legacy is now in her estate and reverts to Henry, except that, by the jointure, the brooch reverts to her sister's line. The brother's line is the doctor's line, through the steward. The doctor stands inside the margin of Henry's small inheritance. Second, Henry is not a dune by blood, he is a dune by marriage. The brooch should, by the will, be returned to the Belk line and held at the parish chest. The doctor is Henry's uncle. The doctor must, for the steward's line, kill

Lavinia before she sends the brooch to a proper solicitor, and he did. Not on her Friday broth, on her Friday cordial. She closed the cabinet. Hannah, who had not heard a word of the cabinet, brought the teapot. Shall I pour, ma'am? Not yet, dear. We have a small errand. The doctor's door is one street over. We shall leave the bottle at his surgery, in exchange for the winter's oranges he has been good enough to send. but we shall not leave it at the door. We shall leave it in his own hand. Yes, ma'am. And Hannah, dear, after we come back, the green glass bottle is to be placed, sealed, in the cabinet box. We must not be seen with it. Yes, ma'am. And dear, while we are out, I want no word of this to Mrs. Bantry,

who is a kind lady and will press me for clematis and brooches and for the parish magazine at once. We are going for oranges. Yes, ma'am. and Hannah, who had been at Miss Marple's elbow for eighteen years, murmured, The doctor's bicycle is in the lane, ma'am, with the chain off the cog. Fiddle, dear, said Miss Marple. Let us go. Section 6. The Tete-à-Tete at Dolly's It was Lady Day by the calendar, and the village kept it as the first of three days of Lenten darning, when Dolly Bantry opened the green door of her aunt's house, for the aunt was gone, to find her cousin Henry in the passage with Miss Marple's small reticule at his elbow and a half-peeled orange in his right hand. He had not, she saw at once, come for company. He

had come for the clematis. The drawing-room was the same, in its half-glow. The lavender water by the mantle, the high-boy with the photograph of the Uncle Alfred, a small photograph of Lavinia as a girl of twenty, the dried clematis wreath, a memorial of the funeral, pinned to the ribbon of the parlour bell. The tea was set with the bantry plate, four cups and saucers, the small russet teapot.

Dolly had laid a place for Sir Henry Clithering, who was on his way up from the station, a place for the Colonel, who had fallen from the list of mourners, a place for the Vicar, who would not come. There was also a place for Miss Marple, who, when the late morning post had been fetched, had written a polite note to Dolly. My dear, I shall be there at the half hour. Bring the photograph, the wreath, and, if you will, the small black cloth pouch that you will find in the silver drawer of the linen press. Henry laid the orange down. He said, without preliminary, Aunt Dolly, was my uncle an honest steward? No, Dolly said with a small prim lift of her chin. No, she said again after a pause, and laughed a little against her palm. Henry, dear, no.

He was a very fine steward. He kept the books at length for forty years. He never touched the family's packet. He was not an honest steward, in the sense your mother meant, of self-denial. Your mother never set up a high mark, but he was the kindest steward in three counties. He was, we would all say, the kindest man of the parish. He was your mother's second cousin by marriage.

He was, by the family books, no relative of hers at all. He was, however, by the books she kept and the books I have, your father. My father. Yes, dear. Say on, Aunt Dolly. Your mother was married to him in 1904. You were christened Henry in 1909, in the church at St Mary's. The entry in the registry, the entry which your mother's hand later amended, the amendment in the margin is in her own hand, that the entry which had been made by the bishop's register in 1918 was had been double-checked and found correct. The entry which had been made by the bishop's register to support the inheritance claim from her great-uncle in the year 1922 was that she was born in 1878, two years earlier than the parish register. Your mother had no brothers. The great-uncle's inheritance,

on the old entail of 1864, was for the only surviving niece, born before 1880. Lavinia's elder sister died childless in 1912. Lavinia's younger sister died of scarlet fever in 1912 also. Hyacinth Belk was not, by the entail, eligible. Hyacinth was a cousin. Lavinia, by falsifying the date of her birth, claimed the inheritance. The date, my dear, the date on the marble, is wrong. It is the same date as the entry she had to invent. Henry set his teacup down. He said, Then her elder sister, by the entail, was Miriam. Miriam was the heir. Miriam died in 1909 of childbirth. She died, not in childbirth, but as a result of a particular act of medical attention, an abortion, administered by the doctor in Sissingham on the

9th of January 1909. The doctor's name was Fitzhugh's great-uncle. The abortion was unsuccessful, and Miriam died of sepsis. How do you know this, Henry? I have, my dear, in my pocket, the second volume of Mr. Boreham's ledger for 1909. He handed it to me at the lawyer's office this morning. The ledger, which is in the parish chest, has, on its inner page, the entry. The family of Miriam signed a deed, under signature, attested by the steward, Alfred Dune, disclaiming any inheritance by the unborn child. The deed was not, by sound counsel, valid. The child, you, was born at seven months. The child, you, died within a fortnight. The death was reported. The birth was reported for Parrish as the birth of Lavinia's own boy. The deed is mentioned

in the rector's terse note of the time. Lavinia, who was twenty-four, took her sister Miriam's name as her own, and wore the clematis brooch of her sister every day in her sister's place for forty-five years. And her husband? Her husband, Alfred, stewarded the estate, and was, for the year before his death, the doctor's medical student. The doctor's family took him in. The doctor's family, in 1917, killed him.

