«I daresay I should,» said Lady Swaffham.
«Quite. An' if you found that the lawyer and the doctor had once upon a time been in business at Poggleton-on-the-Marsh when the Bishop had been vicar there, you'd begin to remember you'd once heard of me payin' a visit to Poggleton-on-the-Marsh a long time ago, an' you'd begin to look up the parish registers there an' discover I'd been married under an assumed name by the vicar to the widow of a wealthy farmer, who'd died suddenly of peritonitis, as certified by the doctor, after the lawyer'd made a will leavin' me all her money, and then you'd begin to think I might have very good reasons for gettin' rid of such promisin' blackmailers as the lawyer, the doctor an' the bishop. Only, if I hadn't started an association in your mind by gettin' rid of 'em all in the same place, you'd never have thought of goin' to Poggleton-on-the-Marsh, 'n' you wouldn't even have remembered I'd ever been there.»
« Were you ever there, Lord Peter?» enquired Mrs. Tommy, anxiously.
«I don't think so,» said Lord Peter, «the name threads no beads in my mind. But it might, any day, you know.»
«But if you were investigating a crime,» said Lady Swaffham, «you'd have to begin by the usual things, I suppose — finding out what the person had been doing, and who'd been to call, and looking for a motive, wouldn't you?»
«Oh, yes,» said Lord Peter, «but most of us have such dozens of motives for murderin' all sorts of inoffensive people. There's lots of people I'd like to murder, wouldn't you?»
«Heaps,» said Lady Swaffham. «There's that dreadful — perhaps I'd better not say it, though, for fear you should remember it later on.»
«Well, I wouldn't if I were you,» said Peter, amiably. «You never know. It'd be beastly awkward if the person died suddenly to-morrow.»
«The difficulty with this Battersea case, I guess,» said Mr. Milligan, «is that nobody seems to have any associations with the gentleman in the bath.»
«So hard on poor Inspector Sugg,» said the Duchess. «I quite felt for the man, having to stand up there and answer a lot of questions when he had nothing at all to say.»