“Of course, I know that,” Miss Prince spoke with a touch of impatience. “What I want you to try to remember is whether Mr. Garlett was ever in this house alone for, say, a quarter of an hour? Especially, Lucy,” she hesitated, then asked the question firmly, “whether he was ever in this upper part of the house by himself? As you know, he is my landlord. On him depend all the outside repairs. It is possible, nay, even probable, he may have come upstairs once or twice on such business as that.”
“Mr. Garlett never bothered about that sort of thing himself, ma’am. He always sent the builder along. A nice fat lot of money Blackman has made out of that poor gentleman in the last ten years! Mr. Garlett never bothered, and Mrs. Garlett was too ill to bother.”
Miss Prince looked fixedly at the girl.
“Then you are not one of those,” she observed in a rather cold tone, “who believe that Mr. Garlett poisoned Mrs. Garlett?”
Lucy hesitated, and then she made a reply that surprised Miss Prince.
“I don’t care one way or the other,” she said sullenly. “Though it doesn’t seem to me that Mr. Garlett had any reason to do such a wicked thing. It wasn’t as if he’d known Miss Bower then—leastways he did know her, but he didn’t like her. I know that!”
“You know that, Lucy?”
“I do, ma’am. I heard Mr. Garlett say one day, when I was waiting at table, that he wished Mrs. Maclean hadn’t gone and asked him to take her niece on at the factory. He said it would be difficult to reprimand her—that was the word he used—if she did anything that he or old Mr. Dodson didn’t like. He said it was a mistake to mix up friendship and business.”
“Whom did he say that to?” asked Miss Prince eagerly. Here she was on her old familiar ground of gossip.
“He said it to the lawyer, Mr. Toogood,” answered Lucy.