“Yes, I think it is rather important,” he said at length, looking up from his book and down the table to where The Tundish sat facing him, his chair tilted back and his knees against the table edge. “Would you mind repeating the arguments you used?”
“But I’ve already admitted that it was I who stuck up the notice and played the silly practical jokes.”
“Yes, you have, Doctor, but that is not the point. The implication is that first you poisoned Miss Palfreeman, then you played the practical joke, as you call it, and that at breakfast time this morning you went out of your way to prove that any of the rest of the party also had the opportunity to play the joke, in order to establish it clearly beforehand that any one of you could have added the poison to the sleeping draft as well. Now please repeat, as nearly word for word as you can, what you said at breakfast time that has caused these strange and unpleasant fancies to come to Mr. Dane.”
At first I thought the doctor was going to refuse—he seemed to hesitate for a fraction of a second—and then, leaning forward with his elbows on the table, he repeated the bantering arguments he had adopted earlier in the day. He not only repeated the words, but he seemed to create the atmosphere of the earlier scene as well. He put the clock back somehow. We were all sitting round the breakfast table again and he was teasing Kenneth—I could almost smell the coffee and the bacon.
Even little Allport was impressed. “Yes, that certainly sounds realistic, and innocent enough,” he laughed, but he went over it all again, nevertheless, pausing to make notes in his book, and asking each of us in turn to corroborate the statements the doctor had made. It was ultimately established that he had given Annie the medicine to take up-stairs immediately before he joined the other five—Stella, Margaret, Ethel and the two boys—in the dining-room for supper. I had been alone up-stairs while I changed, and could have added the poison either then, or later, when as a matter of fact I was wandering about in the garden just prior to the accident. Kenneth and Ralph had been together the whole evening—at least so they both said. It transpired that the two had gone to a neighboring hotel for a drink, an admission they made with some little shame, pleading the heat as their excuse. Hanson, I should explain, is rather a strict teetotaler and alcoholic drinks are taboo at Dalehouse. Ethel was alone in the surgery wing for about ten minutes after the accident, clearing up the mess. Margaret had been left by herself in the basement all the time that Ethel was occupied up-stairs.
Having sorted out all our movements to his satisfaction, and having completed his notes about them, he got up and rang the bell at the side of the fireplace behind him. When Annie appeared to answer it, he surprised us all by asking her whether the little heap of washing he had noticed on the dresser, when he had searched the basement, was the clothes that had been ironed the night before, and whether they had yet been put away.
“No, sir, they’re still on the dresser.”
“Fetch them.”
She brought them and put them before him on the table, and he turned them over one by one, including the undergarments about which Ethel and Margaret had both been so modest. “It certainly does not look like a two hours’ job even allowing for the iron and the accident—I agree with you there, Doctor—not on piece-work pay anyhow,” he concluded as he came to the socks at the bottom of the pile.
“But where is the brother to this?” he asked sharply, holding up an odd sock that I recognized as one of mine. It was marked on the inside and he noticed it at once. “F. H. J.; which of you two ladies ironed Mr. Jeffcock’s socks?”