“I’d like to keep this, if I may,” he told her.
“And welcome,” responded the landlady with alacrity. If her visitors were ready to pay good cash for such an insignificant souvenir of the tragedy, who was she to stand in their way?
“I suppose you can’t say at all definitely which evening it was, can you?” Roger asked, tucking the flimsy thing away in his pocket-book.
“Yes, I can, sir,” returned the landlady, not without triumph. “It was the very night before that poor Mrs. Vane was thrown over the cliff. That fixed it in my memory, like. Wasn’t that a dreadful thing, sir? Really, I don’t know what’s happening to Ludmouth. First Mrs. Vane and then the Rev. Meadows! Do you think that police-inspector is going to find out anything, sir? You being with him last week and all, I thought perhaps⸺”
Roger discouraged her inquisitiveness with gentle firmness and began to prowl round the room. The excuse he had given for his presence, that the dead man was an old friend of his, could be easily stretched to cover any curiosity, bordering on the indecent, which he might display regarding that old friend’s habits and possessions.
A rack on the wall containing three or four pipes arrested his attention, and he drew one out of its socket. “Mr. Meadows was a heavy smoker, wasn’t he?” he remarked.
“Well, it’s funny you should say that, sir,” observed the landlady, who had been following his movements with interest, “because I shouldn’t have said he was, meself, at all. Leastways, not compared with my husband, he wasn’t. He’d smoke his pipe after breakfast, the Rev. Meadows would, and again after his dinner and perhaps a bit in the evening if he felt like it, but not much more than that. Now my husband; you’d hardly ever see him without he had a pipe in⸺”
“But Mr. Meadows had a lot of pipes for so small a smoker?”
“Well, yes, he had, sir; I’d noticed that meself. But he was very funny about his pipes, the Rev. Meadows was. He used to smoke them one at a time, for a week; in roteration, he called it. Very comical about it, he was too. ‘Pipes are like wives, ma,’ he used to say (always called me ma, he did; said I mothered him better than his own mother ever had; a very friendly sort of gentleman, the Rev. Meadows was). Yes, ‘Pipes are like wives,’ he’d say; ‘a man ought never to have more than one of ’em going at a time.’ That was just one of his comicalities, you see. Always full of jokes like that, he was. ‘Pipes are like wives,’ indeed! You see what he meant: a man ought never⸺”
“Yes, very comical indeed,” Roger agreed gravely. “Ha, ha! By the way, you don’t know where Mr. Meadows bought his tobacco, do you?”