“I thought you’d be interested, sir,” said the inspector blandly. “So it’s the Rev. Samuel Meadows, is it? I thought I’d seen that man’s face before, if you remember. Must have had a photograph of him through my hands.”
“Herbert Peters!” Roger murmured raptly. “Do you know, I guessed right inside me that he’d turn out to be Mrs. Vane’s husband, but I daren’t put it into words; it seemed too good to be true. But I thought you said you’d got no information about Herbert Peters?”
“Yes, that was a bad bit of routine work,” the inspector admitted handsomely.
“You’ve got no doubts about it now, I suppose?” Roger persisted.
The inspector did not reply directly. “What do you imagine his motive was?” he asked instead.
“Well, he was blackmailing her, obviously. It was a gift for him. She married the doctor when he was in the middle of that five years’ stretch, evidently hoping that he wouldn’t be able to trace her. Oh, yes; it was a gift for friend Peters.”
“But that doesn’t answer my question, sir,” the inspector pointed out mildly. “That would be a motive for her murdering him, not he her. What do you imagine his motive was?”
Roger helped himself to pickled onions. “Well, it’s impossible to say definitely, isn’t it? I daresay I could think of half-a-dozen perfectly good motives, but this one strikes me as the most obvious: she knew there were two or three warrants out against him, so she countered his threat of blackmail with a threat of her own, to hand him over to the police. He got the wind up and pushed her over the cliff in a sudden panic. How’s that?”
“That’s quite plausible,” the inspector agreed.
“After you with the potatoes, Anthony,” said Roger. “Well, what do you think about it, fair coz?”