Latest / Miss Marple Sleep Stories / A Spinster Found Dead in the Fog | Miss Marple Sleep Stories

Transcript

A Spinster Found Dead in the Fog | Miss Marple Sleep Stories · Miss Marple Sleep Stories

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: The lamps are lit early against the valley mist, the
• 0:02
  Speaker 1: last dahlias are still standing in the vicarage garden, and
• 0:05
  Speaker 1: behind the lich gate a bell that cannot ring is
• 0:08
  Speaker 1: keeping its own counsel. Draw your chair nearer the fire.
• 0:11
  Speaker 1: In Lower Wintham, where the tea is always strong and
• 0:14
  Speaker 1: the secrets are always older, a spinster lies dead in
• 0:17
  Speaker 1: the vestry, and an old lady with pink cheeks and
• 0:20
  Speaker 1: pale blue eyes is about to notice what everyone else
• 0:23
  Speaker 1: has kindly overlooked. Fog, silence, and one dead spinster. A
• 0:29
  Speaker 1: Miss Marple Mystery Section 1. The Fog Comes Down on
• 0:33
  Speaker 1: Lower Wintham The fog came down on Lower Wintham on
• 0:37
  Speaker 1: a Thursday, and by Friday morning Miss Evelyn Frobisher was dead,
• 0:41
  Speaker 1: though the village, being a village, required the whole of
• 0:43
  Speaker 1: Friday and most of Saturday to adjust its understanding of
• 0:46
  Speaker 1: the word dead from the natural sort to the other kind.
• 0:51
  Speaker 1: It had been a beautiful autumn until then. That is
• 0:53
  Speaker 1: what everyone said afterward. with the faint reproach of people
• 0:56
  Speaker 1: who feel that weather, like a trusted servant, has no
• 0:59
  Speaker 1: business changing its character without notice. October had come in
• 1:04
  Speaker 1: mild and golden. The dahlias in the vicarage garden were
• 1:07
  Speaker 1: still holding their crimson heads high. The apple crop was gathered.
• 1:11
  Speaker 1: The organ fund, after three years of envelopes and bazaars,
• 1:14
  Speaker 1: and a dramatic reading of The Pied Piper by the schoolmistress, stood,
• 1:18
  Speaker 1: according to Major Hartwell, who kept the ledger in a
• 1:21
  Speaker 1: ruled exercise book, within forty pounds of its goal. Lower
• 1:25
  Speaker 1: Wintham was the kind of village where nothing ever happened,
• 1:28
  Speaker 1: and where, in consequence, everything was remembered. The last real
• 1:32
  Speaker 1: event had been the fire at the Blue Boar in 1919,
• 1:35
  Speaker 1: and people still described it to visitors with the appetite
• 1:38
  Speaker 1: of a thing half-enjoyed. Miss Marple had arrived in the
• 1:41
  Speaker 1: village on the Tuesday, two days before the fog, to
• 1:44
  Speaker 1: spend a fortnight with her old friend Mrs Caroline Ainger
• 1:48
  Speaker 1: at Dovecote Cottage. She came every few years, when the
• 1:51
  Speaker 1: London fogs she remembered from girlhood made her think, perversely,
• 1:55
  Speaker 1: of country air. She was a very old lady now,
• 1:59
  Speaker 1: pink and white and fragile as a China ornament, with
• 2:02
  Speaker 1: China blue eyes that people tended to describe as sweet
• 2:06
  Speaker 1: until they had known her a week, after which they
• 2:08
  Speaker 1: described her, if pressed, as a little unsettling somehow. She
• 2:13
  Speaker 1: sat that first afternoon in the window of Dovecote Cottage
• 2:16
  Speaker 1: with her knitting, a shawl, pearl grey, of the softest wool,
• 2:20
  Speaker 1: and looked out across the green at the church of
• 2:22
  Speaker 1: St Cuthbert's, whose bell, she was informed, had been silent
• 2:26
  Speaker 1: since September. Cracked, said Mrs. Anger, setting down the tea.
• 2:31
  Speaker 1: All the fittings are. Mr. Fanshawe is in despair. A
• 2:34
  Speaker 1: church without a bell, he says, is like a village
• 2:37
  Speaker 1: without a voice. Though between ourselves, Jane, half the parish
• 2:41
  Speaker 1: is rather enjoying the quiet. Old Mrs. Tidd, opposite the
• 2:44
  Speaker 1: lich gate, says she has slept properly for the first
• 2:47
  Speaker 1: time in thirty years. How interesting, said Miss Marple gently.
• 2:52
  Speaker 1: One forgets how much of village life is arranged around sound.
• 2:55
  Speaker 1: And the fog makes it worse. When it comes down
• 2:58
  Speaker 1: in the valley, you can't hear the cows in the
• 2:59
  Speaker 1: next field. It's like being wrapped in wool. Mrs. Anger
• 3:03
  Speaker 1: shivered pleasantly, the way one shivers at a ghost story
• 3:06
  Speaker 1: in a warm room. We shall have it before the
• 3:08
  Speaker 1: week is out. It always comes when the wind drops
• 3:11
  Speaker 1: after rain. It came on the Thursday, as promised, rolling
• 3:15
  Speaker 1: up out of the water meadows at dusk and swallowing
• 3:17
  Speaker 1: the village by inches, first the church tower, then the rooftops,
• 3:21
  Speaker 1: then the very gates of the houses, until Lower Wintham
• 3:24
  Speaker 1: existed only in small lit islands, the post office window,
• 3:27
  Speaker 1: the vicarage study, the lamp in the doctor's surgery. It
• 3:31
  Speaker 1: was the sort of fog in which a person might
• 3:33
  Speaker 1: pass his own gate and not know it, the sort
• 3:35
  Speaker 1: in which footsteps arrived before the feet that made them,
• 3:38
  Speaker 1: and voices seemed to speak from nowhere and be answered
• 3:41
  Speaker 1: from nowhere. The villagers shut their doors early, and were
• 3:44
  Speaker 1: glad of their fires. Miss Evelyn Frobisher did not shut
• 3:47
  Speaker 1: her door early. Miss Evelyn Frobisher, sixty-eight years of age,
• 3:51
  Speaker 1: President of the Mother's Union, Treasurer Emeritus of the Organ Fund,
• 3:55
  Speaker 1: and the nearest thing Lower Wintham possessed to an institution,
• 3:58
  Speaker 1: walked out of her house, Church House, the tall Georgian
• 4:01
  Speaker 1: one beside the Lich Gate, at a quarter past six
• 4:04
  Speaker 1: that evening, wearing, according to her companion Mrs. Halloway, her
• 4:08
  Speaker 1: best grey shawl with the pearl pin, and crossed the
• 4:11
  Speaker 1: green to the church. She had told Mrs. Halloway she
• 4:14
  Speaker 1: was going to look over the vestry before the choir
• 4:16
  Speaker 1: practice on Saturday, and that she might be late, and
• 4:18
  Speaker 1: that Mrs. Halloway was not to wait up. She was
• 4:21
  Speaker 1: found at nine o'clock by young Bert Tanner, the verger's boy,
• 4:25
  Speaker 1: who had gone to fetch a surplice, and found the
• 4:27
  Speaker 1: vestry lamp burning, and Miss Frobisher lying at the foot
• 4:30
  Speaker 1: of the brass eagle lectern, with her head against its base,
• 4:33
  Speaker 1: and her grey shawl folded, folded. which was the thing
• 4:36
  Speaker 1: Bert could never afterward explain to his own satisfaction, neatly
• 4:40
  Speaker 1: over the back of the chair. Bert Tanner was fourteen,
• 4:43
  Speaker 1: and he did what fourteen does. He ran. He ran
• 4:46
  Speaker 1: out of the church and through the lich-gate and into
• 4:49
  Speaker 1: the fog which swallowed him at the second step. He
• 4:51
  Speaker 1: fetched his father, and his father fetched the constable, and
• 4:54
  Speaker 1: the constable fetched the doctor, and by ten o'clock the
• 4:57
  Speaker 1: little chain of lamplight had done its work, and church-house
• 5:00
  Speaker 1: stood with its door open and its curtains undrawn, blazing
• 5:03
  Speaker 1: into the fog like a ship in trouble. It was
• 5:06
  Speaker 1: the folded shawl that stayed with people. The blow could
• 5:08
  Speaker 1: be hidden under the comfortable word accident, but the shawl.
• 5:12
  Speaker 1: The shawl was repeated everywhere, and everywhere it was repeated
• 5:16
  Speaker 1: it made the listeners uneasy in a way they could
• 5:18
  Speaker 1: not name. A shawl folded neatly in a room where
• 5:21
  Speaker 1: a woman lay dead. It was wrong, that was all.
• 5:24
  Speaker 1: It was wrong the way a hymn sung in the
• 5:26
  Speaker 1: wrong key is wrong. Nothing you could point to, and
• 5:28
  Speaker 1: nothing you could forget. The village constable, a stout young
• 5:32
  Speaker 1: man named Purbright, bicycling through fog that deadened his own bell,
• 5:36
  Speaker 1: decided it was a fall. Dr Lorimer, summoned from his
• 5:39
  Speaker 1: surgery with his collar unbuttoned and his dinner unfinished, looked
• 5:43
  Speaker 1: at the body for a long time in the lamplight
• 5:45
  Speaker 1: of that small, close, hymn-smelling room, and said he would
• 5:48
  Speaker 1: not sign anything until a proper man from the county
• 5:50
  Speaker 1: had seen her. He said it quietly, and he said
• 5:53
  Speaker 1: it twice, and the fog outside pressed against the small
• 5:56
  Speaker 1: diamond panes of the vestry window as if listening. By
• 6:00
  Speaker 1: breakfast on Friday, Lower Wintham knew, that is, it knew
• 6:04
  Speaker 1: two things, which it held simultaneously without embarrassment, that dear
• 6:08
  Speaker 1: Miss Frobisher had passed away very suddenly, a mercy at
• 6:11
  Speaker 1: her age, really, in the church she loved, and that
• 6:14
  Speaker 1: something was being whispered at the butcher's which one did
• 6:16
  Speaker 1: not repeat in front of the children. The postmistress sold
• 6:20
  Speaker 1: stamps all morning, with the air of a woman keeping
• 6:22
  Speaker 1: a secret the size of a haystack. The vicar, Mr. Fanshawe,
• 6:26
  Speaker 1: went from house to house being gentle with people who
• 6:29
  Speaker 1: were not, on inspection, grieving so much as exhilarated. At
• 6:33
  Speaker 1: Dovecote Cottage, Miss Marple sat by the window and knitted,
• 6:36
  Speaker 1: and watched the fog come and go in drifts across
• 6:39
  Speaker 1: the green, and said very little. It is too dreadful,
• 6:42
  Speaker 1: said Mrs. Anger, who had said it eleven times since breakfast.
• 6:46
  Speaker 1: Evil in Frobisher, in the vestry. One has known her
• 6:49
  Speaker 1: forty years, Jane, forty years. She was at my wedding.
• 6:52
  Speaker 1: She bullied the caterers. One was grateful, of course, and
• 6:55
  Speaker 1: now to slip on that terrible stone floor. I have
• 6:58
  Speaker 1: always said those flags are dangerous when it's damp and
• 7:01
  Speaker 1: nobody listens. Was the floor damp, dear? asked Miss Marple. Mrs.
• 7:06
  Speaker 1: Ainger paused. Well, it had been raining earlier, but the
• 7:10
  Speaker 1: fog really was dry. A dry fog. The driest thing
• 7:13
  Speaker 1: about Thursday, one would have said. And the doctor would
• 7:16
  Speaker 1: not sign the certificate. How did you know that? Mrs.
• 7:20
  Speaker 1: Tidd opposite, said Miss Marple, nodding toward the window. has
• 7:23
  Speaker 1: had her curtains open since six. Nothing keeps Mrs. Tidd's
• 7:27
  Speaker 1: curtains open at six except news of an irregular kind.
• 7:30
  Speaker 1: She counted stitches under her breath, four and two together,
• 7:34
  Speaker 1: and the pearl-grey wool grew in her lap like a
• 7:36
  Speaker 1: drift of the fog outside, softening, obscuring. I met Miss
• 7:40
  Speaker 1: Frobisher only once, on Tuesday, at your tea. She struck
• 7:44
  Speaker 1: me as a woman who knew exactly where she was
• 7:46
  Speaker 1: putting her feet. Everyone knew where Evelyn put her feet.
• 7:50
  Speaker 1: She was the surest walker in the parish. up and
• 7:52
  Speaker 1: down to the church in all weathers, never a stumble. Yes,
• 7:56
  Speaker 1: said Miss Marple, that is rather what I thought, and
• 7:59
  Speaker 1: she dropped a stitch, and had to go back, and
• 8:02
  Speaker 1: did not explain why she had dropped it, which was
• 8:04
  Speaker 1: that through a gap in the fog she had just
• 8:06
  Speaker 1: seen the county car, a black Wolseley with two men
• 8:09
  Speaker 1: in it, draw up outside the lich gate, and the
• 8:12
  Speaker 1: taller of the two men stand for a long moment,
• 8:14
  Speaker 1: looking at the church door, with the particular stillness of
• 8:17
  Speaker 1: a man who has read a report he does not like.
• 8:20
  Speaker 1: Inspector Hewitt had come to Lower Wintham. The fog stayed
• 8:24
  Speaker 1: all that day and the next, and the bell of
• 8:26
  Speaker 1: St Cuthbert's did not ring, because it could not, and
• 8:29
  Speaker 1: the village moved about its business in a muffled, cotton-wool world,
• 8:33
  Speaker 1: in which it was perfectly possible, as several people remarked afterward,
• 8:37
  Speaker 1: with hindsight's uneasy pleasure, to stand three feet from another
• 8:40
  Speaker 1: human being and not know they were there. Which, as
• 8:44
  Speaker 1: Inspector Hewitt was shortly to observe to Sergeant Fanning, was
• 8:47
  Speaker 1: precisely the trouble. Section 2 The village reacts. Precisely the trouble,
• 8:53
  Speaker 1: said Inspector Hewitt, lowering his voice as the verger's boy
• 8:56
  Speaker 1: clattered away down the aisle with the vestry key, is
• 8:59
  Speaker 1: that everyone in this village was indoors in front of
• 9:02
  Speaker 1: a fire between six and eight on Thursday evening, and
• 9:05
  Speaker 1: every one of them can prove it by every other
• 9:07
  Speaker 1: one of them. It's like interrogating a bowl of goldfish.
• 9:11
  Speaker 1: Sergeant Fanning, who had grown up in a village not
• 9:13
  Speaker 1: unlike this one and knew better than to say so,
• 9:15
  Speaker 1: made a non-committal noise and wrote goldfish in his notebook
• 9:19
  Speaker 1: before thinking better of it and crossing it out. The
• 9:22
  Speaker 1: word murder was not spoken in Lower Wintham that weekend.
• 9:25
  Speaker 1: It was considered, it was weighed, it was passed from
• 9:28
  Speaker 1: hand to hand under the counter, so to speak, like
• 9:31
  Speaker 1: a doubtful coin. What was spoken, freely and at length
• 9:34
  Speaker 1: and with considerable artistry, was everything else. At the post
• 9:38
  Speaker 1: office the theory was the niece. Miss Nora Teasdale, Miss
• 9:42
  Speaker 1: Frobisher's brother's daughter, had arrived from London that summer in
• 9:45
  Speaker 1: a motor-car she drove herself, wearing trousers, and had stayed
• 9:49
  Speaker 1: three weeks at Church House, during which she had been heard,
• 9:52
  Speaker 1: by Mrs Tidd, whose window commanded the gate, to say,
• 9:55
  Speaker 1: on the subject of the house,' Aunt Evelyn, you can't
• 9:58
  Speaker 1: keep this great barn for ever.' The postmistress, Mrs. Golightly,
• 10:02
  Speaker 1: repeated this to every customer with scrupulous fidelity, adding each time,'
• 10:06
  Speaker 1: Not that I am one to talk.' At the Blue
• 10:09
  Speaker 1: Boar the theory was Major Hartwell. The Major had quarrelled
• 10:13
  Speaker 1: with Miss Frobisher at the Fate Committee on the Tuesday.
• 10:16
  Speaker 1: The whole of the Scout Hut had heard it through
• 10:17
  Speaker 1: the partition. over the organ fund accounts, which she had
• 10:20
  Speaker 1: asked to see and he had declined, in his capacity
• 10:23
  Speaker 1: as treasurer, to produce until they were properly cast up.
• 10:27
  Speaker 1: The Major had said, in his parade-ground voice, that he
• 10:30
  Speaker 1: would not be audited by a woman in his own
• 10:32
  Speaker 1: village hall, and Miss Frobisher had said, in her soft,
• 10:35
  Speaker 1: precise voice, that she found that an interesting choice of words.
• 10:39
  Speaker 1: The Blue Boar was of the opinion that the Major
• 10:41
  Speaker 1: had a temper, had been in India, and had once
• 10:44
  Speaker 1: shot a man in a duel in 1911. a story
• 10:47
  Speaker 1: which had begun life as the major once shooting at
• 10:49
  Speaker 1: a tiger and missing, but which had improved with keeping.
