Mrs Davis

Mrs Davis is an offstage witness whose ordinary work as a caller places her close to a pattern of suspicious deaths. Her uneasy remarks about the people she visited, especially a client who died soon after appearing healthy, give Inspector Lejeune a possible explanation for the names on Father Gorman’s list and for why the dying Mrs Davis sought a priest. The evidence does not establish exactly what she knew or whether she understood the whole scheme; that uncertainty is central to her role in the investigation.

Work and Growing Unease

Mrs Davis’s job involved calling on people, and Lejeune later reasons that the names on the list were people she had visited who subsequently died. Eileen Brandon recalls that Mrs Davis had become unhappy with the arrangement. She had overheard something suggesting that the work was not what it appeared to be, but she had not explained the details or described the operation definitively.

Her response was divided. Mrs Davis reportedly considered the pay very good and believed that the callers were not being asked to do anything illegal; on that basis, she had told herself there was no need to concern herself with what lay behind the work. Yet the effort to dismiss her suspicions did not make them disappear. Brandon remembers her saying that she sometimes felt like Typhoid Mary, a comparison she made after noticing that people she visited seemed to die. The remark turns routine calling into something ominous: Mrs Davis could not identify a cause, but she had begun to feel implicated in a recurring pattern.

The Deaths on Her List

The clearest example she shared with Brandon was Ormerod. He had been on her list only a fortnight before he died suddenly of a cerebral hemorrhage. Mrs Davis had thought him to be in excellent condition, and his death upset her. She reportedly laughed off the possibility that her visits had anything to do with such deaths, calling the pattern a coincidence, but Brandon understood that she was not comfortable with that explanation.

The list thus acquires a meaning beyond a record of calls. Lejeune interprets it as a register of people Mrs Davis had visited and who later died, which gives her casual work an unintended connection to the crimes under investigation. His interpretation is a working deduction, not a confirmed account of every name or death. Mrs Davis herself seems to have noticed a pattern without knowing how it operated; the gap between that partial recognition and a provable explanation gives the evidence its force.

What She Told Eileen Brandon

Mrs Davis shared these doubts with Brandon, another woman connected to the work. Brandon also remembers Mrs Davis saying that people appeared to die after she had called on them, then laughing as if the coincidence could be dismissed. The mixture of nervous insight and attempted reassurance suggests that Mrs Davis had not openly accused anyone, even as she found the situation increasingly difficult to ignore.

At their last meeting, Mrs Davis told Brandon to read the Bible. Brandon did not understand what she meant, and she did not know where Mrs Davis was afterward or whether she remained with C.R.C. The remark is therefore an unresolved piece of testimony rather than a clear explanation. When Lejeune later tells Brandon that Mrs Davis is dead, Brandon is startled and asks how it happened. The news confirms that the woman whose suspicions might have clarified the arrangement can no longer be questioned directly.

Final Disclosure and Significance

Lejeune supplies the missing outline: Mrs Davis became seriously ill, and while dying she sent for Father Gorman and told him what she knew and suspected. He infers that she had learned enough to become dangerous, although he stresses that the extent of her knowledge remains uncertain. In particular, he wonders whether she recognized someone leaving a house where he had no legitimate reason to be, disguised as a workman, and whether that person realized she had recognized him.

That possibility links Mrs Davis’s last disclosure to Father Gorman’s murder. Lejeune reasons that if she passed the recognition to the priest, the person implicated had an urgent reason to silence him before he could reveal it. The theory remains a deduction in this conversation, not a fact established by Mrs Davis’s testimony, but it reframes her deathbed confession as a crucial link in the chain of danger. Mrs Davis matters because she saw the pattern from within the ordinary routines of her job: she could sense that something was wrong, yet her partial knowledge arrived too late to protect either herself or the priest she consulted.