夜雨聆风if that was the way she said it … Be-cause if she’d said ‘She wasn’t there’ it wouldn’t have meant the samething.”
“Now that’s too subtle a point for me,” said Craddock.
Miss Marple turned her eager pink and white face to him.
“Just think what’s going on in Miss Murgatroyd’s mind … One does seethings, you know, and not know one sees them. In a railway accident once,I remember noticing a large blister of paint at the side of the carriage. Icould have drawn it for you afterwards. And once, when there was a flyingbomb in London—splinters of glass everywhere—and the shock—butwhat I remember best is a woman standing in front of me who had a bighole halfway up the leg of her stockings and the stockings didn’t match. Sowhen Miss Murgatroyd stopped thinking and just tried to remember whatshe saw, she remembered a good deal.
“She started, I think, near the mantelpiece, where the torch must havehit first—then it went along the two windows and there were people inbetween the windows and her. Mrs. Harmon with her knuckles screwedinto her eyes for instance. She went on in her mind following the torchpast Miss Bunner with her mouth open and her eyes staring—past a blankwall and a table with a lamp and a cigarette box. And then came the shots—and quite suddenly she remembered a most incredible thing. She’d seenthe wall where, later, there were the two bullet holes, the wall where Leti-tia Blacklock had been standing when she was shot, and at the momentwhen the revolver went off and Letty was shot, Letty hadn’t been there.…“You see what I mean now? She’d been thinking of the three womenMiss Hinchcliffe had told her to think about. If one of them hadn’t beenthere, it would have been the personality she’d have fastened upon. She’dhave said—in effect—‘That’s the one! She wasn’t there;’ But it was a placethat was in her mind—a place where someone should have been—but theplace wasn’t filled—there wasn’t anybody there. The place was there—butthe person wasn’t. And she couldn’t take it in all at once. ‘How extraordin-ary, Hinch,’ she said. ‘She wasn’t there’… So that could only mean LetitiaBlacklock….”
“But you knew before that, didn’t you?” said Bunch. “When the lampfused. When you wrote down those things on the paper.”
