The investigation that now sets in is completely in the hands of amateurs: Giles and Gwenda Reed and Miss Marple. Miss Marple, who first advises the young couple to 'let sleeping murder lie', later suggests to her own doctor that he prescribe her some sea air, and she travels to Dillmouth. The young couple realize that there may be an unsolved crime to investigate. Her father, devastated by his wife's disappearance and convinced he murdered her, sent Gwenda to New Zealand to be raised by an aunt and died soon afterward in an asylum. Her young stepmother, Helen, disappeared, having presumably run off with a man. The Reeds and Miss Marple do a bit of research, and they discover that Gwenda is not psychic at all, but in fact she did spend a year during early childhood in the house she was later to buy.

Miss Marple suggests that she may be remembering something she witnessed as a small child (looking through rather than over the banisters), and that it may have happened in the house she has just bought, despite her belief that she has never been in England before. She insists that she does not know anyone named Helen, and she believes she is going mad. Miss Marple's interest is piqued when, at a performance of John Webster's The Duchess of Malfi, Gwenda screams and flees the theatre - for no reason that even she understands - when she hears the actor speaking the famous line, 'Cover her face mine eyes dazzle she died young.' Gwenda tells Miss Marple later that as she heard those words, she felt she was looking down through the banisters at the dead, blue face of someone named Helen, strangled by a man uttering the same line. Becoming increasingly uneasy, she accepts an invitation to stay for a few days in London with Miss Marple's somewhat pretentious nephew Raymond West and his wife Joan (who appear also in other stories with Miss Marple). She finds an old house in the small seaside resort of Dillmouth, in Devon, which instantly appeals to her, and she buys it.Īfter moving in, Gwenda begins to believe that she must be psychic, as she seems to know things about the house which she could not possibly know: the location of a connecting door that had been walled over, the pattern of a previous wallpaper, a set of steps in the garden that are not where they should be, and so on. While her husband Giles is still abroad on business, she drives around the countryside looking for a suitable house. She believes that her father took her directly from India to New Zealand when she was a two year-old girl and that she has never been in England before. 'Let sleeping murder lie': this is the proverb (a variation on 'Let sleeping dogs lie') which is not obeyed by twenty-one year old New Zealander Gwenda Reed (née Halliday), who has recently married and now comes to England to settle down there.

Marple sleeping murders