“You’re laughing, my dear,” said Miss Marple, “but after all, that is a very sound way of arriving at the truth. It’s really what people call intuition and make such a fuss about. Intuition is like reading a word without having to spell it out. A child can’t do that because it has had so little experience. But a grown-up person knows the word because they’ve seen it often before. You catch my meaning, Vicar?”
“Yes,” I said slowly, “I think I do. You mean that if a thing reminds you of something else—well, it’s probably the same kind of thing.”
“Exactly.”
“And what precisely does the murder of Colonel Protheroe remind you of?”
Miss Marple sighed.
“That is just the difficulty. So many parallels come to the mind. For instance, there was Major Hargreaves, a churchwarden and a man highly respected in every way. And all the time he was keeping a separate second establishment—a former housemaid, just think of it! And five children—actually five children—a terrible shock to his wife and daughter.”
I tried hard to visualize Colonel Protheroe in the role of secret sinner and failed.
“And then there was that laundry business,” went on Miss Marple. “Miss Hartnell’s opal pin—left most imprudently in a frilled blouse and sent to the laundry. And the woman who took it didn’t want it in the least and wasn’t by any means a thief. She simply hid it in another woman’s house and told the police she’d seen this other woman take it. Spite, you know, sheer spite. It’s an astonishing motive—spite. A man in it, of course. There always is.”