I had one."
"Oh, yes, but they weren't real at all.
Dear Maud here tumbled on that.
Even in peaceful Lymstock there are plenty of scandals, and I can assure you any woman living in the place would have known about them and used them.
But a man, you see, isn't interested in gossip in the same way - especially a detached logical man like Mr. Symmington.
But a genuine woman writer of those letters would have made her letters much more to the point.
"So you see that if you disregard the smoke and come to the fire you know where you are.
You just come down to the actual facts of what happened.
And putting aside the letters, just one thing happened - Mrs. Symmington died.
"So then, naturally, one thinks of who might have wanted Mrs. Symmington to die, and of course the very first person one thinks of in such a case is, I am afraid, the husband.
And one asks oneself is there any reason? - any motive? - for instance, any other woman?
"And the very first thing I hear is that there is a very attractive young governess in the house.
So clear, isn't it?
Mr. Symmington, a rather dry repressed unemotional man, tied to a querulous and neurotic wife and then suddenly this radiant young creature comes along.
"I'm afraid, you know, that gentlemen, when they fall in love at a certain age, get the disease very badly.
It's quite a madness.
And Mr. Symmington, as far as I can make out, was never actually a good man - he wasn't very kind or very affectionate or very sympathetic - his qualities were all negative - so he hadn't really the strength to fight his madness.
And in a place like this, only his wife's death would solve his problem.
He wanted to marry the girl, you see. She's very respectable and so is he.
And besides, he's devoted to his children and didn't want to give them up.
He wanted everything, his home, his children, his respectability and Elsie.
And the price he would have to pay for that was murder.
"He chose, I do think, a very clever way.
He knew so well from his experience of criminal cases how soon suspicion falls on the husband if a wife dies unexpectedly - and the possibility of exhumation in the case of poison.
So he created a death which seemed only incidental to something else.
He created a nonexistent anonymous letter writer.
And the clever thing was that the police were certain to suspect a woman - and they were quite right in a way.
All the letters were a woman's letters; he copied them very cleverly from the letters in the case last year and from a case Dr. Griffith told him about.
I don't mean that he was so crude as to reproduce any letter verbatim, but he took phrases and expressions from them and mixed them up, and the net result was that the letters definitely represented a woman's mind - a half-crazy repressed personality.
"He knew all the tricks that the police use, handwriting, typewriting tests, etc.
He's been preparing his crime for some time.
He typed all the envelopes before he gave away the typewriter to the Women's Institute, and he cut the pages from the book at Little Furze probably quite a long time ago when he was waiting in the drawing room one day.
People don't open books of sermons much!
"And finally, having got his false Poison Pen well established, he staged the real thing.
A fine afternoon when the governess and the boys and his stepdaughter would be out, and the Servants having their regular day out.
He couldn't foresee that the little maid Agnes would quarrel with her boyfriend and come back to the house."
Joanna asked,
"But what did she see?
Do you know that?"
"I don't know.
I can only guess. My guess would be that she didn't see anything."
"That it was all a mare's nest?"
"No, my dear, I mean that she stood at the pantry window all the afternoon waiting for the young man to come and make it up and that quite literally she saw nothing.
That is, no one came to the house at all, not the postman, nor anybody else.
"It would take her some time, being slow, to realize that that was very odd - because apparently Mrs. Symmington had received an anonymous letter that afternoon."
"Didn't she receive one?" I asked, puzzled.
"But of course not!
As I say, this crime is so simple.
Her husband just put the cyanide in the top cachet of the ones she took in the afternoon when her sciatica came on after lunch.
All Symmington had to do was to get home before, or at the same time as Elsie Holland, call his wife, get no answer, go up to her room, drop a spot of cyanide in the plain glass of water she had used to swallow the cachet, toss the crumpled-up anonymous letter into the grate, and put by her hand the scrap of paper with 'I can't go on' written on it."