With a sweeping gesture she indicated Miss Marple. Miss Marple had finished the fleecy knitting and was now engaged with a crochet hook and a ball of cotton.

“That’s my expert,” said Mrs. Dane Calthrop. “Jane Marple. Look at her well. I tell you, that woman knows more about the different kinds of human wickedness than anyone I’ve ever known.”

“I don’t think you should put it quite like that, dear,” murmured Miss Marple.

“But you do.”

“One sees a good deal of human nature living in a village all the year round,” said Miss Marple placidly.

Then, seeming to feel it was expected of her, she laid down her crochet, and delivered a gentle old-maidish dissertation on murder.

“The great thing is in these cases to keep an absolutely open mind. Most crimes, you see, are so absurdly simple. This one was. Quite sane and straightforward—and quite understandable—in an unpleasant way, of course.”

“Very unpleasant!”

“The truth was really so very obvious. You saw it, you know, Mr. Burton.”

“Indeed I did not.”

“But you did. You indicated the whole thing to me. You saw perfectly the relationship of one thing to the other, but you just hadn’t enough self-confidence to see what those feelings of yours meant. To begin with, that tiresome phrase ‘No smoke without fire.’ It irritated you, but you proceeded quite correctly to label it for what it was—a smoke screen. Misdirection, you see—everybody looking at the wrong thing—the anonymous letters, but the whole point was that there weren’t any anonymous letters!”

“But my dear Miss Marple, I can assure you that there were. I had one.”

“Oh yes, but they weren’t real at all. Dear Maud here tumbled to that. Even in peaceful Lymstock there are plenty of scandals, and I can assure you any woman living in the place would have known about them and used them. But a man, you see, isn’t interested in gossip in the same way—especially a detached logical man like Mr. Symmington. A genuine woman writer of those letters would have made her letters much more to the point.

“So you see that if you disregard the smoke and come to the fire you know where you are. You just come down to the actual facts of what happened. And putting aside the letters, just one thing happened—Mrs. Symmington died.

“So then, naturally, one thinks of who might have wanted Mrs. Symmington to die, and of course the very first person one thinks of in such a case is, I am afraid, the husband. And one asks oneself is there any reason?—any motive?—for instance, another woman?