14 MISS MARPLE - Agatha Christie - short stories

more lobster than the others, in great pain, and he sends, as you told us, for some opium pills. He does not go himself, he sends. Who will give the messenger the opium pills? Clearly his daughter. Very likely she dispenses his medicines for him. She is in love with Jones and at this moment all the worst instincts in her nature rise and she realizes that the means to procure his freedom are in her hands. The pills she sends contain pure white arsenic. That is my solution." "And now Sir Henry, tell us," said Joyce eagerly. "One moment," said Sir Henry, "Miss Marple has not yet spoken." "Dear, dear," she said. "I have dropped another stitch. I have been so interested in the story. A sad case, a very sad case. It reminds me of old Mr. Hargraves who lived up at the Mount. His wife never had the least suspicion--until he died, leaving all his money to a woman he had been living with and by whom he had had five children. She had at one time been their housemaid. Such a nice girl, Mrs. Hargraves always said---thoroughly to be relied upon to turn the mattresses every day---except Fridays, of course. And there was old Hargraves keeping this woman in a house in the neigh-bouring town and continuing to be a Churchwarden and to hand round the plate every Sunday." "My dear Aunt Jane," said Raymond with some impatience. "What have dead and gone Hargraves got to do with the case?" "This story made me think of him at once," said Miss Marple. "The facts are so very alike, aren't they? I suppose the poor girl has confessed now and that is how you know, Sir Henry." "What girl?" said Raymond. "My dear Aunt, what are you talking about?" "That poor girl, Gladys Linch, of course--the one who was so terribly agitated when the doctor spoke to her--and