“And how far had he got by the time the beating was over?”

Mrs. Larkin capitulated. She would be a star witness and have her picture in all the papers. She said,

“Just about half way to that waste piece of ground.”

They looked together from the window. The road was plainly in sight.

“You went on watching him?”

She nodded.

“For a bit. Enough to make a cat laugh the way he’d keep clapping a hand first one place and then another and cursing all the time!”

“You could hear him?”

“Enough to know he was at it. And a good thing he’d got too far away for me to hear the language!” She rounded this off with a virtuous sniff.

“Did you see him get as far as the waste piece of ground?”

“Just about the beginning of it.”

“And there was no one on the road behind him?”

“Well, no, there wasn’t.”

“You’ll swear to that? You may have to, you know.”

The tip of the sharp ferrety nose went an angry pink.

“Anything I’ve said is all the same as if I was on my oath! I haven’t said nothing that isn’t true! Nor nothing but what I’m willing to stand up in court and take my Bible oath on!”

“So there was no one on the road behind him-” Frank used a meditative tone. Then, with an abrupt change of manner, “Or in front of him, Mrs. Larkin? On the road from the village?”

She didn’t answer. He said insistently,

“Was there anyone on the road in front of him, coming from the village?”

She backed away.

“Well then, there was.”

“Man, or woman?”

She shook her head.

“I couldn’t see-nobody couldn’t have seen. It was gone ten o’clock and more.”

“There was a moon.”

“It never come through the cloud. All I could tell was there was someone coming along the road. So I reckoned whoever it was would give Flaxman a hand. And I shut my window.”

“Sure about that?”

“Of course I’m sure! Nellie, she’d stopped crying-leastways she’d stopped bawling out loud. And it was too dark and too far to bother any longer with that Flaxman, so I gave up. I was as cold as a stone. I made myself a good hot cup of tea and went to my bed. And that’s the gospel truth.”

Frank came away with the strong conviction that it was.

“And if it is,” he observed to Grayson a little later, “it lets Tom Humphreys out.”

Inspector Grayson said he thought so too.

During the rest of the day everyone in the village was asked where he or she had been between half past nine and half past ten on the night of Flaxman’s murder. There was apparently a collective alibi for the men who remained in the Falcon after Tom Humphreys had gone out. They had left together at ten o’clock, and since, as it happened, all lived on the side of Bleake nearest to Wraydon and farthest from the waste piece of ground where the body had lain, they went home in a bunch, calling out cheerful good-nights as each disappeared into his own dwelling. And all their wives were prepared not only to say but to swear that they had not gone out again. This left a number of people whom there was no reason for suspecting, and who were for the most part asleep in bed. And the women-wives, mothers, sisters, and grandmothers of Bleake-who had no possible reason for setting foot outside at such an hour.

Grayson had worked solidly through the lot, when he encountered Miss Silver coming out of the village shop. She bowed, and was about to pass on, when he fell into step beside her.

“Abbott tells me it was you who put him up to the idea that Mrs. Larkin might have seen someone coming from the direction of the village. Well, I’ve been through the place with a toothcomb, and there isn’t anyone who will so much as admit to having been out at the time.”

Miss Silver did not consider this at all surprising. Inspector Grayson was doubtless an excellent officer, but not perhaps endowed with the finer shades of tact. Put as he had just put it, his questioning of the local inhabitants could only have sounded like an invitation to confess. With a slight preliminary cough she enquired,

“Did you, perhaps, make it sufficiently clear that you were seeking for the co-operation of a witness, and not preparing the way for an arrest?”

He stared.

“They had got the wind up, the whole lot of them. If anyone was out, he wasn’t going to admit it-you could see that.”

Miss Silver smiled in the dusk.

“Did you have any conversation with old Mrs. Pease?”

She was aware of his jerk of surprise.

“Granny Pease? Why, no! She was in bed with the rheumatics, and as to going out in the dark, why she wouldn’t think of such a thing. She must be well up in her eighties anyhow.”

“Nevertheless I think you will find that she did go out on the night of the murder.”

“What makes you think so, madam?”

His tone expressed an obstinate disbelief. Miss Silver ignored it.

“Her daughter, Mrs. Bowyer, works for Miss Falconer. She arrived as usual on the morning after the murder, and before it had become public property. In the course of a casual conversation with Miss Falconer she deplored the fact that Granny, as she called her, was so venturesome-‘Slipping out last night when everyone’s back was turned, and not a word where she was going. Said she’d remembered a very particular cough mixture from her great-grandmother’s recipe, and finding she’d got a bottle of it by her, she’d gone down the street with it to Mrs. Miller’s where they hadn’t been able to sleep for nights on account of Stanley’s cough. And after ten before she came home.’ ”

“You heard this yourself?”

“No, Inspector, it was said to Miss Falconer, who only spoke of it to me about half an hour ago. She had heard that you were anxious to find anyone who might have seen the murderer, and her conscience would not allow her to keep silence. If I had not met you just now I would have rung up the police station at Wraydon.”

He was frowning in the darkness, a fact which Miss Silver was very well able to deduce from the tone of his voice.

“It is most unlikely that she saw anything at all, but anyhow she can’t very well be suspected of the murder, so perhaps she’ll be willing to talk. I’ll say good-night, Miss Silver.”

He went striding on past Miss Falconer’s cottage. He would have to see the old woman, but he told himself that he expected nothing from the interview. On the other hand she had been out until after ten, and Mrs. Miller’s house was the last in the village. Coming and going she would pass the entrance to the Ladies’ House. There were possibilities, but of course no use to build on them. He stood knocking on the cottage door, and wondered who would come to it. It was not the least of his surprises that it was Granny Pease herself, in a large black shawl and slippers of crimson wool. There was nothing on her head but its own sparse white hair, and she immediately complained of the draught and told him to come in and be quick about it. By virtue of some attenuated relationship to his wife she addressed him as Johnny.

“Come to have a nice little chat with me, have you? Time was when young men would come visiting me evenings-and never too late to start again! Sit you down by the fire. I’ve a nice strong cup of tea in the pot.”

The tea was stewed and bitter, but he took it, repressed a shudder over his first sip, and said in a good-humoured bantering tone,

“Well, Granny, I’m glad to see you up and about. Aggie told me this afternoon that you couldn’t move out of your bed with the rheumatics.”

Her cup looked blacker and must have tasted worse than his own, but she seemed to be enjoying it. Her face twisted in a malicious smile.

“Didn’t want me to see you-didn’t want you to see me! Keeping of us apart, that’s what Aggie was a-doing! Jealous of my new young man, I shouldn’t wonder, and thinking I wouldn’t know nothing about your coming because of me having my forty winks! But her Ernie let it out. ‘What’s that Johnny Grayson want, coming here?’ he says. And I give it to Aggie proper! And now that you’re here, I’ll arst the same as what he did. What do you want, Johnny Grayson? You’d better look lively, or Aggie will be home, and maybe she’ll pack you off.”