‘I know just the sort of thing you mean, dear,’ said Miss Marple. ‘For instance Mrs Carruthers had a very strange experience yesterday morning. She bought two gills of picked shrimps at Elliot’s. She called at two other shops and when she got home she found she had not got the shrimps with her. She went back to the two shops she had visited but these shrimps had completely disappeared. Now that seems to me very remarkable.’

‘A very fishy story,’ said Sir Henry Clithering gravely.

‘There are, of course, all kinds of possible explanations,’ said Miss Marple, her cheeks growing slightly pinker with excitement. ‘For instance, somebody else—’

‘My dear Aunt,’ said Raymond West with some amusement, ‘I didn’t mean that sort of village incident. I was thinking of murders and disappearances—the kind of thing that Sir Henry could tell us about by the hour if he liked.’

‘But I never talk shop,’ said Sir Henry modestly. ‘No, I never talk shop.’

Sir Henry Clithering had been until lately Commissioner of Scotland Yard.

‘I suppose there are a lot of murders and things that never are solved by the police,’ said Joyce Lemprière.

‘That is an admitted fact, I believe,’ said Mr Petherick.

‘I wonder,’ said Raymond West, ‘what class of brain really succeeds best in unravelling a mystery? One always feels that the average police detective must be hampered by lack of imagination.’

‘That is the layman’s point of view,’ said Sir Henry dryly.

‘You really want a committee,’ said Joyce, smiling. ‘For psychology and imagination go to the writer—’

She made an ironical bow to Raymond but he remained serious.

‘The art of writing gives one an insight into human nature,’ he said gravely. ‘One sees, perhaps, motives that the ordinary person would pass by.’

‘I know, dear,’ said Miss Marple, ‘that your books are very clever. But do you think that people are really so unpleasant as you make them out to be?’

‘My dear Aunt,’ said Raymond gently, ‘keep your beliefs. Heaven forbid that I should in any way shatter them.’

‘I mean,’ said Miss Marple, puckering her brow a little as she counted the stitches in her knitting, ‘that so many people seem to me not to be either bad or good, but simply, you know, very silly.’

Mr Petherick gave his dry little cough again.

‘Don’t you think, Raymond,’ he said, ‘that you attach too much weight to imagination? Imagination is a very dangerous thing, as we lawyers know only too well. To be able to sift evidence impartially, to take the facts and look at them as facts—that seems to me the only logical method of arriving at the truth. I may add that in my experience it is the only one that succeeds.’

‘Bah!’ cried Joyce, flinging back her black head indignantly. ‘I bet I could beat you all at this game. I am not only a woman—and say what you like, women have an intuition that is denied to men—I am an artist as well. I see things that you don’t. And then, too, as an artist I have knocked about among all sorts and conditions of people. I know life as darling Miss Marple here cannot possibly know it.’