"What led you and your husband astray at the be-ginnin' was one little fact. Hubert Fane was mean. Just ordinary, plain, miserly mean. He's the sort of person — we all know 'em — who couldn't put his hand in his pocket to pay for a round of drinks if his life depended on it; and who'd think nothin' of charmingly sponging off relatives by living with 'em all year, when all the time he could buy 'em out ten times over.
"Charming people these are, mostly. But I group 'em with my own late uncle under the general category of lice.
"Now, you thought Hubert was a blackmailer. Whereas Masters and I were all at sea simply because, burn me, we did know the facts!
"Last Sunday afternoon, Masters came round to me with a lot of accumulated facts. With the assistance of the bank, he'd looked up the financial standing of everybody in this case; and, as he said, he found absolutely nothing to surprise or help us in any way. In other words, Hubert was just what he pretended to be: a rich man.
"But I didn't at all like die statement of Arthur's financial position.
"What did we know? Six months ago, Arthur was so flat broke and in debt that he had to cash in on his life insurance. But what happened? He got it back later. And what else? All of a sudden, streams of cash were runnin' into Arthur's account — into the current account, where he could use 'em to pay debts — and by the middle of August his books were all straight again."
Again H.M. peered over his spectacles at Vicky. He chewed at the end of his black cigar.
"We then talked to you. You poured out the details of how Arthur had killed Polly Allen (details supplied by Hubert alone); and you told us how Hubert was a penniless blackmailer who'd been bleedin' Arthur in a mild, gentlemanly way.
"And, I repeat, that tore it. I saw how the whole situation had been put the wrong way round. If Hubert himself was the murderer, and Arthur the blackmailer, that made everything fit together with a wallop. It supplied the thing that had bothered me like blazes: motive."
Vicky had a wrinkle between her brows. She made several false starts before she managed to speak.