• 10:53
  Speaker 1: At the grocer's, more darkly, the theory was Dr. Lorimer,
• 10:57
  Speaker 1: not that anyone says so, but the doctor was with
• 10:59
  Speaker 1: her last, in a manner of speaking, and a doctor
• 11:02
  Speaker 1: knows where to strike, if you'll pardon the expression, though
• 11:05
  Speaker 1: what grievance the doctor could possibly have against the president
• 11:08
  Speaker 1: of the mother's union, nobody could say, which, in a village,
• 11:12
  Speaker 1: was not an objection, but an inducement. And at the vicarage,
• 11:16
  Speaker 1: Mrs Diana Fanshawe poured tea for Miss Marple, who had
• 11:20
  Speaker 1: been invited, with Mrs Ainger, as a known comfort in
• 11:23
  Speaker 1: times of trouble, and said what everyone was actually thinking,
• 11:26
  Speaker 1: which was the thing nobody had yet said aloud. It
• 11:29
  Speaker 1: isn't that anyone wanted Evelyn dead, said Diana Fanshawe. She
• 11:34
  Speaker 1: was a handsome, hurried woman of forty, much in love
• 11:37
  Speaker 1: with her husband, and much harassed by his parish, and
• 11:40
  Speaker 1: she had the vicarage wife gift of saying the unsayable
• 11:43
  Speaker 1: in a tone of voice that made it sound like
• 11:45
  Speaker 1: the weather. That's what's so horrible. Nobody disliked her. She
• 11:49
  Speaker 1: was tiresome about the accounts, and she never forgot anything,
• 11:53
  Speaker 1: and she could make you feel nine years old with
• 11:55
  Speaker 1: one sentence. But she was good, genuinely good. She sat
• 11:59
  Speaker 1: up with old Mrs. Crump three nights running last winter,
• 12:02
  Speaker 1: and now we're all sitting in our parlours wondering which
• 12:05
  Speaker 1: of us. She stopped and put the milk jug down
• 12:08
  Speaker 1: and said, in quite a different voice, And that's it,
• 12:11
  Speaker 1: isn't it? That's the murder. Not Evelyn. This. My dear,
• 12:16
  Speaker 1: said the vicar, distressed. No, Hugh, it's true. Mrs. Tidd
• 12:19
  Speaker 1: hasn't spoken to the postmistress since Friday, because the postmistress
• 12:23
  Speaker 1: said that about Nora. And Major Hartwell came to the
• 12:26
  Speaker 1: door this morning to say, quite unprompted, that he had
• 12:29
  Speaker 1: never in his life raised a hand to a woman.
• 12:32
  Speaker 1: Nobody had accused him, Hugh. Nobody had even mentioned him.
• 12:35
  Speaker 1: We're poisoning ourselves. In a week, we'll all believe it
• 12:38
  Speaker 1: of each other. The fog shifted outside the vicarage windows,
• 12:42
  Speaker 1: thinning to a gauze in which the lich-gate appeared, and
• 12:45
  Speaker 1: vanished like a thought one cannot quite hold. Miss Marple,
• 12:49
  Speaker 1: who had been following the knitting in her lap with
• 12:51
  Speaker 1: apparent absorption, the grey shawl now more than half finished,
• 12:55
  Speaker 1: looked up and said, with the mildness that her friends
• 12:58
  Speaker 1: had learned, over the years, to treat with a certain caution, Mrs.
• 13:02
  Speaker 1: Halloway must find the house very quiet. There was a
• 13:05
  Speaker 1: small silence. Edith Halloway, said Diana. Oh, devoted, absolutely devoted.
• 13:12
  Speaker 1: Twelve years she's been with Evelyn. companion, housekeeper, everything. She
• 13:16
  Speaker 1: found the body, you know. No, I beg your pardon.
• 13:19
  Speaker 1: The Tanner boy found it. But it was Edith who
• 13:22
  Speaker 1: raised the alarm when Evelyn didn't come home, walked all
• 13:24
  Speaker 1: the way to the Verger's cottage in that fog. She
• 13:27
  Speaker 1: was in a terrible state. The doctor gave her something.
• 13:31
  Speaker 1: She went out in the fog to look for her.
• 13:33
  Speaker 1: At half-past eight, anyone would have. Yes, said Miss Marple,
• 13:38
  Speaker 1: anyone would have. And yet how few of us would
• 13:40
  Speaker 1: have known where to look. She smiled at Diana's expression.
• 13:44
  Speaker 1: Forgive me. Old women think about these things. To walk
• 13:47
  Speaker 1: out into a fog like Thursday's, alone, and go straight
• 13:50
  Speaker 1: to the church. Not the verger's cottage, Diana, for you
• 13:53
  Speaker 1: said she walked to the verger's cottage, which means she
• 13:56
  Speaker 1: did not go to the church first, and yet she
• 13:58
  Speaker 1: must have known Miss Frobisher had gone to the church.
• 14:01
  Speaker 1: She had told her so herself. One would expect her
• 14:03
  Speaker 1: to go to the church. Jane, said Mrs. Anger uneasily,
• 14:08
  Speaker 1: you make it sound— I make it sound like nothing
• 14:10
  Speaker 1: at all, dear— I am sure there is a perfectly
• 14:13
  Speaker 1: simple explanation. There always is, for the way people behave.
• 14:17
  Speaker 1: That is the whole of it, really. People always have reasons,
• 14:20
  Speaker 1: and the reasons are always simple. It is only the
• 14:23
  Speaker 1: rest of us who are complicated. She rolled her knitting
• 14:26
  Speaker 1: and put it away, a little breathless, a little flushed,
• 14:29
  Speaker 1: every inch the elderly lady who had talked too much
• 14:32
  Speaker 1: at tea. Now, Diana, you must tell me about this niece. London,
• 14:37
  Speaker 1: and trousers, how adventurous. Is she coming down for the funeral?
• 14:41
  Speaker 1: Nora Teasdale came down on the Monday, in the motor-car,
• 14:44
  Speaker 1: with the trousers, and was observed by the whole village
• 14:47
  Speaker 1: to have red eyes and a set jaw, and to
• 14:50
  Speaker 1: go straight to Church House without stopping at the Blue
• 14:52
  Speaker 1: Boar for petrol, which Mrs. Goh likely found significant, though
• 14:56
  Speaker 1: of what she did not specify. She was observed also
• 15:00
  Speaker 1: to embrace Mrs. Halloway on the doorstep, genuinely, you know,
• 15:04
  Speaker 1: not for show, and to send the Major's card up unopened,
• 15:08
  Speaker 1: or so Mrs. Tidd reported from behind her curtains. having
• 15:11
  Speaker 1: deduced it from the Major's face as he walked home.
• 15:15
  Speaker 1: The funeral was set for Thursday, a week from the death,
• 15:18
  Speaker 1: since the county police had not yet released a word
• 15:21
  Speaker 1: the village repeated with relish, the body. Inspector Hewitt, meanwhile,
• 15:26
  Speaker 1: moved through Lower Wintham like a man walking through a
• 15:29
  Speaker 1: house of tissue paper, aware that everything he touched rustled.
• 15:33
  Speaker 1: He interviewed the verger and the verger's boy. He interviewed Mrs.
• 15:37
  Speaker 1: Golightly and instantly regretted it. He interviewed Major Hartwell, who
• 15:42
  Speaker 1: gave his account of Tuesday's committee with a stiffness that
• 15:44
  Speaker 1: did him no favours. He interviewed Dr Lorimer in the surgery,
• 15:48
  Speaker 1: among the bottles, and came away with a notebook page
• 15:51
  Speaker 1: on which he had written, The doctor says the blow
• 15:54
  Speaker 1: was struck before the fall, and then, after a moment,
• 15:58
  Speaker 1: how did he know? And then, in brackets, ask again.
• 16:03
  Speaker 1: On the Tuesday evening, at Dovecote Cottage, Mrs. Ainger read
• 16:06
  Speaker 1: the county paper's paragraph aloud. The death of Miss Evelyn
• 16:10
  Speaker 1: Frobisher of Church House, Lower Wintham, is being treated as unexplained,
• 16:15
  Speaker 1: and said, Unexplained. There. So it wasn't the other thing.
• 16:21
  Speaker 1: It was the other thing, Caroline, said Miss Marple. The
• 16:24
  Speaker 1: moment Dr Lorimer looked twice at her head in the lamplight,
• 16:28
  Speaker 1: and the whole village has known it since Friday, whatever
• 16:30
  Speaker 1: the newspaper finds it polite to say. Fog is very
• 16:34
  Speaker 1: obliging stuff. It muffles everything, except, curiously, what people say
• 16:39
  Speaker 1: about one another afterward. That travels for miles. She picked
• 16:44
  Speaker 1: up her knitting. I think I shall call on Mrs.
• 16:46
  Speaker 1: Halloway tomorrow. A woman who has been twelve years in
• 16:49
  Speaker 1: a house knows everything that has ever happened in it,
• 16:51
  Speaker 1: and she will be in need of someone to tell
• 16:53
  Speaker 1: it to, and I am such a good listener. Mrs.
• 16:56
  Speaker 1: Anger looked at her old friend for a moment, at
• 16:59
  Speaker 1: the mild blue eyes, the pink cheeks, the soft, inoffensive,
• 17:03
  Speaker 1: gently bobbing head, and felt, as she had felt perhaps
• 17:06
  Speaker 1: five times in forty years of friendship, a small cold
• 17:09
  Speaker 1: draught at the back of her neck, as though the
• 17:11
  Speaker 1: fog had found its way indoors after all. Section 3.
• 17:15
  Speaker 1: Early Investigation Mrs. Anger looked at her old friend for
• 17:19
  Speaker 1: a moment longer, at the mild blue eyes and the
• 17:22
  Speaker 1: soft bobbing head, and then the draught at her neck passed,
• 17:25
  Speaker 1: as draughts do, and she said only, You will take
• 17:28
  Speaker 1: your scarf, Jane, if you're going out in this, and
• 17:31
  Speaker 1: went to fetch it. Church House stood beside the lich gate,
• 17:35
  Speaker 1: tall and Georgian and faintly smug, as houses do that
• 17:38
  Speaker 1: have been well run for a hundred years. Miss Marple
• 17:41
  Speaker 1: was admitted by a small, grey, neat woman of perhaps fifty-five,
• 17:45
  Speaker 1: with a face that had once been pretty, and had
• 17:47
  Speaker 1: long ago decided not to trouble about it, and hands
• 17:50
  Speaker 1: that were never still, smoothing, straightening, aligning. Edith Halloway had
• 17:55
  Speaker 1: the particular worn brightness of a woman who has been
• 17:58
  Speaker 1: indispensable for so long that she has forgotten it was
• 18:00
  Speaker 1: ever a choice. Miss Marple, how kind. Miss Nora is
• 18:05
  Speaker 1: in the drawing-room. This terrible business. The police have only
• 18:08
  Speaker 1: just gone. The hands fluttered, straightened a candlestick on the
• 18:12
  Speaker 1: hall table, were still. You will forgive the house. I
• 18:16
  Speaker 1: cannot seem to keep it as she... A pause, exactly
• 18:20
  Speaker 1: one breath long. As it was kept. In the drawing-room,
• 18:24
  Speaker 1: Nora Teasdale sat by a cold grate with a cup
• 18:27
  Speaker 1: of tea gone cold too. A tall girl with her
• 18:30
  Speaker 1: aunt's jaw and none of her aunt's armour. She was
• 18:33
  Speaker 1: glad of Miss Marple. in the way that young people
• 18:35
  Speaker 1: are glad of the very old, because they ask nothing.
• 18:38
  Speaker 1: They talked of London, of the motor-car, of the funeral arrangements,
• 18:42
  Speaker 1: and all the while Miss Marple's gaze wandered, sweetly and
• 18:45
  Speaker 1: vaguely and missing nothing, over the room. The photograph of
• 18:48
  Speaker 1: Miss Frobisher as a young woman, chin up on the piano,
• 18:51
  Speaker 1: the two chairs by the fire, one with a cushion
• 18:54
  Speaker 1: beaten thin by use, one hardly sat in, the work-basket
• 18:57
  Speaker 1: with its mending, a grey wool stocking, half darned. She
• 19:01
  Speaker 1: was darning that the evening before, said Nora, following her eyes,
• 19:04
  Speaker 1: and her voice cracked. A stocking, sixty-eight years old and
• 19:08
  Speaker 1: running the whole parish, and she sat there darning a
• 19:10
  Speaker 1: stocking like anyone's grandmother. I keep thinking I'll hear her
• 19:13
  Speaker 1: tread on the stair. She had a tread like a
• 19:15
  Speaker 1: sergeant major. Edith used to say you could set your
• 19:18
  Speaker 1: watch by it. Twelve years is a long time to
• 19:20
  Speaker 1: keep house for another woman, said Miss Marple gently. Edith
• 19:23
  Speaker 1: was more than a housekeeper. She was... I don't know
• 19:26
  Speaker 1: what she was. Aunt Evelyn didn't pay her enough, that's
• 19:28
  Speaker 1: one thing. I told her so in the summer, and
• 19:30
  Speaker 1: she said... Nora stopped, and frowned at the memory. She said,
• 19:34
  Speaker 1: Edith is looked after, Nora, though not in the way
• 19:36
  Speaker 1: you mean. I thought she meant the will. I assumed
• 19:39
  Speaker 1: there'd be something in the will. There is a will.
• 19:42
  Speaker 1: Mr Pritchett in Milchester has it. He wrote last year
• 19:45
  Speaker 1: to say it had been... revised, I think was his word.
• 19:48
  Speaker 1: Aunt never talked about money. She thought it vulgar. Nora
• 19:51
  Speaker 1: gave a short laugh that was half a sob. She
• 19:53
  Speaker 1: thought most things vulgar. Grief, probably. I keep catching myself
• 19:57
  Speaker 1: being vulgar all over the place. It was then that
• 20:00
  Speaker 1: Edith Halloway came in with the tray, and Miss Marple
• 20:02
  Speaker 1: watched her move about the room. watched the hands, always
• 20:05
  Speaker 1: the hands, and saw what she had come to see,
• 20:08
  Speaker 1: though she did not yet know that she had seen it.
• 20:10
  Speaker 1: Every object Edith touched, she aligned. The cups went down
• 20:14
  Speaker 1: with their handles at four o'clock. The traycloth was squared
• 20:17
  Speaker 1: to the table's edge. When she took Miss Frobisher's unused
• 20:20
  Speaker 1: chair cushion to plump it, she folded, actually folded, a
• 20:24
  Speaker 1: small unconscious pleating motion, two turns of the wrist, the
• 20:27
  Speaker 1: antimacassar that had slipped before she caught herself and set
• 20:30
  Speaker 1: it straight instead. It was nothing, It was the sort
• 20:33
  Speaker 1: of thing a tidy woman does ten thousand times in
• 20:36
  Speaker 1: twelve years. It was the sort of thing nobody would
• 20:38
  Speaker 1: ever think of twice, unless they had happened to hear,
• 20:41
  Speaker 1: as Miss Marple had happened to hear from Mrs. Ainger,
• 20:44
  Speaker 1: who had it from Dr. Lorimer's housekeeper, who had it
• 20:46
  Speaker 1: from Constable Purbright's young wife, that Miss Evelyn Frobisher's best
• 20:50
  Speaker 1: grey shawl had been found in the vestry, folded, folded,
• 20:53
  Speaker 1: neatly over the back of the chair, while its owner
• 20:56
  Speaker 1: lay dead upon the floor. A murderer strikes, he does
• 20:59
  Speaker 1: not fold. The police would never fold. But there exists
• 21:02
  Speaker 1: a kind of woman in this world, Miss Marple reflected,
• 21:05
  Speaker 1: accepting her tea with a small tremor of elderly gratitude,
• 21:09
  Speaker 1: who has spent so many years folding another woman's things
• 21:12
  Speaker 1: that her hands would do it alone, unasked, in the dark,
• 21:15
  Speaker 1: in the worst moment of her life, a reflex deeper
• 21:18
  Speaker 1: than guilt and older than murder. She had watched it,
• 21:22
  Speaker 1: in her time, in a dozen parlours. In St Mary Mead,
• 21:25
  Speaker 1: it had been old Mr Badger's housekeeper, poor soul, who
• 21:28
  Speaker 1: had served him forty years, and laid out her dead
• 21:31
  Speaker 1: master's shirts with tears on her hands, though the man
• 21:34
  Speaker 1: had been a brute and everyone knew it. The hands
• 21:37
  Speaker 1: remembered what the heart could not afford to say. Edith
• 21:40
  Speaker 1: had withdrawn to the kitchen for fresh tea, and Miss
• 21:43
  Speaker 1: Marple turned to Nora with the sweet inconsequence of her kind.
• 21:47
  Speaker 1: Your Edith has been here a long time. Forever, said Nora,
• 21:52
  Speaker 1: longer than I've been coming anyway. She came after Uncle
• 21:54
  Speaker 1: Morris died. Aunt Evelyn was alone in this barn of
• 21:57
  Speaker 1: a place, and the agency sent Edith. and Edith stayed.
• 22:01
  Speaker 1: She knows where everything is. She knows things about this
• 22:04
  Speaker 1: house that Aunt Evelyn herself had forgotten. Where the wedding
• 22:07
  Speaker 1: presents are stored. Which stair creaks. How my grandmother liked
• 22:11
  Speaker 1: her fire laid. Aunt used to say she couldn't die.
• 22:15
  Speaker 1: The house wouldn't know what to do without Edith. Nora
• 22:18
  Speaker 1: attempted a smile. That was one of her jokes. She
• 22:21
  Speaker 1: had three, and they were all like that. Jokes about
• 22:24
  Speaker 1: other people's indispensability to her. And was Edith happy here,
• 22:29
  Speaker 1: would you say? Nora considered this with the brutal honesty
• 22:33
  Speaker 1: of the young. I don't know that I ever thought
• 22:35
  Speaker 1: about it. Isn't that awful? Twelve years, and I couldn't
• 22:39
  Speaker 1: tell you if she was happy. She was just... Edith.
