Morning+Activities+in+Chipping+Cleghorn

A Murder is Announced Chapter 12 Summary
> And he wonders why she doesn't want to talk to him.
 * Mrs. Haymes has another visitor at work; this time it's Edmund Swettenham.
 * It's pretty obvious that she doesn't want to be talking to him, but he doesn't take the hint.
 * He says he is "respectful- at a distance- but firmly pursuing", which basically means that this is a recurring thing and that he hasn't realized his advances are unwanted (106).
 * He's really not supposed to be at her work, but his excuse is that his mother wants him to trade honey for vegetable marrows.
 * The conversation then turns to Tennyson, even though Mrs. Haymes is trying to make him go away at every opportunity.
 * Edmund describes Mrs. Haymes rather rudely through a Tennyson quote, saying that she is "faultily faultless, icily regular, splendidly null" (106).
 * Now he's being pretentious and saying how he's writing a book and how he's read all these sophisticated things that taught him so much about humanity.
 * We get to know a bit about Mrs. Hayme's husband after Edmund commands her to "talk about [her] damned husband, tell me about him"(108).
 * Edmund wants to marry Mrs. Haymes. The way he phrases this is not romantic in the least.
 * According to Edmund, his worst faults are that he "sponges, he writes tripey books, he has defective eyesight and he talks to much"(108). How modest.
 * Phillipa, not surprisingly, says no, because he doesn't "know anything about anything" (108).
 * Edmund doesn't seem to care about her rejection, and begins trying to fit her name into poem.
 * Meanwhile, Sargent Fletcher is alone in Little Paddocks.
 * It's Mitzi's day off, which means she took the 11 o'clock bus into Medenham Wells.
 * Fletcher figures out that whoever oiled the door did it so that they could leave the room unnoticed. Mitzi wouldn't have needed the door, so she's been ruled out.
 * He narrows down the list even further by assuming that the neighbors wouldn't have an opportunity to oil the door. This leaves Patrick, Julia, Phillipa, and Dora.
 * After examining the wiring, Fletcher, who's apparently "an expert on electricity" can't figure out how the lights were turned out (109).
 * A search of everyone's bedrooms finds that they're all normal. Phillipa has pictures and letters from her son and a couple theater programs, Julia has pictures from France, Patrick has stuff from his Naval days, and Dora's "few personal possessions" were innocent (110).
 * Fletcher's search of the house is interrupted by Mrs. Swettenham, who just waltzed in through the side door to drop off a basket of quinces
 * Apparently, people do this all the time, because nobody has servants anymore to let people in.
 * This new information means that anyone could have gotten in to oil the door, and everybody that was there that night is still a suspect.
 * We now go over to Hinchcliffe and Murgatroyd, where Hinch has been speculating about the night of the murder.
 * Hinch makes Murgatroyd act out the part of the burglar, illustrating how difficult it would have been for him to hold a flashlight and a gun at the same time.
 * Hinch can tell there's something fishy going on with the whole thing, and says that there was probably someone helping the burglar.
 * Colonel Easterbrook is now musing to his wife about how he can't find his old revolver from the war.
 * Laura says she saw it last in his drawer, and that Mrs. Butt wouldn't have touched it.
 * She also says she saw it a week ago, the day after the murder at Little Paddocks.
 * This is great news for the Colonel, who thought it might have been stolen and used in the crime.