“I said that I solved the mystery exactly forty-three minutes ago. And a few odd seconds, of course. It was an interesting little problem in its way, my dear Alexander Watson, but absurdly simple once one had grasped the really vital factor in the case. For some extraordinary reason I appeared to have overlooked it before; hence the delay. But don’t put that bit in when you come to write up the case, or I shall never land the next vacancy for a stolen-crown-jewels recoverer to an influential emperor.” “You’ve solved it, have you?” Alec growled sceptically. “I seem to have heard something like that before.” “Meaning Jefferson? Yes, I admit I backed the wrong horse there. But this is a very different matter. I’ve really solved it this time.” “Oh? Well, let’s hear it.” “With the greatest pleasure,” Roger responded heartily. “Let me see now. Where shall I begin? Well, I think I’ve told you all the really important things that I managed to elicit from Mrs. Plant and Jefferson, haven’t I? Except one.” Roger dropped his bantering manner with startling suddenness. “Alec,” he said seriously, “that man Stanworth was as choice a scoundrel as I’ve ever heard of. What I didn’t tell you is that he gave Mrs. Plant three months in which to find two hundred and fifty pounds for him; and hinted that if she hadn’t got it already, a pretty woman like her would have no difficulty in laying her hands on it.” “Good God!” Alec breathed. “He even went farther than that and offered to introduce her to a rich man out of whom she would be able to wheedle it, if she played her cards properly. Oh, I tell you, shooting was much too easy a death for friend Stanworth. And the person who did it ought to be acclaimed as a public benefactor, instead of being hanged by a grateful country; as he certainly would be, if all this had got into the hands of the police.” “You can hardly expect the law to recognise the principle of poetic justice for all that,” Alec objected. “I don’t see why not,” Roger retorted. “However, we won’t go into that at present. Well, to my mind there were two chief difficulties in this Stanworth business. The first one was that at the beginning there didn’t seem to be any definite motive for killing him; and afterwards, when we’d found out about him, there were far too many. All those people in the house, Mrs. Plant, Jefferson, Lady Stanworth, the butler (who, by the way, appears to be a murderer in a small way already, as I gather from Jefferson; that was the hold which Stanworth had over him)—all of them had every reason to kill him; and the case began to take on the aspect not so much of proving who did it, but, by a process of elimination, of finding out who didn’t. In that way I managed eventually to dismiss Mrs. Plant, Jefferson, and Lady Stanworth. But besides the people actually under our noses in the house, there were all the others—goodness only knows how many of them!—of whose very existence we knew nothing; all his other victims.”