They set up, by then, the false medical certificate by which Lavinia's sole heir, a boy of seven, would be the doctor's relative. My dear, That is a very long stretch. My dear, it is in the parish chest. Henry lifted the photograph of his mother as a girl of twenty. The brooch at the throat was the clematis. The girl was dignified, slender, inscribed by an engraver's signature. The brooch had been Miriam's. The girl had been called Mary Lavinia, a goddaughter of the vicar's sister. She had never been the heir of a great-uncle. The door opened. Sir Henry Clithering came in, and the Colonel's wife, and the polite echo of the hall behind them. Dolly rose. The day was to be a long one, and Miss Marple had

not yet arrived. Dolly looked at the photograph of her aunt and said, Set it back, my dear. She took a small lump of sugar from the sugar bowl and set it before the photograph, a custom of the bereaved. Miss Marple arrived just after the half hour, in her dark coat with the fur collar, two small heavy parcels under her arm, one in stiff white paper, one in brown.

She sat at the head, where Henry had been. His hat stood on the table. The ladies were silent. Dolly's eyes went to the brown parcel. My dears, Miss Marple said, I have brought two gifts. The first, for the parish, is a wreath of clematis. It is not, I fear, in the first flushes. It is dried. But it is, as lavenders are, more persistent, and I think the parish will not object. The second is for you, Mr. Dune.

I have carried it for some days. I think you have a right to it. She opened the brown parcel. It was a small, black cloth pouch, tied with a black thong. Inside was the clematis brooch, the silver filigree mounting a pressed sprig of the flower, mounted on its black velvet ribbon. The brooch was not the same one Lavinia had worn. It was the other brooch. the one that had been Miriam's, taken from the doctor's family silver at the time of the abortive operation and pressed against the doctor's family stamp. Miss Marple was showing it in this small circle as evidence of two secrets held in one grave. Henry took it. I have seen this before. Where, my dear? In my mother's bedroom, on her dresser, on

the morning of her funeral. It was, then, locked in the doctor's bag. Was it in the same brooch, my dear, that Miss Marple spoke of at the churchyard, which Lavinia, was it not, wore every day of her life? If we may have both brooches, one Miriam's, one Lavinia's, the picture is a different one. They were, each, the gift of an older sister to a younger one, two sisters, both called by the family Lavinia, and the two brooches, taken together, are gifts to each other. The doctor's family seal, the clematis, was forged from the two. Sir Henry Clithering lowered his head. Miss Marple, he said, you speak of two brooches as of two halves of one thing. The doctor, his brother, Alfred, the steward who took the operation, by

whose marriage Lavinia made Henry her own. These are not two halves. They are the same man. Three halves, my dear, said Miss Marple. The doctor, his brother Alfred, Lavinia, and Hyacinth. Hyacinth, who was, by the French post-mortem at Bardouville, in March 1933, but we must wait for the lawyer's dispatch on that point.

It will arrive tomorrow. At the Lichgate that evening, Dolly's gardener, Mr. Sindon, was laying a fresh clod of earth at the eastern side of the measured grave. He had been told to do so by the vicar. The clod was a foot thick. He smoothed it. From the seed pods of the clematis, the dry, pale winter pods that wound the cemetery rail, a single black seed, blown by the wind, fell onto the fresh earth. Clod of new earth covers clod of dry clod, the village said, in such small, proper terms.

Section 7. The Second Grave Opened Thursday morning broke clear and very cold, with an east wind that set the vicar's weather-veins spinning as if called by name. the Reverend Septimus March had shaken off his heavy heart of recent days. Miss Marple had observed it in the careful way he locked the vestry door, and the sexton, Josiah Graves, had been at the cemetery since five, on his hands and knees, marking out the second grave with a yard-line of white string.

Hyacinth Belk was to be interred at the half-past two, the same unbroken custom of the parish. A single bell at the gate, the curate's brief prayer, the mourners walking backward in their black, the undertaker's men folding the trestles. But this burial had a difference. The doctor had, the evening before, written to the vicar a letter of two lines. R.V.

could not, on conscience, allow a second box to be committed without a small witness. We'll attend with the chemist. The vicar had agreed. Sloane had been told. Inspector Polk had been told. So the second grave, which Miss Marple had measured on Tuesday, was to be opened by three gentlemen, not one. The undertaker's cab was late. The bearers were at the gate at twenty to two, their feathered hatbands half stiff with the cold. They carried the coffin of Hyacinth Belk, a slim oak box, freshly polished, with a small silver plate at its head. Hyacinth Belk, Nay Doon, 1876-1956.