• 22:43
  Speaker 1: Like the clock on the stairs. You don't ask if
• 22:46
  Speaker 1: the clock is happy. You're grateful it keeps the time.
• 22:49
  Speaker 1: She stopped, and her face changed. That's what she was
• 22:53
  Speaker 1: to all of us, isn't it? The clock on the stairs.
• 22:57
  Speaker 1: Your companion, she said to Nora, when Edith had gone.
• 23:00
  Speaker 1: Wore a pin this morning, I think. A pearl? No,
• 23:03
  Speaker 1: forgive me. I confuse people so. She had not confused anything.
• 23:08
  Speaker 1: Edith Halloway had worn no pin, and Miss Marple had
• 23:11
  Speaker 1: merely wished to watch her face when pearls were mentioned.
• 23:14
  Speaker 1: But Edith had been gone from the room, and the
• 23:17
  Speaker 1: experiment must wait. The fog had thickened again when she
• 23:19
  Speaker 1: left Church House, and she stood a moment on the step,
• 23:22
  Speaker 1: a small pink-and-white figure in a world gone grey, looking
• 23:25
  Speaker 1: at the lich-gate looming and vanishing. Inspector Hewitt came through
• 23:29
  Speaker 1: it at that moment, like a man materialising out of
• 23:31
  Speaker 1: his own bad temper, and stopped and raised his hat,
• 23:35
  Speaker 1: because his mother had taught him to raise his hat
• 23:37
  Speaker 1: to old ladies in all weathers. You'll be Mrs. Ainge's visitor,
• 23:40
  Speaker 1: he said, the one that's been asking questions at the vicarage. Oh,
• 23:44
  Speaker 1: I never ask questions, Inspector. I only listen. People tell
• 23:47
  Speaker 1: one so much, don't you find, when they believe one
• 23:50
  Speaker 1: isn't listening? She peered up at him through the fog.
• 23:53
  Speaker 1: You have not found the weapon, I suppose. Hewitt blinked.
• 23:56
  Speaker 1: The doctor says a blow, from something heavy and smooth, metal, likely.
• 24:00
  Speaker 1: We've turned the vestry upside down. Candlesticks, lamp, the lot,
• 24:04
  Speaker 1: nothing marked. Whoever it was wiped it clean and put
• 24:07
  Speaker 1: it back where it belonged. Cool as you please, or
• 24:10
  Speaker 1: else walked off with it into that, he gestured at
• 24:12
  Speaker 1: the fog, and it'll never be found. There's a hundred
• 24:15
  Speaker 1: ditches in this parish. Or it is still in the church,
• 24:18
  Speaker 1: said Miss Marple, being looked at every day by everyone,
• 24:21
  Speaker 1: which is the safest hiding place in the world. Good afternoon, Inspector.
• 24:25
  Speaker 1: She went home across the green, slowly, because the damp
• 24:28
  Speaker 1: was bad for her, and the fog took her by degrees,
• 24:31
  Speaker 1: first her feet, then her shoulders, then the soft white
• 24:34
  Speaker 1: crown of her head, until there was nothing left of
• 24:37
  Speaker 1: her at all. Behind her, in church house, Edith Halloway
• 24:40
  Speaker 1: stood at the drawing-room window and watched her go, though
• 24:43
  Speaker 1: there was nothing to see, and stood watching the nothing
• 24:45
  Speaker 1: for a long time afterward, her hands folding and folding
• 24:49
  Speaker 1: the edge of the curtain, two turns of the wrist,
• 24:51
  Speaker 1: over and over, like a woman folding something away that
• 24:54
  Speaker 1: would not stay folded. Section 4. The First Suspect. Over
• 24:59
  Speaker 1: and over, like a woman folding something away that would
• 25:02
  Speaker 1: not stay folded, until the curtain edge was warm from
• 25:04
  Speaker 1: her hands, and she let it go and turned back
• 25:07
  Speaker 1: to the room. Two days later, Lower Wintham had its suspect.
• 25:11
  Speaker 1: It was not, in the end, the whispering at the
• 25:13
  Speaker 1: blue boar that did for Major Hartwell. It was the ledger.
• 25:17
  Speaker 1: Inspector Hewitt, proceeding in his methodical, unimaginative, and frequently effective
• 25:21
  Speaker 1: way through the small paper litter of Miss Frobisher's life,
• 25:24
  Speaker 1: had asked to see the organ fund accounts, those famous
• 25:28
  Speaker 1: accounts for which the dead woman had asked at Tuesday's
• 25:30
  Speaker 1: committee and been refused in front of six witnesses, and
• 25:33
  Speaker 1: Major Hartwell had produced his ruled exercise book, and the
• 25:36
  Speaker 1: exercise book, examined by a police sergeant with an adding machine,
• 25:40
  Speaker 1: was £ 90 short. £ 90. It was an enormous sum. It
• 25:45
  Speaker 1: was more than a year's wages for a girl like
• 25:47
  Speaker 1: the postmistress's assistant. It was a motive wearing a uniform
• 25:51
  Speaker 1: and marching in step. The Major, required to explain, stood
• 25:55
  Speaker 1: in his own study with his back to the fireplace,
• 25:57
  Speaker 1: and explained badly. He had, he said, advanced the money
• 26:00
  Speaker 1: temporarily upon his own security, to meet a private obligation.
• 26:04
  Speaker 1: It had been replaced, would be replaced, within the month.
• 26:08
  Speaker 1: He declined to state the nature of the obligation. He said, declined,
• 26:12
  Speaker 1: several times, in a voice that had once made subalterns tremble,
• 26:15
  Speaker 1: and each time he said it, Inspector Hewitt wrote something down.
• 26:18
  Speaker 1: and the Major grew redder and more military, and more
• 26:21
  Speaker 1: obviously a man with something to hide. He quarrelled with
• 26:24
  Speaker 1: her on the Tuesday, Hewitt said to Sergeant Fanning, walking
• 26:27
  Speaker 1: back through the village in a dusk that was, mercifully,
• 26:30
  Speaker 1: only an ordinary dusk, the fog having drawn off for
• 26:33
  Speaker 1: a day as if to breathe. She demanded the accounts.
• 26:36
  Speaker 1: He refused her in public. On the Thursday she was dead,
• 26:39
  Speaker 1: and the accounts were ninety pounds short. She'd have found it, Fanning.
• 26:43
  Speaker 1: She'd have found it, and she'd have had him up
• 26:44
  Speaker 1: before the committee, the bench, the bishop. A woman like
• 26:47
  Speaker 1: that doesn't do anything by halves. A man's whole position
• 26:50
  Speaker 1: in a village like this. Gone. That's motive enough for
• 26:53
  Speaker 1: any jury. And the opportunity, sir? He walked his dog
• 26:57
  Speaker 1: on the green every evening at six. Mrs. Tidd's curtains
• 27:00
  Speaker 1: confirm it. He says he walked the dog and went home,
• 27:03
  Speaker 1: and his wife says he walked the dog and went home,
• 27:05
  Speaker 1: and a wife's word fanning. Is worth exactly what the
• 27:08
  Speaker 1: wife is worth, sir. Mrs. Hartwell, said Hewitt, came to
• 27:12
  Speaker 1: the station this morning. He stopped walking. She came to
• 27:15
  Speaker 1: say her husband was at home all Thursday evening, and
• 27:18
  Speaker 1: she said it, Fanning, without once looking at me, and
• 27:21
  Speaker 1: when I asked her what they had had for dinner
• 27:22
  Speaker 1: she couldn't tell me. A woman who lies about Thursday
• 27:25
  Speaker 1: and can't remember the dinner. He shook his head slowly,
• 27:28
  Speaker 1: like a man who has been a policeman long enough
• 27:30
  Speaker 1: to be saddened rather than pleased. I'll have him in
• 27:33
  Speaker 1: before the week's out. He was as good as his word,
• 27:36
  Speaker 1: or nearly. On the Friday the Major was asked to
• 27:38
  Speaker 1: attend at the Constable's Cottage, which served Lower Wintham as
• 27:41
  Speaker 1: an interview room, and he attended, as he attended everything,
• 27:44
  Speaker 1: in his best tweeds, with his stick, as though it
• 27:47
  Speaker 1: were a point of regimental honour to be arrested tidily.
• 27:50
  Speaker 1: He was not arrested, he was invited to make a
• 27:53
  Speaker 1: further statement, and he made it, and it was the
• 27:55
  Speaker 1: same statement, word for word, and the very sameness of
• 27:59
  Speaker 1: it told against him, for an innocent man, the police reason,
• 28:02
  Speaker 1: varies his story with retelling, and only a rehearsed one
• 28:05
  Speaker 1: stays put. What the police did not observe, being concerned
• 28:09
  Speaker 1: properly with what the Major said, was how he looked
• 28:12
  Speaker 1: saying it. A man terrified, yes, but not of the rope.
• 28:17
  Speaker 1: He kept glancing at the window that gave onto the lane,
• 28:19
  Speaker 1: toward the Milchester Road, as if what he feared might
• 28:23
  Speaker 1: come cycling toward him from that direction at any moment.
• 28:26
  Speaker 1: Sergeant Fanning noted it in his book, because Fanning noted everything,
• 28:30
  Speaker 1: and underlined it, because he did not understand it. Afraid
• 28:34
  Speaker 1: of something coming from Milchester, he wrote, not of us.
• 28:38
  Speaker 1: It was the truest sentence in the whole of the
• 28:40
  Speaker 1: police file. and nobody ever read it who understood it
• 28:44
  Speaker 1: until much later. Mrs. Tidd, whose curtains had observed the
• 28:48
  Speaker 1: dog walked at six o'clock on Thursdays since before the war,
• 28:51
  Speaker 1: gave her evidence with the reluctance of a queen parting
• 28:54
  Speaker 1: with a jewel, and was heard to say afterward that
• 28:57
  Speaker 1: she had always known there was something about military gentlemen,
• 29:00
  Speaker 1: and had said so, though nobody could recall when. The village,
• 29:04
  Speaker 1: informed of none of this, knew all of it by nightfall,
• 29:08
  Speaker 1: and knew it in an improved form. The major had
• 29:10
  Speaker 1: been arrested, The Major had confessed. The Major's wife had
• 29:14
  Speaker 1: left him. The ninety pounds had gone on a woman
• 29:17
  Speaker 1: in Milchester. Only the last of these was near enough
• 29:21
  Speaker 1: to the truth to wound, and it was this version,
• 29:24
  Speaker 1: sensed rather than stated, that brought Laura Hartwell to Dovecote
• 29:28
  Speaker 1: Cottage on the Wednesday afternoon. A thin, elegant, frightened woman,
• 29:32
  Speaker 1: with a cavalry husband and bridge debts, who had heard,
• 29:36
  Speaker 1: as everyone heard everything, that Mrs. Ainger's elderly guest was
• 29:40
  Speaker 1: clever about people. She did not say why she had come.
• 29:44
  Speaker 1: They talked, instead, about the chrysanthemums, and the shocking price
• 29:48
  Speaker 1: of butter, and the Major's health. His heart, she said,
• 29:52
  Speaker 1: the doctors had warned him about excitement, and it was
• 29:55
  Speaker 1: only as she was leaving, with her hand on the
• 29:57
  Speaker 1: door and her face turned away, that she said, in
• 30:01
  Speaker 1: a voice of ordinary politeness, perfectly preserved, He never touched her.
• 30:06
  Speaker 1: He is a pompous man, and he quarrels in public
• 30:09
  Speaker 1: because he has never learned to do it in private
• 30:11
  Speaker 1: like the rest of us. But he never touched her.
• 30:14
  Speaker 1: I lied to the inspector about Thursday because... A small breath.
• 30:19
  Speaker 1: Because I was not at home on Thursday evening either,
• 30:21
  Speaker 1: Miss Marple, and where I was is my own affair
• 30:24
  Speaker 1: and nobody's, and I could not tell him where Henry was,
• 30:28
  Speaker 1: because I was not there to know, and she was gone,
• 30:30
  Speaker 1: down the path and into the grey afternoon, very upright,
• 30:33
  Speaker 1: like a woman walking out of the house that is
• 30:35
  Speaker 1: on fire, without letting the neighbours see the smoke. Well,
• 30:39
  Speaker 1: said Mrs. Anger, when the door had shut. The bridge debts.
• 30:42
  Speaker 1: Everyone knows about the bridge debts. Ninety pounds were just about.
• 30:46
  Speaker 1: But Jane, if she wasn't at home either, and she
• 30:49
  Speaker 1: lies to the police, and the Major had the money
• 30:51
  Speaker 1: and the quarrel, even you must admit it looks. It
• 30:54
  Speaker 1: looks exactly as it is meant to look, said Miss Marple. Mrs.
• 30:57
  Speaker 1: Ainger stared. Meant? Consider, dear, a village is a theatre
• 31:02
  Speaker 1: with a very small stage. Everyone in Lower Wintham knew
• 31:05
  Speaker 1: that the Major had refused her the accounts. Everyone knew
• 31:08
  Speaker 1: he walked his dog at six. Everyone knew his wife
• 31:11
  Speaker 1: could not account for Thursday. It is all so public,
• 31:14
  Speaker 1: is it not? So conveniently public. When a thing is
• 31:17
  Speaker 1: that visible, Caroline, one should always ask whose lantern is
• 31:20
  Speaker 1: shining on it. She picked up her knitting, the grey shawl,
• 31:24
  Speaker 1: nearly done, soft as the weather outside. and was silent
• 31:27
  Speaker 1: a moment. A man who embezzles ninety pounds does not
• 31:31
  Speaker 1: commit murder to hide it. He commits murder to hide
• 31:33
  Speaker 1: something a great deal worse, and ninety pounds is not worse.
• 31:38
  Speaker 1: And a woman who loves her husband does not come
• 31:40
  Speaker 1: to tea to defend him. She comes to tea to
• 31:42
  Speaker 1: find out whether there is anything to hope. Mrs. Hartwell
• 31:45
  Speaker 1: came to find out whether I thought he did it.
• 31:48
  Speaker 1: And do you? No, said Miss Marple simply. The Major
• 31:52
  Speaker 1: is a vain man, and a silly man, and quite
• 31:54
  Speaker 1: possibly a dishonest man in the small way of men
• 31:57
  Speaker 1: who cannot say no to their wives, but he is
• 31:59
  Speaker 1: not a cruel one. And this, Caroline, whatever the village thinks,
• 32:03
  Speaker 1: was a cruel murder. Not violent, quiet, and quick, and
• 32:07
  Speaker 1: the shawl folded afterward. That is what nobody has understood.
• 32:12
  Speaker 1: There was a great deal of feeling in that vestry
• 32:14
  Speaker 1: on Thursday night, the sort of feeling that has been
• 32:16
  Speaker 1: marinating for years. She counted her stitches, and the needles clicked.
• 32:21
  Speaker 1: small and remorseless as a clock. Tell me, the funeral
• 32:24
  Speaker 1: is tomorrow, is it not, and the family come back
• 32:27
  Speaker 1: to church house afterward for the reading of the will?
• 32:30
  Speaker 1: I think, if Nora will permit it, I should like
• 32:32
  Speaker 1: to attend. Old women are supposed to attend funerals. It
• 32:36
  Speaker 1: is one of the few social occasions on which we
• 32:38
  Speaker 1: are never in the way. Outside, beyond the window, the
• 32:42
  Speaker 1: fog was coming down again over Lower Wintem, earlier than
• 32:45
  Speaker 1: the night, soft and grey and patient, like something that
• 32:48
  Speaker 1: had gone away only to fetch its strength. Section 5.
• 32:53
  Speaker 1: The Hidden Clue. Soft and grey and patient, like something
• 32:57
  Speaker 1: that had gone away only to fetch its strength, and
• 32:59
  Speaker 1: by the morning of the funeral it lay over Lower
• 33:02
  Speaker 1: Wintham so thick that the bearers had to feel their
• 33:04
  Speaker 1: way up the church path, and the bell of St Cuthbert's,
• 33:07
  Speaker 1: which should have told, said nothing at all. A funeral
• 33:10
  Speaker 1: without a bell, said the vicar, white and distressed, standing
• 33:14
  Speaker 1: at the lich gate in his surplus. It isn't right,
• 33:17
  Speaker 1: it isn't right. Evelyn rang that bell for forty years,
• 33:20
  Speaker 1: in a manner of speaking. and now it can't even
• 33:22
  Speaker 1: see her out. The whole village came, because the whole
• 33:26
  Speaker 1: village would have come to a funeral in any case,
• 33:28
  Speaker 1: and because this funeral was the social event of the decade,
• 33:31
  Speaker 1: and because, though no one said so above a whisper,
• 33:34
  Speaker 1: everyone wished to look at everyone else and think, in
• 33:37
  Speaker 1: the decent muffle of hymn and prayer, was it you?
• 33:40
  Speaker 1: The Major sat very straight in the front pew, like
• 33:43
  Speaker 1: a man on parade, with his wife beside him staring
• 33:46
  Speaker 1: at her gloves. Dr. Lorimer stood at the back with
• 33:48
  Speaker 1: his bare head bowed, and his face unreadable. Nora Teasdale
• 33:52
  Speaker 1: cried openly, vulgarly, exactly as her aunt would have disapproved,
• 33:56
  Speaker 1: and it was the most honest sound in the church.
