Miss Marple turned to me.
"You were quite right about that, too, Mr. Burton.
A 'scrap of paper' was all wrong.
People don't leave suicide notes on small torn scraps of paper.
They use a sheet of paper - and very often an envelope too.
Yes, the scrap of paper was wrong and you knew it."
"You are rating me too high," I said.
"I knew nothing."
"But you did, you really did, Mr. Burton.
Otherwise why were you immediately impressed by the message your sister left scribbled on the telephone pad?"
I repeated slowly: "'Say that I can't go on Friday'I see!
'I can't go on'?"
Miss Marple beamed on me.
"Exactly.
Mr. Symmington came across such a message and saw its possibilities.
He tore off the words he wanted for when the time came - a message genuinely in his wife's handwriting."
"Was there any further brilliance on my part?" I asked.
Miss Marple twinkled at me.
"You put me on the track, you know.
You assembled those facts together for me - in sequence - and on top of it you told me the most important thing of all - that Elsie Holland had never received any anonymous letters."
"Do you know," I said, "last night I thought that she was the letter writer and that that was why there had been no letters written to her?"
"Oh, dear me, no... The person who writes anonymous letters practically always sends them to herself as well.
That's part of the - well, the excitement, I suppose.
No, no, the fact interested me for quite another reason.
It was really, you see, Mr. Symmington's one weakness.
He couldn't bring himself to write a foul letter to the girl he loved.
It's a very interesting sidelight on human nature - and a credit to him, in a way - but it's where he gave himself away."
Joanna said, "And he killed Agnes?
But surely that was quite unnecessary?"
"Perhaps it was, but what you don't realize, my dear (not having killed anyone) is that your judgement is distorted afterward and everything seems exaggerated.
No doubt he heard the girl telephoning to Partridge, saying she'd been worried ever since Mrs. Symmington's death, that there was something she didn't understand.
He can't take any chances - this stupid foolish girl has seen something, knows something."
"Yet apparently he was at his office all that afternoon?"
"I should imagine he killed her before he went.
Miss Holland was in the dining room and kitchen.
He just went out into the hall, opened and shut the front door as though he was going out, then slipped into the little cloakroom.
"When only Agnes was left in the house, he probably rang the frontdoor bell, slipped back into the cloakroom, came out behind her and hit her on the head as she was opening the front door, and then after thrusting the body into the cupboard, he hurried along to his office, arriving just a little late if anyone had happened to notice it, but they probably didn't.
You see, no one was suspecting a man."
"Abominable brute," said Mrs. Dane Calthrop.
"You're not sorry for him, Mrs. Dane Calthrop?" I inquired.
"Not in the least.
Why?"
"I'm glad to hear it, that's all."
Joanna said:
"But why Aimйe Griffith?
I know that the police have found the pestle taken from Owen's dispensary - and the skewer too.
I suppose it's not so easy for a man to return things to kitchen drawers.
And guess where they were? Superintendent Nash only told me just now when I met him on my way here.
In one of those musty old deed boxes in his office.
Estate of Sir Jasper Harrington-West, deceased."