hair like a man and wore mannish coats and skirts.
"Dear me," I said, "that makes it very dif-ficult.''
MISS MARPLE TELLS A STORY
137
Mr. Petherick looked inquiringly at me, but I
didn't want to say any more just then, so I asked
what Sir Malcolm Olde had said.
Sir Malcolm Olde, it seemed, was going all out
for suicide. Mr. Petherick said the medical evi-dence
was dead against this, and there was the ab-sence
of fingerprints, but Sir Malcolm was confi-dent
of being able to call conflicting medical testi-mony
and to suggest some way of getting over the
fingerprint difficulty. I asked Mr. Rhodes what
he thought and he said all doctors were fools but
he himself couldn't really believe his wife had
killed herself. "She wasn't that kind of woman,"
he said simply--and I believed him. Hysterical
people don't usually commit suicide.
I thought a minute and then I asked if the door
from Mrs. Rhodes' room led straight into the cor-ridor.
Mr. Rhodes said no--there was a little hall-way
with bathroom and lavatory. It was the door
from the bedroom to the hallway that was locked
and bolted on the inside.
"In that case," I said, "the whole thing seems
to me remarkably simple."
And really, you know, it did .... The simplest
thing in the world. And yet no one seemed to have
seen it that way.