• 33:59
  Speaker 1: And in the pew nearest the door, small and grey
• 34:02
  Speaker 1: and neat, sat Edith Halloway, her gloved hands folded in
• 34:05
  Speaker 1: her lap, not crying, her eyes fixed on the coffin,
• 34:08
  Speaker 1: with an expression that Miss Marple, three rows behind, watched
• 34:12
  Speaker 1: for the whole of the service, and could not at
• 34:14
  Speaker 1: first name, and then could. It was not grief, it
• 34:17
  Speaker 1: was not triumph, it was the face of a woman
• 34:20
  Speaker 1: waiting for the other shoe to drop, for the thing
• 34:22
  Speaker 1: she had set in motion to finish happening, so that
• 34:24
  Speaker 1: she could stop being afraid of it. Afterward, while the
• 34:28
  Speaker 1: village crowded into church house for ham and funeral cake,
• 34:31
  Speaker 1: and the solicitor from Milchester, Miss Marple did a curious thing.
• 34:35
  Speaker 1: She asked the verger's boy, young Bert Tanner, proud and
• 34:38
  Speaker 1: pale with his new importance as the finder of the body,
• 34:41
  Speaker 1: whether she might see the vestry. For a moment's quiet, dear.
• 34:45
  Speaker 1: Funeral baked meats always make me feel so faint. The
• 34:48
  Speaker 1: vestry was small and close, and smelled of hymnbooks and polish,
• 34:51
  Speaker 1: and very faintly, still, of fog. The brass eagle lectern
• 34:56
  Speaker 1: stood by the door, its base scrubbed. She could see
• 34:59
  Speaker 1: the scrub marks, and the lamp on the table, and
• 35:02
  Speaker 1: the two candlesticks on the shelf, and the cupboard where
• 35:04
  Speaker 1: the surpluses hung. Miss Marple stood in the middle of
• 35:08
  Speaker 1: it with her hands folded on her handbag, and looked,
• 35:11
  Speaker 1: the way she had looked at her garden for sixty years.
• 35:14
  Speaker 1: Not for anything. but at everything. Bert, dear, she said.
• 35:19
  Speaker 1: When you found her, the lamp was burning, you told
• 35:22
  Speaker 1: the inspector. Yes, miss, burning low, like it had been
• 35:26
  Speaker 1: turned down. Turned down, not out. How very... considerate. She
• 35:33
  Speaker 1: moved to the shelf. And the candlesticks. Brasses are your duty,
• 35:37
  Speaker 1: I believe. Saturdays, miss. I polish Saturdays. Of course. And
• 35:43
  Speaker 1: today is... Thursday. a week to the day. She did
• 35:48
  Speaker 1: not touch the candlesticks. She merely looked at them, one
• 35:52
  Speaker 1: and then the other, the way one looks at two
• 35:54
  Speaker 1: children when only one has been in the jam. Then
• 35:57
  Speaker 1: she turned and smiled and allowed herself to be escorted
• 36:00
  Speaker 1: back to the funeral meets, a frail old lady restored
• 36:04
  Speaker 1: by a moment's quiet. The will was read at three
• 36:08
  Speaker 1: o'clock in the drawing-room by Mr Pritchett of Milchester, a
• 36:12
  Speaker 1: dry little man, with the air of a surgeon delivering
• 36:15
  Speaker 1: news that is bad but not his fault. The village
• 36:18
  Speaker 1: was not present for this part, but the village learned
• 36:21
  Speaker 1: it all within the hour, from the parlourmaid's sister, and
• 36:24
  Speaker 1: the village was disappointed. It was all so moderate. The
• 36:29
  Speaker 1: house and the bulk of the estate to Nora Teasdale. Legacies,
• 36:33
  Speaker 1: to the organ fund, to the mother's union, to Bert
• 36:37
  Speaker 1: Tanner's mother of all people. and to Edith Halloway, in
• 36:41
  Speaker 1: consideration of twelve years of devoted service, three hundred pounds,
• 36:45
  Speaker 1: and the codicil dated the previous March, which Mr Pritchett
• 36:49
  Speaker 1: read twice in his dry voice while the room held
• 36:52
  Speaker 1: its breath. The lifetime tenancy, rent free, of the dower
• 36:56
  Speaker 1: cottage at the end of the lane, the same to
• 36:59
  Speaker 1: be purchased and conveyed to her sole use and occupation
• 37:02
  Speaker 1: for the term of her natural life, in recognition that
• 37:05
  Speaker 1: she has made of my house a home, and of service,
• 37:09
  Speaker 1: a friendship. There was a silence. The dower cottage was
• 37:14
  Speaker 1: the prettiest house in Lower Wintham after the vicarage. Three
• 37:17
  Speaker 1: hundred pounds was a fortune. It was not the will
• 37:21
  Speaker 1: of a woman discarding a servant. It was the will
• 37:24
  Speaker 1: of a woman securing, clumsily and completely and forever, the
• 37:28
  Speaker 1: comfort of the one person she had. Nora saw it,
• 37:31
  Speaker 1: and said so later, through her tears, loved. But the village,
• 37:36
  Speaker 1: gathering up its umbrellas and its funeral gloves in the hall,
• 37:39
  Speaker 1: did not see it so. The village saw the dour
• 37:43
  Speaker 1: cottage and three hundred pounds and drew its own conclusion
• 37:46
  Speaker 1: with the speed of long practice. Edith Halloway had known
• 37:50
  Speaker 1: what was coming to her and had got it. Nobody
• 37:53
  Speaker 1: said this in the house. It was saved for the
• 37:55
  Speaker 1: gates and the lanes where it grew very fast in
• 37:58
  Speaker 1: the wet air. By nightfall the cottage had become, in
• 38:02
  Speaker 1: the telling, the price of twelve years' patience. By the
• 38:05
  Speaker 1: following day, the price of something else. Nora had cried
• 38:09
  Speaker 1: at the graveside without shame, and the village, which had
• 38:12
  Speaker 1: been prepared to find her fast and modern in London,
• 38:15
  Speaker 1: found itself disarmed. A girl who cried like that, they
• 38:19
  Speaker 1: told one another over the ham, could not be all bad,
• 38:22
  Speaker 1: trousers or no trousers. It was the beginning of Nora's
• 38:26
  Speaker 1: conquest of Lower Wintham, though she did not know it,
• 38:29
  Speaker 1: and would not have cared if she had. Miss Marple,
• 38:32
  Speaker 1: taking her leave among the departing mourners, heard a little
• 38:35
  Speaker 1: of what was being said at the gates, and stored
• 38:38
  Speaker 1: all of it, the way her mind stored everything, in
• 38:41
  Speaker 1: the soft, capacious way of a woman putting wool away
• 38:44
  Speaker 1: in a drawer. She stood a moment in the hall
• 38:47
  Speaker 1: while Mrs. Anger found her umbrella, and she looked at
• 38:49
  Speaker 1: the house as Edith Halloway moved through it, among the
• 38:52
  Speaker 1: dregs of the gathering, gathering glasses, straightening, squaring, and she
• 38:57
  Speaker 1: looked at the young woman in the photograph on the piano,
• 39:00
  Speaker 1: chin up, forty years ago. Evelyn Marsh. who had had
• 39:04
  Speaker 1: everything arranged for her by a father with money, and
• 39:07
  Speaker 1: had spent the rest of her life in return arranging
• 39:10
  Speaker 1: everybody else. People did not change, Miss Marple reflected, accepting
• 39:15
  Speaker 1: her umbrella. They only grew more so. The child who
• 39:19
  Speaker 1: organised the other children's games became the woman who organised
• 39:23
  Speaker 1: the parish, and the woman who organised the parish had
• 39:26
  Speaker 1: died in the end of organising, though not in any
• 39:29
  Speaker 1: way the village was likely to understand.' Coming, Jane?' said Mrs. Ainger.' Yes, dear,'
• 39:36
  Speaker 1: said Miss Marple.' I was only thinking about funerals. How
• 39:40
  Speaker 1: strange it is that we read the will aloud in
• 39:42
  Speaker 1: the house of the dead, with the funeral baked meats
• 39:45
  Speaker 1: still on the table.' It is the one time a
• 39:48
  Speaker 1: person is ever quite honest about what they meant to us,
• 39:51
  Speaker 1: and it is always, always too late to answer. It
• 39:55
  Speaker 1: was revised last year, said Nora that evening to Miss Marple,
• 39:59
  Speaker 1: who had stayed late at church house by some obscure
• 40:02
  Speaker 1: elderly prerogative that nobody questioned. March, that's when Aunt Evelyn
• 40:07
  Speaker 1: had the influenza and nearly died, and Edith nursed her
• 40:11
  Speaker 1: through it, day and night, wouldn't let the district nurse
• 40:14
  Speaker 1: touch her. She must have made the codicil as soon
• 40:17
  Speaker 1: as she was well. She blew her nose. And the
• 40:20
  Speaker 1: horrible thing, Miss Marple, the horrible thing is that last Thursday,
• 40:24
  Speaker 1: the very day she, Aunt Evelyn told Edith at luncheon,
• 40:27
  Speaker 1: about the cottage, she told me at tea, she was
• 40:30
  Speaker 1: so pleased with herself, in her way, I have settled
• 40:33
  Speaker 1: Edith's future, Nora, and she took it very quietly, but
• 40:36
  Speaker 1: I dare say she is pleased. Quietly, Miss Marple, she
• 40:40
  Speaker 1: told her that day, and that night, she stopped, the
• 40:43
  Speaker 1: fog pressed at the windows. Downstairs Edith Halloway moved through
• 40:47
  Speaker 1: the drawing-room, among the dregs of the funeral, gathering glasses,
• 40:50
  Speaker 1: squaring plates, folding, always folding, the linen napkins one by one,
• 40:55
  Speaker 1: two turns of the wrist, her face serene and empty
• 40:58
  Speaker 1: as a shuttered house. Nora, said Miss Marple very quietly,
• 41:02
  Speaker 1: go and ask Mr Pritchett, he is still here, I think,
• 41:04
  Speaker 1: whether Miss Frobisher told him, in March, why she wished
• 41:07
  Speaker 1: the cottage purchased rather than left, and ask him to
• 41:10
  Speaker 1: write it down. And then, my dear, go to bed,
• 41:13
  Speaker 1: and do not lie awake thinking, because it will do
• 41:15
  Speaker 1: no good, and what is done is done. She rose,
• 41:18
  Speaker 1: creaking a little, and wrapped the fog-grey shawl of her
• 41:21
  Speaker 1: own knitting about her shoulders. I shall see you tomorrow.
• 41:24
  Speaker 1: Sleep well, and Nora, be kind to Edith. Whatever happens
• 41:28
  Speaker 1: in the next few days, my dear, be kind to her.
• 41:30
  Speaker 1: She is going to need it. Section 6. Confrontations and
• 41:34
  Speaker 1: Secrets She is going to need it, Miss Marple said,
• 41:37
  Speaker 1: and went down the stairs, leaning on the banister, past
• 41:40
  Speaker 1: the drawing-room where the glasses were being gathered one by one,
• 41:43
  Speaker 1: and out into the fog. The days after a funeral
• 41:46
  Speaker 1: in a village are like the days after a storm
• 41:48
  Speaker 1: at sea. The wreckage comes ashore. It came ashore in
• 41:51
  Speaker 1: Lower Wintham that week, piece by piece, borne on the
• 41:54
  Speaker 1: tides of tea. The first piece was the doctor's. It
• 41:58
  Speaker 1: surfaced at the vicarage, of all places, at the committee
• 42:01
  Speaker 1: tea for the Christmas fate, which met, in defiance of
• 42:04
  Speaker 1: death and police, because the fate was the fate, and
• 42:06
  Speaker 1: it surfaced because Diana Fanshawe, pouring, said carelessly that one
• 42:10
  Speaker 1: could hardly expect Dr. Lorimer to judge a festivity. The
• 42:14
  Speaker 1: man had been in love with Evelyn Frobisher for forty years,
• 42:17
  Speaker 1: and had just certified her murdered. Forty years, said Mrs. Golightly,
• 42:22
  Speaker 1: clasping her cup. The Lorimer boy. Well, he was the
• 42:26
  Speaker 1: Lorimer boy then, and she was evil in marsh, and
• 42:29
  Speaker 1: everyone said, But her father had the money, and the
• 42:32
  Speaker 1: doctor's father had the practice, and neither family. She never married,
• 42:36
  Speaker 1: said Mrs. Ainger, and neither did he, until his wife,
• 42:40
  Speaker 1: and she died in nineteen. And he has lived in
• 42:42
  Speaker 1: that surgery ever since, three hundred yards from her gate.
• 42:46
  Speaker 1: He was going to marry her, you know, said Diana Fanshawe,
• 42:49
  Speaker 1: refilling the cups. My mother had it from her mother,
• 42:53
  Speaker 1: who had it from the pew-opener, so it must be true.
• 42:56
  Speaker 1: They were engaged for a fortnight in the summer of 1889,
• 42:59
  Speaker 1: and then it was broken off, and Evelyn never spoke
• 43:02
  Speaker 1: of it again. Not once in forty years. Mother said
• 43:06
  Speaker 1: that was the frightening part. Anyone can have a broken heart.
• 43:10
  Speaker 1: But to wrap it up and put it away like
• 43:12
  Speaker 1: a winter cloak and never take it out. She set
• 43:15
  Speaker 1: down the teapot. He never sent her a bill in
• 43:18
  Speaker 1: his life. She paid, of course. Evelyn would have died
• 43:22
  Speaker 1: rather than owe him sixpence. But he never sent a bill.
• 43:25
  Speaker 1: Forty years of doctoring, and not one bill. The whole
• 43:29
  Speaker 1: village knew it, and the whole village thought it was touching.
• 43:33
  Speaker 1: And was it, said Miss Marple. Was it what? Touching.
• 43:39
  Speaker 1: Diana Fanshawe opened her mouth and shut it again. I
• 43:43
  Speaker 1: don't know, she said honestly. I have known that story
• 43:46
  Speaker 1: all my life, and it has never once occurred to
• 43:48
  Speaker 1: me to ask. Is that what you do, Miss Marple?
• 43:52
  Speaker 1: Go about asking whether things are the things we call them?
• 43:56
  Speaker 1: Only the very old may do it, said Miss Marple placidly,
• 43:59
  Speaker 1: because nobody minds the very old. We are expected to
• 44:03
  Speaker 1: be tiresome. Mrs. Ainger glanced, despite herself, at Miss Marple,
• 44:08
  Speaker 1: who was eating bread and butter with an air of
• 44:10
  Speaker 1: total innocence. Jane, it explains, doesn't it, the way he
• 44:15
  Speaker 1: looked at her that night in the vestry. The housekeeper
• 44:18
  Speaker 1: said he stood over her for five minutes without speaking.
• 44:22
  Speaker 1: It explains why he would not sign the certificate, said
• 44:25
  Speaker 1: Miss Marple, but not, I think, anything else. Love that
• 44:29
  Speaker 1: has waited forty years, Caroline, learns patience if it learns
• 44:32
  Speaker 1: nothing else. It does not suddenly lose its temper in
• 44:36
  Speaker 1: a vestry at sixty-eight with a candlestick. She said candlestick
• 44:40
  Speaker 1: quite idly, stirring her tea, and nobody noticed it except
• 44:43
  Speaker 1: Inspector Hewitt, who had been invited to the tea in
• 44:46
  Speaker 1: his capacity as a resident and was regretting it hourly,
• 44:49
  Speaker 1: and who had never said aloud to anyone what the
• 44:51
  Speaker 1: weapon might have been. He looked at the old lady
• 44:54
  Speaker 1: for a long moment over the top of his cup,
• 44:56
  Speaker 1: and said nothing, and wrote nothing down, and remembered. The
• 45:00
  Speaker 1: second piece of wreckage was the Major's, and it came
• 45:03
  Speaker 1: ashore by his own hand. On the Friday, eight days
• 45:06
  Speaker 1: after the murder, a package was pushed through the vicarage
• 45:09
  Speaker 1: letterbox in the dark, the organ fund ledger, which had
• 45:12
  Speaker 1: been missed from the Major's study that morning, and with it,
• 45:15
  Speaker 1: ninety pounds in notes, and a letter in a strong, shamed,
• 45:18
  Speaker 1: soldierly hand. Major Hartwell came to the police station himself
• 45:22
  Speaker 1: at nine o'clock the next day, and stood at attention
• 45:25
  Speaker 1: before Inspector Hewitt's desk, and confessed to the defalcation, his
• 45:29
  Speaker 1: wife's bridge debts, the Milchester Card Club, the whole shabby
• 45:32
  Speaker 1: little structure of pretense, and to having refused Miss Frobisher
• 45:36
  Speaker 1: the accounts, because she had already, on the Tuesday before
• 45:38
  Speaker 1: the committee, taxed him with it privately, and given him
• 45:41
  Speaker 1: until Christmas to repay. She was decent about it, said
• 45:45
  Speaker 1: the Major. and his voice, for the first time in
• 45:48
  Speaker 1: the whole affair, was neither military nor defensive, but simply
• 45:51
  Speaker 1: the voice of a tired man telling the truth. That
• 45:54
  Speaker 1: is the devil of it, Inspector. She was decent. She said,
• 45:58
  Speaker 1: Every man has a weak place, Hartwell. The thing is
• 46:00
  Speaker 1: not to build your house on it. I have thought
• 46:03
  Speaker 1: about that sentence every night since she died. I should
• 46:06
  Speaker 1: like you to know, he swallowed. that I walked the
• 46:08
  Speaker 1: dog on Thursday at six, and was home by twenty past,
• 46:11
  Speaker 1: and I did not go near the church, and I
• 46:13
  Speaker 1: cannot prove it, because my wife was in Milchester paying
• 46:16
  Speaker 1: her debts with money I had told her we did
• 46:18
  Speaker 1: not have. That is the whole of my part in
• 46:20
  Speaker 1: this business. Do what you must. Hewitt, who had been
• 46:24
  Speaker 1: a policeman a long time, knew truth when it finally
• 46:27
  Speaker 1: shuffled into his office with its hat in its hands.
