Flamborough shook his head again, more definitely this time.
“It doesn't sound likely, sir.”
Then his face changed.
“Wait a bit, though,” he added quickly: “If that's what happened, she must have had a motive for suicide. Perhaps someone was on her track, somebody pretty dangerous; and she saw the game was up. I don't profess to know how that could happen. But if the man on her heels was the fellow who did the work with the tourniquet at Heatherfield last night, she might have thought poison an easier way out of things. It's a possibility, sir.”
“It leaves us hunting for the clue to a purely hypothetical mystery, though, Inspector, I'm afraid. I don't say you're wrong, of course.”
“I daresay it's complicated enough already,” Flamborough admitted without prejudice. “Besides, this Case 4 of yours has another flaw in it—several, in fact. Unless you take the idea I suggested, it's hard to see why the girl should have had a supply of poison handy at all. It sounds a bit wild. And you've got to assume that a third party shot young Hassendean twice by accident, if a third party came into the business at all. To my mind, that won't wash, sir. It's not good enough. Whereas if it was a case of Mrs. Silverdale shooting him by accident, there was no need for her to commit suicide because of that. No one knew she was here. She could simply have walked out of the front door and got clear away with no questions asked. And if she'd already taken poison, she wouldn't need to shoot herself in the head, would she?”
“Grave objections,” Sir Clinton admitted. It amused him to see the Inspector entering so keenly into the game. “Now we proceed to Case 5.”
“Oh, Case 5 is just bunkum,” the Inspector pronounced bluntly. “She gets accidentally poisoned; then she gets accidentally shot; then young Hassendean suicides. It's too thick altogether.”
“I like the concise way you put it,” Sir Clinton answered with simulated admiration. “So we go on to No. 6, eh? She was deliberately murdered and he was accidentally shot. What about that?”
“I'd want to see some motive for the murder, sir, before accepting that as a possible basis. And if she was deliberately poisoned, what was the good of young Hassendean dragging her off to the bungalow? That would throw suspicion straight on to him if he poisoned her. . . .”