Twenty-four
“N obody could have made more of a muck of it than I seem to have done,” said Dermot Craddock gloomily.
He sat, his long legs stretched out, looking somehow incongruous in faithful Florence’s somewhat overfurnishedparlour. He was thoroughly¹ tired, upset and dispirited.
Miss Marple made soft, soothing² noises of dissent³. “No, no, you’ve done very good work, my dear boy. Very goodwork indeed.”
“I’ve done very good work, have I? I’ve let a whole family be poisoned. Alfred Crackenthorpe’s dead and nowHarold’s dead too. What the hell’s going on here. That’s what I should like to know.”
“Poisoned tablets,” said Miss Marple thoughtfully.
“Yes. Devilishly cunning, really. They looked just like the tablets that he’d been having. There was a printed slipsent in with them ‘by Doctor Quimper’s instructions.’ Well, Quimper never ordered them. There were chemist’s labelsused. The chemist knew nothing about it, either. No. That box of tablets came from Rutherford Hall.”
“Do you actually know it came from Rutherford Hall?”
“Yes. We’ve had a thorough check up. Actually, it’s the box that held the sedative⁴ tablets prescribed for Emma.”
“Oh, I see. For Emma….”
“Yes. It’s got her fingerprints⁵ on it and the fingerprints of both the nurses and the fingerprint⁶ of the chemist whomade it up. Nobody else’s, naturally. The person who sent them was careful.”
“And the sedative tablets were removed and something else substituted?”
“Yes. That of course is the devil with tablets. One tablet looks exactly like another.”
“You are so right,” agreed Miss Marple. “I remember so very well in my young days, the black mixture and thebrown mixture (the cough mixture that was) and the white mixture, and Doctor So-and- So’s pink mixture. Peopledidn’t mix those up nearly as much. In fact, you know, in my village of St. Mary

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