In the study Chief Inspector Lamb sat in Jimmy Latter’s writing-chair with a hand on either knee, looking sometimes across the table at Frank Abbott, and sometimes to his right where Miss Silver, a little detached from the proceedings, was knitting. She was halfway through one of the useful grey stockings destined for her niece Ethel’s second boy, Derek. The needles clicked busily. A portrait in oils of the late Mr. Francis Latter looked down from over the mantelpiece and gloomed upon the scene. Considered by all who knew him to be a depressingly accurate likeness, it raised the question as to how near-relations could have so little in common. No one could have supposed him to be Jimmy Latter’s father. Francis Latter stood there, tall, dark, and haggard. There was a hint of his nephew Antony, but Antony had not the tragic look which was, however, very appropriate to the present occasion.

Lamb was speaking.

“It looks pretty black for him-you’ll admit that?”

Miss Silver coughed.

“I am not prepared to contradict you, but I would ask you to bear in mind some of Lord Tennyson’s wisest words. He observes that-

Lamb’s eyes bulged visibly.

“Well, I don’t know about meads and buds and blooms, but when I see a man that’s got every reason to think his wife isn’t any better than she ought to be, and when that man has to admit she’d made a will leaving him a fortune, I don’t have to ask Lord Tennyson’s leave to suspect Mr. Jimmy Latter of having two very good motives for poisoning Mrs. Latter.”

Miss Silver’s needles clicked.

“Two motives may be one too many, Chief Inspector.”

Frank Abbott’s look sharpened to interest.

“Meaning that if he was knocked off his balance by jealousy he wouldn’t be thinking about the money, and if he was all out for the money he wouldn’t have been knocked endways by that scene in Antony Latter’s room?”

Lamb thumped his knee.

“That’s just where you’re wrong then! That’s where you young chaps can make a big mistake. People aren’t all that simple-they’re all mixed up. You’d be surprised if you knew how many different things a man can have in his mind at the same time, first one thing coming up on top and then another. Say a man’s jealous about his wife, but not jealous enough to kill her-he has a quarrel with her about something else. He begins to see that she means to take her way about everything and leave him to take his. He remembers that she holds the purse strings, and that gets his goat. There are sharper and sharper differences about family affairs-he wants to keep the family together, and she wants to split them up. He’s pretty hard up-it’s doubtful if he can run the place without her money-it’s an old place that’s been in the family a long time. That pulls at him. The way she’s carrying on pulls at him-she wants to break up the family, and she’s setting her cap at his cousin. They’re heading for a breach, and if there’s a breach, perhaps he won’t be able to carry on. Then overnight the breach becomes inevitable-he finds her in his cousin’s room. Don’t you see how it all works in together? If it weren’t for the money, he could let her go. If she hadn’t gone too far for him to overlook it, the money by itself mightn’t have got him to the point of murdering her. I say there are two motives here, both of them strong in themselves, and the way they come to bear on this case each of them strengthens the other.”

Miss Silver gave her slight cough.

“You illustrate my quotation perfectly, Chief Inspector. You have found a meaning suited to your mind.”

His florid colour deepened.

“I use my mind to get a meaning-is that what you’re after? And if there’s any other way of getting a meaning, I’d like to know about it. To my mind that will of Mrs. Latter’s is very damaging-you can’t get away from it. And on the top of that comes this report from Smerdon. Miss Mercer’s medicine-chest has been examined by the police surgeon. Besides the ordinary household remedies which you’d expect, there’s a quarter-full glass bottle of morphia tablets. He says they’re of German manufacture and much stronger than what you could get in this country. Now all the things in the medicine-cupboard have got Miss Mercer’s fingerprints on them- some old, some fresh, which is just what you’d expect. This bottle of tablets has a very good set of her prints. But it’s got Mr. Jimmy Latter’s prints on it too. They’re a bit smudged, as if she’d taken hold of it after he had, but they’re his all right. He’d been to that chest, picking things over. There’s a very clear set of his prints on another very similar bottle with quinine pills in it. I’d say he was looking for the morphia and picked the other one up by mistake. There’s a bottle of ipecac there too, but no fingerprints on it. If you’re right, Miss Silver, about those preliminary attacks-well, I’d say he was being careful to start with. Wiped the bottle, or wore gloves-something like that. I don’t know why he should have risked the attacks at all, but I daresay we shall find out before we’re through. Well, I didn’t put any of this to Mr. Latter when we had him in here just now, because I thought I’d like to see what Miss Mercer had to say about it first. She handled that morphia bottle after he did, and I want to see what she’s got to say about it. She may have moved it to get at something else, in which case I’d like to know if it was out of its place. Or-” he looked hard at Miss Silver-“it may be that she was in on the job. She may have been-there’s no saying.”

There was a knock upon the door. Lamb said, “Come in!” and there entered Mrs. Maniple, very majestic in the almost visible panoply of more than fifty years’ service, her head high, her colour steady, her manner dignified and purposeful. She came round to the far end of the writing-table and stood there, the Chief Inspector on her right, Sergeant Abbott on her left, and Miss Silver in her direct line of sight. There was something about her entry which proclaimed an occasion of the first magnitude. No one spoke until she did. She put her hands down flat on the table edge and said,

“There’s something I’ve got to say.”

Lamb swung round to face her, moving his whole big body. He said,

“You’re the cook, aren’t you-Mrs. Maniple?”

She said, “Yes.”

Frank Abbott got up and brought her a chair.

“Won’t you sit down?”

She looked at him, sizing him up, and said,

“No, thank you, sir.”

For once in his life Sergeant Abbott was abashed. He went back to his seat with some colour in his face, and busied himself with writing-pad and pencil.

The Chief Inspector looked grimly at the old woman who had kept her “sir” for his subordinate. He knew what it meant quite as well as she did. Something in him respected her. Something else made a mental note that Master Frank mustn’t be allowed to get wind in his head. He said,

“I see you have something to say, Mrs. Maniple. Will you tell me what it is?”

She stood there very upright.

“That’s what I’ve come for. Before Mrs. Latter died she was taken sick two or three times. I’ve come to tell you, those turns she had-they were along of what I put in her coffee.”

There was a short electric silence. Miss Silver stopped knitting for a moment and gave her a long, steady look.

Lamb said, “If this is a confession, it is my duty to warn you that anything you say may be taken down and used in evidence against you.”

There was no change in Mrs. Maniple’s expression, nor in her voice when she spoke.

“I’ve no objection to anything being taken down-I wouldn’t be here if I had. And I’m not confessing nothing about what Mrs. Latter died of, only about those sick turns she had, which was along of ipecac-in her coffee mostly, but there was once I put it in the fruit salad.”