"We — we moved him to it after the fifteenth of July," Vicky gritted.
"And," said Ann, "Phil and I saw his shadow pass the window there the night you were so ill."
"That's right," agreed H.M. "I sort of thought at the time there was a ghosty kind of shadow up over our heads. But I paid no attention. Hubert, pokin' his big nose out to get a breath of air, heard Courtney tellin' me all about Polly Allen.
"To say that Hubert must have got the breeze up would be puttin' it mildly. The coppers mustn't even hear about Polly. But they had. Under pressure, Mrs. Fane was almost certain to speak out. Why shouldn't she? Her husband, who she thought was the murderer, was dead. The police would get to pryin'. They'd connect Hubert with it. They'd find out that instead of being a 'penniless blackmailer—'
"Well, what Hubert had to do was to shut her mouth before she told the police that he knew anything about Polly Allen. Up to that time (remember?) we didn't know Hubert had any connection with it at all.
"/ gave him his bright idea, curse him. I got rather a phobia about sterilizin' things, and raised a rumpus with Courtney about Rich using a pin on the lady's arm without sterilizing it.
'That gave Hubert to think. If Mrs. Fane died an accidental death, poor gal, of tetanus…
"He went down to the library and looked up tetanus in the encyclopedia. There, starin' back at him in the article (as you can verify by reading it) was the information that the symptoms of tetanus are just the same as those of strychnine poisoning.
"So he had a use for his strychnine after all."
H.M. paused, and pulled at a dead cigar.