Beloved sister of Lavinia. The plate was wrong. Hyacinth was not Lavinia's sister. Hyacinth was Lavinia's first cousin, twice removed. The plate had been engraved by the doctor, who had ordered it from Sims and Sons, Folkestone, on the Tuesday afternoon. And the wording, sister, was, if lifted to the sunlight, written in the small, four-petalled watermark that was the doctor's family paper. Sloane took the plate into his hand. He showed it to the vicar. Rector, this plate is not parish plate. It is the doctor's. It is the same plate, the vicar said, as was set on the family ledger. Sir, with your permission, I will open the box. My dear Sloane, on what authority? On my authority. On Inspector Polk's authority.

On the authority of the parish, in fact, for the parish will demand it, sir. at the next vestry meeting, when I shall call for the parish chest. The vicar stepped back. Sloane took up the sexton's chisel. One tap, two taps, and the lid of Hyacinth's coffin was loosened. One further tap, and the lid was lifted. The interior of the coffin was empty. The bearers drew a sharp breath.

The curate, who had been keeping a clean cuff distance, looked up. The vicar said, Good God! Miss Marple, who had been waiting on the path past the gate, came forward at the curate's request. There is no English ceremony like a sound mark for an Englishwoman listening to men in an empty box, and stood, with cane in hand, at the lip of the trench. She did not speak.

Mr Sloane, Miss Marple said very softly, where is Hyacinth's body? She is at the funeral parlour at Sissingham, ma'am, in the cold room. Is she properly interred? Not until three, ma'am. And yet her box is open. Yes, ma'am. Mr. Sloan, who ordered the plate? The doctor, ma'am, by his note. The doctor, sir, has had the plate engraved with the words sister, which were not true, and with the family's small flower, which is the doctor himself. The doctor's body is not in the box. The doctor's note is, in the legal sense, on a stationery he has used before. Josiah, dear. Yes, ma'am.

Tell me, was the doctor's plate sent through the post? No, ma'am, he brought it himself. When did he bring it? On Tuesday, the evening, in his bicycle. Was anyone with him? No, ma'am. Was the plate the first thing he set down at the grave? Yes, ma'am. At seven o'clock, in the dark. He worked by tallow. He said he would not sleep if he hadn't done it. Did he take the plate away with him? No, ma'am. He left it at the gate, on the third bar. Was the plate still on the third bar on Wednesday morning? No, ma'am. The sexton took it inside at six. And the plate was set on the box when? Just now, ma'am. The undertaker's men set it on, when they brought the box in. The plate was on the third bar on Tuesday night, on Wednesday

inside the vestry, and on Thursday just before the box was opened. Between Tuesday night and Thursday morning, Mr. Sloan, the doctor, has had the plate in his hands for at least thirty-one hours. He has had the plate in his hands, sir, with the box closed. He has had the time of a parish thief, sir, to set the plate at the box-head without anyone seeing, and to set the panel of the box itself, for the panel at the foot has been glued, very wet, with the doctor's green wax, without anyone seeing. The internal fittings of the box, sir, will be found, on close inspection, to be those of Lavinia Doone's coffin. Sloane bent down. He was a man of six foot, stooped now, his moustache within an inch of the wood. He touched the panel at the foot,

and the touch of his fingers took a small, dark smudge of green wax, very fresh, with a faint greasiness to it. He lifted the smudge to his mouth. He tasted it. Rosin, he said. Resin. The doctor pressed it at his tallow. Miss Marple, from the path's edge, wrote in her small notebook, Thursday, half-past two. The doctor set the plate Tuesday, took the plate Wednesday, set the box Thursday.

Two boxes, two plates, one cemetery. Two secrets, date of birth and parentage, meet at the clematis. The plate is wrong. The box is wrong. The doctor's family seal, on the plate and on the box, is the clematis. She went on, Mr Sloane, open the box of Lavinia Dune. The lid is at the catacomb at the back of the cemetery.

It has not yet been sealed. The plate on Lavinia's box has been engraved by the parish. The plate on Hyacinth's box has been engraved by the doctor. They were, the doctor told me Tuesday, both engraved at Sims and Sons. But the parish plate is third pattern. The doctor plate is fourth pattern. They have been, sir, taken from two boxes in two shops. The plate on Hyacinth's box was a gift of a box's lid once carried by Lavinia's elder sister in 1933 from France. The undertaker's man stepped forward. Ma'am, I will open the second lid. The lid was raised.

There was a smell in the catacomb which had not been there earlier, a faint, very faint, cool sweetness of pressed dockflowers. The contents of the second coffin, as it lay in its cradle, were a small silver chain, a sheet of green blotting paper, two pairs of scissors, a folded envelope of black silk, a small black cloth pouch, the same that Dolly had received from Miss Marple the day before. But in the pouch there was no brooch.

The brooch had, in the night, been moved to its original sister at the doctor's surgery. Miss Marple took in the inventory without comment. She said, Mr Sloane. Ma'am. Was the doctor at his surgery this morning? He was, ma'am, at eight. Did you see his bicycle? No, ma'am. It is in the lane. The chain is unloosed. Sloane stared.

The curate, who had been at the gate for the long twenty minutes, came forward. The day had been hijacked. Miss Marple said, Josiah, dear, help Mr Sloane to the Sexton's shed. Winch the doctor's bicycle out of the lane. Let us not have the doctor's bicycle in our plant for the burial. She paused and added, very quietly, And let us not have the doctor's bicycle pressed against the clematis.

