“Mrs Penhallow!”
“Yes, but I don’t make a lot of that, sir. She seems to have been taking the stuff for years, and though she does seem a silly creature, I shouldn’t think she’d be silly enough to leave the bottle about, if she’d used the stuff to poison her husband with.”
“The use of poison often points to a woman, Logan.”
“Yes, sir. I didn’t mean that I was ruling her out. But she isn’t the only woman to be mixed up in this case. And really I should doubt whether she’d have had the nerve to poison anyone from the way she carries on! Of course she’s upset by the whole thing, as is natural she should be. But let alone her getting a bit hysterical at my finding the bottle empty, she goes up in the air as soon as ever I ask any questions about anyone else in the house, and keeps on telling me that she knows none of them could possibly have done it, till I could pretty well have brained her. Its plain the rest of them don’t think much of her. What’s more, it’s plain they don’t any of them think she had anything to do with the crime. And that’s significant, sir, because they don’t give me the impression they like her."
The Major nodded. “All right: go on. What about the boy who has absconded?”
“Well, we haven’t managed to catch up with him yet sir, but there doesn’t seem to bee much doubt that he made off with three hundred pounds in cash, which h, took from Mr Penhallow’s bed.”
“From his bed!”
“Yes, sir. Oh, I don’t mean he kept it under his pillows, but pretty near as bad! I’ve never seen such a bed in my life. It has got a whole lot of cupboards and drawers in the head of it. But there doesn’t seem to have been any need for this Jimmy to have murdered Penhallow. He was his father, too.”
“What?”
“Oh, yes, sir!” said Logan matter-of-factly. “The rest of them call him Jimmy the Bastard, making no bones about it!”