Twenty-three
END PIECES
I“T hat old lady gives me the creeps,” said Sir Andrew McNeil, when he had said good-bye and thanks to MissMarple.
“So gentle—and so ruthless,” said the Assistant Commissioner¹.
Professor Wanstead took Miss Marple down to his car which was waiting, and then returned for a few final words.
“What do you think of her, Edmund?”
“The most frightening woman I ever met,” said the Home Secretary.
“Ruthless?” asked Professor Wanstead.
“No, no, I don’t mean that but—well, a very frightening woman.”
“Nemesis²,” said Professor Wanstead thoughtfully.
“Those two women,” said the P.P.D. man, “you know, the security agents who were looking after her, they gave amost extraordinary description of her that night. They got into the house quite easily, hid themselves in a smalldownstairs room until everyone went upstairs, then one went into the bedroom and into the wardrobe and the otherstayed outside the room to watch. The one in the bedroom said that when she threw open the door of the wardrobe andcame out, there was the old lady sitting up in bed with a pink fluffy³ shawl round her neck and a perfectly⁴ placid⁵ face,twittering away and talking like an elderly school marm. They said she gave them quite a turn.”
“A pink fluffy shawl,” said Professor Wanstead. “Yes, yes, I do remember—.”
“What do you remember?”
“Old Rafiel. He told me about her, you know, and then he laughed. He said one thing he’d never forget in all hislife. He said it was when one of the funniest scatterbrained old pussies⁶ he’d ever met came marching into his bedroomout in the West Indies, with a fluffy pink scarf round her neck, telling him he was to get up and do something toprevent a murder. And he said, ‘What on earth do you think you’re doing?’ And she said she was Nemesis. Nemesis!
He could not imagine anything less like it, he said. I like the touch of the pink woolly scarf,” said Professor Wanstead,thoughtfully, “I like that, very much.”

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