• 46:30
  Speaker 1: He did not drop the major from his thoughts. Policemen
• 46:33
  Speaker 1: cannot afford such luxuries, but he put him, so to speak,
• 46:36
  Speaker 1: on a lower shelf, and sat back and stared at
• 46:39
  Speaker 1: the wall, and thought, if not the money, then what?
• 46:43
  Speaker 1: The third piece of wreckage came ashore at Church House,
• 46:46
  Speaker 1: and it was the worst, because it was not a
• 46:48
  Speaker 1: secret of the dead woman's, but of the living one.
• 46:50
  Speaker 1: Miss Marple had taken to calling at Church House every afternoon,
• 46:54
  Speaker 1: for Nora, ostensibly, who was young and alone and drowning
• 46:57
  Speaker 1: in probate, and she sat in the drawing-room with her
• 46:59
  Speaker 1: knitting and her gentle, meandering talk, and Edith Halloway brought
• 47:03
  Speaker 1: the tea, and stayed, sometimes, to drink a cup. because Nora,
• 47:07
  Speaker 1: with the blind grace of the young, insisted that Edith
• 47:10
  Speaker 1: was practically family. And it was on one such afternoon
• 47:14
  Speaker 1: the talk had turned, by one of those drifts that
• 47:16
  Speaker 1: nobody steers, to the subject of service. The grocer's girl
• 47:20
  Speaker 1: had given notice. Everyone agreed that girls were not what
• 47:23
  Speaker 1: they were, that it happened. It is not the work
• 47:26
  Speaker 1: they mind, said Edith Halloway, in her quiet, precise voice.
• 47:30
  Speaker 1: It is the being nothing. A girl in a good
• 47:32
  Speaker 1: place gives her whole self, her sleep, her knees, her
• 47:36
  Speaker 1: best years, her, her heart, if she is foolish, and
• 47:39
  Speaker 1: she is still the girl. The family may love her,
• 47:42
  Speaker 1: oh yes, in their way, the way one loves a
• 47:44
  Speaker 1: chair one has sat in for twelve years, but let
• 47:47
  Speaker 1: the chair creak, let it ask for one thing of
• 47:49
  Speaker 1: its own, and it is put out on the landing.
• 47:52
  Speaker 1: She stopped. The room was very quiet. She set down
• 47:55
  Speaker 1: her cup with a small, precise click, handle at four o'clock,
• 47:59
  Speaker 1: and smiled, and the smile was worse than the words.
• 48:03
  Speaker 1: But Miss Evelyn was not like that. Miss Evelyn was generous.
• 48:07
  Speaker 1: She said the word the way one says the name
• 48:09
  Speaker 1: of a disease. She had settled my future. She told
• 48:13
  Speaker 1: me so that Thursday at luncheon. The dower cottage, and
• 48:16
  Speaker 1: three hundred pounds, and my, my own home, at last,
• 48:20
  Speaker 1: at fifty-five, when there is nothing much left to put
• 48:22
  Speaker 1: in it. Her hands lay in her lap, still for once, folded.
• 48:27
  Speaker 1: She meant it so kindly. That is what nobody will
• 48:30
  Speaker 1: ever understand about her. She meant everything so kindly. and
• 48:34
  Speaker 1: it never once occurred to her that kindness, from the
• 48:36
  Speaker 1: top of the stairs, is only another word for dismissal.
• 48:40
  Speaker 1: Nobody spoke. Outside the fog shifted against the windows like
• 48:44
  Speaker 1: a listener changing its weight from foot to foot, and
• 48:47
  Speaker 1: then Edith Halloway rose and collected the cups and squared
• 48:50
  Speaker 1: the traycloth to the table's edge and was herself again, quiet, grey, indispensable,
• 48:56
  Speaker 1: and went out and closed the door so softly that
• 48:59
  Speaker 1: it made no sound at all. Jane, whispered Mrs. Ainger.
• 49:03
  Speaker 1: who had walked her friend over and now wished she
• 49:06
  Speaker 1: had not. Jane, that was the most dreadful thing I
• 49:09
  Speaker 1: have ever... Yes, dear, said Miss Marple, watching the closed door.
• 49:14
  Speaker 1: Twelve years of devotion. One does not know until something
• 49:17
  Speaker 1: breaks it whether devotion was a gift or a debt.
• 49:21
  Speaker 1: And a debt, Caroline, a debt of twelve years, called
• 49:24
  Speaker 1: in with a cottage and three hundred pounds, and the words,
• 49:28
  Speaker 1: My own home at last. She rolled her knitting, slowly,
• 49:32
  Speaker 1: and her face was sad and very old. A debt
• 49:35
  Speaker 1: like that can hate, oh yes, it can hate very quietly,
• 49:39
  Speaker 1: for a long time, and no one ever hears it,
• 49:41
  Speaker 1: like a bell that is cracked, dear. It hangs in
• 49:44
  Speaker 1: the tower, and looks like every other bell, and makes
• 49:47
  Speaker 1: no sound at all, until one day someone strikes it.
• 49:51
  Speaker 1: Section 7. The Second Shock Until one day someone strikes it,
• 49:56
  Speaker 1: said Miss Marple, and the words were still hanging in
• 49:59
  Speaker 1: the warm, tea-smelling air of the drawing-room, when the door opened,
• 50:03
  Speaker 1: not softly this time, and Constable Perbright stood on the threshold,
• 50:06
  Speaker 1: scarlet and out of breath, his helmet under his arm,
• 50:09
  Speaker 1: with the fog on his cape in little beads. Mr
• 50:12
  Speaker 1: Hewitt's compliments, he gasped, and will Miss Teasdale come at once? No,
• 50:17
  Speaker 1: not you, Miss, best not. It's Mrs Halloway. The doctor's
• 50:20
  Speaker 1: with her now. She's taken something. The bottle by her bed.
• 50:23
  Speaker 1: The sleeping stuff the doctor gave her. Half of it gone. She...
• 50:27
  Speaker 1: he did not finish. Nora was already past him and
• 50:29
  Speaker 1: up the stairs, running as her aunt had never run
• 50:32
  Speaker 1: in that house, and the constable turned in the doorway
• 50:34
  Speaker 1: and said, to the room at large, in the voice
• 50:36
  Speaker 1: of a man delivering the sentence he has bicycled through
• 50:39
  Speaker 1: fog to deliver. She left a letter, on the dressing-table,
• 50:42
  Speaker 1: addressed to the police. The village, which had been starving
• 50:46
  Speaker 1: for an ending, seized upon this one with both hands.
• 50:49
  Speaker 1: By nightfall it was everywhere, polished and improved in the telling.
• 50:53
  Speaker 1: Edith Halloway had confessed. Edith Halloway had confessed and died.
• 50:57
  Speaker 1: Edith Halloway had confessed, died and named an accomplice. In
• 51:01
  Speaker 1: the post office the letter was said to be three
• 51:03
  Speaker 1: pages long and to name the accomplice as a person
• 51:06
  Speaker 1: highly respected. In the Blue Boar it was said to
• 51:09
  Speaker 1: be one page and to name no one, which was
• 51:11
  Speaker 1: somehow worse. Mrs Tidd, who had seen the constable arrive
• 51:15
  Speaker 1: and the doctor arrive and the inspector's car arrive, retired
• 51:18
  Speaker 1: behind her curtains with the air of a woman who
• 51:21
  Speaker 1: has been given a box at the opera. and was
• 51:23
  Speaker 1: understood to be composing her account for posterity. What the
• 51:26
  Speaker 1: village did not know, and would not have believed, was
• 51:29
  Speaker 1: how quiet it all was. No handcuffs, no shouting, no drama.
• 51:34
  Speaker 1: Only a doctor's bag going up the stairs, and a
• 51:36
  Speaker 1: young woman with a set jaw running up them after it,
• 51:39
  Speaker 1: and the fog leaning against the windows of Church House
• 51:42
  Speaker 1: as it had leaned on the Thursday, as if it
• 51:44
  Speaker 1: knew the house now, and had come back to see
• 51:46
  Speaker 1: the rest. Nora sat by Edith's bed until midnight, holding
• 51:50
  Speaker 1: the thin, still hand, and thought about the codicil, and
• 51:53
  Speaker 1: the cottage, and the words, She took it very quietly,
• 51:57
  Speaker 1: but I dare say she is pleased. She had repeated
• 52:00
  Speaker 1: those words as a small wound, now they seemed to
• 52:03
  Speaker 1: her a great one. To tell a woman at luncheon
• 52:06
  Speaker 1: that her whole future was settled, kindly, generously, over the
• 52:10
  Speaker 1: cold ham, and to expect pleasure. Was that love, Nora wondered,
• 52:14
  Speaker 1: or was it merely love's paperwork? And if it was paperwork,
• 52:18
  Speaker 1: how many years of it could a heart file away
• 52:20
  Speaker 1: before something tore? The truth, as usual, was smaller and sadder.
• 52:26
  Speaker 1: Edith Halloway was not dead. Dr. Lorimer had reached her
• 52:29
  Speaker 1: in time, and she lay in her small room under
• 52:32
  Speaker 1: the eaves, grey as her own name, breathing shallowly, with
• 52:36
  Speaker 1: Nora in the chair beside her. And the letter, which
• 52:39
  Speaker 1: Inspector Hewitt read twice in the lamplit dining-room of Church House,
• 52:43
  Speaker 1: confessed to nothing at all. He read it aloud in
• 52:46
  Speaker 1: the end to Miss Marple. He did this in defiance
• 52:49
  Speaker 1: of every regulation of his service, and he did it
• 52:52
  Speaker 1: because she had been fetched, at her own quiet suggestion,
• 52:55
  Speaker 1: conveyed by the constable, as someone the deceased's family would
• 52:59
  Speaker 1: wish present, and because he had reached the point in
• 53:02
  Speaker 1: the case where an extra mind, even a very old
• 53:05
  Speaker 1: one in a lace cap, seemed worth more than another policeman.
• 53:09
  Speaker 1: The letter was short, in a small, neat, governessy hand.
• 53:13
  Speaker 1: To the officer in charge. By the time this is read,
• 53:16
  Speaker 1: the matter will no longer concern me. I have served
• 53:20
  Speaker 1: Church House for twelve years, and I will not leave
• 53:22
  Speaker 1: it to be spoken of as I have heard others
• 53:24
  Speaker 1: spoken of this fortnight. I did not harm Miss Frobisher.
• 53:28
  Speaker 1: Before God I did not. But I find I cannot
• 53:31
  Speaker 1: live in a village that has already decided I did,
• 53:34
  Speaker 1: nor in a house that no longer has a use
• 53:36
  Speaker 1: for me. The cottage was kindly meant. That is the
• 53:39
  Speaker 1: worst of it. It was all so kindly meant. E.H.
• 53:45
  Speaker 1: The lamp hissed. Fog pressed at the windows like a face. Well,
• 53:51
  Speaker 1: said Hewitt heavily, folding the letter. The village will say
• 53:54
  Speaker 1: it's as good as a confession. Half the bench will
• 53:57
  Speaker 1: say it come to that. Despair, remorse, guilty conscience. I've
• 54:02
  Speaker 1: seen juries hang on less. He looked up. You don't
• 54:06
  Speaker 1: think so. I can see you don't. I think, said
• 54:10
  Speaker 1: Miss Marple, that it is a letter of the utmost truthfulness, Inspector.
• 54:15
  Speaker 1: Every word of it. Consider what she says. She did
• 54:18
  Speaker 1: not harm Miss Frobisher before God. A woman who has
• 54:22
  Speaker 1: just tried to die does not lie to God in
• 54:24
  Speaker 1: her farewell letter. It is the one correspondence she cannot deceive.
• 54:29
  Speaker 1: And the rest? A house that no longer has a
• 54:32
  Speaker 1: use for me. She is not confessing to murder, Inspector.
• 54:36
  Speaker 1: She is dying of being dismissed. She has been dying
• 54:39
  Speaker 1: of it since Thursday at luncheon. She was silent a moment,
• 54:43
  Speaker 1: her hands still in her lap. No, Mrs. Halloway did
• 54:47
  Speaker 1: not write that letter because she killed Evelyn Frobisher. She
• 54:50
  Speaker 1: wrote it because the village thinks she did, and because,
• 54:54
  Speaker 1: in some part of her heart that I very much
• 54:56
  Speaker 1: hope we shall never quite have to examine in a
• 54:58
  Speaker 1: court of law, she is not entirely sorry that she
• 55:01
  Speaker 1: is suspected. Hewitt stared. That's the damnedest. He stopped. Beg pardon.
• 55:09
  Speaker 1: Then we're nowhere. The major's cleared, more or less. The
• 55:12
  Speaker 1: niece was seen in Milchester at half-past six by three
• 55:15
  Speaker 1: people at the garage. The doctor was in his surgery
• 55:18
  Speaker 1: with a patient. The tidwoman. of all useful witnesses, curtains
• 55:22
  Speaker 1: or no curtains. The vicar was writing his sermon. Mrs
• 55:26
  Speaker 1: Fanshawe was addressing envelopes with half the parish. He shuffled
• 55:30
  Speaker 1: his papers with a sound like defeat. Everyone accounted for.
• 55:34
  Speaker 1: Everyone indoors in the fog, every one of them swearing
• 55:37
  Speaker 1: to every other. A woman walks into a church at
• 55:40
  Speaker 1: a quarter past six, in a fog you could carve,
• 55:43
  Speaker 1: and somebody meets her there, somebody she knew well enough
• 55:46
  Speaker 1: to turn her back on, near enough to strike before
• 55:49
  Speaker 1: she cried out. And that somebody is made of fog, apparently,
• 55:53
  Speaker 1: because nobody in this blasted village saw them go or come.
• 55:57
  Speaker 1: Somebody who knew she would be in the vestry at
• 55:59
  Speaker 1: that hour, said Miss Marple. Somebody who knew the house
• 56:03
  Speaker 1: so well that her own movements in it were invisible.
• 56:06
  Speaker 1: A person coming and going from church house on an errand,
• 56:09
  Speaker 1: in the fog, would attract no remark at all, would they?
• 56:13
  Speaker 1: If it was someone whose comings and goings were a
• 56:15
  Speaker 1: part of the scenery. Somebody who knew about the quarrel
• 56:18
  Speaker 1: over the accounts. and who, perhaps, made sure the village
• 56:22
  Speaker 1: knew about it too, afterward, and about the trousers and
• 56:25
  Speaker 1: the motor-car and the doctor's late visit. A whisper here,
• 56:30
  Speaker 1: a word there. Fog is not the only thing that
• 56:33
  Speaker 1: can be laid over a village, Inspector. She rose, slowly,
• 56:37
  Speaker 1: and he rose too, automatically, because his mother had taught him.
• 56:42
  Speaker 1: May I see her, Mrs. Halloway, for five minutes? I am,
• 56:46
  Speaker 1: after all, practically family. Upstairs, in the small room under
• 56:51
  Speaker 1: the eaves, Edith Halloway lay with her eyes open, staring
• 56:54
  Speaker 1: at the ceiling, breathing. Nora had gone down to telephone
• 56:58
  Speaker 1: the nurse. The room was painfully neat, the brush and
• 57:01
  Speaker 1: comb squared on the dresser, the chair against the wall,
• 57:05
  Speaker 1: nothing anywhere that was not aligned, and on the dresser,
• 57:08
  Speaker 1: alone in a saucer, stood a small heap of things
• 57:11
  Speaker 1: emptied from a pocket, a thimble, two buttons, a handkerchief
• 57:14
  Speaker 1: folded to a square. Miss Marple sat down by the
• 57:18
  Speaker 1: bed with the little grunt of effort that old ladies
• 57:20
  Speaker 1: permit themselves, and took one of the still, cold hands
• 57:23
  Speaker 1: in hers, and said nothing at all for a long time. Outside,
• 57:28
  Speaker 1: somewhere in the muffled dark, the fog shifted its weight
• 57:31
  Speaker 1: against the village, and the dead church bell hung in
• 57:34
  Speaker 1: its tower, silent. Edith, my dear, Miss Marple said at last,
• 57:39
  Speaker 1: very gently. I have been knitting a shawl, grey, soft wool.
• 57:44
  Speaker 1: It has been a great companion to me these two weeks.
• 57:47
  Speaker 1: One thinks so clearly, knitting. The hands are busy and
• 57:50
  Speaker 1: the mind is free. She paused. The police found Miss
• 57:54
  Speaker 1: Frobisher's shawl, you know. Her best grey one, with the
• 57:58
  Speaker 1: pearl pin. Folded over the chair, so neatly. I have
• 58:02
  Speaker 1: thought about that shawl every day, Mrs. Halloway. A person
• 58:06
  Speaker 1: lies dying on the floor, and someone, someone in that room,
• 58:10
  Speaker 1: folded her shawl. The cold hand did not move in hers.
• 58:15
  Speaker 1: The breathing did not change. Only love does that, I think.
