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that the girl had gone out for the evening without telling anybody. She based her belief, I think, on the fact that the girl was wearing a good pair of nylon stockings and her best shoes. There, however, she was proved quite wrong. The girl had obviously remembered suddenly that she had not taken in some clothes that were drying outside on the clothesline. She ran out to fetch them in, had taken down half of them apparently, when somebody took her unawares by slipping a stocking round her neck and—well, that was that.”

“Someone from outside?” said Miss Marple.

“Perhaps,” said Inspector Neele. “But perhaps someone from inside. Someone who’d been waiting his or her opportunity to get the girl alone. The girl was upset, nervous, when we first questioned her, but I’m afraid we didn’t quite appreciate the importance of that.”

“Oh, but how could you,” cried Miss Marple, “because people so often do look guilty and embarrassed when they are questioned by the police.”

“That’s just it. But this time, Miss Marple, it was rather more than that. I think the girl Gladys had seen someone performing some action that seemed to her needed explanation. It can’t, I think, have been anything very definite. Otherwise she would have spoken out. But I think she did betray the fact to the person in question. That person realized that Gladys was a danger.”

“And so Gladys was strangled and a clothes-peg clipped on her nose,” murmured Miss Marple to herself.

“Yes, that’s a nasty touch. A nasty, sneering sort of touch. Just a nasty bit of unnecessary bravado.”

Miss Marple shook her head.

“Hardly unnecessary. It does all make a pattern, doesn’t it?”

Inspector Neele looked at her curiously.

“I don’t quite follow you, Miss Marple. What do you mean by a pattern?”

Miss Marple immediately became flustered.

“Well, I mean it does seem—I mean, regarded as a sequence, if you understand—well, one can’t get away from facts, can one?”

“I don’t think I quite understand.”

“Well, I mean—first we have Mr. Fortescue. Rex Fortescue. Killed in his office in the city. And then we have Mrs. Fortescue, sitting here in the library and having tea. There were scones and honey. And then poor Gladys with the clothes-peg on her nose. Just to point the whole thing. That very charming Mrs. Lance Fortescue said to me that there didn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason in it, but I couldn’t agree with her, because it’s the rhyme that strikes one, isn’t it?”

Inspector Neele said slowly: “I don’t think—”

Miss Marple went on quickly:

“I expect you’re about thirty-five or thirty-six, aren’t you, Inspector Neele? I think there was rather a reaction just then, when you were a little boy, I mean, against nursery rhymes. But if one has been brought up on Mother Goose—I mean it is really highly significant, isn’t it? What I wondered was,” Miss Marple paused, then appearing to take her courage in her hands went on bravely: “Of course it is great impertinence I know, on my part, saying this sort of thing to you.”

“Please say anything you like, Miss Marple.”

“Well, that’s very kind of you. I shall. Though, as I say, I do it with the utmost diffidence because I know I am very old and rather muddleheaded, and I dare say my idea is of no value at all. But what I mean to say is have you gone into the question of blackbirds?”

Chapter Fourteen

I

For about ten seconds Inspector Neele stared at Miss Marple with the utmost bewilderment. His first idea was that the old lady had gone off her head.

“Blackbirds?” he repeated.

Miss Marple nodded her head vigorously.

“Yes,” she said, and forwith recited:

“ ‘Sing a song of sixpence, a pocketful of rye,

Four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie.

When the pie was opened the birds began to sing.

Wasn’t that a dainty dish to set before the king?

“ ‘The king was in his counting house, counting out his money,

The queen was in the parlour eating bread and honey,

The maid was in the garden hanging out the clothes,

When there came a little dickey bird and nipped off her nose.’ ”

“Good Lord,” Inspector Neele said.