Title: One Glimmer of Light
Fandom: Miss Marple
Rating: G
Length: 365 words
Summary: Miss Marple is struggling for inspiration
Also written for ficlet_zone Willie Nelson challenge

“Surely, Jane, you must have some idea about who could have done such a thing?” Dolly Bantry asked her friend.

“Sadly, whatever angle I try and look at it from I come up against a complete blank,” Miss Marple replied. “And the trouble is, even when I try to do something else for a while to take my mind off it, I still find myself thinking through the possible strands and getting nowhere.”

“It’s rather like one of those church services, when we sit in complete darkness and the vicar says something like ‘darkness was on the face of the earth’, although I’m not sure those are quite the right words.”

“And then at the back, a candle is lit and slowly the flame is passed from candle to candle until the whole church is ablaze with light.” Miss Marple was beginning to sound excited.

“Jane, you’ve had an idea!”

“Just a tiny one, but if I’m right… Come along, Dolly, we have some enquiries to make.”

***

A few hours later, Miss Marple was explaining to Inspector Slack that Hetty Brown and her friend Geraldine Watkins hadn’t seen Malcolm Briggs on the bus on the day in question.

“I fail to grasp the significance of this,” Inspector Slack said. “And are you sure these schoolgirls are reliable witnesses? They might have got the day confused.”

“I asked them both individually and they both gave me the same answer. Now, if I said Briggs wasn’t there, you would believe me, wouldn’t you?”

“Of course.”

“Then I suggest you believe two extremely intelligent schoolgirls.”

“Very well. But I still don’t see why it matters?”

“Briggs never actually said he was on the bus, but witnesses agreed they’d seen him walking along the street just after the bus left.”

“So what you’re saying is that he could have arrived earlier and set everything up, then returned to the scene of the crime to remove certain traces afterwards.”

“I think that is highly possible.”

“But what led you down this way?”

“I told myself if I could find one little flame, namely that he wasn’t on the bus, then that would begin to shine light on everything else.”