“Why?”
“Because he had devised some system which, like many others before him, he felt certain must result in large winnings, and he did not tell his friends his intentions lest they might jeer at him. He went; he lost; and he killed himself!”
“But he lived in London afterwards!” I protested. “I saw him dozens of times—dined with him, played billiards with him, and was visited here by him. He could not possibly have been dead at the time!”
“But he was dead!” she declared. “Strange though it may seem, I am ready to swear in any court of law that I was present when Roderick Morgan, the member for South-West Sussex, committed suicide in the Salle Mauresque at Monte Carlo. That fact can no doubt be established in two ways: first, by the register of deaths, and secondly, by exhumation of the body.”
“But when Roddy was here in London, dining, smoking, and talking with me, how can I believe that he was already dead?”
“It was for a brief space that he came back to his own home,” she responded, in that same far-away voice, turning her eyes full upon me. “And did not life leave him suddenly, in a manner which has since remained a mystery?”
“No,” I answered determinedly, my mind fully made up. “Not altogether a mystery. The police have discovered many things.”
“The police!” she gasped. “What have they discovered?”
“They do not generally tell the public the result of their investigations,” I answered. “But they have found out that he received a visitor clandestinely half an hour before his death, and further, that he was murdered.”
“Murdered!” she exclaimed, with an uneasy glance and stirring in her chair. “Do they suspect any one?”