I regarded him furiously. The thing was that he would be quite capable of doing just that. I began to understand the force of the words of the chief of police when he had said—“Once Lance O’Leary gets his teeth into anything, it is as good as done.”
“I suppose you’ll have to know sometime, anyway,” I said sulkily.
The flicker in his gray eyes was like a ripple across a very calm, deep lake.
“You are right, Miss Keate. So why not tell me now?”
Well, to make a long story short, I told him of the missing hypodermic, which after all, was little enough: barely the fact that Maida’s syringe had been removed and my own substituted, but this without my knowledge. And that Maida had had the opportunity to take my own, and if she had wished to use it, all that she needed to do was ask me for it.
“Which she conspicuously did not do,” commented O’Leary. “Oh, by the way, Miss Keate, have you ever attended an inquest?”
“No.”
“Well, don’t get bothered. Our coroner is a decent old fellow but he does love to be pompous. Just answer what he asks, tell your story as briefly as possible and don’t—er—volunteer anything. You see there are some things that you and I know that will not come up at the inquest.”
“You mean—they would warn the guilty one?”
He nodded briefly as he turned away.