"This, he explained, "is in a woman's handwriting, so I judge it's Miss Cheyne's. Across the top, heavily underscored, she's got the name, `Elizabeth Antrim.'
"'This case hasn't got anything to do with counterfeit money. She did it. She's been living a dull life in a dull place with a dull G.P., and she's not the lass to stand dullness. She's her father's daughter. Last week she learned that her father was dead and she was heiress to a substantial fortune.
Now she could cut loose. She did it to get rid of her husband. She gave Hogenauer strychnine and then fooled about with the bottles so it would be assumed somebody had switched them. Who? Well, she made those marks on the inside of the window herself, just so Dr. Antrim would fall into the trap and she could prove the marks must have been made inside. And it worked: Also, her going to Hogenauer's apparently to keep him from drinking the poison, was another neat little alibi. She's like that. I know this is true.
Stone put down the paper with indulgence, but he clucked his tongue.
"I know it's true, too," Evelyn announced fiercely. "You're all going star-gazing after the most horribly complicated reasons and actions-people coming in and out of windows or playing sleight-of-hand tricks with bottles. The plain truth is that there wasn't either a change of bottles or a burglar. And I defy you to answer me."
"Still — " muttered H.M. The invisible fly had come back to bother him again. "It's the simplest solution, granted. But in that case, what becomes of Bower's story that somebody visited Hogenauer behind a locked door, and that Hogenauer kept addressin' the person as `Antrim'? Do you think that it was really Mrs. Antrim, and that Hogenauer was a kind of sinister Man in the Case? Wow! Poor old Hogenauer in a crime of passion don't seem easy in his role. Or do you agree half-and-half with Ken, and say that Mrs. A. bribed Bowers to say that her husband was there?"
"H'm," murmured Evelyn thoughtfully.
H.M. shook his head. "I told you that whichever way you looked at it, the motivation was goin' to be weak. According to this, Mrs. A. is bored with her husband. So she up and kills somebody else, hopin' that the husband will hang; she commits a double murder whose only certain victim is somebody who has nothin' to do with her. No, no, wench; it's too roundabout. I don't deny husbands and wives have killed each other. But, if they've got to that point of marital asphyxiation, they're burnin' far too much with impatience to be anything else than simple and direct. Unless you can produce a reason why Hogenauer was dragged into this at all, it won't do… We've got two opposites. Your solution is sound on mechanics, but weak on motive. Ken's solution is sound on motive, but weak on mechanics. Or is it? I say, Ken: if Bowers did the dirty work, how did he do it?"
I reflected.
"As a suggestion, Bowers knew Hogenauer had been given a small bottle of bromide. He drove back here in the hired car, after he had deposited Hogenauer at home, in order to pinch some poison — any poison — to doctor the bromide. He got in through the window"