An old woman is so sure that her beloved niece has been murdered by her husband that she plans revenge against him. Everyone considered it a tragedy, but she felt sure about it. Honestly, the guy acted so calmly and confident around her that I wondered if she was right or not, for almost the entire episode I thought she might have made a mistake due to her tremendous grief, but at the end it seems like she was right. There's nothing definite about it, but it is implied that she may have been right.
This is crime-novels author Abigail Mitchell. Edmund is the widower who doesn't caught on her strange behaviour at all, never suspecting a thing. She tells him she wants to make him her heir, and also has her lawyer write a testament for him in her favour, so if he dies before her she'll get back what he inherited from his wife.
Right before a trip to New York, she manages to talk to him alone, while having all the others (her lawyer, her maid and her assistant Veronica) think that he left already. She has Edmund walk inside her big safe to take something for her, then she closes the door and activates the alarm (apparently, I didn't notice this), to lock him inside. It's soundproof so nobody will notice anything.
She hoped it would be considered an accident, she will even say that maybe Edmund came back and entered the safe to take some money since he knew she had a lot of cash in there - no, not stealing, merely a bit of his inheritance in advance - and got trapped in there by accident... but Columbo never believed that for a second, because of the alarm. Someone set it from the outside...
Edmund had left his car keys on the table so she took them and hid them in the house, but when she tried to retrieve them she couldn't find them. The maid saw them and Veronica took them, saying she lost them. Abigail didn't know what to expect from this. Later Veronica gives her the keys, but doesn't exactly blackmails her. She simply wants to be closer to her, travelling around the world with her and stuff, have fun.
Abigail wants to throw away the keys when she meets Colombo. He's been looking for those keys everywhere, and even tells her that if he finds the keys he finds the killer. She gives the keys to him, saying she found them in a bush... (these keys, it didn't make sense to hide them in the house, just take them with you and drop them somewhere in New York! now it doesn't make sense to give them to Colombo....). Colombo has pictures that prove she couldn't have found them where she says she did, but this is not much of a proof.
The evidence that counts is that, right in front of her, he manages to decipher Edmund's last message. He took one of her books, and only hid a little piece of it. The title was slightly changed, he had no pen and no light, but he had a few matches and he deleted a couple of words only leaving "I was murdered by Abigail Mitchell".
Previously, Colombo had visited Edmund's apartment with Abigail, and he noted that there weren't any pictures of his dead wife, and because of this he says that it was not a happy marriage. This is the first clue that Abigail was actually right.
At the end of the episode, Abigail says that none of this would have ever happened if only had been Colombo the one in charge of investigating the death of her niece.... exactly, that's what makes detectives like him heroes and the real world so scary...
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