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By Root 567 0

one after another of the young men round hereabouts to help them. Geoffrey Grant they had up. They were pretty sure it was him to begin with. He was always a bit queer, ever since he was a boy. Interfered with little girls going to school, you know. He used to offer them sweets and get them to come down the lanes with him and see the primroses, or something like that. Yes, they had very strong suspicions about him. But it wasn’t him. And then there was another one. Bert Williams, but he’d been far away on two occasions, at least — what they call an alibi, so it couldn’t be him. And then at last it came to this — what’s-is-name, I can’t remember him now. Luke I think his name was — no Mike something. Very nice-looking, as I say, but he had a bad record. Yes, stealing, forging cheques, all sorts of things like that. And two what-you-call ’em paternity cases, no, I don’t mean that, but you know what I mean. When a girl’s going to have a baby. You know and they make an order and make the fellow pay. He’d got two girls in the family way before this.’

‘Was this girl in the family way?’

‘Oh yes, she was. At first we thought when the body was found it might have been Nora Broad. That was Mrs Broad’s niece, down at the mill shop. Great one for going with the boys, she was. She’d gone away missing from home in the same way. Nobody knew where she was. So when this body turned up six months later they thought at first it was her.’

‘But it wasn’t?’

‘No — someone quite different.’

‘Did her body ever turn up?’

‘No. I suppose it might some day, but they think on the whole it was pushed into the river. Ah well, you never know, do you? You never know what you may dig up off a ploughed field or something like that. I was taken once to see all that treasure. Luton Loo was it — some name like that? Somewhere in the East Counties. Under a ploughed field it was. Beautiful. Gold ships and Viking ships and gold plate, enormous great platters. Well, you never know. Any day you may turn up a dead body or you may turn up a gold platter. And it may be hundreds of years old like that gold plate was, or it may be a three- or four-years-old body, like Mary Lucas who’d been missing for four years, they say. Somewhere near Reigate she was found. Ah well, all these things! It’s a sad life. Yes, it’s a very sad life. You never know what’s coming.’

‘There was another girl who’d lived here, wasn’t there?’ said Miss Marple, ‘who was killed.’

‘You mean the body they thought was Nora Broad’s but it wasn’t? Yes. I’ve forgotten her name now. Hope, it was, I think. Hope or Charity. One of those sort of names, if you know what I mean. Used to be used a lot in Victorian times but you don’t hear them so much nowadays. Lived at the Manor House, she did. She’d been there for some time after her parents were killed.’

‘Her parents died in an accident, didn’t they?’

‘That’s right. In a plane going to Spain or Italy, one of those places.’

‘And you say she came to live here? Were they relations of hers?’

‘I don’t know if they were relations, but Mrs Glynne as she is now, was I think a great friend of her mother’s or something that way. Mrs Glynne, of course, was married and gone abroad but Miss Clotilde — that’s the eldest one, the dark one — she was very fond of the girl. She took her abroad, to Italy and France and all sorts of places, and she had her trained a bit of typewriting and shorthand and that sort of thing, and art classes too. She’s very arty, Miss Clotilde is. Oh, she was mighty fond of the girl. Broken-hearted she was when she disappeared. Quite different to Miss Anthea — ’

‘Miss Anthea is the youngest one, isn’t she?’

‘Yes. Not quite all there, some people say. Scatty like, you know, in her mind. Sometimes you see her walking along, talking to herself, you know, and tossing her head in a very queer way. Children get frightened of her sometimes. They say she’s a bit queer about things. I don’t know. You hear everything in a village, don’t you? The great-uncle who lived here before, he was a bit peculiar too. Used to practise revolver shooting in