“Poor devil!” said Hannasyde. “All the same, but for her there wouldn't have been a case at all, so really we've nothing to grumble about, whatever her motive may have been.”
The Sergeant scratched the tip of his nose in a reflective manner. “No motive. Bit of womanly intuition, if you ask me. Funny things, women.”
“You don't believe in that, do you?” asked the Inspector scornfully.
The Sergeant looked at him with a penetrating eye. “You a married man, Inspector?”
“I'm not.”
“That was what you call a rhetorical question,” said the Sergeant. “I know you aren't. You'd believe in woman's instinct fast enough if you were. Why, they're always having fits of it, even the best of them, and about once in a dozen times it turns out to be right. Granite-faced Gertrude had a Feeling someone did her brother in, and if you knew as much about woman's Feelings as I do, you wouldn't go around saying she did it out of spite. Not she! What she thought was: "I don't like any of the people in this house." And believe me, Inspector, once a woman gets a thought like that into her head she'll develop a Feeling against the whole lot in double-quick time.”
“It wouldn't surprise me,” said the Inspector, who had taken an unreasoning dislike to Mrs Lupton, “if we found she did it, and was acting like this to put us off the scent.”
The Sergeant exchanged an indulgent glance with Hannasyde. “Bad psychology,” he said. “She's all right.”
“Wasting our time!” snorted the Inspector. “There wasn't a thing she could tell us we didn't know already. Don't you agree, Superintendent?”
Hannasyde, who had not been paying much attention, said: “Agree? Oh! No, I don't agree with either of you. I think she had more than a Feeling, and I think she did tell us several things.”