The doctor, my dear, has an annual habit of pressing clematis heads for his prescription cards. The clematis on his cards, the clematis on his ledger, the clematis on his plate, the clematis on his pocket, they are not the same as the clematis of Miriam. they are the clematis of the cemetery. She lifted, very tenderly, the small black cloth pouch from the catacomb, and placed it in her reticule.

The pouch was, like the rest of her, going home. The bell at the gate began to ring, and the bell rang once, and twice, and three times, and was silent. Section 8 Miss Marple's Test Friday morning opened with a wash of cold gold across the meadow by St Mary's, and Miss Marple was, as she always was on the days of her quiet tasks, in her apron before seven o'clock.

She had laid out on the deal table, in two careful rows, twelve small sprigs of clematis, not the green glossy sprigs of summer, but the dried seed pods of winter, each tied with a number twelve silken thread. She had with her the parish's printed list of mourners and well-wishers, She had a plan. By nine o'clock, having drunk a small dish of weak tea and a slice of bread and butter, she sent Hannah to the village with twelve envelopes.

Each envelope contained a single dried clematis seed pod, mounted on a small slip of card, with a brief note. Dear friend, I am preparing a small wreath for the mother's meeting, and I have not, this winter, been able to gather clematis. If you have a sprig of dried clematis in your pantry, be it but one head, please send it to me at the cottage, for a small remembrance.

With thanks, you're obliged. J. M. The note was unsigned below. Twelve packets. Twelve recipients, picked by Miss Marple in such a careful order that the twelfth packet reached Dr. Ambrose Fitzhugh at quarter-past eleven, after the chemist's midday office closed. The recipients were Mrs. Flory Gladish, the blue boar, Mrs.

Margaret March, the vicar's wife, Sir Henry Clithering, the Countess of St. Cyr, an old friend from her girlhood in the country, the Reverend Septimus March, Mr. Boreham, the curate Mr. Pye, Mr. Josiah Graves, the sexton, Mr. Sinden, the gardener, Mrs. Woolmer, the postmistress, Colonel Melchett, and the doctor. Each sprig had been gathered by Miss Marple at her grandfather's cottage, where the family clematis had been cut down three years before, and pressed for Miss Marple by her great-aunt in the old fashion. The threads for the twelve sprigs were different.

One was grey, one was black, one was green, one was red. One had no thread at all. Hannah had been told which packet which person was to receive. Miss Marple had been told, by the chemist, the evening before, what would happen if a person who has not dried clematis in their pantry sends, under the polite cover of kindness, a sprig back to the giver. The giver would, on inspection, see that the sprig was not from the giver's stock, would see, also, that the sprig had a particular resin, the resin of the doctor's pressed clematis head, and would see the colour of the thread. The doctor's stock of clematis, in the doctor's dispensary, had been pressed with green thread.

At five-thirty on Friday afternoon, Miss Marple sat at her parlour, and Hannah, in three small heaps at her elbow, laid down the twelve returns. Eleven of the returns were polite little silver papers containing a single dried clematis head. The twelfth, from the doctor, was a larger paper, neatly folded, with a small sprig, pressed and dried, on a bright green thread.

Miss Marple lifted the bright green thread. Hannah, dear. Ma'am. This is the doctor's clematis. Yes, ma'am. It is not a dried head. It is a pressed head. of the kind he presses for his prescription cards. And the green thread is the doctor's medical stationery thread, in a grade he carries from his great-grandfather's stock. We have, my dear, twelve replies, of which eleven are as expected, and one is the only reply that will help the parish to its conclusion. She unrolled the paper on the doctor's reply.

On its back, in a small hand that she recognised, was a note. Dear Miss Marple, of course. I have many heads, gathered in October at the cemetery rail, and dried by my own method. I enclose one. The resin, in the preservation, is the village's old, and the resin will, I think, last another ten years. A.F. Miss Marple laid the small sprig on the table. She said, Hannah, dear, when I was a girl, my great-aunt pressed clematis for the family. We took the green thread. We did not, my dear, take the green thread from a doctor's stationery box.

There is, and the doctor is correct, a resin which lasts. But there is no green thread in our parish but the doctor's, and the doctor has today confirmed, by his reply, that he knows where the clematis of his dispensary is pressed, and he has told us, my dear, that it is pressed in October at the cemetery rail, by his own hand.

There are, at his dispensary, twelve clematis heads, one for each month of the year. The parish chest now has, sir, his own confession. She took a small pair of scissors. She cut, from the doctor's pressed sprig, a single seed-pod. She set it on a card. She folded the card. Hannah dear, will you carry this card to Sir Henry Clithering at the cottage by the church, and ask him, if he will, to set it in the bench at Evensong for the resurrection of Hyacinth Belk. At half-past six, the curate went to the door of the doctor's surgery.