• 58:19
  Speaker 1: Hate strikes the blow, but only love stays afterward and
• 58:23
  Speaker 1: folds the shawl. The fog pressed in, and in the small,
• 58:27
  Speaker 1: neat room under the eaves, Edith Halloway's eyes filled slowly
• 58:31
  Speaker 1: with tears that slid, one after another, sideways into her hair,
• 58:36
  Speaker 1: and her hand turned, barely, a degree, within Miss Marple's,
• 58:40
  Speaker 1: and held on. Section 8 Miss Marple's Test A degree,
• 58:45
  Speaker 1: within Miss Marple's, and held on and for a long
• 58:48
  Speaker 1: while the two old women sat so in the lamplight,
• 58:51
  Speaker 1: hand in hand, while the fog moved against the small
• 58:55
  Speaker 1: window like something that wanted to come in and could not.
• 58:58
  Speaker 1: It was Edith who spoke first, at last, in a
• 59:01
  Speaker 1: voice rubbed thin as old linen. She wore the shawl,
• 59:05
  Speaker 1: her best one, grey, with the pearl pin that was
• 59:08
  Speaker 1: her mother's, I remember thinking, the vestry, in her best shawl,
• 59:13
  Speaker 1: on a Thursday. One doesn't dust hymn books in one's best.
• 59:18
  Speaker 1: But I had learned not to wonder where she was concerned.
• 59:21
  Speaker 1: Twelve years teaches you that. You can know everything about
• 59:24
  Speaker 1: a person, how she takes her tea, how she holds
• 59:27
  Speaker 1: her pen. the exact sound of her tread on the stair,
• 59:31
  Speaker 1: and know nothing at all about what she is doing
• 59:33
  Speaker 1: it for. A pause, the shallow breathing. She said, going out,
• 59:39
  Speaker 1: I am going to settle the last of it, Edith.
• 59:42
  Speaker 1: I thought she meant the vestry books. The last of it.
• 59:46
  Speaker 1: She had settled me at luncheon, you see. The cottage.
• 59:49
  Speaker 1: My own home. And I stood in this house, Miss Marple,
• 59:53
  Speaker 1: in the hall, with the door still shaking from her going,
• 59:57
  Speaker 1: and I, I did not feel anything I should have felt.
• 1:00:01
  Speaker 1: That is what I could not live with. Not the village,
• 1:00:04
  Speaker 1: my own heart. I opened my mouth to thank her,
• 1:00:06
  Speaker 1: and nothing came out but, very good, Miss Evelyn, like
• 1:00:09
  Speaker 1: a parlour maid. Twelve years, and that is what came out.
• 1:00:14
  Speaker 1: And what should you have said, my dear? That I
• 1:00:16
  Speaker 1: did not want a cottage, that I wanted, the thin
• 1:00:19
  Speaker 1: voice frayed, oh, I don't know, to be asked, to
• 1:00:23
  Speaker 1: be something besides settled. She was going to die, I think.
• 1:00:26
  Speaker 1: knowing she had done right by everyone, and not one
• 1:00:29
  Speaker 1: of us had the courage to tell her that being
• 1:00:31
  Speaker 1: done right by is the loneliest thing in the world.
• 1:00:34
  Speaker 1: Edith turned her head on the pillow. I did not
• 1:00:37
  Speaker 1: kill her, but I let her walk out of the
• 1:00:39
  Speaker 1: door with Very good, Miss Evelyn, for a goodbye, and
• 1:00:43
  Speaker 1: there is not a night now that I do not
• 1:00:44
  Speaker 1: hear it. You did not know what she was going
• 1:00:47
  Speaker 1: to tell you then, said Miss Marple. It was not
• 1:00:50
  Speaker 1: a question. No, she said only that she was going
• 1:00:53
  Speaker 1: to settle things. She had been saying it all week,
• 1:00:56
  Speaker 1: At breakfast. I am going to settle Edith. I am
• 1:00:59
  Speaker 1: going to settle the fund. I am going to settle
• 1:01:02
  Speaker 1: someone else. The thin voice paused. She did not say who,
• 1:01:07
  Speaker 1: but she was pleased. I knew her pleasures, Miss Marple.
• 1:01:11
  Speaker 1: Twelve years teaches you those, at least. She was pleased
• 1:01:14
  Speaker 1: the way she was pleased when the bazaar came right,
• 1:01:17
  Speaker 1: or when the bishop wrote back by return. It was
• 1:01:19
  Speaker 1: the pleasure of a woman signing the last page of something.
• 1:01:23
  Speaker 1: And you think there was someone else? still to be settled.
• 1:01:27
  Speaker 1: I think there was one person in this village she
• 1:01:29
  Speaker 1: had never arranged, said Edith, and that it was preying
• 1:01:33
  Speaker 1: on her, that last week, that she had arranged everyone
• 1:01:36
  Speaker 1: except him. Her eyes closed. I should not say these things.
• 1:01:41
  Speaker 1: I have no proof of anything. I have lived in
• 1:01:43
  Speaker 1: this house twelve years, and I know where every creak
• 1:01:46
  Speaker 1: in it comes from, and I know nothing, Miss Marple.
• 1:01:50
  Speaker 1: That is what service is. You are the walls. The
• 1:01:53
  Speaker 1: walls hear everything, and are asked nothing. and know nothing,
• 1:01:56
  Speaker 1: because knowing is a privilege of the people who sit
• 1:01:59
  Speaker 1: in the chairs. Hush, my dear, said Miss Marple, and
• 1:02:02
  Speaker 1: there was something in her voice that was not elderly
• 1:02:04
  Speaker 1: at all. The walls hear everything, you have said so yourself,
• 1:02:08
  Speaker 1: and a wall does not need proof, Edith, it needs
• 1:02:10
  Speaker 1: only to have been standing in the room. Miss Marple
• 1:02:13
  Speaker 1: sat a while longer, and then she said, very gently,
• 1:02:16
  Speaker 1: that grief and guilt were the two most exhausting emotions
• 1:02:19
  Speaker 1: in the world, and that Edith must sleep, and that
• 1:02:22
  Speaker 1: she herself would come again to-morrow. and she tucked the
• 1:02:25
  Speaker 1: thin hand under the coverlet, and went downstairs, and found Nora,
• 1:02:30
  Speaker 1: and said what was needed, and then went home through
• 1:02:32
  Speaker 1: the fog to Dovecote Cottage, where she sat down by
• 1:02:35
  Speaker 1: the window and did not pick up her knitting. Caroline,
• 1:02:39
  Speaker 1: she said at last, Do you think Dr. Lorimer would
• 1:02:41
  Speaker 1: see me in the morning? This damp has got into
• 1:02:44
  Speaker 1: my shoulder something cruel. Mrs. Ainger, who knew her friend,
• 1:02:48
  Speaker 1: said nothing at all. The surgery smelled of carbolic and
• 1:02:51
  Speaker 1: coal-tar soap, and Dr. Lorimer received her with the grave
• 1:02:54
  Speaker 1: courtesy of his profession, a tall, stooped, grey man with
• 1:02:58
  Speaker 1: a beautiful pair of hands, and the loneliest eyes she
• 1:03:01
  Speaker 1: had seen in many years. He looked at her shoulder,
• 1:03:05
  Speaker 1: he prescribed liniment, he wrote it down in a small,
• 1:03:08
  Speaker 1: exact hand. And while he wrote, Miss Marple talked, in
• 1:03:12
  Speaker 1: her soft, wandering, elderly way, of the village, and the shock,
• 1:03:17
  Speaker 1: and poor Evelyn, and how the police were really so thorough, remarkable.
• 1:03:21
  Speaker 1: They notice everything, those county men. The lamp turned down,
• 1:03:25
  Speaker 1: such a strange little thing. And the shawl, folded, with
• 1:03:29
  Speaker 1: the pin gone. The inspector is quite puzzled about the
• 1:03:32
  Speaker 1: little pearl pin. It was not on the shawl, you know.
• 1:03:36
  Speaker 1: He keeps that back, of course. The police always keep
• 1:03:38
  Speaker 1: one thing back, I believe, so that they may know
• 1:03:41
  Speaker 1: when a person knows too much. A pearl pin. Her mother's, Mrs.
• 1:03:46
  Speaker 1: Halloway says. She never wore the shawl without it. The
• 1:03:50
  Speaker 1: pen stopped. It was the smallest thing in the world,
• 1:03:53
  Speaker 1: a pause, a quarter of a breath, the nib holding
• 1:03:57
  Speaker 1: still above the paper, so that a drop of ink
• 1:03:59
  Speaker 1: swelled and fell. She was not wearing it, said Dr Lorimer.
• 1:04:04
  Speaker 1: The surgery was very quiet. The coal ticked in the grate. Outside,
• 1:04:09
  Speaker 1: beyond the frosted pane, the fog stood against the glass
• 1:04:12
  Speaker 1: like a face pressed close and listening, and somewhere far
• 1:04:16
  Speaker 1: off a door banged, muffled to nothing. Not wearing it?
• 1:04:20
  Speaker 1: said Miss Marple, innocent as milk. But Mrs. Halloway was
• 1:04:24
  Speaker 1: quite sure. The pearl pin, she said, she never wore
• 1:04:27
  Speaker 1: the shawl without. I meant, said the doctor, and his
• 1:04:31
  Speaker 1: voice was perfectly level, the voice of a man who
• 1:04:34
  Speaker 1: has delivered bad news for thirty years, and knows how
• 1:04:37
  Speaker 1: to hold a sentence steady. That if she had been
• 1:04:40
  Speaker 1: wearing it, it would have been found. That is all.
• 1:04:44
  Speaker 1: The police are very thorough, as you say. Forgive me,
• 1:04:46
  Speaker 1: he rose, and the prescription was in her hand, and
• 1:04:49
  Speaker 1: he was at the door. holding it open with that
• 1:04:51
  Speaker 1: grave courtesy which was, she thought, the whole of the man.
• 1:04:55
  Speaker 1: The shoulder should be kept warm. A shawl is better
• 1:04:57
  Speaker 1: than a coat, at our age. Good morning, Miss Marple.
• 1:05:01
  Speaker 1: She went home through the fog, slowly, because the damp
• 1:05:04
  Speaker 1: was bad for her, and because she was thinking. He knew.
• 1:05:07
  Speaker 1: He had known, in one unguarded quarter-breath, that Evelyn Frobisher's
• 1:05:11
  Speaker 1: pearl pin had never been on the folded shawl at all,
• 1:05:14
  Speaker 1: that it had come away before the folding, and there
• 1:05:16
  Speaker 1: was only one room in the world where a person
• 1:05:18
  Speaker 1: could have learned that, and only one hour, and the
• 1:05:21
  Speaker 1: fog had wrapped that room and that hour as carefully
• 1:05:24
  Speaker 1: as wool wraps china. At Dovecote Cottage she found Inspector
• 1:05:28
  Speaker 1: Hewitt waiting on the doorstep, damp and sceptical and faintly hopeful,
• 1:05:32
  Speaker 1: because the old lady's message, conveyed by Constable Purbright, who
• 1:05:36
  Speaker 1: had been made to repeat it twice to be sure
• 1:05:38
  Speaker 1: he had it right, had said only, Tell him to
• 1:05:40
  Speaker 1: bring his notebook and his patience, and not to expect
• 1:05:43
  Speaker 1: anything so vulgar as proof. Well, ma'am, said Hewitt, I've
• 1:05:47
  Speaker 1: brought the notebook. I'll tell you frankly, the Chief Constable
• 1:05:50
  Speaker 1: wants the Major, the Coroner wants anything that'll hold still,
• 1:05:53
  Speaker 1: and I've got a witness at the garage in Milchester,
• 1:05:55
  Speaker 1: a wife lying about a dinner, a companion half-poisoned, and
• 1:05:59
  Speaker 1: a vicarage full of envelopes. If you've got something, for
• 1:06:02
  Speaker 1: pity's sake. I have very little, Inspector. I have a
• 1:06:05
  Speaker 1: candlestick that was polished on the wrong day. I have
• 1:06:08
  Speaker 1: a lamp turned down by a kind hand. I have
• 1:06:10
  Speaker 1: a shawl folded by a loving one. I have a day-book,
• 1:06:14
  Speaker 1: I fancy. You must look at Dr. Lorimer's day-book, and
• 1:06:17
  Speaker 1: ask Mrs. Tidd, very casually, what time she got home
• 1:06:20
  Speaker 1: to her kippers on Thursday. And I have a pearl pin.
• 1:06:23
  Speaker 1: She looked up at him, and her eyes were not
• 1:06:25
  Speaker 1: sweet at all, but very clear, and very old, and
• 1:06:28
  Speaker 1: very sad. And I have a man, Inspector, who has
• 1:06:31
  Speaker 1: loved a woman for forty years, three hundred yards from
• 1:06:34
  Speaker 1: her gate, and who was told last Thursday, in the
• 1:06:36
  Speaker 1: kindest possible words, exactly what that love had been worth. Tomorrow,
• 1:06:41
  Speaker 1: I think, will be difficult. Tonight I must finish my shawl.
• 1:06:44
  Speaker 1: One likes to finish a thing before the weather changes.
• 1:06:47
  Speaker 1: She glanced up at the sky, where the fog, for
• 1:06:50
  Speaker 1: the first time in a week, was beginning, barely beginning,
• 1:06:54
  Speaker 1: to thin. Because the fog is going, Inspector, and when
• 1:06:57
  Speaker 1: it lifts, everything in this village is going to be
• 1:06:59
  Speaker 1: visible at last. I am not sure Lower Wintham will
• 1:07:03
  Speaker 1: much care for what it sees. Section 9 The Quiet
• 1:07:06
  Speaker 1: Assembly of Truth Not sure Lower Wintham will much care
• 1:07:10
  Speaker 1: for what it sees, said Miss Marple, and went in,
• 1:07:14
  Speaker 1: and sat down by the fire, and took up the
• 1:07:16
  Speaker 1: grey shawl, and knitted, stitch after stitch, while the fog
• 1:07:20
  Speaker 1: outside thinned and thinned, until by midnight, when she cast
• 1:07:24
  Speaker 1: off the last stitch and bit the wool, a watery
• 1:07:27
  Speaker 1: moon was standing over the church tower, the first sky
• 1:07:30
  Speaker 1: the village had seen in eight days. The morning came
• 1:07:34
  Speaker 1: up clear and cold, and ruthlessly bright, as mornings do
• 1:07:38
  Speaker 1: after a long fog, and everything in Lower Wintham looked
• 1:07:41
  Speaker 1: new-washed and faintly ashamed, the gutters running, the bare trees dripping,
• 1:07:46
  Speaker 1: the lich-gate black and shining. And into this scoured light came,
• 1:07:51
  Speaker 1: one after another, like witnesses called to a quiet bench,
• 1:07:54
  Speaker 1: the last of the facts. The first arrived by post,
• 1:07:58
  Speaker 1: in a stiff envelope from Milchester. Mr Pritchett, the solicitor,
• 1:08:02
  Speaker 1: wrote in answer to Miss Teasdale's inquiry, with the dry
• 1:08:05
  Speaker 1: precision of his kind. As to your aunt's instruction that
• 1:08:09
  Speaker 1: the dower cottage be purchased and conveyed to Mrs. Halloway
• 1:08:12
  Speaker 1: in her lifetime, rather than left by will, Miss Frobisher
• 1:08:16
  Speaker 1: was quite explicit. Her words, as I have them in
• 1:08:19
  Speaker 1: my attendance note of March last, were, A legacy can
• 1:08:23
  Speaker 1: be contested, Mr. Pritchett, or whittled, or resented. A gift
• 1:08:27
  Speaker 1: given while I am alive is a promise kept where
• 1:08:30
  Speaker 1: people can see it. I would have Edith safe, and
• 1:08:33
  Speaker 1: I would have her know that she is safe, and
• 1:08:35
  Speaker 1: I would have the village know it too. I may
• 1:08:38
  Speaker 1: say she appeared to attach considerable importance to the point.
• 1:08:42
  Speaker 1: Nora read it twice, standing in the hall of Church House,
• 1:08:46
  Speaker 1: and then she sat down on the stairs in her
• 1:08:48
  Speaker 1: aunt's house, and cried as she had not cried even
• 1:08:51
  Speaker 1: at the funeral, because it was so like her, so
• 1:08:54
  Speaker 1: exactly like her, the clumsy, magnificent, high-handed love that arranged everything. everything,
• 1:09:00
  Speaker 1: foresaw everything, provided for everything, and never once thought to say,
• 1:09:05
  Speaker 1: I love you, in any language a person could answer back.
• 1:09:10
  Speaker 1: She was building Edith a wall against the whole world,
• 1:09:13
  Speaker 1: Nora said, to the stairs, to the house, to the
• 1:09:16
  Speaker 1: ghost of the sure tread upon them. and all Edith
• 1:09:19
  Speaker 1: could see was the door in it. She took the
• 1:09:22
  Speaker 1: letter to Dovecote Cottage that same afternoon, and Miss Marple
• 1:09:25
  Speaker 1: read it twice, and was silent for a long while,
• 1:09:28
  Speaker 1: looking at the fire. You see what it means, my dear,
• 1:09:32
  Speaker 1: she said at last. Your aunt was afraid, not of death,
• 1:09:36
  Speaker 1: of dying with her affairs unwitnessed. A will speaks after,
• 1:09:41
  Speaker 1: she wished to speak before. She wished Edith's security to
• 1:09:45
  Speaker 1: be a thing seen, dated, signed, and handed over in
• 1:09:49
  Speaker 1: the light of day, a promise kept where people could
• 1:09:51
  Speaker 1: see it. That is not the action of a woman
• 1:09:54
  Speaker 1: tidying her papers. That is the action of a woman
• 1:09:57
  Speaker 1: making amends in the only grammar she knew. Amends for what?
