8 MISS MAR PLE- Agatha Christie - short stories

Miss Marple nodded her head. "There was talk, I suppose," she said, "there csually is." "And now I must describe the actors in this littl151¢ drama. I will call the husband and wife Mr. and Mrs. Jon es, and the wife's companion Miss Clark. Mr. Jones was a trasveller for a firm of manufacturing chemists. He was a good-looJ°king man in a kind of coarse, florid way, aged about fifty. Hiis wife was a rather commonplace woman, of about forty-five,"' The companion, Miss Clark, was a woman of sixty, a sr5°ur cheery woman with a beaming rubicund face. None of ' them, you might say, very interesting. "Now the beginning of the troubles arose in very curious way. Mr. Jones had been staying the previous6 night at a small commercial hotel in Birmingham. It hap."Pened that the blotting paper in the blotting book had beenlno-r'ut intfr'esh that day, and the chambermaid, having apparenty nlng better to do, amused herself by studying the blc?tter in the mirror just after Mr. Jones had been writing a letrer there. A few days later there was a report in the papers of t/he death of Mrs. Jones as the result of eating tinned lobster' and the chambermaid then imparted to her fellow servant s the words that she had deciphered on the blotting pad. TIey were as follows: 'Entirely dependent on my wife ... when she is dead I will ... hundreds and thousands ...' You may remember that there had recently b n a ca.s.e of a wife being poisoned by her husband. It needed very little to fire the imagination of these maids. Mr. Jones had planned to do away with his wife and inherit undreds of thousands of pounds! As it happened one of thdr maids had relations living in the small market town where the Joneses resided. She wrote to them, and they in return vd'rote to her. Mr. Jones, it seemed, had been very attentive {o the local doctor s daughter, a good-looking young woman of thirty- three. Scandal began to hum. The Home Secret0'fy was peri-