Sloane was there. Inspector Polk was there. The polite knock was answered by Mrs Plum. The curate said, We have a small matter to lay before the doctor. Mrs Plum said, The doctor is at the cemetery. Sloane said, At the cemetery? Mrs Plum said, He is, sir, at the cemetery, working on the eastern edge of the dune plot. He has told me he wished to reset the clematis rail, as the packet of green thread has been delivered to him by Hannah. Sloane went. Polk went. The curate went. By seven o'clock they were at the lich gate, in the half-dark, with the lanterns of the sexton and the lamps of the vicarage. The doctor was on his knees at the eastern rail. The green thread on the doctor's coat was partly unrolled, uncut, along the lower rail of the cemetery.

The doctor was using the thread, in his small, careful habit, to mark the winter position of the seed-pods along the rail. Sloane took the doctor's arm. Doctor, by your courtesy, a small matter. The doctor, on his knees, did not look up. A small matter, sirs, is not the proper method of administering a parish. The parish, sir, will speak with me in the morning. It will not, sir. It will, Mr. Sloane, for I have been for thirty years the doctor of this parish, and I have earned the small right to take my leisure in such matters as these. Good evening, sir.

Good evening, doctor. but I would have you for a moment. The doctor, with a small, polite frown, looked up. He saw, in Sloane's hand, the small card Miss Marple had set there. He saw, in the curate's hand, the same card as the curate had unfolded it for the bench. He saw, in Paulk's hand, the bright green thread unravelled for an inch and a half from the doctor's coat. He saw, at the priest's bench, the doctor's sprig laid flat. He looked at Sloane a long, quiet moment, and then at the card. He said, Miss Marple has sent, I think, a sprig of her own clematis. No, Doctor. And she has set it on the bench for Evensong. Yes, Doctor. Then, sir, I shall, if I may, take a small walk in my own parish. He stood. He set his small, neat

black hat on his head. He walked with Sloane to the Doctor's gate. By nine o'clock, Sloane had laid at Sir Henry's bench the doctor's sprig, the curate's reply, Mrs Plum's note of the doctor's movements, the doctor's medical stationery thread, at the doctor's own discretion, and the ledger page from the doctor's surgery. At nine-thirty, Miss Marple, in her parlour, looked at the cabinet and said, Hannah, dear, the doctor, by his reply, has confirmed the resin, the seed, the green thread, and the pressed head. The doctor has, by his own confession, told us, sirs, that the clematis of the cemetery, the clematis of his dispensary, the clematis of his plate, the clematis of his stationery, are the same plant.

The doctor has, my dear, told us, by what he has sent to me, that the plant he pressed in his own dispensary, in October 1955, was, in every leaf and in every seed, the clematis of the Doon family plot. And Hannah said, Yes, ma'am. And the night drew on, and the bell of St Mary's did not ring, and the village was quiet, as if it had been waiting all along for an Englishwoman to press a sprig against the door of her small parlour and find the parish's secret, cold and complete, in the doctor's own hand. Section 9.

The Quiet Assembly of Truth Saturday morning, after a thin frost and a still night, The village drew its breath. The mother's meeting took its tea in the vicarage parlour at eleven, as it did every Saturday at eleven, and the curate had been told by the vicar to look away from any question about the cemetery. The mother's meeting, in its small chorus of approval for scones and the reverend's quiet way, did as it was bid. They did not speak of the lich gate. They did not speak of the second plate. They did not speak of the doctor.

But in Miss Marple's parlour, at the same hour, Fewer than half a dozen persons sat with their teacups before them, in a small assembly drawn, not by summons, but by the lightest of written notes, by a kind lady who had asked, of each of them, a small favour. The first cup of Sir Henry Clithering sat at the head of the table, a half-inch from his saucer. Boram, the lawyer, sat opposite. Sloane, the coroner's officer, sat at the foot.

Mrs Plum, the doctor's housekeeper, sat at the right hand of Miss Marple. Dolly Bantry sat at the left. The Reverend's Septimus March sat a little further away, near the door, his prayer-book open on his lap but unread. The curate had been invited. He sent his regrets. Henry Doon had been invited. He came at the end, in his dark overcoat, his hat in his hand, his face at last pale with the day. Hannah, dear, said Miss Marple, the silver tray, if you please. Hannah set down the silver tray. On it were the parish chest's twelve envelopes, the doctor's reply, the silver filigree brooch, the small pressed clematis head in green thread, the doctor's medical ledger, the parish certificate of death,

the chemist's laboratory report, the small blackcloth pouch, the bits of the second grave's panel, the cold stone of the eastern rail of the dune plot, and a piece of cotton string from the doctor's dispensary. Lavinia's cord, brushed for thirty-five winters, had been set with a single knot of green wax into a small red box. Miss Marple, having set the tray, drew her hands together and began. My dears, she said, we have come here today, as we have not in twenty years, to settle in this village whether we have been wrong. We have not. We have been right.

