'The actress girl?' Lady Kilterbury asked, pronouncing the second word as though it were a rare and painful disease.
'She played Desdemona in the film adaptation of Othello, didn't she?' Mrs Fenn asked. 'She looked so much older than the rest of us. Look at the photograph, she looks practically twenty-eight.'
'I just find it too funny seeing little Jane in her bathing-suit,' Aubrey Fenn laughed.
Miss Marple, ignoring his snide remark, mused, 'She reminds me of the milkman's fiancée, Miss Gibson - a very trustworthy young thing, but the poor dear was quite flighty, and too talkative for her own good. Her husband had embezzled from a farm,
/only about three pounds, but after Miss Gibson blurted it out, he was fined quite a lot of money.'
'Does she?' Elizabeth Fenn yawned, stretching out her long, slender arms.
'Did they make any arrests?' Miss Marple asked. 'For her death?'
Mrs Fenn thought for a moment, then replied, 'Yes. And they kept it out of the newspapers, too, so you didn't hear about it, Bonnie.'
'Ah,' said Lady Kilterbury thoughtfully.
Lord Kilterbury entered the room, with the expression of one braving foreign wilds, his eyes squinted and hands trembling by his sides.
'Are you talking about the girl who was stabbed?' Harold Kilterbury asked, sighing. 'I thought I told you not to gossip, Gerry.'
'Yes, but they were telling me - '
She was cut off by the entrance of a woman Miss Marple recognized with surprise to be Ann Chapman - Leech, rather.
Her hair was a gingery-blonde, and her cheeks were as pale as freshly fallen snow. Her mouth had lost its elusive smile, and instead smiled familiarly, in the manner of a woman more inclined to be submissive than domineering.
'Don't look so shocked, Jane,' Annlaughed. 'I dyed my hair and rouged my cheeks all those years at school, and I sat up nights practicing my charming smile.'
'Well, I never!' Mrs Fenn cried, and Lady Kilterbury fell to the ground in a faint.