The Regatta Mystery and Other Stories (Hercule Poirot 21)

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.