We have not been wise. The village, sirs, has been the proper keeper of two secrets. and the doctor, in his haste, has been the only one who knew both, and so he has been the only one who could kill. She paused. Mr. Sloan, will you read the chemist's report, sir, as you have it in your hand? It is here, ma'am. Thallium, in the broth of Friday 5 February, in a quantity consistent with deliberate admixture. No other poison indicated. The salt tin, on inspection at Sims and Sons, Folkestone, was found to be the doctor's stock. and the lot number matches his September receipt at the chemist's. The receipt, sir, was signed by the doctor on the 23rd of September, 1955. The receipt was for rodenticide for the Vicarage Garden, which, by

the sexton, was never laid out. Sloane set the report down. He said, Ma'am, for purposes of the parish, would you be so kind as to ask Mr. Boreham, sir, for the disposition of the great-uncle's entail? Boreham said very quietly, Great Uncle Honourable Edward Darcy Doon, of Darcy Park, died on the twelfth the curate nodded once, very gravely. Sloane set his cap under his hat. Mrs Plum, with a sigh like a small polite bell, set her teacup down.

At the Lichgate, late Saturday morning, the curate had set a small wreath of dried clematis in the village's old way, on the eastern rail of the Doon plot, with a single pressed head at its centre. The head was the doctor's, in green thread. Sloane and Pork had set the second plate, by parish instruction, on Hyacinth's box. Miss Marple, before she walked home by the Brackengate, had gone to the eastern rail and had set, in a small glass jar, the brooch in its black velvet ribbon with the doctor's pressed head.

She had stopped very briefly and had said, not for the curate's hearing, tomorrow, sir, at the half-past two. Section 10. The Reveal at the Cottage It is Sunday morning. The bells of St Mary's, after thirty-six hours of deliberately held silence, ring a single muffled tone, for a death that is not yet a death, and a sin that is not yet a sin, and the village holds still in its pew-end stillness. Inside the small cottage at No. 4, the lace curtains are drawn against the pale gold of the day, and Miss Marple, white-haired, with the great silver tray before her, sits at her card-table, her hands folded on the small grey book which is her life-annotated ledger of deeds. She is not alone. At the foot of her table sits

the curate. At the head, Sir Henry Clithering, Boram the lawyer, Sloane the coroner's officer, Inspector Pulk, Henry Doon, Mrs Plum the doctor's housekeeper, Dolly Bantry, and at the parlour door, with his hat in his hand, the doctor. Miss Marple has, in her life, given very few speeches. Today she gives one.

My dears, she says, I would have you listen for an hour without interruption, and then I will take questions. The first thing I shall set before the parish is this. The lavenders at Glevering Hall were not the lavenders of daily remembrance. They are the lavenders of Lavinia's sister, Miriam, and they have been pressed into a wreath, and a wreath in this parish is a memorial. That wreath has been hanging on the ribbon of the bell-pull at Dolly Bantry's cottage for thirty-six hours. It has not been taken down.

It has not been removed by the curate. It has been left there in his quiet custom of his church. She paused and drew out the second small cord, the doctor's cord, from the red box. The second thing I shall set before the parish, she says, is the green thread. The doctor's green thread. for thirty-one October seasons, has been pressed into every clematis head at his dispensary. The green thread is the doctor's seal. It has been for thirty-three years on every prescription card the doctor has written. It has been, my dears, the doctor's family mark. She paused and held up her hand. Now I shall speak of two secrets and of one killer. Three things in three parts.

Secret the first, the date. Lavinia Doone was born in 1880, not 1878. She, at the behest of her eldest sister Miriam, falsified the date in order to claim her great-uncle's entail. She was a Belk by birth, a Doone by marriage. By the entail, the Darcy Park estate should have gone, by right of birth, to Miriam, and then to Miriam's eldest daughter. None. Lavinia, in 1922, set down on the parish register, by her own hand and by the doctor's great-uncle's witness, the false date of 1878, and took the estate.

Secret II. Henry's Parentage Henry is the issue of Miriam, born of the steward Alfred Doone, who was, by family connection, the doctor's own great-uncle. Miriam died in 1909 of a botched operation. The steward married Lavinia in the same year. Lavinia raised Henry. Lavinia wore, every day for 45 years, the clematis brooch that was Miriam's 20th birthday gift. The brooch is, by family right, both Miriam's and Lavinia's and Henry's.

The steward's line folded into the doctor's family. Killer, the one. The doctor. Ambrose Fitzhugh, M.D. The doctor's great-uncle was the steward who married Lavinia, and the doctor who administered the operation on Miriam in 1909. The doctor, in 1955, learned that Lavinia had arranged by safe hand for the brooch to be sent to a London solicitor for the lawful heirs of Belk's eldest surviving niece. The doctor knew that this bequest had stripped his family of its heir's claim.

He knew the cordial would be administered on the Friday by his own prescription, since the doctor's seal had been on the bottle in the cupboard at Glevering Hall. He added his own pressed clematis head to the cordial by pressing the head into the cork at his surgery on the Thursday evening. By such a small act, Mr. Pork, by a small dose of thallium in a pressed clematis head in the cork of a small bottle at the cupboard of a small Englishwoman, Lavinia was poisoned. The poison was not in the broth. The poison was in her cordial, which she had taken at the inn in a small cup with hot water and a violet sweet, on the night of the Friday before her broth. She leaned forward.

