Colonel Vane has a stick with a silver dog's-head handle that he taps twice on the floor before he speaks, as though summoning his own opinions to attention, and I have come to find it almost soothing, which tells you something about the state of my nerves generally. I mention him first because you asked me, in your last, to give you the whole cast properly instead of doling them out one alarming detail at a time, and I take the correction fairly.
There are five of us guests trapped here besides the Bexleys and their girl Nell, so let me be orderly about it, since you're forever telling me orderliness is half of detection.
Miss Iris Calloway is a schoolmistress, four-and-thirty, engaged to Mr. Edmund Frayne and by all accounts the most blameless woman in the county — his family, I gather from Mrs. Bexley's endless commentary over the mending, prize her precisely for having "not a blot on her," which struck me as an odd thing to prize a person for, as though she were a ledger rather than a woman. She is quiet, precise to the point of fussiness — I've watched her square the salt-cellar and the pepper-pot to perfect parallel twice now without seeming to notice she's doing it — and she keeps rather to herself. At dinner last night Dr. Penn, in his mild way, was telling one of his old case-stories, something about a patient he'd treated years ago under sad circumstances, and I happened to glance at Miss Calloway and saw her go quite white and excuse herself before the pudding came round. I thought at the time she'd simply taken a chill.
Edmund Frayne I've already sketched for you — the watch-case, the anxious charm. Colonel Vane, retired military, elderly and rather magnificent, claims some distant acquaintance with Dr. Penn from decades back, regiments crossing paths, nothing close. He sat up reading alone in the smoking-room the night Dr. Penn died, by his own account, until past one — no one to youch for it but himself, though I can't imagine what a man of his years and dignity would be doing creeping about the corridors.
I had a rather illuminating half hour with Bexley's account books today — he asked my help totting up the Christmas order, poor man, being run ragged — and found, tucked between the butcher's bill and the coal merchant's, a line I couldn't make sense of: an express-postage charge, entered the very afternoon the snow began, well before Dr. Penn died. I asked Bexley about it, meaning nothing by it, and he went red to the ears and changed the subject so abruptly I nearly laughed, if the circumstances weren't what they are. There was some sharp word between the two of them that same afternoon — I heard raised voices from the hall myself, though not the substance — and I'd assumed it was the usual innkeeper's grievance over an unpaid extra. Now I wonder.
Nell, the housemaid, is two-and-twenty, quick and generally reliable, though she's taken to disappearing for stretches in the evening that Mrs. Bexley puts down to idleness and I privately suspect is something more interesting than idleness. She's the one who found him. I don't think there's anything in it — she's not the sort to have any quarrel with a gentle old man who scarcely knew her name — but Dr. Penn did once scold her rather sharply for tidying his papers when she oughtn't have touched them, and she went quite pink and tucked her hair under her cap the way she does when she's flustered, and hasn't quite forgiven him for it, I think, though that's a very small thing to speak of in the same breath as a death.
Which brings me to the notebook again, since you asked. He kept up the habit every evening I observed him, right to the last — a private, orderly little man, recording his own careful doses like a bookkeeper of his own health. I can't get past the carefulness of it. A man that careful of his own heart drops seems an odd candidate for carelessly overdosing himself.
Here is my real question for you, since I trust your judgment above my own on these things: if you had to choose one person in this house who does not belong among the innocent — not on evidence, mind, just on the shape of things — who would it be, and why?
Yours, in the thick of it,
Purdie
P.S. — Miss Calloway asked me at breakfast, quite casually, whether the post had gone out yet this week. I told her nothing has moved in four days. She only nodded and went back to her tea, but she'd squared her spoon against her cup before she did it.