“That—well, that somebody else poisoned him?”
“There can’t be a shadow of doubt about it,” said the inspector with the utmost cheerfulness. “The Rev. Samuel never committed suicide at all. He was murdered!”
Chapter XXI.
Roger Plays a Lone Hand
It was some minutes before Roger would agree to abandon, once and for all time, his cherished theory of suicide. Suicide had smoothed all difficulties away; suicide had explained both deaths in the simplest possible terms, reduced them to a common denominator; in spite of superficial appearances surely in some way it must be suicide. Not until the inspector had patiently, and for half-a-dozen times in succession, pointed out that the very last place in which a voluntary consumer of aconitine would put the poison was among the contents of his tobacco-jar, and the very last way he would choose of imbibing it was through the stem of his pipe, did Roger reluctantly admit that, hang it! yes, it really did begin to look as if the man had been murdered after all.
“But you don’t think he was under the impression that aconitine was a narcotic and that he could smoke it like opium and so have an easy passage?” he suggested as a final gleam of hope.
“I do not,” said the inspector, briskly extinguishing the gleam. “A man who’s going to use a drug like aconitine at all is going to know something about it; and the very least he’d know is that it isn’t a narcotic. No, sir, there’s no other conclusion at all. Meadows was murdered.”
“Curse the man, then!” Roger observed with feeling. “He’d simply got no right to be, that’s all I can say. Now we’re put right back to the beginning again. Well, who murdered him, Inspector? Perhaps you’ll tell me that too?”
The inspector tugged at his moustache. “I was hoping you’d be able to tell me that, Mr. Sheringham.”
“I see,” Roger said bitterly. “I might have known you weren’t pouring out all this confidential information for nothing. You want to pick my magnificent brains again, I suppose?”
“Well, if you like to put it that way, sir,” remarked the inspector in deprecating tones.