夜雨聆风Yes, my dear. I’ve been puzzling about those lights. I’d realized thatthere were two lamps, a pair, and that one had been changed for the other—probably during the night.”
“That’s right,” said Craddock. “When Fletcher examined that lamp thenext morning it was, like all the others, perfectly in order, no frayed flexor fused wires.”
“I’d understood what Dora Bunner meant by saying it had been theshepherdess the night before,” said Miss Marple, “but I fell into the error ofthinking, as she thought, that Patrick had been responsible. The interest-ing thing about Dora Bunner was that she was quite unreliable in repeat-ing things she had heard—she always used her imagination to exaggerateor distort them, and she was usually wrong in what she thought—but shewas quite accurate about the things she saw. She saw Letitia pick up the vi-olets—”
“And she saw what she described as a flash and a crackle,” put in Crad-dock.
“And, of course, when dear Bunch spilt the water from the Christmasroses on to the lamp wire—I realized at once that only Miss Blacklock her-self could have fused the lights because only she was near that table.”
“I could kick myself,” said Craddock. “Dora Bunner even prattled abouta burn on the table where someone had ‘put their cigarette down’—butnobody had even lit a cigarette … And the violets were dead because therewas no water in the vase—a slip on Letitia’s part—she ought to have filledit up again. But I suppose she thought nobody would notice and as a mat-ter of fact Miss Bunner was quite ready to believe that she herself had putno water in the vase to begin with.”
He went on:
