“Calcott!” cried old Lady Clevedon, “who’s he?”
“A long story,” I returned smilingly. “Thoyne will tell you all about it some day. It has no bearing on this case. But in the course of conversation”—I had turned to Thoyne again—“he told you that he suffered from sleeplessness, to which you replied that you had occasionally done so since you had been wounded and shell-shocked in the war, but that you had found a very useful medicine, which you advised him to try. You had got a new bottle untouched, and you offered to make him a present of it.”
“Quite right.”
“Then there you have the story—that is how Sir Philip Clevedon died. He took the poison Grainger had intended for you.”
“What an escape!” Thoyne muttered, a little hoarsely.
“And the hatpin?” old Lady Clevedon queried sharply. “Was that an accident, also?”
“Hardly,” I replied, “but that is another story, and a very curious one, too.”
I had reached the most difficult part of my explanation. I had to render it intelligible, without betraying Nora Lepley’s secret, which I had surprised. To put it as briefly as possible, she had thrust the hatpin through the heart of the dead man in the hope of diverting suspicion from Ronald Thoyne, whom she believed to be responsible for Sir Philip Clevedon’s death.
“As I had passed through my aunt’s sitting-room,” she had told me, “I saw the hatpin lying there on the mantelpiece, and I picked it up, intending to return it to Miss Kitty. It was in my hand when I entered Sir Philip’s study and found him dead. I knew he had been poisoned, because there was prussic acid in the bottle on the table.”
She explained to me when I questioned her that she had spent much time with her friend, Mary Grainger, in the shop, and was familiar with all sorts of drugs.