She knit her brow and thought hard for a bit.
"I hardly know," she replied at last. "It's awfully difficult to say. There were certain tiny, unimportant things that I noticed, even before I took on the case, but taken separately not one would have meant anything much. I don't believe I can say exactly when I first began to feel uncomfortable about the situation. Perhaps I shouldn't have done so at all if it hadn't been for the pure accident of overhearing a conversation between your stepmother and Captain Holliday that afternoon I told you about."
"I know you saw them together, but you never told me you heard what they were talking about."
"Well, I did hear quite a lot. I listened hard, pretending not to, of course. I got tremendously interested. He was saying he had almost made up his mind to go to South America with his Spanish friend, and she showed very plainly that she was afraid to let him go, that she believed he wouldn't come back to her. Then she made it pretty clear that it was the attitude of a person she called 'Charles' which had caused all the trouble. Of course I didn't know who Charles was! But after that she said something which interested me enormously. She described a visit to a crystal-gazer, or a medium of some kind, and she said the woman saw 'Charles' lying ill in bed, with a nurse beside him and a doctor. And who do you think she said the doctor was? Sartorius!"
"You don't mean it!"
"You see, I had just come from Sartorius's house. I had gone there that afternoon to try to get a job. You may imagine how interested I was to find this woman was a patient of the man I expected to work for. And then … I got the idea that both Lady Clifford and the young man seemed disappointed because the medium didn't see anything further, and Captain Holliday was very bitter about it and said that Charles would recover and live to be ninety, which upset the lady very much."
"Do you think at that time…"
"No, I don't. What I believe is that Lady Clifford had no definite determination to do anything until she heard Holliday say he would probably be sailing on the 8th. I think it was the certainty of losing him so soon that drove her to take a positive step. No doubt she knew a good deal about the doctor through Holliday, and how he might be got at through his desire to be free from routine. As for him, human life as such meant nothing whatever to him—I heard him say so. All he cares for is science."
"Do you think Holliday had anything to do with it?" Roger asked tentatively, playing with the window-cord.
"I am fairly sure he hadn't, though he may have suspected something.
At the last he was dragged into it quite against his will, or at least
I got that idea. He was in a blue funk, too—simply dying to clear
out."