Robert was pale. “But ... but are you really suggesting that she might have turned to murder? Maybe not at her very own hand, but by paying someone to do the deed for her? Is this what you mean by dealt with?”
Mr Wiseman sighed. “After you two gentlemen had visited me, and put the seed of doubt into my head, yes. I began to consider that Lady Purfleet had somehow arranged for the pair of us to be poisoned.”
“Good heavens!”
“But wait. Yes, I began to investigate her,” he went on. “I recovered my strength quickly, and began to make enquiries. I established, very early on, that she had a solid alibi for the whole night in question.”
“But that does not get her off the hook,” said Robert. “She could have planned it all from afar. You spoke of proxies.”
“Indeed so, and you both asked me all about the food that we ate, which caused me to look at exactly where the poison might have been.”
“It was in the gravy,” said Theodore. “I am certain of it. You admitted you ate less, and that Nettles ate the most.”
“Yes, and that is the conclusion which I drew, too. But now comes the sticking point – the thing that upends all of this speculation, and makes me doubt Lady Purfleet’s involvement at all.”
“What?” cried Robert. “Am I to now change my mind again? I had just accepted her as the killer! My head is spinning.”
“None of my servants have mentioned any approach from Lady Purfleet or anyone attached to her household. I went to speak to the few that I could track down from Nettles’ house and they, too, denied all knowledge. But one of them spoke of a woman; short, darker of hair than the lady, and with too much paint and powder on her face. A woman that was already known to the servants. A woman who had been at the house before, and always by the back door, by secret ways, in darkness – a woman who never ought to have been there. A woman with a scandalous closeness to Nettles.”
“Octavia Dymchurch!” Theodore said. “Well. A name we hear over and over again. And so did Mrs Dymchurch pay off the servant? Did she hand them arsenic to put into the gravy?”
“No one would admit to that! They told me of the love affair between Nettles and Mrs Dymchurch, which I believe is now common knowledge. They also told me that Mrs Dymchurch had not been to the house as frequently of late, and suggested that any spark of passion between them had ebbed away. It was suggested that she had hoped for a proposal of marriage from Nettles but that was increasingly unlikely.”
Theodore and Robert stared at one another, and then at Mr Wiseman, and then at one another again. Theodore said, “Have you any idea about what might have occurred the last time Mrs Dymchurch visited Mr Nettles? Or when it was?”
“I asked them that, of course, and they said it was in November. But she had been back to the house in December, on more than one occasion – but it was not to see Nettles. She only went when he was not at home.”
“Then what was her business there?” Theodore demanded.
Robert snorted. “Well, to poison her ex-lover, clearly.”
Mr Wiseman nodded. “Gentlemen, I agree. According to the servant with whom I spoke, Mrs Dymchurch had formed some particular connections with some of the lower girls. I spoke with the housekeeper, who was tricky to track down and she was a rough sort of woman herself, but she was particularly scathing of the way that the scullery maid and the kitchen maid seemed to cleave to Mrs Dymchurch. For her part, Mrs Dymchurch claimed to be engaged in some sort of charitable outreach work, and often brought them sweets and fancy food, and pamphlets about how to live a good life, which the housekeeper felt was a front, though for what ends, she did not know.”
“Well, we know. It was through those relationships that the poison was introduced to the gravy,” said Theodore. “And it ties up one more loose end too. For Mrs Dymchurch would know very well that Nettles liked to have his food swimming in gravy.”
“I don’t think she knew that I disliked gravy though.”
“I doubt that you were part of the target at all,” Theodore told Mr Wiseman. “I think you were but an unhappy accident but how providential for us that you survived!”
“Well, and for me. Anyway, I came close to not surviving,” Mr Wiseman said in a grim voice. “And I have been reflecting on that matter a lot over the past few days. Such a brush with death does focus the mind somewhat.”
“And that’s why you decided to come here and tell the truth?”
“Yes. And why I looked into this common enemy – Lady Purfleet – and instead found a different murderess entirely. So, gentlemen, what do we do next?”
“Ah,” said Robert. “As to that, we were in fact letting the matter drop. The
