“It hasn’t occurred to you that something in the pasts of these three people might change the circumstances enough that what appeared to be suicide was actually murder and suicide? To use an instance I came across recently.”

Hawkins threw up his hands. “Murder and suicide? You’ve been drinking, I can smell it on your breath. Enough to be having delusions?”

“No, I’m as sober as you are,” Rutledge said, reining his temper in hard.

“Not bloody likely, when you suggest such things as you did just now! I walked into that study and found two people on the couch. A man and a woman. Their hands were touching, his left and her right. In the other hand, each held a glass. There had been laudanum in the glasses, and it was on their lips and in their mouths and in their guts. Enough to kill both quickly, and several times over. Miss Marlowe had had poliomyelitis, and contrary to what people tell you, paralysis is not painless. She had been given laudanum by my father-in-law and by me, as needed. Until this spring she’d used it responsibly, no indications of addictions or abuse. But it’s as painless a death as you could wish for, if you have to go out. I can’t blame her for choosing it, and I saw no evidence that either one had forced drinking it on the other. No bruises about the mouth or tongue, none on the lips. Nothing else in their stomachs to arouse suspicion. Double suicide. That’s precisely what it was. No more, no less.”

“Nothing in their stomachs to suggest that one might have secretly given an overdose to the other, before swallowing his or her own draught?”

“It’s hard to introduce laudanum secretly into clear soup, spring lamb, roasted, vegetables and potatoes.”

“People of their sort usually drank wine with meals, and coffee afterward.”

“The state of digestion tells me that they lived for enough hours after their meal that it couldn’t have been in their wine or their coffee. I’d say they swallowed the laudanum some time after midnight. As if they’d sat up talking about it, and then decided to do it. Or possibly around dawn. They’d been dead for some time when Mrs. Trepol discovered them on Monday morning. Over twenty-four hours. Now my own meal is waiting, and if you’ll excuse me, I’ll go and eat it. My advice to you is to return to London and do something useful there. There’s very little crime in a place like Borcombe. We haven’t needed the services of Scotland Yard in living memory, and I doubt if we will in the next twenty years!”

Rutledge left the doctor’s office, thinking over what he’d been told that morning.

Damn all, if you came right down to it!