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By Root 474 0

She became very fond of Phillipa and I think, unconsciously, it helped to stifle any qualms of conscience she may have had. She told herself that when she inherited the money, she was going to look after Phillipa. She would treat her as a daughter. Phillipa and Harry should live with her. She felt quite happy and beneficent about it. But once the Inspector began asking questions and finding out about ‘Pip and Emma’ Charlotte became very uneasy. She didn’t want to make a scapegoat of Phillipa. Her whole idea had been to make the business look like a hold-up by a young criminal and his accidental death. But now, with the discovery of the oiled door, the whole viewpoint was changed. And, except for Phillipa, there wasn’t (as far as she knew, for she had absolutely no idea of Julia’s identity) anyone with the least possible motive for wishing to kill her. She did her best to shield Phillipa’s identity. She was quick-witted enough to tell you when you asked her, that Sonia was small and dark and she took the old snapshots out of the album so that you shouldn’t notice any resemblance at the same time as she removed snapshots of Letitia herself.”

“And to think I suspected Mrs. Swettenham of being Sonia Goedler,” said Craddock disgustedly.

“My poor mamma,” murmured Edmund. “A woman of blameless life—or so I have always believed.”

“But of course,” Miss Marple went on, “it was Dora Bunner who was the real danger. Every day Dora got more forgetful and more talkative. I remember the way Miss Blacklock looked at her the day we went to tea there. Do you know why? Dora had just called her Lotty again. It seemed to us a mere harmless slip of the tongue. But it frightened Charlotte. And so it went on. Poor Dora could not stop herself talking. That day we had coffee together in the Bluebird, I had the oddest impression that Dora was talking about two people, not one—and so, of course, she was. At one moment she spoke of her friend as not pretty but having so much character—but almost at the same moment she described her as a pretty lighthearted girl. She’d talk of Letty as so clever and so successful—and then say what a sad life she’d had, and then there was that quotation about stern affliction bravely borne—which really didn’t seem to fit Letitia’s life at all. Charlotte must, I think, have overheard a good deal that morning she came into the café. She certainly must have heard Dora mention about the lamp having been changed—about its being the shepherd and not the shepherdess. And she realized then what a very real danger to her security poor devoted Dora Bunner was.

“I’m afraid that that conversation with me in the café really sealed Dora’s fate—if you’ll excuse such a melodramatic expression. But I think it would have come to the same in the end … Because life couldn’t be safe for Charlotte while Dora Bunner was alive. She loved Dora—she didn’t want to kill Dora—but she couldn’t see any other way. And, I expect (like Nurse Ellerton that I was telling you about, Bunch) she persuaded herself that it was almost a kindness. Poor Bunny—not long to live anyway and perhaps a painful end. The queer thing is that she did her best to make Bunny’s last day a happy day. The birthday party—and the special cake….”

“Delicious Death,” said Phillipa with a shudder.

“Yes—yes, it was rather like that … she tried to give her friend a delicious death … The party, and all the things she liked to eat, and trying to stop people saying things to upset her. And then the tablets, whatever they were, in the aspirin bottle by her own bed so that Bunny, when she couldn’t find the new bottle of aspirin she’d just bought, would go there to get some. And it would look, as it did look, that the tablets had been meant for Letitia. …

“And so Bunny died in her sleep, quite happily, and Charlotte felt safe again. But she missed Dora Bunner—she missed her affection and her loyalty, she missed being able to talk to her about the old days … She cried bitterly the day I came up with that note from Julian—and her grief was quite genuine. She’d killed her own dear friend