“I don’t agree. Someone might get all het up about the girl, and see red when she turned him down. He may have fancied she treated him badly. It’s an idea.”
“It is an idea, yes,” said Hercule Poirot, but his tone was not encouraging.
Peter Lord said pleadingly:
“Go on, M. Poirot.”
“You want me, I see, to be the conjurer. To take out of the empty hat rabbit after rabbit.”
“You can put it that way if you like.”
“There is another possibility,” said Hercule Poirot.
“Go on.”
“Someone abstracted a tube of morphine from Nurse Hopkins’ case that evening in June. Suppose Mary Gerrard saw the person who did it?”
“She would have said so.”
“No, no, mon cher. Be reasonable. If Elinor Carlisle, or Roderick Welman, or Nurse O’Brien, or even any of the servants, were to open that case and abstract a little glass tube, what would anyone think? Simply that the person in question had been sent by the nurse to fetch something from it. The matter would pass straight out of Mary Gerrard’s mind again, but it is possible that, later, she might recollect the fact and might mention it casually to the person in question—oh, without the least suspicion in the world. But to the person guilty of the murder of Mrs. Welman, imagine the effect of that remark! Mary had seen: Mary must be silenced at all costs! I can assure you, my friend, that anyone who has once committed a murder finds it only too easy to commit another!”
Peter Lord said with a frown:
“I’ve believed all along that Mrs. Welman took the stuff herself….”
“But she was paralysed—helpless—she had just had a second stroke.”
“Oh, I know. My idea was that, having got hold of morphine somehow or other, she kept it by her in a receptacle close at hand.”
“But in that case she must have got hold of the morphine before her second attack and the nurse missed it afterwards.”
“Hopkins may only have missed the morphine that morning. It might have been taken a couple of days before, and she hadn’t noticed it.”
“How would the old lady have got hold of it?”
“I don’t know. Bribed a servant, perhaps. If so, that servant’s never going to tell.”
“You don’t think either of the nurses were bribable?”
Lord shook his head.
“Not on your life! To begin with, they’re both very strict about their professional ethics—and in addition they’d be scared to death to do such a thing. They’d know the danger to themselves.”
Poirot said:
“That is so.”
He added thoughtfully:
“It looks, does it not, as though we return to our muttons? Who is the most likely person to have taken that morphine tube? Elinor Carlisle. We may say that she wished to make sure of inheriting a large fortune. We may be more generous and say that she was actuated by pity, that she took the morphine and administered it in compliance with her aunt’s often-repeated request; but she took it—and Mary Gerrard saw her do it. And so we are back at the sandwiches and the empty house, and we have Elinor Carlisle once more—but this time with a different motive: to save her neck.”
Peter Lord cried out:
“That’s fantastic. I tell you, she isn’t that kind of person! Money doesn’t really mean anything to her—or to Roderick Welman, either, I’m bound to admit. I’ve heard them both say as much!”
“You have? That is very interesting. That is the kind of statement I always look upon with a good deal of suspicion myself.”
Peter Lord said: