No constable is coming, and I find that has settled something in me rather than the reverse — I had half hoped for an official person to arrive and take the whole business out of my hands, and now that I know for certain none will, for days yet, I feel obliged to think properly instead of merely fretting decoratively by the fire.
The message came by a farmer on snowshoes this morning, more for the mail than for us, though word travels faster than letters here: the bridge at Marsh Lane is down, the road beyond it drifted to the hedge-tops, and nothing official will reach the village, let alone us, until it's cleared. Bexley took the news with something close to relief, which I noted and did not remark on. A death in the house is bad enough for business without an inspector poking through his cellars and his account books besides.
It was Nell who gave me the thread I've been pulling at since, though she didn't mean to. She keeps a little nightly list for her own duties — which fires banked, which jugs filled, which basins emptied — a habit her mother taught her, she says, so nothing's ever forgot and nothing's ever argued over. I asked to see the page for the night Dr. Penn died, more out of idle thoroughness than any real hope of it, and she fetched it without a thought, glad of something useful to do.
Rm 4 (Dr. P.) — fire banked 9:40. Jug filled fresh, full. Basin emptied. Tumbler by bed — rinsed, left empty per usual.
I asked her what "left empty per usual" meant, and she looked at me as though I'd asked her to explain why water is wet. Dr. Penn, she said, always had her leave the tumbler quite empty at night — he liked to fill it himself from the fresh jug when he took his drops, measure the water the way he measured everything else, a full glass each time, diluted just so. It was, she said, the one particular thing about him she remembered clearly, because old Mrs. Hartle before her had always left the tumbler half-full out of habit and been sharply corrected for it.
So: a full jug, and a glass meant to be filled fresh and full each night — and yet by morning the jug stood nearly untouched, and the glass by his bed held only the barest mouthful, gone cloudy with what I can only assume were his drops. If he filled his glass fully as he always did, where did the rest of that water go? And if he did not fill it fully — if there was only a mouthful of water in that glass to begin with — then someone measured his dose into a very small amount of liquid indeed, not the generous, diluted glassful Nell describes as his invariable habit.
I put this to Miss Calloway at tea, not accusingly, only as one of my "little puzzles," the way I do when I want to watch a face rather than hear an answer. She said, quite reasonably, that perhaps he simply hadn't felt like a full glass that night, being unwell, and went back to her needlework. It was a perfectly sensible answer. I only wish she hadn't lined up her scissors and thimble in a neat little row along the table's edge while she gave it.
Edmund, meanwhile, has taken to prowling the upstairs corridor on some pretext or other — fetching his coat, forgetting his gloves — often enough that I begin to suspect he is looking for something rather than merely restless, though I can't imagine what a solicitor would want with a dead physician's belongings. Bexley caught him near Dr. Penn's door yesterday evening and there were sharp words again, though shorter this time, and Edmund came down looking thoroughly rattled and asked for brandy before dinner, which is not like him.
I am no longer entirely comfortable calling this a puzzle, and I think you'll agree once you've read this far. Tell me honestly — does a full jug and an empty glass strike you as I think it ought to strike a reasonable person, or have I gone entirely into the pamphlets and lost my sense of proportion?
Yours, in the thick of it,
Purdie
P.S. — Colonel Vane's stick was found this morning leaning just outside Dr. Penn's door, though he swears he hasn't been down that corridor in days. He seemed more embarrassed than alarmed about it, which I confess I found reassuring rather than otherwise.