“She started, I think, near the mantelpiece, where the torch must have hit first—then it went along the two windows and there were people in between the windows and her. Mrs. Harmon with her knuckles screwed into her eyes for instance. She went on in her mind following the torch past Miss Bunner with her mouth open and her eyes staring—past a blank wall and a table with a lamp and a cigarette box. And then came the shots—and quite suddenly she remembered a most incredible thing. She’d seen the wall where, later, there were the two bullet holes, the wall where Letitia Blacklock had been standing when she was shot, and at the moment when the revolver went off and Letty was shot, Letty hadn’t been there.…

“You see what I mean now? She’d been thinking of the three women Miss Hinchcliffe had told her to think about. If one of them hadn’t been there, it would have been the personality she’d have fastened upon. She’d have said—in effect—‘That’s the one! She wasn’t there;’ But it was a place that was in her mind—a place where someone should have been—but the place wasn’t filled—there wasn’t anybody there. The place was there—but the person wasn’t. And she couldn’t take it in all at once. ‘How extraordinary, Hinch,’ she said. ‘She wasn’t there’… So that could only mean Letitia Blacklock….”

“But you knew before that, didn’t you?” said Bunch. “When the lamp fused. When you wrote down those things on the paper.”

“Yes, my dear. It all came together then, you see—all the various isolated bits—and made a coherent pattern.”

Bunch quoted softly:

“Lamp? Yes. Violets? Yes. Bottle of Aspirin. You meant that Bunny had been going to buy a new bottle that day, and so she ought not to have needed to take Letitia’s?”

“Not unless her own bottle had been taken or hidden. It had to appear as though Letitia Blacklock was the one meant to be killed.”

“Yes, I see. And then ‘Delicious Death.’ The cake—but more than the cake. The whole party setup. A happy day for Bunny before she died. Treating her rather like a dog you were going to destroy. That’s what I find the most horrible thing of all—the sort of—of spurious kindness.”