• 1:10:03
  Speaker 1: For twelve years of being loved and calling it service,
• 1:10:06
  Speaker 1: said Miss Marple. And perhaps, she folded the letter along
• 1:10:09
  Speaker 1: its crease, exactly, and handed it back. Perhaps for something older.
• 1:10:14
  Speaker 1: People who have once accepted an arrangement at the cost
• 1:10:16
  Speaker 1: of their own hearts, Nora, spend the rest of their
• 1:10:19
  Speaker 1: lives arranging other people. It is a form of restitution,
• 1:10:23
  Speaker 1: it is also a form of tyranny, and the two
• 1:10:25
  Speaker 1: live in the same house and answer to the same name.
• 1:10:29
  Speaker 1: Nora turned the envelope over in her hands. She told
• 1:10:33
  Speaker 1: someone else that week that she was going to settle them.
• 1:10:36
  Speaker 1: Edith said so, someone else, on the Thursday, and she
• 1:10:40
  Speaker 1: never came home. Yes, said Miss Marple quietly, that is
• 1:10:44
  Speaker 1: rather the point, my dear. A person who is being settled,
• 1:10:48
  Speaker 1: after forty years, may not find it as pleasing as
• 1:10:51
  Speaker 1: the settler expects. Kindness from the top of the stairs, Nora,
• 1:10:56
  Speaker 1: it can fall a very long way down, and it
• 1:10:58
  Speaker 1: can hit very hard at the bottom. The second fact
• 1:11:02
  Speaker 1: came from Mrs. Tidd, and it came, as everything from Mrs.
• 1:11:05
  Speaker 1: Tidd came, gift-wrapped in grievance. Inspector Hewitt, instructed to be casual,
• 1:11:11
  Speaker 1: called about a supposed complaint of boys at her fence,
• 1:11:14
  Speaker 1: and admired her view, and asked whether the fog had
• 1:11:17
  Speaker 1: not quite spoilt it, and was told at length that
• 1:11:20
  Speaker 1: the fog had been a mercy, that she had slept
• 1:11:22
  Speaker 1: for the first time in thirty years without that bell,
• 1:11:25
  Speaker 1: and that she had not been well herself, no, not
• 1:11:27
  Speaker 1: well at all. She had been at the doctor's that
• 1:11:30
  Speaker 1: very Thursday, not that anyone asked after her, and Hewitt, heart-knocking,
• 1:11:35
  Speaker 1: said he hoped the doctor had not kept her waiting long. Waiting? Me?
• 1:11:40
  Speaker 1: I should think not. I was in and out, and
• 1:11:42
  Speaker 1: home to my kippers by half-past six. and I know
• 1:11:45
  Speaker 1: the time, young man, because I put them under the
• 1:11:47
  Speaker 1: grill when the postmistress's clock struck the half-hour, and a
• 1:11:50
  Speaker 1: kipper is four minutes aside. A kipper, as Miss Marple
• 1:11:54
  Speaker 1: observed afterward, is four minutes aside all over England, and
• 1:11:58
  Speaker 1: no one has ever improved on it as an alibi.
• 1:12:01
  Speaker 1: The doctor's day-book, requisitioned that afternoon with a politeness that
• 1:12:04
  Speaker 1: fooled no one, recorded Mrs. Tidd's visit as ending at
• 1:12:08
  Speaker 1: ten minutes to seven. The hand was small and exact.
• 1:12:11
  Speaker 1: The figure, on close inspection, had been Kate. There was
• 1:12:15
  Speaker 1: no other word for it, and the police handwriting man
• 1:12:17
  Speaker 1: from the county used none other. Kate mended. A two
• 1:12:21
  Speaker 1: converted with a single small exact stroke of the doctor's
• 1:12:25
  Speaker 1: own pen into a five. The third fact was the candlestick.
• 1:12:30
  Speaker 1: Hewitt brought both of them, wrapped in brown paper, to
• 1:12:32
  Speaker 1: Dovecote Cottage and set them on Mrs. Ainger's best tablecloth,
• 1:12:36
  Speaker 1: with the air of a man handling the crown jewels,
• 1:12:38
  Speaker 1: and Miss Marple looked at them, one and then the other,
• 1:12:41
  Speaker 1: the way one looks at two children when only one
• 1:12:43
  Speaker 1: has been in the jam. Bert Tanner polishes the brasses
• 1:12:47
  Speaker 1: on Saturdays, she said. Today is Saturday week. Bert tells me,
• 1:12:51
  Speaker 1: I asked him this morning, at the gate, that when
• 1:12:53
  Speaker 1: he came to do them on the Saturday after, one
• 1:12:56
  Speaker 1: of them was already done. Bright as a button, he said,
• 1:12:58
  Speaker 1: and smelling of the doctor. His very words, Inspector, smelling
• 1:13:02
  Speaker 1: of the doctor. He thought he must have done it
• 1:13:04
  Speaker 1: himself and forgotten, the way one does. Carbolic, you see.
• 1:13:08
  Speaker 1: A man who has spent thirty years washing his hands
• 1:13:10
  Speaker 1: of other people's pain would not come away from such
• 1:13:13
  Speaker 1: a moment without washing. It is not in him. Whatever
• 1:13:16
  Speaker 1: else he had become in that one second, the doctor
• 1:13:19
  Speaker 1: in him went home and washed. She put the candlestick
• 1:13:22
  Speaker 1: down gently. There will be nothing on it for your
• 1:13:24
  Speaker 1: men to find. There was never going to be. He
• 1:13:27
  Speaker 1: is not a careless man. That is rather the point.
• 1:13:30
  Speaker 1: The fourth fact was the pin, and it was not
• 1:13:33
  Speaker 1: so much a fact as a silence. Hewitt confirmed it, grudgingly,
• 1:13:37
  Speaker 1: as a man confirms a card he has been keeping
• 1:13:39
  Speaker 1: up his sleeve. The shawl, folded over the chair, had
• 1:13:42
  Speaker 1: had no pin. Mrs. Halloway's statement said the pin. The
• 1:13:46
  Speaker 1: shawl had no pin. The police had told no one, Kay,
• 1:13:50
  Speaker 1: no one in the village, no one at the vicarage,
• 1:13:52
  Speaker 1: not the coroner. We always keep one thing back, ma'am,
• 1:13:56
  Speaker 1: said Hewitt, so that we'll know when a person knows
• 1:13:58
  Speaker 1: too much. and Miss Marple said yes, she had heard
• 1:14:01
  Speaker 1: that the police were very thorough, and did not smile,
• 1:14:04
  Speaker 1: and Hewitt looked at her for a long moment, and understood,
• 1:14:07
  Speaker 1: suddenly and completely, what she had done in the surgery,
• 1:14:10
  Speaker 1: and with what, Kay, a cup of tea, a sore shoulder,
• 1:14:13
  Speaker 1: and the name of a dead woman's mother, Kay, she
• 1:14:16
  Speaker 1: had done it. There's one thing I don't see, he said,
• 1:14:19
  Speaker 1: at the door, his voice low, though there was no
• 1:14:22
  Speaker 1: one to hear but the dripping trees. Why not let
• 1:14:25
  Speaker 1: it stand as a fall, He was the doctor. He
• 1:14:27
  Speaker 1: could have written accidental death and gone home to his fire,
• 1:14:30
  Speaker 1: and no power on earth could have touched him. Instead
• 1:14:33
  Speaker 1: he looks at her head and all but calls the
• 1:14:35
  Speaker 1: county in himself. I've been two weeks on that, ma'am.
• 1:14:38
  Speaker 1: It keeps me up. That, Inspector, said Miss Marple, is
• 1:14:42
  Speaker 1: because you have been thinking of him as a murderer
• 1:14:44
  Speaker 1: who happened to be a doctor, when you should have
• 1:14:45
  Speaker 1: been thinking of him as a doctor, a good doctor,
• 1:14:48
  Speaker 1: an honest man, a man who has signed what is
• 1:14:50
  Speaker 1: true for thirty years over the bodies of people he loved.
• 1:14:54
  Speaker 1: who happened, once, in one second out of forty patient years,
• 1:14:57
  Speaker 1: to be a murderer. He could not write the lie
• 1:15:00
  Speaker 1: across her body. It was the last thing left of him,
• 1:15:02
  Speaker 1: don't you see, and he gave it to her. He
• 1:15:05
  Speaker 1: gave her the truth, and he knew it might hang him,
• 1:15:07
  Speaker 1: and he gave it anyway. She gathered the grey shawl,
• 1:15:11
  Speaker 1: finished now, soft as the departing fog, about her shoulders.
• 1:15:15
  Speaker 1: It is time, I think, to call on Dr. Lorimer.
• 1:15:17
  Speaker 1: We shall not need the handcuffs, and I would be obliged, Inspector,
• 1:15:21
  Speaker 1: if you would let me speak first. He has waited
• 1:15:23
  Speaker 1: forty years to be listened to. It would be a
• 1:15:25
  Speaker 1: pity to begin badly now. Section 10. The Reveal. To
• 1:15:30
  Speaker 1: be listened to. It would be a pity to begin
• 1:15:32
  Speaker 1: badly now, said Miss Marple. And they went out together
• 1:15:35
  Speaker 1: into the scoured bright morning, the old lady on the
• 1:15:38
  Speaker 1: inspector's arm, across the green where the last rags of
• 1:15:41
  Speaker 1: fog hung in the bare elms, like washing forgotten on
• 1:15:44
  Speaker 1: a line, three hundred yards from gate to gate. Dr.
• 1:15:48
  Speaker 1: Lorimer received them in his consulting room, among the bottles.
• 1:15:51
  Speaker 1: He did not seem surprised. He had, Miss Marple thought,
• 1:15:55
  Speaker 1: the look of a man who has been standing for
• 1:15:56
  Speaker 1: two weeks on a platform, watching a very distant train,
• 1:15:59
  Speaker 1: and has just heard its whistle. He asked them to sit.
• 1:16:03
  Speaker 1: He asked if he might offer them sherry. He was,
• 1:16:05
  Speaker 1: to the very end, the best-mannered man in the village.
• 1:16:09
  Speaker 1: It will not take long, Dr. Lorimer, said Miss Marple gently,
• 1:16:12
  Speaker 1: and I should like to say first that I am sorry.
• 1:16:15
  Speaker 1: I have been sorry since Wednesday, when I watched you
• 1:16:17
  Speaker 1: at the graveside. It is a terrible thing to lose
• 1:16:20
  Speaker 1: the person one has loved longest. It is a more
• 1:16:23
  Speaker 1: terrible thing to have to stand by the grave and
• 1:16:25
  Speaker 1: know what everyone is thinking, and to know it is
• 1:16:28
  Speaker 1: the wrong thing. You knew, said the doctor. It was
• 1:16:31
  Speaker 1: not a question. He sat down slowly behind his desk
• 1:16:35
  Speaker 1: and folded his beautiful hands. The pin, I suppose, in
• 1:16:39
  Speaker 1: the surgery. I heard it as I said it. Thirty
• 1:16:42
  Speaker 1: years I have kept this face for my patients, and
• 1:16:45
  Speaker 1: it took an old lady with a sore shoulder and
• 1:16:47
  Speaker 1: a cup of tea four minutes to take it off me.
• 1:16:50
  Speaker 1: He looked at her, and there was, extraordinarily, the ghost
• 1:16:53
  Speaker 1: of a smile. My colleagues in London would tell you,
• 1:16:57
  Speaker 1: Miss Marple, that there is no such thing as an
• 1:16:59
  Speaker 1: old lady with a sore shoulder. There are only patients,
• 1:17:02
  Speaker 1: and we are all of us patients in the end.
• 1:17:05
  Speaker 1: Will you tell us about Thursday? said Miss Marple. Not
• 1:17:08
  Speaker 1: the evidence. The inspector has the evidence. Tell us about
• 1:17:11
  Speaker 1: the evening. Hewitt opened his notebook. The coal ticked. Outside
• 1:17:16
  Speaker 1: a robin was singing on the surgery gate. I loved
• 1:17:19
  Speaker 1: her for forty years, said Dr. Lorimer. You know that.
• 1:17:22
  Speaker 1: The whole village knows it and thinks it a pretty story.
• 1:17:25
  Speaker 1: The doctor and Miss Evelyn. How sad, how faithful. The
• 1:17:29
  Speaker 1: village has no idea. It was not pretty. It was
• 1:17:32
  Speaker 1: my whole life. I married a good woman I did
• 1:17:34
  Speaker 1: not love, because Evelyn's father and my father agreed between
• 1:17:38
  Speaker 1: them that the marsh money and the practice were not
• 1:17:40
  Speaker 1: to be mixed, and Evelyn— Evelyn accepted it. That is
• 1:17:44
  Speaker 1: the thing I never told a soul. She was not prevented.
• 1:17:47
  Speaker 1: She accepted. She looked at me across her father's dinner table,
• 1:17:50
  Speaker 1: and she chose. The parish, the committees, the being needed.
• 1:17:54
  Speaker 1: She chose to be Miss Frobisher of Church House. And
• 1:17:57
  Speaker 1: I stayed. Three hundred yards away. Because I had decided,
• 1:18:00
  Speaker 1: you understand, that she loved me really, underneath, and that
• 1:18:03
  Speaker 1: we were both of us waiting, that there would come
• 1:18:05
  Speaker 1: a day when the committees were done, and we should
• 1:18:07
  Speaker 1: be old, and it would be our turn. Forty years, Inspector.
• 1:18:11
  Speaker 1: I sat with her in fevers. I carried her father
• 1:18:14
  Speaker 1: to his grave. I built the whole of myself around
• 1:18:17
  Speaker 1: a door that I believed would one day open. He stopped.
• 1:18:20
  Speaker 1: The room was very quiet. In March, in the influenza,
• 1:18:24
  Speaker 1: she was dying. We all thought so. And in the
• 1:18:26
  Speaker 1: fever she called me John. She had not called me
• 1:18:29
  Speaker 1: John since 1889. She held my hand and she said, John,
• 1:18:33
  Speaker 1: I have wasted it. I have wasted all of it.
• 1:18:35
  Speaker 1: And I, God forgive me, I was happy. At her deathbed.
• 1:18:39
  Speaker 1: Because I thought the door had opened. but she got well.
• 1:18:42
  Speaker 1: Edith nursed her like a lioness, and when she was well,
• 1:18:45
  Speaker 1: I was Dr. Lorimer again, and the door was shut,
• 1:18:48
  Speaker 1: and I told myself that the fever had been the truth,
• 1:18:51
  Speaker 1: and the health was the convention, and I waited again.
• 1:18:54
  Speaker 1: And on Thursday she sent a line round. She said
• 1:18:56
  Speaker 1: she would be in the vestry at a quarter past six,
• 1:18:59
  Speaker 1: and would I step over, there was a matter she
• 1:19:01
  Speaker 1: wished to settle with me before she told the village. Settle,
• 1:19:04
  Speaker 1: said Miss Marple softly. Settle, the word came out of
• 1:19:08
  Speaker 1: him like a tooth. I dressed as if for a wedding,
• 1:19:11
  Speaker 1: I crossed the green in that fog, and I have
• 1:19:13
  Speaker 1: walked through this village for thirty years as if I
• 1:19:15
  Speaker 1: were made of it, Miss Marple. No one sees the doctor.
• 1:19:18
  Speaker 1: The doctor is part of the scenery. The doctor in
• 1:19:21
  Speaker 1: the fog is no one at all. And she was there,
• 1:19:24
  Speaker 1: in her best grey shawl, with the lamp turned low
• 1:19:26
  Speaker 1: and her chin up, pleased with herself, the way she
• 1:19:29
  Speaker 1: was always pleased with herself when she had been good.
• 1:19:32
  Speaker 1: And she told me. She had settled Edith at luncheon,
• 1:19:35
  Speaker 1: a cottage, bought and conveyed, so the world could see.
• 1:19:38
  Speaker 1: She had settled the fund, she had settled Nora, and
• 1:19:41
  Speaker 1: now she was settling me. I was in the will.
• 1:19:44
  Speaker 1: Five hundred pounds, and her gratitude, her gratitude, those were
• 1:19:48
  Speaker 1: the words. She had made Pritchett write them down. To
• 1:19:51
  Speaker 1: my oldest and dearest friend, in gratitude for a lifetime
• 1:19:54
  Speaker 1: of devotion. His voice did not rise at all. It went,
• 1:19:57
  Speaker 1: if anything, quieter. Forty years, and I was a tradesman
• 1:20:01
  Speaker 1: to be tipped. She had spent one day, one busy,
• 1:20:04
  Speaker 1: happy day, winding us all up. all the people who
• 1:20:07
  Speaker 1: loved her, like clocks, and setting us on shelves. And
• 1:20:10
  Speaker 1: she stood there in her best shawl, and waited for
• 1:20:13
  Speaker 1: me to thank her. And I looked at her, and
• 1:20:15
  Speaker 1: I saw that she had never once, not for one
• 1:20:17
  Speaker 1: hour in forty years, been waiting at any door. The
• 1:20:20
  Speaker 1: door had never been shut. There had never been a door.
• 1:20:23
  Speaker 1: There had only ever been me, standing in the road.
