Агата Кристи: Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. No. 75, April 1959, British Edition

“No, dear, not quite,” said Miss Marple, “You see, if I were going to kill anyone — which, of course, I wouldn’t dream of doing for a minute, because it would be very wicked, and besides I don’t like killing — not even wasps, though I know it has to be, and I’m sure the gardener does it as humanely as possible. Let me see, what was I saying?”

“If you wished to kill anyone,” prompted Sir Henry.

“Oh, yes. Well, if I did, I shouldn’t be at all satisfied to trust to fright. I know one reads of people dying of it, but it seems a very uncertain sort of thing, and the most nervous people are far more brave than one really thinks they are. I should like something definite and certain, and make a thoroughly good plan about it.”

“Miss Marple,” said Sir Henry, “you frighten me. I hope you will never wish to remove me.”

Miss Marple looked at him reproachfully.

“I thought I had made it clear that I would never contemplate such wickedness,” she said. “No, I was trying to put myself in the place of — er — a certain person.”

“Do you mean George Pritchard?” asked Colonel Bantry. “I’ll never believe it of George — though, mind you, even the nurse believes it. I went and saw her about a month afterward, at the time of the exhumation. She didn’t know how it was done — in fact, she wouldn’t say anything at all — but it was clear enough that she believed George to be in some way responsible for his wife’s death.”

“Well,” said Dr. Lloyd, “perhaps she wasn’t so far wrong. And mind you, a nurse often knows. She got no proof — but she knows.”

Sir Henry leaned forward.

“Come now, Miss Marple,” he said persuasively. “You’re lost in a daydream. Won’t you tell us all about it?”

Miss Marple started and turned pink.

“I beg your pardon,” she said. “I was just thinking about our District Nurse. A most difficult problem.”

“More difficult than the problem of a blue geranium?”

“It really depends on the primroses,” said Miss Marple. “I mean, Mrs. Bantry said they were yellow and pink. If it was a pink primrose that turned blue, of course, that fits in perfectly. But if it happened to be a yellow one—”

“It was a pink one,” said Mrs. Bantry.

She stared. They all stared at Miss Marple.

“Then that seems to settle it,” said Miss Marple. She shook her head regretfully. “And the wasp season and everything. And of course the gas.”

“It reminds you, I suppose, of countless village tragedies?” said Sir Henry.

“Not tragedies,” said Miss Marple. “And certainly nothing criminal. But it does remind me a little of the trouble we are having with the District Nurse. After all, nurses are human beings, and what with having to be so correct in the behavior and wearing those uncomfortable collars and being so thrown with the family — well, can you wonder that things happen?”

A glimmer of light broke upon Sir Henry.

“You mean Nurse Carstairs?”

“Oh, no. Not Nurse Carstairs. Nurse Copling. You see, she had been there before, and very much thrown with Mr. Pritchard, who you say is an attractive man. I daresay she thought, poor thing — well, we needn’t go into that. I don’t suppose she knew about Miss Instow, and of course afterward, when she found out, it turned her against him and she tried to do all the harm she could. Of course the letter really gave her away, didn’t it?”

“What letter?”

“Well, she wrote to the fortuneteller at Mrs. Pritchard’s request, and the fortune-teller came, apparently in answer to the letter. But later it was discovered that there never had been such a person at that address. So that shows that Nurse Copling was in it. She only pretended to write — so what could be more likely than that she was the fortune-teller herself?”

“I never saw the point about the letter,” said Sir Henry.

“Rather a bold step to take,” said Miss Marple, “because Mrs. Pritchard might have recognized her in spite of the disguise — though of course if she had, the nurse could have said it was a joke.”

“What did you mean,” said Sir Henry, “when you said that if you were a certain person you would not have trusted to fright?”

“One couldn’t be sure that way,” said Miss Marple. “No, I think that the warnings and the blue flowers were, if I may use a military term,” she laughed self-consciously — “just camouflage.”

“And the real thing?”

“I know,” said Miss Marple apologetically, “that I’ve got wasps on the brain. Poor things, destroyed in the thousands — and usually on such a beautiful summer’s day. But I remember thinking, when I saw the gardener shaking up the cyanide of potassium in a bottle with water, how like smelling salts it looked. And if it were put in a smelling-salt bottle and substituted for the real one — well, the poor lady was in the habit of using her smelling salts. Indeed, you said they were found by her hand. Then, of course, while Mr. Pritchard went to telephone to the doctor, the nurse would change it for the real bottle, and she’d just turn on the gas a little bit to mask any smell of almonds and in case anyone felt queer, and I always have heard that cyanide leaves no trace if you wait long enough. But, of course I may be wrong, and it may have been something entirely different in the bottle; but that doesn’t really matter, does it?”

Jane Helier leaned forward and said, “But the blue geranium, and the other flowers?”

“Nurses always have litmus paper, don’t they?” said Miss Marple, “for — well, for testing. Not a very pleasant subject. We won’t dwell on it. I have done a little nursing myself.” She grew delicately pink. “Blue turns red with acids, and red turns blue with alkalies. So easy to paste some red litmus over a ready flower — near the bed, of course. And then, when the poor lady used her smelling salts, the strong ammonia fumes would turn it blue. Really most ingenious. Of course, the geranium wasn’t blue when they first broke into the room — nobody noticed it till afterward. When nurse changed the bottles, she held the Sal Ammoniac against the wallpaper for a minute, I expect.”

“You might have been there, Miss Marple,” said Sir Henry.

“What worries me,” said Miss Marple, “is poor Mr. Pritchard and that nice girl, Miss Instow. Probably both suspecting each other and keeping apart — and life so very short.”

She shook her head.

“You needn’t worry,” said Sir Henry. “As a matter of fact I have something up my sleeve. A nurse has been arrested on a charge of murdering an elderly patient who had left her a legacy. It was done with cyanide of potassium substituted for smelling salts. Nurse Copling trying the same trick again. Miss Instow and Mr. Pritchard need have no doubts.”

“Now isn’t that nice?” cried Miss Marple. “I don’t mean about the new murder, of course. That’s very sad, and shows how much wickedness there is in the world, and that if once you give way — which reminds me I must finish my little conversation with Dr. Lloyd about the village nurse.”

The porcelain miniature was an Aladdin’s lamp that could bring Henri Pazz his heart’s desire — even against so ruthless a foe as la femme formidable.

Madame Dufour emerged from her mezzanine suite and descended marble stairs to the rococo lounge of the Chateau Plage.

Outside, beyond a bank of plate-lass doors that led to a flagged terrace and an irritable Atlantic Ocean, the late afternoon was miserable. The weather was creating one of those rare mid-January rhapsodies of wind and tropical rain that drive the Chambers of Commerce along Florida’s Gold Coast into spells of acute despair and premonitions of bankruptcy.