Miss Marple said gently: "I am only a stranger, but I am so very very sorry."
And suddenly, uncontrollably, Letitia Blacklog wept.
It was a piteous overmastering grief, with a kind of hopelessness about it.
Miss Marple sat quite still.
Miss Blacklog sat up at last.
Her face was swollen and blotched with tears.
"I'm sorry," she said. "It - it just came over me.
What I've lost.
She - she was the only link with the past, you see.
The only one who - who remembered.
Now that she's gone I'm quite alone."
"I know what you mean," said Miss Marple.
"One is alone when the last one who remembers is gone.
I have nephews and nieces and kind friends - but there's no one who knew me as a young girl - no one who belongs to the old days.
I've been alone for quite a long time now."
Both women sat silent for some moments.
"You understand very well," said Letitia Blacklog.
She rose and went over to her desk.
"I must write a few words to the Vicar."
She held the pen rather awkwardly and wrote slowly.
"Arthritic," she explained.
"Sometimes I can hardly write at all."
She sealed up the envelope and addressed it.
"If you wouldn't mind taking it, it would be very kind."
Hearing a man's voice in the hall she said quickly: "That's Inspector Craddock."
She went to the mirror over the fireplace and applied a small powder puff to her face.
Craddock came in with a grim, angry face.
He looked at Miss Marple with disapprobation.
"Oh," he said.
"So you're here."
Miss Blacklog turned from the mantelpiece.
"Miss Marple kindly came up with a note from the Vicar."
Miss Marple said in a flurried manner: "I am going at once - at once.
Please don't let me hamper you in any way."
"Were you at the tea party here yesterday afternoon?"
Miss Marple said, nervously: "No - no, I wasn't. Bunch drove me over to call on some friends."
"Then there's nothing you can tell me."
Craddock held the door open in a pointed manner, and Miss Marple scuttled out in a somewhat abashed fashion.
"Nosey Parkers, these old women," said Craddock.
"I think you're being unfair to her," said Miss Blacklog.
"She really did come with a note from the Vicar."
"I bet she did."
"I don't think it was idle curiosity."
"Well, perhaps you're right, Miss Blacklog, but my own diagnosis would be a severe attack of Nosey Parkeritis..."
"She's a very harmless old creature," said Miss Blacklog.
"Dangerous as a rattlesnake if you only knew," the Inspector thought grimly.
But he had no intention of taking anyone into his confidence unnecessarily.
Now that he knew definitely there was a killer at large, he felt that the less said the better.
He didn't want the next person bumped off to be Jane Marple.
Somewhere - a killer... Where?