The doctor, my dears, did not kill Lavinia in the broth. The doctor killed her in the cordial. He was not in the kitchen of the Blue Boar on Friday. He was in the dispensary on Thursday, in his apron, with his green wax and his pressed head. The cook, Mrs Gladish, has been cleared, had nothing in her kitchen but six minutes of rest in the kitchen garden. The doctor did not know that thallium, in dried clematis head form, would leave unmistakable traces of the pressed clematis, of the green thread, of his own hand. He had assumed, and this was his error, that his clematis in every stationery sheet, his green wax in his seal, his small brown gown of parish friendship, would hide the truth. The doctor was wrong.

He had his small flower on every prescription card for thirty-three winters. He had his small flower pressed into the cemetery rail in October by his own hand. He did not know that clematis, pressed, in green wax, in the cork of a cordial bottle, on a Thursday evening, would draw itself out of the cork, into the cordial, and into the Englishwoman's throat. He had forgotten that the cold-pressed oil of Clematis, kept many years, blooms a thin resin of the colour of his great-grandfather's stationery, and that the resin, on the salt rim of a cup of hot water, leaves a thin oily stripe of a hue the chemist had observed only once. It was at that moment, with the bell still ringing— that the curate set down the

wreath he had been holding. In his other hand was the small black cloth pouch in which had been sitting two brooches, the silver filigree clematis of Miriam's gift, and, extracted from Hyacinth's second box, the same brooch in green waxed mount that had been the doctor's seal. The curate, with the air of one making an indelible vow, said, Miss Marple, by your leave. By mine, my dear. Sloane stood.

Pork stood. Sir Henry stood. The doctor's eyes flickered. He said, Ma'am, this is a misunderstanding. Doctor, this is not a misunderstanding. This is your own press, your own seal, your own clematis in the cork of a small bottle at Glevering Hall. Your own hand on a Thursday evening with a green wax thread pressed against the rind of Miriam's head. Your own doctor. The doctor drew a breath and set his medical bag flat on the table. I am, by the parish's standard, a sinner. By my own standard, a thief.

I have not, however, killed Lavinia Doon. Doctor, said Miss Marple, the dose was not clinical. It was the chemist's half-strength. It is not your manner to give a clinical dose on a Thursday in October. It is your manner to give a small, very gentle, very medicinal dose of the cold-pressed oil of clematis. the resin of which was not noticed in 1933 at the Hotel du Parc, at Bar du Ville, when an Englishwoman took her own life by thallium.

The same dose, my dear doctor. The same dose that Miriam took upon her own death. She paused and looked at Henry, who had not raised his hat. My dear Henry, your mother was, in life, a belk, not a dune. By marriage, a dune. By her sister's death, the holder of a small pressed flower. The doctor, by the village's proper accounting, is the steward Alfred's nephew, Lavinia's brother-in-law. The curate stepped forward. Henry, pale, lifted his chin. Polk laid his hand on the doctor's shoulder. Sloane laid his notebook on the table. Doctor, I shall have to ask for a word outside. The doctor drew himself upright. He set his hat in place. Inspector, let us have, if you will— One small cup of hot water first, for my head. Sir,

you shall have water. The doctor went to the door. He turned and looked at Miss Marple. My dear, he said, I have not killed Lavinia Doon, but I have given her the same dose in 1956 that I gave her sister in 1909. It was at that moment, and not before, that Miss Marple closed her cabinet book. She stood. She said to Henry, My dear, I am, sir, very sorry.

It will pass, ma'am. It will not, my dear, entirely. The bell at St Mary's rang three times. The brooches were set in a small parcel of black silk in the safe at Glevering. The doctor's bicycle was wheeled to the gate. His hat went to the curate, his apron to his housekeeper. Miss Marple sat and said to Hannah, Hannah, dear, the kettle. then the curtains. I shall sit this afternoon, and not speak and not move, and I shall listen for the bell. Yes, ma'am. Polk and Sloane went out, very quietly, by the lane. Section 11. Aftermath. A single clematis.

The bells of St Mary Mead did not ring again that week. The sky, on the Monday morning after, was a low pewter ceiling pressed down over the chimneys. the rooks in the yew sat hunched and quiet, and only the soft dripping of thaw from the cemetery rail marked the long, slow motion of the village back into its small, unbroken habits. Miss Marple, in her parlour at No. 4, with Hannah at the elbow and the kettle on the hob, watched the postman cross the lane, watched the doctor's bicycle— no, it was gone— watched Henry Doone cross from Glevering, his black coat unbuttoned at the throat, his head at last unbowed.

He had come up the path with Dolly at his side, and his hands were clean of gloves. He held in his right the small parcel of black silk that the curate had entrusted to him on Saturday, the two brooches, the silver filigree of Miriam, and the green waxed mount of the doctor's seal, and in his left a single sprig of dried clematis, of the sort the village women had pressed for their sisters in the old way. He set it, without a word, on the small table by Miss Marple's chair. The great-uncle's entail, he said. by which I am one of two remaining heirs, the other, Boram set down, being the doctor, now under magistrate's instruction at the county, falls to the eldest niece of Miriam. That niece, ma'am,

is my aunt Dorothea, of Folkestone, in poor health. The next is, by the same entail, of a person unknown to me. The next after that is me. And the eldest niece of the dovetail was Lavinia's eldest sister, Mary. of no record except the parish register of Sissingham of 1866, the year of Lavinia's mother-in-law's birth. Miss Marple set her teacup down. She drew out the small violet ribbon of her cabinet book. My dear Henry, she said, the eldest niece, by Mary, was, in the parish register of Sissingham, 1866, the eldest daughter of a vicar's sister. The eldest, by a small chain of events, was Mary Anne's elder sister, who had been disowned for an affair in 1858 with the steward of Darcy Park, and who, on her deathbed

in 1866, took her sister's name, on receiving a small pressed clematis at her ear. My dear, I shall not press that story on the parish in this hour. The elder niece is, by the copy of the parish register, the elder sister's eldest daughter. That daughter was Eleanor Fitzhugh, who married a surgeon in Sissingham. That surgeon was the doctor's grandfather. The eldest niece's eldest son was the doctor's great-uncle, Alfred, the steward, who married Lavinia, and who was also, my dear, the doctor. Henry was very still. My dear Henry, said Miss Marple, you are, by the entail, the one great-uncle's great-niece's eldest's eldest's eldest's great-grandson, through Eleanor Fitzhugh. The doctor, by the same entail, is that same one's, through his

own branch, nephew. The village, by this measure, has had two lawful heirs unto the eleventh generation, and one of them, my dear, has been a murderer, and the other, my dear, has been a widow, and the other, my dear, is yourself. She paused again and said more gently, My dear Henry, this is a long and painful path, and I will not, sir, press it further upon you. The will of 1949, is in the parish chest. The doctor's arrest is in the county record. The brooches are in the parish chest. The clematis is in the cemetery rail, in the small jar by the vicar. Henry set his gloves down. Ma'am, I shall go home today. I shall, in the next month, set the village church a subscription for its organ. I shall set the brooches, in their black silk, in the

parish safe, where they belonged. until the eldest ancestor's proper heir has declared herself. In the spring I shall, at Sissingham, lay a wreath on the elder sister's grave, and I shall, ma'am, by the small clematis in the jar at the cemetery, be at peace. Miss Marple took his hand. She said, My dear Henry, we have in our small way all been wrong. We have in our small way all been right.

Lavinia was, by the village's small, proper accounting, an honest woman of her class, until six Friday ago. Lavinia's sister Miriam was, by Lavinia's accounting, the small sister who had gone to France in 1933 and not returned. The doctor, by his own accounting, was the small English doctor with a habit of clematis, pressed at the cemetery rail. We have, my dear, all been gossips ourselves, and have all been properly punished for our gossip. The village will, ma'am, be a small English village of gossips and of a small English doctor's bitter clematis. And we, sir, will go on.

Henry rose. He held out his hand. He kissed Miss Marples very gently and said, Ma'am. Dolly Bantry, who had been in the kitchen, came in with a small bunch of rosemary and thyme and said with a small bright tear, Miss Marple, we thank you. My dear Dolly, said Miss Marple, We have, as all villages must, of every English yard, lost a great unkindness to a small kindness. We shall be at peace again by the spring. Set the screens at the door. She rose, she crossed the parlour, she took the small sprig of clematis Henry had left at her chair, and set it, very gently, in a small glass jar of forced water on the parlour sill. From the kitchen Hannah went up the stair with the kettle.

and Dolly's small boy, who was Henry's small cousin by a sister of Lavinia's, married to an attorney of Folkestone, ran to the gate with the curate's daughter, and ran with a small shout, The bells! The bells! The bells of St Mary's, which had not rung since Thursday, rang out two clear peals for the village's silence to be at an end. The bell at Glevering, which had been silent for thirty-six hours, rang out its one low note.

The bell at the mother's meeting at number 12 rang twice by the curate's daughter in her small piety. The doctor's bicycle was gone. The doctor's small clay pot at the dispensary was gone. The doctor's wagon lantern in the lane was gone. The doctor's hat in the curate's safe was gone. The village that afternoon was itself, small, English, ordinary, broken in one place and stitched in another. The mother's meeting sat at the vicar's table with their small tear, and the bell rang out at vesper time for a parish that had not been quite right for some weeks, and was now, by the bell's small courtesy, on its way back. The rooks had not gone. The rooks were in the yew. Miss Marple sat in her parlour at

her card-table, and watched the small clematis on her sill begin its quiet, very slow, unfurling leaf by leaf. She was, as always, at ease with the village and at peace. She would, in the coming year, by the smallest of small acts, by the small green thread of the doctor's seal and the silver filigree of Miriam's brooch, see that the parish was at last restored. And, at the Lichgate in the late afternoon, the curate with his prayer book walked with Henry. The curate's small daughter was in his arms, Sir Henry Clithering was at his elbow. The morning star was setting very low over the cemetery rail. The ewe was at rest. The bell stopped. The bell did not ring again. The bell rang in the village for the

last time that day. And Miss Marple, in her small parlour by the small clematis and the kettle and the vicar's curate and the small broken parish of St Mary Mead, drew the curtain. The End

One Grave, Two Secrets, One Killer | Miss Marple Sleep Stories

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