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In the authorized continuation Miss Marple short story The Unravelling, Mr Weaver and his wife Penny ran the local village haberdasher shop. The Weavers were a popular couple.

The villagers were especially sympathetic to them because they had a difficult war. Mr Weaver had volunteered to join the navy and after a while news about him dried up. While many villagers either came back to the village after the war, or were otherwise accounted for, there was no newz of Mr Weaver for a long time. He finally showed up at the village many years later looking rather lost and like he had travelled far and hard. The villagers naturally welcomed him and were too polite to ask where he had been or what he had been through.

Generally considered a mild mannered person, it seemed strange to the villagers that he should get into an altercation with the farm hand Martin in the village square over a minor matter of moving his pigs. Even more strange, Martin was found dead the next day, shot through with an arrow which had been broken off. Many witnesses agreed that Weaver had been the aggressor and no one else admitted any connection with Martin. Thus Sergeant Dover had no choice but to arrest Weaver as the only plausible suspect. To Miss Marple, however, Weaver could not have killed Martin. He had "the shakes" as the result of his experience during the war. His wife had to do the weighing and the cutting of the cloth. He could not have aimed a bowed and shot an arrow accurately.

Weaver was released shortly after his arrest because some anonymous witnesses gave him an alibi. However Miss Marple noted that after his release, Weaver looked "weighed down" rather than happy.

Discerning the truth behind these strange events would form the main challenge for Miss Marple in the rest of the story.

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