“I did not; but she did, and then, I said I would, too. Neither of us meant it, really, but that’s what was said. The woman is so clever it makes her doubly dangerous!”
“But it’s a queer thing for two ladies to be talking about killing anybody.”
“Nonsense! It’s done all the time. It doesn’t mean they’d really do it—though sometimes I have thought——”
“Aunt Letty!” put in Bates, beseechingly.
“I will speak, Richard! Sometimes I have thought that Adeline Everett would be capable of—of anything! Those sleek, fat, complacent people are the very worst sort! I bluster out frankly, but that oily, deceitful woman,—and that Kate of hers,—well, if you want to know my suspicions,—there they are.”
“Then, Miss Prall,” Gibbs looked straight at her, “here’s the situation. Both you and Mrs Everett expressed a willingness to kill Sir Herbert Binney,—no matter if it was not meant. Both of you may be said to have had a motive; both of you could have found opportunity. And, finally, each of you claims to suspect the other. Now, granting for argument’s sake that one of you is guilty, would not the plausible procedure be to pretend to suspect the other?”
“Of course it would,” Eliza Gurney declared. “And since Mrs Everett is the guilty party,—I see it all now! She casts suspicion toward Miss Prall! Of course, Mrs Everett didn’t do it herself, but that Kate Holland did! She is a fiend incarnate, without heart or soul! She is——”
“There, there, Eliza, you’d better be still,” Miss Prall warned her. “If you go on like that, Mr Gibbs will think you’re protesting too much!”
As a matter of fact, that’s just what Gibbs was thinking, and he looked sharply at Letitia, marveling at her cleverness. If she had been instrumental in the death of Sir Herbert, surely this was just the way she would conduct herself. She was deep as well as clever, and Gibbs began to see light.
He was convinced now that the criminals were of a more subtle type than young girls in their teens could possibly be, and the affair, to his thinking, was narrowed down to the households of these two women who were each other’s enemies.