When Eily’s voice had faded out on a sob she took a step towards John Higgins, and he put his arm about her.

“That’s how it happened, Inspector,” he said.

Crisp snapped out, “Then why didn’t she say so at once?”

If they had been alone, or with only Miss Silver present, Frank might have made an enemy for life by permitting himself a classical quotation. The words “Elementary, my dear Watson,” were upon his lips, but he restrained them. He did not quite restrain a faint sarcastic smile.

John Higgins neither smiled nor trifled. His answer was simple and direct.

“It would be because of me, Inspector-on account of not wanting to get me into trouble, as she thought. When she heard that tune it never came to her for a moment that it would be anyone but me.”

“You say it wasn’t you?” Crisp was very short and sharp.

“I say the same as I’ve said all along. I went straight back to Cliff after Eily had talked to me out of her window, and there I stayed till Wat Cooling fetched me along this morning.”

“That’s your story?”

“It’s the truth.”

“And the first you knew about Luke White being murdered? Well now, what was the first you knew?”

“When Wat Cooling came along and fetched me.”

Crisp fairly glared.

“Cooling told you?”

“I’ve known him all his life. I don’t want to get him into any trouble.”

“He’d no business to talk! So you came here knowing all about it-time, place, weapon, everything, I suppose!”

“He said it would be one of those knives out of the dining-room.”

Crisp pounced.

“Oh, you knew about the knives in the dining-room? I thought you said you hadn’t been inside the place for donkey’s years.”

This time John did smile, showing strong white teeth.

“Five years, Inspector. And those knives have been there a sight longer than that-nearer the hundred, I’d say.”

“But you knew they were there. You knew where you could lay hands on a knife.”

“That’s not to say I’d use it.” He stood up straight. “That’s all I’ve got to say. I didn’t come back, I didn’t set foot inside the inn, I didn’t set eyes on Luke White. And I’d like to take Eily away. She’s upset.”

When they were gone, Crisp turned his angry stare upon his fellow Inspector.

“Well, what do you make of that? What put him up to bringing the girl in here and making her tell how she’d heard him come along whistling the second time?”

Miss Silver coughed and made a verbal amendment.

“She thought that it was he whom she heard.”

He pursed up his lips.

“Who else would it be?”

Frank Abbott smiled.

“Almost anyone. Greenland’s Icy Mountains is one of the easier tunes to whistle.”

Crisp made a sound half derisive, half vexed.

“Easy to turn it off with a joke! What I want to know is, what’s behind it? What’s he about, bringing the girl in here to say she heard him under the window and came down to let him in round about the time the murder was done? What’s he getting at?”

Miss Silver said gravely,

“It might be the truth, Inspector.”

He made the same derisory sound again.

“When you’ve seen as many criminals as I have you won’t be in such a hurry to believe what they say!”

Frank Abbott slid his hand across his mouth. He had seen Miss Silver deal with disrespect before, and had found it an enjoyable spectacle. Impossible to say just how it was done, but done it was. There was no raised voice, for she did not speak. There was no flashing glance, for her eyes were not made to flash-she would, in fact, have considered it a very unladylike proceeding. There was a certain distance, a certain dignity, which relegated provincial Inspectors to their very minor place in the service of the law. A sense of authority diffused itself. Even Chief Inspector Lamb had on occasion felt himself carried back to the village school in which he had first learned that two and two make four.

The picture which confronted Inspector Crisp was of a slightly different but no less chastening kind. He had received his education at Lenton Grammar School. There came vividly to his mind a winter’s day and a group of boys throwing snowballs. A massive back presenting a too tempting target, he had let fly. There had been a direct hit, a snowy explosion, and, sudden, majestic and awful, the face of the headmaster looming up from the ensuing flurry. The memory was as momentary as it was vivid, but an oppressive sense of delinquency remained. He said abruptly,

“There isn’t much more to be done till we get the result of the post-mortem. Not that there’s likely to be a lot in it. He couldn’t have been dead very long when we got here at one-thirty. Not much doubt it had just happened when the house was roused. You would agree with that?”

He was addressing Miss Silver. She answered him with the air of a teacher who, having reproved, is now willing to overlook the fault.

“I am not an expert. When I touched his wrist it was cold. But the night was a cold one.”

Crisp nodded.

“We were half an hour getting here, and the blood wasn’t dry.”

Miss Silver said a surprising thing.

“Do you think he was killed where he was found?”

Frank Abbott’s cool blue eyes took on an interested look.

“What makes you think of that?”

She coughed in a deprecating manner-the little dowdy spinster who looked as if she could be snubbed with impunity.

“It seems such a curious place to kill him,” she said.

It was one of the longest Sundays that any of the twelve people shut up together in the Catherine-Wheel could remember. Perhaps Jane and Jeremy felt it least, since each was still exploring the other’s territory and finding it full of new and exciting things. They were also helpfully bent upon making themselves useful, laying and clearing meals and washing up with efficiency and despatch. In the evening Mrs. Bridling returned to oblige, having conducted an all-day battle against Mr. Bridling’s scruples as to her doing so on the Sabbath. She had emerged victorious, not only on account of her own prowess, but because of some fifth-column assistance from Mr. Bridling’s passionate desire to be kept in touch with what was going on. Having arrived, it was difficult to see how she was going to acquire any information, since she never stopped talking and Annie Castell never seemed to open her lips.

Be that as it may, she went on talking for a long time after she got home.

“Annie’s got something on her mind, you can’t get from it.” She beat a pillow vigorously and slipped it back under Mr. Bridling’s head with the dexterity of long practice. “It isn’t what she says, but I didn’t go to school with her for nothing, and there’s something she’s got on her mind. You wouldn’t have known the pastry for hers, for one thing. I don’t say it was heavy, and I don’t say there isn’t many a cook that wouldn’t be glad if she could make it as well, but it wasn’t her usual.”

Mr. Bridling observed in a rather perfunctory manner that he didn’t hold with cooking on a Sunday, not if it wasn’t a work of necessity and mercy like doing for an afflicted husband.

Rightly considering that this required no answer, Mrs. Bridling continued.

“Mr. Castell, he keeps talking about his dear Luke and where is he going to find his equal. I could have told him, but I kept myself. In prison, or in any other place where there’s offscourings is what I could have said, but I kept myself. Never said a word, and let him run on about his dear Luke, which if ever there was a good riddance-”

Mr. Bridling gave it as a considered opinion that it was a judgment. He was a plump old man with a nice colour and a soft purring voice. Successive hospitals had failed to find any reason why he should lie in bed and be waited on hand and foot, but he continued to do so. He spoke through the sheet which his wife had drawn up over his face whilst she straightened the blankets.