"I'd like to know how many inconvenient people are polished off that way. Damn it—it's so easy."
"I wonder how Penberthy's share of the boodle was to be transferred to him."
"I don't," said Hardy. "Look here—here's this girl. Calls herself an artist. Paints bad pictures. Right. Then she meets this doctor fellow. He's mad on glands. Shrewd man—knows there's money in glands. She starts taking up glands. Why?"
"That was a year ago."
"Precisely. Penberthy isn't a rich man. Retired Army surgeon, with a brass plate and a consulting-room in Harley Street—shares the house with two other hard-up brass-platers. Lives on a few old dodderers down at the Bellona. Has an idea, if only he could start one of these clinics for rejuvenating people, he could be a millionaire. All these giddy old goats who want their gay time over again—why, they're a perfect fortune to the man with a bit of capital and a hell of a lot of cheek. Then this girl comes along—rich old woman's heiress—and he goes after her. It's all fixed up. He's to accommodate her by removing the obstacle to the fortune, and she obligingly responds by putting the money into his clinic. In order not to make it too obvious, she had to pretend to get a dickens of an interest in glands. So she drops painting and takes to medicine. What could be clearer?"
"But that means," put in Wimsey, "that she must have known all about the will at least a year ago."
"Why not?"
"Well that brings us back to the old question: Why the delay?"
"And it gives us the answer," said Parker. "They waited till the interest in the glands and things was so firmly established and recognized by everybody that nobody would connect it with the General's death."
"Of course," said Wimsey. He felt that matters were rushing past him at a bewildering rate. But George was safe, anyhow.