“Then what’s the point?” Armadale demanded.
“It’s plain enough, if you’d keep your ears open. When I encouraged the constable to babble at large about Peter Hay, I was on the lookout for one thing. I found out that he didn’t suffer from asthma.”
“I don’t see it yet, sir,” the inspector admitted in perplexity.
Wendover had the information which Armadale lacked.
“Now I see what you’re after, Clinton. You’re thinking of amyl nitrite—the stuff asthmatics inhale when they get a bad turn? You wanted to know if Peter Hay ever used that as a drug? And, of course, now I come to think of it, that stuff has the pear-drop odour also.”
“That’s it, squire. Amyl nitrite for asthma; the solvent that evaporates and leaves the collodion behind when you use New-Skin; and the perfume of pear-drops—they’re all derived from a stuff called amyl alcohol; and they all have much the same smell. Eliminate New-Skin, as it doesn’t seem to fit into this case. That leaves you with the possibilities that the body smelt of pear-drops or of amyl nitrite.”
Inspector Armadale was plainly out of his depth.
“I don’t see that you’re much further forward, sir. After all, there are the pear-drops. What’s the good of going further? If it’s poison you’re thinking of—Is this amyl nitrite poisonous, and you think it might have been used in the pear-drops so that their perfume would cover its smell?”
“It’s a bit subtler than that, inspector. Now I admit quite frankly that this is all pure hypothesis; I’m merely trying it out, so to speak, so that we can feel certain we’ve covered all the possibilities. But here it is, for what it’s worth. I’ll put it in a nutshell for you. Amyl nitrite, when you inhale it, produces a rush of blood to the brain.”
“And Peter Hay suffered from high blood-pressure in any case,” Wendover broke in, “so an extra flood of blood rushing to the head would finish him? Is that what you mean?”
“Well, it’s always a possibility, isn’t it?” Sir Clinton returned. “Even a slight dose—a couple of sniffs—will give you a fair headache for the rest of the afternoon. It’s beastly stuff.”
Inspector Armadale ruminated for a moment or two.
“Then you think that when they’d done with him they dosed him with this stuff and gave him an apoplectic stroke, sir?”
“It could be done easily enough,” Sir Clinton said cautiously. “A teaspoonful of the stuff on a bit of cotton-wool under his nose would do the trick, if he was liable to a stroke. But they didn’t do it in the cottage. They must have carried him out here, chair and all, and dosed him in the open air, or else we’d have smelt the stuff strongly in the room, even after this time. Perhaps that’s what suggested leaving him outside all night, so that the stuff would evaporate from him as far as possible. We’ll know for certain after the P.M. His lungs ought to have a fair amount of the nitrite in them, at any rate, if that notion’s correct.”
He paused for a time, then continued:
“Now I don’t say that it is correct. We don’t know for certain yet. But let’s assume that it is, and see if it takes us any further. They must have procured the amyl nitrite beforehand and brought it here on purpose to use it. Now amyl nitrite won’t kill an ordinary man. Therefore they must have known the state of Peter Hay’s health. And they must have known, too, that he kept some sweets in the house always. My impression is that they brought that bag of pear-drops with them and took away Peter’s own bag—which probably hadn’t pear-drops in it. You’d better make a note to look into Peter’s sweet-buying in the village lately, inspector. Find out what he bought last.”
Sir Clinton pitched his cigarette-end over the hedge and took out his case.
“You see what these things point to?” he inquired, as he lit his fresh cigarette.
“It’s easy enough to see, when you put it that way,” Wendover replied. “You mean that if they knew about Peter’s health and Peter’s ways to that extent, they must be local people and not strangers.”
“If one works from the premises, I think that’s so,” Sir Clinton confirmed. “But remember, the premises are only guesses so far. We need the P.M. to confirm them. Now, there are just three more points: the time of death; the lack of wounds on the face or anywhere; and the matter of the silver in the drawer. As to the first two, the amyl nitrite notion fits in quite well. The murderers, if it was murder, made their first slip when they laid him down so carefully and forgot to arrange the hands under the body. I suppose they thought they were giving a suggestive turn to things by the attitude they chose—as though Peter Hay had collapsed under a thunderbolt attack. As to the time of the assumed murder, all we really know was that it was after dew-fall. They may have talked for hours before they finished the old man, for all we can tell; or they may have given him the nitrite almost as soon as they got him tied up. We can’t tell, and it’s not so very important, after all.”
He flicked some ash from his cigarette.
“Now we come to the real thing that a jury would want to know about: the motive. What were they after?”
He glanced at his two companions, as if inviting an opinion.
“I suggested a possible motive, sir,” the inspector reminded him.
“Yes, but from the jury point of view you’d have to do two things to make that convincing. You’d have to prove that Peter Hay was helping himself to stuff from Foxhills; and you’d have to establish that the murderers got away with the bulk of it. That’s almost a case in itself. If you ask me, inspector, I think that silver represents the usual
