"Mrs. Spenlow, you see, was already suffering from conscience and was inclined to be emotionally religious. This young man no doubt urged her to 'face up' and to 'come clean,' and I daresay she was strung up to do so. But Miss Politt didn't see it that way. All she saw was that she might go to prison for a robbery she had committed years ago. So she made up her mind to put a stop to it all. I'm afraid, you know, that she was always rather a wicked woman. I don't believe she'd have turned a hair if that nice, stupid Mr. Spenlow had been hanged."
Colonel Melchett said slowly, "We can - er - verify your theory - up to a point. The identity of the Politt woman with the lady's maid at the Abercrombies', but - "
Miss Marple reassured him. "It will be all quite easy. She's the kind of woman who will break down at once when she's taxed with the truth. And then, you see, I've got her tape measure. I - er - abstracted it yesterday when I was trying on. When she misses it and thinks the police have got it - well, she's quite an ignorant woman and she'll think it will prove the case against her in some way."
She smiled at him encouragingly. "You'll have no trouble, I can assure you." It was the tone in which his favourite aunt had once assured him that he could not fail to pass his entrance examination into Sandhurst.
And he had passed.
THE CASE OF THE CARETAKER
'Well,' demanded Doctor Haydock of his patient. 'And how goes it today?'
Miss Marple smiled at him wanly from pillows.
'I suppose, really, that I'm better,' she admitted, 'but I feel so terribly depressed. I can't help feeling how much better it would have been if I had died. After all, I'm an old woman. Nobody wants me or cares about me.'
Doctor Haydock interrupted with his usual brusqueness. 'Yes, yes, typical after-reaction of this type of flu. What you need is something to take you out of yourself. A mental tonic.'
Miss Marple sighed and shook her head.
'And what's more,' continued Doctor Haydock, 'I've brought my medicine with me!'
He tossed a long envelope on to the bed.
'Just the thing for you. The kind of puzzle that is right up your street.'
'A puzzle?' Miss Marple looked interested.
'Literary effort of mine,' said the doctor, blushing a little. 'Tried to make a regular story of it. "He said," "she said," "the girl thought," etc. Facts of the story are true.'
'But why a puzzle?' asked Miss Marple.
Doctor Haydock grinned. 'Because the interpretation is up to you. I want to see if you're as clever as you always make out.' With that Parthian shot he departed.
Miss Marple picked up the manuscript and began to read.
'And where is the bride?' asked Miss Harmon genially.
The village was all agog to see the rich and beautiful young wife that Harry Laxton had brought back from abroad. There was a general indulgent feeling that Harry - wicked young scapegrace - had had all the luck. Everyone had always felt indulgent towards Harry. Even the owners of windows that had suffered from his indiscriminate use of a catapult had found their indignation dissipated by young Harry's abject expression of regret. He had broken windows, robbed orchards, poached rabbits, and later had run into debt, got entangled with the local tobacconist's daughter - been disentangled and sent off to Africa - and the village as represented by various ageing spinsters had murmured indulgently. 'Ah, well! Wild oats! He'll settle down!'
And now, sure enough, the prodigal had returned - not in affliction, but in triumph. Harry Laxton had 'made good' as the saying goes. He had pulled himself together, worked hard, and had finally met and successfully wooed a young Anglo-French girl who was the possessor of a considerable fortune.
Harry might have lived in London, or purchased an estate in some fashionable hunting county, but he preferred to come back to the pan of the world that was home to him. And there, in the most romantic way, he purchased the derelict estate in the dower house of which he had passed his childhood.
Kingsdean House had been unoccupied for nearly seventy years. It had gradually fallen into decay and abandon. An elderly caretaker and his wife lived in the one habitable corner of it. It was a vast, unprepossessing grandiose mansion, the gardens overgrown with rank vegetation and the trees hemming it in like some gloomy enchanter's den.
The dower house was a pleasant, unpretentious house and had been let for a long term of years to Major Laxton, Harry's father. As a boy, Harry had roamed over the Kingsdean estate and knew every inch of the tangled woods, and the old house itself had always fascinated him.
