Myrna Murgatroyd’s murder is Charlotte Blacklock’s attempt to silence the one witness whose recovered memory could undo the staged shooting at Little Paddocks. Its significance lies in the way an apparently small distinction—whether a person or a place was absent—reconstructs the crime, and in how Charlotte’s fear turns that recognition into a second murder.

Background and the recovered memory

After Miss Hinchcliffe urged her friend to recall what she had seen during the shooting, Charlotte Blacklock came to understand that Murgatroyd might be dangerous to her. Charlotte had assumed that everyone would be watching Rudi Scherz, the apparent intruder. She had not considered that someone might instead remember the room’s arrangement and the people in it. From outside the cottage, she heard Miss Hinchcliffe prompting Murgatroyd to think back, and then heard Murgatroyd call after her, “She wasn’t there…”

The phrase initially sounded like it might identify one of the women under discussion. Miss Marple explains that Murgatroyd was instead recalling an unoccupied place. As she mentally retraced the flashlight’s movement—from the mantelpiece past the windows and the people between them—she remembered the wall where the bullet holes appeared and where Letitia Blacklock was later understood to have stood. At the moment Letitia was supposedly shot, however, Letitia had not been there. The absence, rather than the identity of a person who was present, was the crucial observation.

The murder

Once Charlotte realized that Murgatroyd had reached this conclusion, she had only a short interval in which to prevent her from telling anyone. Miss Hinchcliffe had gone to the station; when she returned, Murgatroyd could explain what she had remembered. Miss Marple’s reconstruction is that Charlotte went to the cottage, greeted Murgatroyd, and killed her by strangling her. The act was not prepared as a staged scene: it was a hurried, direct attempt to silence a witness before the memory could be shared.

Charlotte then rushed home, changed, and sat by the fire before the others returned, presenting herself as if she had not been away. That return to an ordinary domestic scene contrasts with the urgency of the killing: the appearance of calm was part of her effort to conceal that she had acted to protect her secret.

Consequences and significance

Murgatroyd’s remembered absence connects the staged shooting to Charlotte’s impersonation of Letitia Blacklock. The murder does not erase the clue; it demonstrates how threatening the clue had become. A fleeting impression, initially difficult for Murgatroyd to interpret, proves more revealing than the attention everyone paid to Rudi Scherz and the apparent gun attack.

The killing also belongs to a tightening progression of danger around Charlotte. Miss Marple describes her as frightened and increasingly unable to reason clearly. After Murgatroyd’s death, the revelation of Julia’s identity and the possibility that others might notice Charlotte’s scar add to her alarm; later, when Mitzi becomes another perceived threat, Charlotte considers silencing her too. Murgatroyd’s murder is therefore both an effort to preserve the impersonation and a turning point in Charlotte’s loss of control, as the need to suppress one remembered fact leads toward further danger.