“A darned good miss, I should imagine! Is that the full list of the people you suspect?”
“No, sir, I’ve got one more suspect, and one man I’ll have to look into this afternoon. There’s Mrs Penhallow’s son, this one they call Clay. Nervous boy, scared stiff of me, and trying to carry the whole thing off in a breezy kind of way. Seems his father had just taken him away from college, and meant to article him to his cousin — Hastings, of Blazey, Blazey, Hastings, and Wembury. I had all this from Eugene and Conrad and Aubrey. Apparently Master Clay never has got on with the rest of the family — well, it isn’t likely he would: he’s the soft kind, and I should think a chap like that would have a pretty thin time in that household. He’s been going about talking in a wild way about how he’d go mad if he had to live at Trevellin for the rest of his life, and how he’d sooner be anything than a solicitor. What’s more, he tried to hatch up some sort of an alibi for himself, which didn’t exist; and altogether he struck me as a chap worth watching.”
“H’m! And the other man you mentioned?”
“Well, I don’t know that there’s much in that, sir, but I’ll have to investigate it. Miss Penhallow — who seems to have got an idea that it’s she and not me who’s conducting this case ,tells me that a Mr Phineas Ottery, who was the first Mrs Penhallow’s brother, went up to Trevellin to call on Mr Penhallow yesterday afternoon and insisted on seeing him privately.”
“I don’t see much in that.”
“No, sir, no more did I, but it’s obvious the Penhallows do. They all say it was highly unusual of Mr Ottery to come to Trevellin uninvited, and there isn’t one of them that has any idea of what he could possibly have wanted with their father. None of them saw him, except the old man himself, and they all seem to think there was something fishy about the visit. All except Mr Raymond, that is. When I spoke to him about it, he said there way nothing odd in it at all, and that his father probably had a bit of business with him. I shouldn’t think much of it if it weren’t for the fact that none of the servants showed Mr Ottery out of the house, and no one can tell mc whether Mr Penhallow went with him to the door or not.”
“Penhallow? I thought he was bedridden, or next door to it?"
“No, not entirely he wasn’t, sir. He had a wheeled chair which he used whenever he got out of that extraordinary bed of his. He was up yesterday. Got up after lunch, and didn’t go back to bed until late in the evening. That’s the factor that makes this case a bit of a teaser. By what I could get out of Martha Bugle — she’s the old woman that used to be nurse to the sons, and has looked after Penhallow ever since he first took ill — the room was turned out during the afternoon, but finished, and left ready for Penhallow, by five o’clock. Except for this Jimmy we’re hunting for going in just before dinner to make up the fire, and draw the curtains, which they say he did, I can’t discover that anyone went near the room until Penhallow was put to bed again, which would have been somewhere around eleven o’clock at night. In fact, sir, from five till eleven the coast was perfectly clear for anyone to go into the room, and do what they liked there. As far as the family’s concerned, you can rule out the dinner-hour, when they were all present and correct, but after dinner two of them left the room where the rest were sitting: Mr Bart, who says he was with Loveday Trewithian, and is borne out by her and by his twin brother, who had to fetch him to help get their father to bed; and Master Clay, who says he spent the evening knocking the balls about in the billiard-room. But in between five and eight, when dinner was served, there was nothing to stop any of them tampering with the old man’s whisky, which was kept in a cupboard in his room, and there’s not one of them has an alibi for the whole of that period. Several can prove they were somewhere else for part of the time, but that’s all. The room’s right at the end of the house: you can get to it down a broad sort of passage on the ground floor, or through a garden-door leading into the small hall it opens into, or by way of a staircase leading down into that hall. It’s at the opposite end of the house to the kitchen premises, and the chances are that at that hour of the day you wouldn’t stand much chance of meeting anyone in that wing.”
The Major’s face began to lengthen. “This doesn’t sound promising, Inspector.”
“No, sir, it isn’t promising, and that’s a fact. Talk about murder made easy! Why, even the butler played into the murderer’s hands, by having made it a rule never to leave more than a couple of drinks in the whisky decanter in his master’s room! And as for fingerprints, we can rule them out, because the only ones on the decanter that aren’t hopelessly confused are Penhallow’s own; and the only one on the veronal phial belongs to the housesmaid who admits she moved all the bottles when she dusted the shelf this morning.”