“Yes,” said Wimsey, thoughtfully, “yes – you will have to do that – naturally.”

Mr. Crofts did not look best pleased when this story was handed on to him.

“I warned you, Lord Peter,” he said, “what might come of showing our hand to the police. Now they’ve got hold of this incident, they will have every opportunity to turn it to their own advantage. Why didn’t you leave it to us to make the investigation?”

“Damn it,” said Wimsey angrily, “it was left to you for about three months and you did absolutely nothing. The police dug it up in three days. Time’s important in this case, you know.”

“Very likely, but don’t you see that the police won’t rest now till they’ve found this precious packet?”

“Well?”

“Well, and suppose it isn’t arsenic at all? If you’d left it in our hands, we could have sprung the thing on them at the last moment, when it was too late to make enquiries, and then we should have knocked the bottom out of the prosecution. Give the jury Mrs. Bulfinch’s story as it stands and they’d have to admit there was some evidence that the deceased poisoned himself. But now, of course, the police will find or fake something and show that the powder was perfectly harmless.”

“And supposing they find it and it is arsenic?”

“In that case, of course,” said Mr. Crofts, “we shall get an acquittal. But do you believe in that possibility, my lord?”

“It’s perfectly evident that you don’t,” said Wimsey, hotly. “In fact, you think your client’s guilty. Well, I don’t.”

Mr. Crofts shrugged his shoulders.

“In our client’s interests,” he said, “we are bound to look at the unfavourable side of all evidence, so as to anticipate the points that are likely to be made by the prosecution. I repeat, my lord, that you have acted indiscreetly.”

“Look here,” said Wimsey, “I’m not out for a verdict of ‘Not Proven.’ As far as Miss Vane’s honour and happiness are concerned, she might as well be found guilty as acquitted on a mere element of doubt. I want to see her absolutely cleared and the blame fixed in the right quarter. I don’t want any shadow of doubt about it.”

“Highly desirable, my lord,” agreed the solicitor, “but you will allow me to remind you that it is not merely a question of honour or happiness, but of saving Miss Vane’s neck from the gallows.”

“And I say,” said Wimsey, “that it would be better for her to be hanged outright than to live and have everybody think her a murderess who got off by a fluke.”

“Indeed?” said Mr. Crofts, “I fear that is not an attitude that the defence can very well adopt. May I ask if it is adopted by Miss Vane herself?”

“I shouldn’t be surprised if it was,” said Wimsey. “But she’s innocent, and I’ll make you damn well believe it before I’ve done.”

“Excellent, excellent,” said Mr. Crofts, suavely, “nobody will be more delighted than myself. But I repeat that, in my humble opinion, your lordship will be wiser not to betray too many confidences to Chief-Inspector Parker.”

Wimsey was still simmering inwardly from this encounter when he entered Mr. Urquhart’s office in Bedford Row. The head-clerk remembered him and greeted him with the deference due to an exalted and expected visitor. He begged his lordship to take a seat for a moment, and vanished into an inner office.

A woman typist, with a strong, ugly, rather masculine face, looked up from her machine as the door closed, and nodded abruptly to Lord Peter. Wimsey recognized her as one of the “Cattery,” and put a commendatory mental note against Miss Climpson’s name for quick and efficient organisation. No words passed, however, and in a few moments the head-clerk returned and begged Lord Peter to step inside.

Norman Urquhart rose from his desk and held out a friendly hand of greeting. Wimsey had seen him at the trial, and noted his neat dress, thick, smooth dark hair and general appearance of brisk and business-like respectability. Seeing him now more closely, he noticed that he was rather older than he had appeared at a distance. He put him down as being somewhere about the middle forties. His skin was pale and curiously clear, except for a number of little freckles, like sunspots, rather unexpected at that time of the year, and in a man whose appearance conveyed no other suggestion of an outdoor life. The eyes, dark and shrewd, looked a little tired and were bistred about the orbits, as though anxiety were not unknown to them.

The solicitor welcomed his guest in a light, pleasant voice and asked what he could do for him.

Wimsey explained that he was interested in the Vane poisoning trial, and that he had the authority of Messrs. Crofts & Cooper to come and bother Mr. Urquhart with questions, adding, as usual, that he was afraid he was being a nuisance.

“Not at all, Lord Peter, not at all. I’m only too delighted to help you in any way, though really I’m afraid you have heard all I know. Naturally, I was very much taken aback by the result of the autopsy, and rather relieved, I must admit, to find that no suspicion was likely to be thrown on me, under the rather peculiar circumstances.”

“Frightfully tryin’ for you,” agreed Wimsey. “But you seem to have taken the most admirable precautions at the time.”

“Well, you know, I suppose we lawyers get into a habit of taking precautions. Not that I had any idea of poison at the time – or, needless to say, I should have insisted on an enquiry then and there. What was in my mind was more in the nature of some kind of food-poisoning; not botulism, the symptoms were all wrong for that, but some contamination from cooking utensils or from some bacillus in the food itself. I am glad it turned out not to be that, though the reality was infinitely worse in one way. I suppose, really, in all cases of sudden and unaccountable illness, an analysis of the secretions ought to be made as a routine part of the business, but Dr. Weare appeared perfectly satisfied, and I trusted entirely to his judgment.”

“Obviously,” said Wimsey. “One doesn’t naturally jump to the idea that people are being’ murdered – though I dare say it happens more often than one is apt to suppose.”

“It probably does, and if I’d ever had the handling of a criminal case, the suspicion might have occurred to me, but my work is almost entirely conveyancing and that sort of business – and probate and divorce and so on.”

“Talkin of probate,” said Wimsey, carelessly, “had Mr. Boyes any sort of financial expectations?”

“None at all that I know of. His father is by no means well off – the usual country parson with a small stipend and a huge Vicarage and tumble-down Church. In fact, the whole family belongs to the unfortunate professional middle-class – over-taxed and with very little financial stamina. I shouldn’t think there were more than a few hundred pounds to come to Philip Boyes, even if he had outlived the lot of them.”

“I had an idea there was a rich aunt somewhere.”

“Oh, no – unless you’re thinking of old Cremorna Garden. She’s a great-aunt, on the mother’s side. But she hasn’t had anything to do with them for very many years.”

At this moment Lord Peter had one of those bursts of illumination which come suddenly when two unrelated facts make contact in the mind. In the excitement of hearing Parker’s news about the white paper packet, he had paid insufficient attention to Bunter’s account of the teaparty with Hannah Westlock and Mrs. Pettican, but now he remembered something about an actress with a name like “ ’Yde Park or something of that.”

The readjustment made itself so smoothly and mechanically in his mind that his next question followed almost without a pause.

“Isn’t that Mrs. Wrayburn of Windle in Westmorland?”

“Yes,” said Mr. Urquhart. “I’ve just been up to see her, as a matter of fact. Of course, yes, you wrote to me there. She’s been quite childish, poor old lady, for the last five years or so. A wretched life – dragging on like that, a misery to herself and everybody else. It always seems to me a cruel thing that one may not put these poor old people out of the way, as one would a favourite animal – but the law will not let us be so merciful.”