With a start, the Inspector wrenched himself away from his speculations.
Miss Marple was missing.
He must go to the Vicarage.
He found Bunch and her husband waiting for him, their faces anxious and drawn.
"She hasn't come back," said Bunch.
"Did she say she was coming back here when she left Boulders?" asked Julian.
"She didn't actually say so," said Craddock slowly, throwing his mind back to the last time he had seen Jane Marple.
He remembered the grimness of her lips and the severe frosty light in those usually gentle blue eyes.
Grimness, an inexorable determination... to do what?
To go where?
"She was talking to Sergeant Fletcher when I last saw her," he said.
"Just by the gate.
And then she went through it and out.
I took it she was going straight home to the Vicarage.
I would have sent her in the car - but there was so much to attend to, and she slipped away very quietly.
Fletcher may know something!
Where's Fletcher?"
But Sergeant Fletcher, it seemed, as Craddock learned when he rang up Boulders, was neither to be found there nor had he left any message where he had gone.
There was some idea that he had returned to Milchester for some reason.
The Inspector rang up headquarters in Milchester, but no news of Fletcher was to be found there.
Then Craddock turned to Bunch as he remembered what she had told him over the telephone.
"Where's that paper?
You said she'd been writing something on a bit of paper."
Bunch brought it to him.
He spread it out on the table and looked down on it.
Bunch leant over his shoulder and spelled it out as he read.
The writing was shaky and not easy to read: Lamp.
Then came the word "Violets".
Then after a space: Where is bottle of aspirin?
The next item in this curious list was more difficult to make out.
"Delicious Death," Bunch read.
"That's Mitzi's cake."
"Making enquiries," read Craddock.
"Inquiries?
What about, I wonder?
What's this?
Severe affliction bravely borne... What on earth?"
"Iodine," read the Inspector.
"Pearls.
Ah, pearls."
"And then Lotty - no, Letty.
Her e's look like o's.
And then Berne.
And what's this?
Old Age Pension..."
They looked at each other in bewilderment.
Craddock recapitulated swiftly:
"Lamp.
Violets.
Where is bottle of aspirin?