Appleby Talking Read Online Free PDF Page B

detection indeed.”
    “I don’t know that I’d call it that. But at least it sent me to the waste-paper basket. And there, sure enough, with a London postmark and Miss Pinhorn’s address, was the scrap of wrapping I expected.
    “And there was something more – a slip of notepaper with the words: ‘To Aunt Amelia on her birthday, with love from Jane.’
    “So I hunted out the postman. Apart from a few letters, he had delivered nothing at Miss Pinhorn’s for weeks – until the very morning of the day on which she died. On that day he had delivered a small oblong parcel.
    “I looked like being hot on a trail. That evening, while the remaining chocolates were being analysed, with what was to prove an entirely negative result, I went up to town and sought out Jane Pinhorn.
    “And I didn’t care for what I found. Jane was as nice a girl as you could wish to meet, and she had liked her eccentric aunt. This birthday box of chocolates had been an annual occasion with her. She was a highly intelligent girl, too.
    “Miss Pinhorn’s symptoms, so far as we knew about them, were consistent with the ingestion of some poison of the atropine group. The sudden thirst, and the delirium resulting from incoordinate stimulation of the higher centres of the cerebrum, were consistent with this.
    “Deadly nightshade, as you may know, is not in fact all that deadly. But one could no doubt cram a chocolate with quite enough to cause a great deal of mischief, and Jane Pinhorn had possessed the opportunity to do this.
    “Moreover, she had a motive. Along with a male cousin – a ne’er-do-well in Canada – she was the dead woman’s only relative and co-heir.
    “I saw suspicion inevitably attaching itself to this girl.
    “I came back to Sheercliffe that night seriously troubled, and as soon as I arrived I went straight out to the dead woman’s cottage.
    “The rest of that night I spent prowling from one room to another.
    “And then, quite suddenly, I found that I had come to a halt in the little hall and was staring at an envelope lying beside the telephone directory on a small table. It was a plain manila envelope, stamped ready for post, and creased down the middle.
    “For a second I didn’t see the significance of that crease. What had touched off some spring in my mind was the address – a single-spaced typescript affair of the most commonplace sort. International Vitamin Warehouses Limited, if mildly absurd, was nothing out of the way and wouldn’t have troubled me.
    “The snag lay in what followed. I know my East London fairly well. And the street in which this pretentious organisation claimed an abode contains nothing but mean private houses and a few shabby little shops.
    “And so the truth came to me… The truth, to begin with, about that crease. This envelope had come to Miss Pinhorn folded inside another one.
    “I slit the thing open there and then. ‘ Send no money. Simply fill up the back of this form …’ It had been a diabolically clever scheme. And it had, of course, been a completely fatuous one as well.”
    Appleby paused. The Vicar was looking largely puzzled. But the Doctor drew a long breath. “The nephew in Canada?”
    “Precisely. He knew about the sealed-room effect. He knew about Jane’s annual birthday gift. And he knew about his aunt’s idiosyncrasy to belladonna.
    “Some months before, its use by her oculist in a normal clinical dose had made her so seriously unwell as to take her into a nursing-home. The nephew believed that he could get on the gum of a reply-paid envelope a quantity which in her special case would be fatal.
    “Miss Pinhorn, you remember, could never resist a free sample of anything. So she would fill in the form, lick the envelope – and perish!
    “The envelope, if posted, would go to what was in fact a shady accommodation address in London, and our precious nephew would pick it up when he came over to England. He would also pick up the half of his aunt’s fortune