fight his madness. And in a place like this, only his wife's death would solve his problem. He wanted to marry the girl, you see. She's very respectable and so is he. And besides, he's devoted to his children and didn't want to give them up. He wanted everything, his home, his children, his respectability and Elsie. And the price he would have to pay for that was murder.
'He chose, I do think, a very clever way. He knew so well from his experience of criminal cases how soon suspicion falls on the husband if a wife dies unexpectedly – and the possibility of exhumation in the case of poison. So he created a death which seemed only incidental to something else. He created a nonexistent anonymous letter writer. And the clever thing was that the police were certain to suspect a woman – and they were quite right in a way. All the letters were a woman's letters; he copied them very cleverly from the letters in the case last year and from a case Dr. Griffith told him about. I don't mean that he was so crude as to reproduce any letter verbatim, but he took phrases and expressions from them and mixed them up, and the net result was that the letters definitely represented a woman's mind – a half-crazy repressed personality.
'He knew all the tricks that the police use, handwriting, typewriting tests, etc. He's been preparing his crime for some time. He typed all the envelopes before he gave away the typewriter to the Women's Institute, and he cut the pages from the book at Little Furze probably quite a long time ago when he was waiting in the drawing room one day. People don't open books of sermons much!
'And finally, having got his false Poison Pen well established, he staged the real thing. A fine afternoon when the governess and the boys and his stepdaughter would be out, and the servants having their regular day out. He couldn't foresee that the little maid Agnes would quarrel with her boyfriend and come back to the house.'
Joanna asked, 'But what did she see? Do you know that?'
'I don't know. I can only guess. My guess would be that she didn't see anything.'
'That it was all a mare's nest?'
'No, my dear, I mean that she stood at the pantry window all the afternoon waiting for the young man to come and make it up and that quite literally she saw nothing. That is, no one came to the house at all, not the postman, nor anybody else.
'It would take her some time, being slow, to realize that that was very odd – because apparently Mrs. Symmington had received an anonymous letter that afternoon.'
'Didn't she receive one?' I asked, puzzled.
'But of course not! As I say, this crime is so simple. Her husband just put the cyanide in the top cachet of the ones she took in the afternoon when her sciatica came on after lunch. All Symmington had to do was to get home before, or at the same time as Elsie Holland, call his wife, get no answer, go up to her room, drop a spot of cyanide in the plain glass of water she had used to swallow the cachet, toss the crumpled-up anonymous letter into the grate, and put by her hand the scrap of paper with 'I can't go on' written on it.'
Miss Marple turned to me.
'You were quite right about that, too, Mr. Burton. A 'scrap of paper' was all wrong. People don't leave suicide notes on small torn scraps of paper. They use a sheet of paper – and very often an envelope too. Yes, the scrap of paper was wrong and you knew it.'
'You are rating me too high,' I said. 'I knew nothing.'
'But you did, you really did, Mr. Burton. Otherwise why were you immediately impressed by the message your sister left scribbled on the telephone pad?'
I repeated slowly: ''Say that I can't go on Friday' I see! 'I can't go on'?'
Miss Marple beamed on me.
'Exactly. Mr. Symmington came across such a message and saw its possibilities. He tore off the words he wanted for when the time came – a message genuinely in his wife's handwriting.'
'Was there any further brilliance on my part?' I asked.
Miss Marple twinkled at me.
'You put me on the track, you know. You assembled those facts together for me – in sequence – and on top of it you told me the most important thing of all – that Elsie Holland had never received any anonymous letters.'
'Do you know,' I said, 'last night I thought that she was the letter writer and that that was why there had been no letters written to her?'
'Oh, dear me, no… The person who writes anonymous letters practically always sends them to herself as well. That's part of the – well, the excitement, I suppose. No, no, the fact interested me for quite another reason. It was really, you see, Mr. Symmington's one weakness. He couldn't bring himself to write a foul letter to the girl he loved. It's a very interesting sidelight on human nature – and a credit to him, in a way – but it's where he gave himself away.'
Joanna said, 'And he killed Agnes? But surely that was quite unnecessary?'
'Perhaps it was, but what you don't realize, my dear (not having killed anyone) is that your judgement is distorted afterward and everything seems exaggerated. No doubt he heard the girl telephoning to Partridge, saying she'd been worried ever since Mrs. Symmington's death, that there was something she didn't understand. He can't take any chances – this stupid foolish girl has seen something, knows something.'
'Yet apparently he was at his office all that afternoon?'
'I should imagine he killed her before he went. Miss Holland was in the dining room and kitchen. He just went out into the hall, opened and shut the front door as though he was going out, then slipped into the little cloakroom.
'When only Agnes was left in the house, he probably rang the frontdoor bell, slipped back into the cloakroom, came out behind her and hit her on the head as she was opening the front door, and then after thrusting the body into the cupboard, he hurried along to his office, arriving just a little late if anyone had happened to notice it, but they probably didn't. You see, no one was suspecting a man.'
'Abominable brute,' said Mrs. Dane Calthrop.
'You're not sorry for him, Mrs. Dane Calthrop?' I inquired.
'Not in the least. Why?'
'I'm glad to hear it, that's all.'
Joanna said:
'But why Aimee Griffith? I know that the police have found the pestle taken from Owen's dispensary – and the skewer too. I suppose it's not so easy for a man to return things to kitchen drawers. And guess where they were? Superintendent Nash only told me just now when I met him on my way here. In one of those musty old deed boxes in his office. Estate of Sir Jasper Harrington-West, deceased.'
'Poor Jasper,' said Mrs. Dane Calthrop. 'He was a cousin of mine. So a correct old boy. He would have had a fit!'
'Wasn't it madness to keep them?' I asked.
'Probably madder to throw them away,' said Mrs. Dane Calthrop. 'No one had any suspicions about Symmington.'
'He didn't strike her with the pestle,' said Joanna. 'There was a clock weight there too with hair and blood on it. He pinched the pestle, the thing, on the day Aimee was arrested, and hid the book pages in her house. And that brings me back to my original question. What about Aimee Griffith? The police actually saw her write that letter.'
'Yes, of course,' said Miss Marple. 'She did write that letter.'
'But why?'
'Oh, my dear, surely, you have realized that Miss Griffith had been in love with Symmington all her life?'
'Poor thing!' said Mrs. Dane Calthrop mechanically. 'They'd always been good friends, and I daresay she thought, after Mrs. Symmington's death, that someday, perhaps – well -'
Miss Marple coughed delicately. 'And then the gossip began spreading about Elsie Holland and I expect that upset her badly. She thought of the girl as a designing minx worming her way into Symmington's affections and quite unworthy of him. And so, I think, she succumbed to temptation. Why not add one more anonymous letter, and frighten the girl out of the race? It must have seemed quite safe to her and she took, as she thought, every precaution.'
'Well?' said Joanna. 'Finish the story.'
'I should imagine,' said Miss Marple slowly, 'that when Miss Holland showed that letter to Symmington he
