“The simple fact that Mrs. Plant received a note from old Stanworth, saying that he was going to kill himself for private reasons of his own or something.”
“Oh!”
“I can tell you, it knocked me upside down for the minute. Anything more unexpected I couldn’t have imagined. And the trouble is that I don’t see how we can possibly get round it. A note like that is a very different matter to that statement.”
“You know, I’m not sure that I’m altogether surprised that something like this has turned up,” Alec said slowly. “I was never quite so convinced by the murder idea as you were. After all, when you come to look at all the facts of the case, although they certainly seemed to be consistent with murder, were no less consistent with suicide, weren’t they?”
“So it appears,” Roger said regretfully.
“It was simply that you’d got the notion of murder into your head—more picturesque, I suppose—and everything had to be construed to fit it, eh?”
“I suppose so.”
“In fact,” Alec concluded wisely, “it was an idée fixe, and everything else was sacrificed to it. Isn’t that right?”
“Alexander, you put me to shame,” Roger murmured.
“Well, anyhow, that shows you what comes of muddling in other people’s affairs,” Alec pointed out severely. “And it’s lucky you hit on the truth before you made a still bigger idiot of yourself.”