“My head aches,” said Miss Blacklock in a dull voice. She pressed her fingers to her forehead. “Why should Hinch murder Miss Marple? It doesn’t make sense.”

“It would if Hinch had really murdered Murgatroyd,” said Patrick triumphantly.

Phillipa came out of her apathy to say:

“Hinch wouldn’t murder Murgatroyd.”

“She might have if Murgatroyd had blundered on something to show that she—Hinch—was the criminal.”

“Anyway, Hinch was at the station when Murgatroyd was killed.”

“She could have murdered Murgatroyd before she left.”

Startling them all, Letitia Blacklock suddenly screamed out:

“Murder, murder, murder—! Can’t you talk of anything else? I’m frightened, don’t you understand? I’m frightened. I wasn’t before. I thought I could take care of myself … But what can you do against a murderer who’s waiting—and watching—and biding his time! Oh, God!”

She dropped her head forward on her hands. A moment later she looked up and apologized stiffly.

“I’m sorry. I—I lost control.”

“That’s all right, Aunt Letty,” said Patrick affectionately. “I’ll look after you.”

“You?” was all Letitia Blacklock said, but the disillusionment behind the word was almost an accusation.

That had been shortly before dinner, and Mitzi had then created a diversion by coming and declaring that she was not going to cook the dinner.

“I do not do anything more in this house. I go to my room. I lock myself in. I stay there until it is daylight. I am afraid—people are being killed—that Miss Murgatroyd with her stupid English face—who would want to kill her? Only a maniac! Then it is a maniac that is about! And a maniac does not care who he kills. But me, I do not want to be killed. There are shadows in the kitchen—and I hear noises—I think there is someone out in the yard and then I think I see a shadow by the larder door and then it is footsteps I hear. So I go now to my room and I lock the door and perhaps even I put the chest of drawers against it. And in the morning I tell that cruel hard policeman that I go away from here. And if he will not let me I say: ‘I scream and I scream and I scream until you have to let me go!’”

Everybody, with a vivid recollection of what Mitzi could do in the screaming line, shuddered at the threat.

“So I go to my room,” said Mitzi, repeating the statement once more to make her intentions quite clear. With a symbolic action she cast off the cretonne apron she had been wearing. “Good night, Miss Blacklock. Perhaps in the morning, you may not be alive. So in case that is so, I say good-bye.”

She departed abruptly and the door, with its usual gentle little whine, closed softly after her.

Julia got up.