Thorndyke regarded me with a quizzical smile. “Because,” he answered, “Miller’s previous experiences have been repeated. There has been another discovery. It has transpired that Miss Norris also had dealings with a wholesale druggist. But in her case there was no fraud or irregularity. The druggist with whom she dealt was the one who used to supply her father with materia medica and to whom she was well known.”
“Then, in that case, I suppose she had an account with him?”
“No, she did not. She also paid cash. Her purchases were only occasional and on quite a small scale; too small to justify an account.”
“Has she made any statement as to what she wanted the drugs for?”
“She denies that she ever purchased drugs, in the usual sense, that is substances having medicinal properties. Her purchases were, according to her statement, confined to such pharmaceutical and chemical materials as were required for purposes of instruction in her classes. Which is perfectly plausible, for, as you know, academic cookery is a rather different thing from the cookery of the kitchen.”
“Yes, I know that she had some materials in her cupboard that I shouldn’t have associated with cookery and I should accept her statement without hesitation. In fact, the discovery seems to me to be of no significance at all.”
“Probably you are right,” said he; “but the point is that, in a legal sense, it confuses the issues hopelessly. In her case, as in Wallingford’s, materials have been purchased from a druggist, and, as no record of those purchases has been kept, it is impossible to say what those materials were. Probably they were harmless, but it cannot be proved that they were. The effect is that the evidential value of Wallingford’s admission is discounted by the fact that there was another person who is known to have purchased materials some of which may have been poisons.”
“Yes,” said I, “that is obvious enough. But doesn’t it strike you, Thorndyke, that all this is just a lot of futile logic-chopping such as you might hear at a debating club? I can’t take it seriously. You don’t imagine that either of these two persons murdered Harold Monkhouse, do you? I certainly don’t; and I can’t believe Miller does.”
“It doesn’t matter very much what he believes, or, for that matter, what any of us believe. ‘He discovers who proves.’ Up to the present, none of us has proved anything, and my impression is that Miller is becoming a little discouraged. He is a genius in following up clues. But where there are no clues to follow up, the best of detectives is rather stranded.”
“By the way,” said I, “did you pick up anything from my diary that threw any light on the mystery?”