Mrs Davis’s death is the point at which a pattern of unease becomes a possible motive for silencing witnesses. Before she died, she had overheard something suggesting that the operation she was connected with was not what it appeared to be. She was then taken ill, sent for Father Gorman, and told him what she knew and suspected. Lejeune later connects that disclosure to a more dangerous possibility: that Mrs Davis had recognized a man where he had no business to be, and that her recognition may have led to Father Gorman’s murder.

Unease about the operation

Eileen Brandon tells Lejeune that she had spoken with Mrs Davis, who was unhappy about the arrangement too. Mrs Davis had overheard something, though she had not explained it in enough detail for Brandon to be certain what had happened. What she did say left Brandon with the impression that the operation was a racket of some kind. At the same time, Mrs Davis seemed to distinguish suspicion from direct involvement: the money was good, and she believed they were not being asked to do anything illegal. Her unease therefore sat alongside a reason to look away. She had encountered a troubling suggestion, but apparently did not yet feel that it required her to withdraw or report what she knew.

One remark stayed with Brandon because she could not make sense of it at the time. Mrs Davis said she sometimes felt like Typhoid Mary. The comparison suggests that she sensed a connection between her ordinary work and other people’s misfortune, but the evidence does not establish precisely what she meant by it. In retrospect, Lejeune interprets the remark alongside the list of people who died after Mrs Davis had called on them in the course of her job. What sounded to Brandon like an obscure expression becomes, for the investigators, a possible sign that Mrs Davis had begun to suspect her work was connected to a series of deaths.

Illness and the deathbed disclosure

By the time Lejeune speaks with Brandon, Mrs Davis is dead. Brandon is startled by the news and asks how it happened, but the exchange does not give a diagnosis or describe the circumstances of her death in medical detail. Lejeune later supplies the investigative outline: Mrs Davis was suddenly taken ill, and, while dying, sent for a priest and told him what she knew and suspected. That priest was Father Gorman. Her account thus passed from a woman who was uncertain about what she had overheard to a priest who could recognize the seriousness of a possible crime.

The sequence matters even though its details remain incomplete. Mrs Davis’s death is not presented as a fully witnessed scene, and the text does not establish exactly when she first understood the danger or what she managed to tell Father Gorman. Instead, the reader encounters the event through later conversation and inference. The gap between what Mrs Davis suspected, what she disclosed, and what Father Gorman could pass on becomes part of the mystery: her death removes a potential witness, while her final communication may also have made the priest a target.

The list and the suspected recognition

After Brandon leaves, Lejeune considers what the names on Father Gorman’s list might represent. His working explanation is that they were people Mrs Davis had visited as part of her job and who had subsequently died. This is an inference, not a confirmed account of how the list was made. If correct, it gives Mrs Davis’s Typhoid Mary remark a grim retrospective significance: she may have felt implicated in a repeating pattern without understanding, or being able to prove, how it worked.

Lejeune also distinguishes that pattern from the fact he considers most immediately dangerous. He reasons that Mrs Davis may have recognized a man emerging from a house where he had no legitimate reason to be, while pretending to be some kind of workman. If she told Father Gorman about this, the man might have realized that she recognized him—or might have feared that she had passed the recognition on. Lejeune therefore proposes that Father Gorman had to be silenced before he could relay the information. The explanation is presented as the inspector’s reconstruction, not as a certainty independently confirmed in the scene; its force lies in showing how one possible recognition could connect Mrs Davis’s knowledge to the priest’s murder.

Consequences for the investigation

Mrs Davis’s death changes the investigation from a search for the meaning of scattered names into a search for the person who may have known that the operation was criminal. Her apparent employment supplied a route through which she could encounter people later found among the dead; what she overheard suggested that the work was not as innocent as she had been told; and her possible recognition of the disguised man offered a reason that someone might fear her testimony. Each strand is incomplete alone. Together, they give Lejeune a plausible account of why she became dangerous and why Father Gorman’s visit to her could have precipitated his murder.

The event also sharpens the later interpretation of illness as evidence. When Ginger becomes unwell, Mrs Dane Calthrop insists that the illness itself must be taken seriously. That exchange does not establish that Mrs Davis died in the same way, nor does it supply her diagnosis. It does show how the investigation has learned to distrust an apparently ordinary illness when it sits within a pattern of deaths and concealed wrongdoing. Mrs Davis’s death consequently functions both as a loss of a potential witness and as a clue whose meaning emerges only after others compare what she said, the names on the list, and the people who followed Father Gorman.

The account leaves important particulars unresolved: the precise cause and timing of Mrs Davis’s death, the full substance of her deathbed disclosure, and whether she certainly recognized the man Lejeune describes. That uncertainty is integral to the event’s role in the mystery. Mrs Davis cannot clarify what she knew; investigators must reconstruct it from Brandon’s partial recollection and the consequences that followed. Her death is thus not merely another name in a succession of fatalities. It is the hinge between private suspicion and the effort to stop the people who may be turning that suspicion into a reason to kill.