Mrs McGinty’s Dead. Agatha Christie

an elderly lady who lives with her son. They’ve got a maid, but she’s getting on, and Mrs McGinty used to go once a week to give things a good turn out. Mr and Mrs Wetherby never seem to keep any help long—she’s rather an invalid. Mr and Mrs Carpenter have a beautiful home and do a lot of entertaining. They’re all very nice people.’

      It was with this final pronouncement on the population of Broadhinny that Poirot went out into the street again.

      He walked slowly up the hill towards Long Meadows. He hoped devoutly that the contents of the bulged tin and the bloodstained beans had been duly eaten for lunch and had not been saved for a supper treat for him. But possibly there were other doubtful tins. Life at Long Meadows certainly had its dangers.

      It had been, on the whole, a disappointing day.

      What had he learned?

      That James Bentley had a friend. That neither he nor Mrs McGinty had had any enemies. That Mrs McGinty had looked excited two days before her death and had bought a bottle of ink—

      Poirot stopped dead…Was that a fact, a tiny fact at last?

      He had asked idly, what Mrs McGinty should want with a bottle of ink, and Mrs Sweetiman had replied, quite seriously, that she supposed she wanted to write a letter.

      There was significance there—a significance that had nearly escaped him because to him, as to most people, writing a letter was a common everyday occurrence.

      But it was not so to Mrs McGinty. Writing a letter was to Mrs McGinty such an uncommon occurrence that she had to go out and buy a bottle of ink if she wanted to do so.

      Mrs McGinty, then, hardly ever wrote letters. Mrs Sweetiman, who was the postmistress, was thoroughly cognisant of the fact. But Mrs McGinty had written a letter two days before her death. To whom had she written and why?

      It might be quite unimportant. She might have written to her niece—to an absent friend. Absurd to lay such stress on a simple thing like a bottle of ink.

      But it was all he had got and he was going to follow it up.

      A bottle of ink…