Twenty-two
A M AN IN H ER L IFE?
G etting a little chat in a natural manner with Dr. Graham was not so easy as Miss Marple had hoped. She wasparticularly anxious not to approach him directly since she did not want to lend undue¹ importance to the questions thatshe was going to ask him.
Tim was back, looking after Molly, and Miss Marple had arranged that she should relieve him there during the timethat dinner was served and he was needed in the dining room. He had assured her that Mrs. Dyson was quite willing totake that on, or even Mrs. Hillingdon, but Miss Marple said firmly that they were both young women who likedenjoying themselves and that she herself preferred a light meal early and so that would suit everybody. Tim once againthanked her warmly. Hovering² rather uncertainly round the hotel and on the pathway which connected with variousbungalows, among them Dr. Graham’s, Miss Marple tried to plan what she was going to do next.
She had a lot of confused and contradictory⁴ ideas in her head and if there was one thing that Miss Marple did notlike, it was to have confused and contradictory ideas. This whole business had started out clearly enough. MajorPalgrave with his regrettable capacity for telling stories, his indiscretion that had obviously been overheard and thecorollary, his death within twenty-four hours. Nothing difficult about that, thought Miss Marple.
But afterwards, she was forced to admit, there was nothing but difficulty. Everything pointed⁵ in too many differentdirections at once. Once admit that you didn’t believe a word that anybody had said to you, that nobody could betrusted, and that many of the persons with whom she had conversed⁶ here had regrettable resemblances to certainpersons at St. Mary Mead⁷, and where did that lead you?
Her mind was increasingly focused on the victim. Someone was going to be killed and she had the increasingfeeling that she ought to know quite well who that someone was. There had been something. Something she hadheard? Noticed? Seen?
Something someone had told her that had a bearing on the case. Joan Prescott? Joan Prescott had said a lot ofthings about a lot of people. Scandal? Gossip? What exactly had Joan Prescott said?

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