“I suppose that it was a means of death which could only be used on somebody more or less helpless or unconscious.”
“Exactly. As for instance, a hypodermic injection—only nothing appears to have been injected. Or a delicate operation of some kind—if we could only think of one to fit the case. Or the inhalation of something—such as chloroform—only we could find no traces of suffocation.”
“Yes. That doesn’t get us very far, though.”
“It’s something. Then again, it may very well be something that a trained nurse would have learnt or heard about. Miss Whittaker was trained, you know—which, by the way, was what made it so easy for her to bandage up her own head and provide a pitiful and unrecognisable spectacle for the stupid Mr. Trigg.”
“It wouldn’t have to be anything very out of the way—nothing, I mean, that only a trained surgeon could do, or that required very specialised knowledge.”
“Oh, no. Probably something picked up in conversation with a doctor or the other nurses. I say, how about getting hold of Dr. Carr again? Or, no—if he’d got any ideas on the subject he’d have trotted ’em out before now. I know! I’ll ask Lubbock, the analyst. He’ll do. I’ll get in touch with him to-morrow.”
“And meanwhile,” said Parker, “I suppose we just sit round and wait for somebody else to be murdered.”
“It’s beastly, isn’t it? I still feel poor Bertha Gotobed’s blood on my head, so to speak. I say!”
“Yes?”
“We’ve practically got clear proof on the Trigg business. Couldn’t you put the lady in quod on a charge of burglary while we think out the rest of the dope? It’s often done. It was a burglary, you know. She broke into a house after dark and appropriated a scuttleful of coal to her own use. Trigg could identify her—he seems to have paid the lady particular attention on more than one occasion—and we could rake up his taxi-man for corroborative detail.”