• 1:20:26
  Speaker 1: The candlestick, he said, had been in his hand before
• 1:20:29
  Speaker 1: he knew he had picked it up. One blow. She
• 1:20:31
  Speaker 1: had no time to be afraid. He had made sure afterward, professionally, automatically,
• 1:20:36
  Speaker 1: kneeling in the lamplight with his fingers on her pulse,
• 1:20:39
  Speaker 1: and that was the part he would take with him,
• 1:20:41
  Speaker 1: that his hands, which had mended half the village, could
• 1:20:44
  Speaker 1: find no way back from what his hands had done.
• 1:20:46
  Speaker 1: He had washed the candlestick and set it back. He
• 1:20:49
  Speaker 1: had turned the lamp low so that the fog-grey room
• 1:20:51
  Speaker 1: would be kind to her face, and her shawl had
• 1:20:53
  Speaker 1: slipped from the chair back, and he had picked it
• 1:20:55
  Speaker 1: up and folded it. I had watched her fold things
• 1:20:58
  Speaker 1: all my life, he said, and I was never once
• 1:21:01
  Speaker 1: allowed to do anything for her, and my hands did
• 1:21:03
  Speaker 1: it alone. And the little pearl pin had come away
• 1:21:06
  Speaker 1: in his palm, and he had kept it. She gave
• 1:21:09
  Speaker 1: everything else away that day, he said. I would not
• 1:21:11
  Speaker 1: leave it for the police to tag in an envelope.
• 1:21:13
  Speaker 1: It was the only thing of hers that ever lay
• 1:21:15
  Speaker 1: against her heart. He opened the desk drawer and took
• 1:21:19
  Speaker 1: out an envelope, and from the envelope took the pin,
• 1:21:21
  Speaker 1: a small thing, a single seed-pearl, and laid it on
• 1:21:24
  Speaker 1: the desk between them, where it sat in the lamplight
• 1:21:27
  Speaker 1: like a tear. You will want it, Inspector, and the day-book,
• 1:21:30
  Speaker 1: you will have seen the day-book. I mended the five
• 1:21:33
  Speaker 1: over the two at midnight, and I sat here afterward
• 1:21:35
  Speaker 1: and listened to the silence where the bell should be,
• 1:21:38
  Speaker 1: and I thought, that is the truest thing in this
• 1:21:40
  Speaker 1: village now, a cracked bell that everyone has stopped hearing.
• 1:21:44
  Speaker 1: He looked up. You are wondering why I did not
• 1:21:46
  Speaker 1: write accidental death. I will tell you. I could have.
• 1:21:50
  Speaker 1: It was in my hand, and no one would have
• 1:21:52
  Speaker 1: questioned it, and I should have gone home to my fire,
• 1:21:54
  Speaker 1: and I could not do it. I stood over her
• 1:21:56
  Speaker 1: for five minutes, and she had never in her life
• 1:21:59
  Speaker 1: told a lie, and I found I could not write
• 1:22:01
  Speaker 1: one across her body and sign my name. It was
• 1:22:04
  Speaker 1: the last thing I had left to give her, the truth,
• 1:22:06
  Speaker 1: even if it hanged me. He rose and straightened his
• 1:22:10
  Speaker 1: waistcoat and was again himself. May I have an hour, Inspector?
• 1:22:13
  Speaker 1: There is a letter I should like to write to
• 1:22:15
  Speaker 1: Miss Teasdale, and I should prefer to walk to the
• 1:22:17
  Speaker 1: station like a man paying a call, if the village
• 1:22:20
  Speaker 1: is watching. It will make a great deal of talk
• 1:22:22
  Speaker 1: either way, but one likes to set the style of
• 1:22:24
  Speaker 1: a thing. At the door he paused, and turned, and
• 1:22:28
  Speaker 1: looked at Miss Marple. How did you know? he asked.
• 1:22:31
  Speaker 1: Not the pin, before the pin. The shawl, said Miss Marple,
• 1:22:36
  Speaker 1: from the first day. Murderers run, Dr. Lorimer. Only love
• 1:22:40
  Speaker 1: stays afterward and folds the shawl. He bowed to her,
• 1:22:43
  Speaker 1: an old-fashioned bow from another century, and said the last
• 1:22:46
  Speaker 1: thing she ever heard him say, standing in his doorway.
• 1:22:50
  Speaker 1: On Thursday, for the first time in my life, I
• 1:22:52
  Speaker 1: was grateful for the fog. One should never be grateful
• 1:22:55
  Speaker 1: for the fog, Miss Marple. That was when I knew.
• 1:22:58
  Speaker 1: Section 11. Aftermath. The bell rings for Advent. Grateful for
• 1:23:03
  Speaker 1: the fog, Miss Marple. That was when I knew, said Dr. Lorimer,
• 1:23:06
  Speaker 1: and he went back into his house among his bottles
• 1:23:09
  Speaker 1: to write his letter, and the door of the surgery
• 1:23:11
  Speaker 1: shut behind him with the soft, exact click with which
• 1:23:14
  Speaker 1: it had shut on half the sorrows of Lower Wintham
• 1:23:17
  Speaker 1: for thirty years. The village, which had waited a fortnight
• 1:23:20
  Speaker 1: to hate somebody, found to its bewilderment that it could
• 1:23:23
  Speaker 1: not hate Dr. Lorimer, and this frightened it far more
• 1:23:26
  Speaker 1: than the murder had. It is comfortable to discover a
• 1:23:29
  Speaker 1: monster at the end of a lane. It is not
• 1:23:31
  Speaker 1: comfortable to discover, at the end of the lane, a
• 1:23:34
  Speaker 1: man one has known all one's life, who set the
• 1:23:36
  Speaker 1: Tanner boy's arm, and sat up with old Mrs. Crump,
• 1:23:39
  Speaker 1: and carried one's husband to his grave. A good man,
• 1:23:42
  Speaker 1: the village said, in the bewildered tone of people revising
• 1:23:45
  Speaker 1: a will. A good man who had done the worst thing, once,
• 1:23:49
  Speaker 1: in one second, for the oldest reason in the world.
• 1:23:53
  Speaker 1: For a week or two the village was gentler than
• 1:23:55
  Speaker 1: it had ever been. People were careful at the post office.
• 1:23:58
  Speaker 1: Mrs Tidd sent a jar of dams and jam to
• 1:24:01
  Speaker 1: the postmistress, with whom she had not spoken since the Friday.
• 1:24:05
  Speaker 1: Diana Fanshawe said, at the vicarage, what everyone was thinking.
• 1:24:09
  Speaker 1: We did it too, you know. All of us. Forty
• 1:24:12
  Speaker 1: years we watched him wait at that gate and thought
• 1:24:14
  Speaker 1: it was pretty. We made a story of it. We
• 1:24:17
  Speaker 1: never once asked what it was costing him. That would
• 1:24:19
  Speaker 1: have been vulgar. And the vicar, who was a good
• 1:24:22
  Speaker 1: man though a harassed one, preached on the first Sunday
• 1:24:25
  Speaker 1: of December from the text about the beam and the moat,
• 1:24:28
  Speaker 1: and was heard in a silence the church had not
• 1:24:31
  Speaker 1: known in living memory, because there was no bell to
• 1:24:33
  Speaker 1: quarrel with the quiet. Dr Lorimer was committed for trial
• 1:24:37
  Speaker 1: at the Assizes and did not see them. His heart,
• 1:24:41
  Speaker 1: which had served the village faithfully for thirty years, and
• 1:24:44
  Speaker 1: its owner, perhaps, less faithfully, stopped one January night in
• 1:24:47
  Speaker 1: the infirmary at the county town, quietly. He left the
• 1:24:51
  Speaker 1: practice to a young man from Scotland, and a letter
• 1:24:54
  Speaker 1: to Nora Teasdale, which she burned, and a small bequest,
• 1:24:58
  Speaker 1: which she accepted on his behalf, and did exactly as
• 1:25:00
  Speaker 1: he asked with it, the little seed-pearl pin, her great-grandmother's,
• 1:25:04
  Speaker 1: and her aunt's, and briefly a murderer's, went with Evelyn
• 1:25:08
  Speaker 1: Frobisher into the churchyard in the end, in the spring.
• 1:25:11
  Speaker 1: It was the only one of Evelyn's settlements that was
• 1:25:14
  Speaker 1: made by somebody else, and Nora said that her aunt
• 1:25:17
  Speaker 1: would have allowed it had anyone dared to ask her.
• 1:25:19
  Speaker 1: The Major was not prosecuted, the fund was repaid, and
• 1:25:23
  Speaker 1: there had been, the Chief Constable decided, quite enough of
• 1:25:26
  Speaker 1: Lower Wintham, and he resigned the Treasurership with a short
• 1:25:29
  Speaker 1: speech of such rigid and painful honesty that the Committee,
• 1:25:32
  Speaker 1: in a spasm of respect, elected him President. His wife
• 1:25:36
  Speaker 1: gave up the Milchester Card Club, and the Major gave
• 1:25:39
  Speaker 1: up pretending not to know why she had gone, and
• 1:25:41
  Speaker 1: people meeting them on the green in the evenings, walking
• 1:25:44
  Speaker 1: the dog together, said that the Hartwells had come out
• 1:25:46
  Speaker 1: of it better than anyone, which was the kind of
• 1:25:48
  Speaker 1: thing Lower Wintham said now, having learned what worse looked like.
• 1:25:53
  Speaker 1: The Christmas fate was held that year in a village
• 1:25:55
  Speaker 1: that had forgotten how to be ordinary and was just
• 1:25:57
  Speaker 1: learning again, and it was, everyone agreed, the strangest and
• 1:26:01
  Speaker 1: the best in living memory. The Major presided in his
• 1:26:05
  Speaker 1: new office with a humility that sat on him like
• 1:26:07
  Speaker 1: a borrowed coat, stiff but becoming. Mrs. Golightly sold tickets
• 1:26:12
  Speaker 1: for the raffle and invented nothing whatsoever about anyone for
• 1:26:15
  Speaker 1: a full three hours. Diana Fanshawe organised the produce stall
• 1:26:20
  Speaker 1: and told nobody what to do, a first in the
• 1:26:22
  Speaker 1: annals of the parish, and the vicar, judging the miniature gardens,
• 1:26:26
  Speaker 1: awarded first prize to Mrs. Tidd's grand-nephew and was seen
• 1:26:29
  Speaker 1: to shake the old lady's hand, a reconciliation conducted like
• 1:26:33
  Speaker 1: everything else in Lower Wintham, without a word being said
• 1:26:36
  Speaker 1: about the thing it reconciled. Only the church stood a
• 1:26:40
  Speaker 1: little apart from the merriment, as churches do, its tower
• 1:26:43
  Speaker 1: empty of sound, waiting for its new voice. Some of
• 1:26:47
  Speaker 1: the older villagers, coming out into the dark after the fate,
• 1:26:51
  Speaker 1: found themselves glancing up at it and hurrying on, not
• 1:26:54
  Speaker 1: from fear exactly, but from a new and uncomfortable knowledge
• 1:26:58
  Speaker 1: of what a silence can hold. The vicar said in
• 1:27:01
  Speaker 1: his Christmas sermon, that a bell was a strange thing
• 1:27:04
  Speaker 1: to found a metaphor on, since it was all mouth
• 1:27:07
  Speaker 1: and no heart. And then he looked out over his congregation,
• 1:27:10
  Speaker 1: and said no, he was wrong, it had a heart,
• 1:27:13
  Speaker 1: and the heart was the crack, and the crack was
• 1:27:16
  Speaker 1: where the sound got lost. It was thought to be
• 1:27:19
  Speaker 1: the best sermon he ever preached. Edith Halloway did not
• 1:27:22
  Speaker 1: take the dower cottage. She came down from her room
• 1:27:25
  Speaker 1: under the eaves in the second week of December, thin
• 1:27:28
  Speaker 1: and grey and upright. and told Nora, with the quiet
• 1:27:32
  Speaker 1: precision of a woman laying a table, that she was obliged,
• 1:27:35
  Speaker 1: and would not. Your aunt meant it as a home,
• 1:27:38
  Speaker 1: Miss Nora, and I should always have sat in it
• 1:27:40
  Speaker 1: remembering the shape it came in. I keep the letter,
• 1:27:44
  Speaker 1: the one I wrote, that the police were kind enough
• 1:27:46
  Speaker 1: to give back, to remind me that I was angry
• 1:27:49
  Speaker 1: at being loved in the wrong shape. It is more
• 1:27:52
  Speaker 1: than most people get, loved in the wrong shape. I
• 1:27:56
  Speaker 1: shall go to my sister in Bournemouth, where there is
• 1:27:58
  Speaker 1: a sea and no church tower, and nobody who knew her.
• 1:28:02
  Speaker 1: She went in the new year, and at the station
• 1:28:05
  Speaker 1: Miss Marple put a parcel into her hands, soft, grey, unmistakable,
• 1:28:10
  Speaker 1: and said, It is a shawl, my dear, folded by
• 1:28:13
  Speaker 1: hands that wished you well. And Edith Halloway, who had
• 1:28:16
  Speaker 1: not wept since the night under the eaves, stood on
• 1:28:18
  Speaker 1: the platform with the grey wool against her face and wept,
• 1:28:22
  Speaker 1: and the train came in and took her away to
• 1:28:24
  Speaker 1: the sea. Church House did not go to strangers. Nora Teasdale,
• 1:28:29
  Speaker 1: having shocked the village by arriving in trousers, shocked it
• 1:28:32
  Speaker 1: a second time by staying. She kept the house, and
• 1:28:35
  Speaker 1: learned the parish, and discovered in herself, to her occasional alarm,
• 1:28:39
  Speaker 1: her aunt's exact tread upon the stair she asked Miss
• 1:28:43
  Speaker 1: Marple once before the old lady went home to St
• 1:28:45
  Speaker 1: Mary Mead what she ought to do about the mother's
• 1:28:48
  Speaker 1: union presidency which the village had offered her out of
• 1:28:50
  Speaker 1: sentiment Miss Marple considered accept it my dear she said
• 1:28:55
  Speaker 1: and do the work which is considerable but do not
• 1:28:58
  Speaker 1: settle anyone Help them or thwart them, or love them
• 1:29:01
  Speaker 1: as loudly and badly as you like, but never settle them.
• 1:29:05
  Speaker 1: Your aunt's whole life was a will, Nora. It is
• 1:29:08
  Speaker 1: a dreadful thing to be remembered as a bequest. The
• 1:29:11
  Speaker 1: bell of St Cuthbert's, which had hung cracked and silent
• 1:29:14
  Speaker 1: since September, was taken down in February and sent to
• 1:29:17
  Speaker 1: the founders, and came home in the spring with a
• 1:29:20
  Speaker 1: new tone, lower than the old one, richer, a little sad.
• 1:29:24
  Speaker 1: It rang for the first time on Easter morning, and
• 1:29:27
  Speaker 1: the whole village stood still to hear it, and old Mrs. Tidd,
• 1:29:31
  Speaker 1: opposite the Lichgate, was heard to say that she had
• 1:29:33
  Speaker 1: slept very nicely without it, but was glad all the same.
• 1:29:38
  Speaker 1: That night she did not sleep, and lay awake listening
• 1:29:41
  Speaker 1: to it mark the hours, and was not sorry. Miss
• 1:29:44
  Speaker 1: Marple went home to St. Mary Mead before the spring,
• 1:29:47
  Speaker 1: on a morning of thin sunshine, with her knitting-bag empty
• 1:29:51
  Speaker 1: for once, and her mind, as she told Caroline Ainger
• 1:29:54
  Speaker 1: at the station, much quieter. Mrs. Ainger asked her, It
• 1:29:58
  Speaker 1: was the question the whole county would have asked. Could
• 1:30:01
  Speaker 1: it have got near enough? Whether she did not find
• 1:30:04
  Speaker 1: it all terribly sad? Sad? said Miss Marple. She looked
• 1:30:08
  Speaker 1: back along the platform, toward where the Tower of St
• 1:30:11
  Speaker 1: Cuthbert stood over the bare trees in the clear air. Yes, dear, sad.
• 1:30:17
  Speaker 1: But not strange. Every village is a room full of
• 1:30:20
  Speaker 1: bells that never ring, Caroline. All the things people feel
• 1:30:24
  Speaker 1: and never say, all the love and all the resentment—
• 1:30:27
  Speaker 1: hanging up there in the dark where nobody has to
• 1:30:29
  Speaker 1: listen to them. And we go about underneath, and we
• 1:30:33
  Speaker 1: call the silence peace, and we are so proud of
• 1:30:35
  Speaker 1: how quiet everything is. She gathered her coat about her,
• 1:30:39
  Speaker 1: for the train was coming in. The tragedy is never
• 1:30:42
  Speaker 1: that someone strikes one, in the end. That happens everywhere,
• 1:30:45
  Speaker 1: and always has. The tragedy is that no one ever
• 1:30:48
  Speaker 1: thinks to climb the tower and look for the crack,
• 1:30:51
  Speaker 1: until the day it breaks, and brings the whole bell
• 1:30:54
  Speaker 1: down with it. The train took her away through the water-meadows,
• 1:30:58
  Speaker 1: where the fog had all gone and would come again,
• 1:31:00
  Speaker 1: as fog does, and forgetfulness, and next year's gossip. And
• 1:31:05
  Speaker 1: behind her the new bell rang the hour over Lower Wintham,
• 1:31:08
  Speaker 1: clear and lowered, and faintly sorrowful, and the village went
• 1:31:12
  Speaker 1: on about its business beneath it, which is what villages do,
• 1:31:16
  Speaker 1: and what, in the end, they are for. The End