'She wasn't there' it wouldn't have meant the same thing."
"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 see things, 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.
I could have drawn it for you afterward.
And once, when there was a fly-bomb in London - splinters of glass everywhere - and the shock - but what I remember best is a woman standing in front of me who had a big hole half-way up the leg of her stockings and the stockings didn't match.
So when Miss Murgatroyd stopped thinking and just tried to remember what she saw, she remembered a good deal.
"She started, I think, near the mantelpiece, where the torch must have hit first - then it went along the two windows and there were people in between the windows and her. Mrs. Harmon with her knuckles screwed into her eyes for instance.
She went on in her mind following the torch past Miss Bunner with her mouth open and her eyes staring - past a blank wall 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 seen the wall where, later, there were the two bullet holes, the wall where Letitia Blacklog had been standing when she was shot, and at the moment when 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 women Miss Hinchliffe had told her to think about.
If one of them hadn't been there, it would have been the personality she'd have fastened upon.
She'd have said - in effect -
'That's the one!
She wasn't there!'
But it was a place that was in her mind - a place where someone should have been - but the place wasn't filled - there wasn't anybody there. The place was there but the person wasn't.
And she couldn't take it in all at once.
'How extraordinary, Hinch,' she said.
'She wasn't there.'... So that could only mean Letitia Blacklog..."
"But you knew before that, didn't you?" said Bunch. "When the lamp fused.
When you wrote down those things on the paper."
"Yes, my dear.
It all came together then, you see all the various isolated bits and made a coherent pattern."
Bunch quoted softly:
"Lamp? Yes.
Violets? Yes.
Battle of Aspirin. You meant that Bunny had been going to buy a new bottle that day, and so she ought not to have needed to take Letitia's?"
"Not unless her own bottle had been taken or hidden.
It had to appear as though Letitia Blacklog was the one meant to be killed."
"Yes, I see.
And then
'Delicious Death.'
The cake but more than the cake.
The whole party set-up.
A happy day for Bunny before she died.
Treating her rather like a dog you were going to destroy.
That's what I find the most horrible thing of all - the sort of spurious kindness."
"She was quite a kindly woman.
What she said at the last in the kitchen was quite true.
'I didn't want to kill anybody.' What she wanted was a great deal of money that didn't belong to her!
And before that desire (and it had become a kind of obsession - the money was to pay her back for all the suffering life had inflicted on her) everything else went to the wall.
People with a grudge against the world are always dangerous.
They seem to think life owes them something.
I've known many an invalid who has suffered far worse and been cut off from life much more than Charlotte Blacklog - and they've managed to lead happy contented lives.
It's what's in yourself that makes you happy or unhappy.
But, oh dear, I'm afraid I'm straying away from what we were talking about.