He looked at her with contempt.

“There’s nothing for them to think about. I’ve known Mirrie since she was a child. She lived in my sister’s house-in a way you may say I am a relation. I got to know you, we liked each other, and you happened to mention Mr. Field’s name- said he was leaving a lot of money to a girl called Mirrie Field. There’s nothing the police can do about that, is there?”

“It would lose me my job, and I should never get another.”

“Oh, well, there’s no need to mention names. I can just say it was a girl in the office. If they press me, I’m the perfect gentleman and couldn’t give a young lady away. You don’t need to worry about your job. No one is going to think of you having a boy friend when there are a couple of girls around. Is Jenny the fair one?”

She said, “Yes.”

She was cold right through and through-cold and numb. Presently she would remember what he had said and feel the bruise which his words had left. At the moment she felt nothing but the numbness and the cold.

He said,

“Well, we’d better not be seen together. You go home and take some aspirin or something and get that look off your face. Better say you’ve got a headache, or people will be beginning to wonder what’s happening to you.”

She said,

“You don’t seem to realize the police think you had a motive for Mr. Field’s murder. They’re trying to connect you with it. They think he was killed because he had signed that will. They think you went down there and shot him on Tuesday night because that will he had signed in the afternoon left a lot of money to Mirrie Field. I think she has told them whatever she knows.”

“She doesn’t know anything, and there isn’t anything to know. As for Tuesday night, the Jenkins, where I live, can tell your nosey-parker policeman I came in to fetch my raincoat about nine. Coming downstairs I caught my foot in it and took a nasty fall. They came running out and found me knocked clean out at the bottom of the stairs. Tom had to give me brandy and help me up to bed. Mrs. Jenkins gave me two of her sleeping-tablets and they put me out till the morning. Pretty bad head I had too, but no bones broken. They said to knock on the floor if I wanted anything, but I slept like the dead. Not much the police can do about that, is there?”

She had kept those strained dark eyes upon him. They searched his face. She said,

“You’ve got a motorbike, haven’t you?”

“So what?”

“Where do you keep it?”

“In the shed at the bottom of the yard.” He met her look with a savage angry one. “What are you getting at? You don’t think I fell downstairs, had to be helped to bed, and then got up and took the bike out and went down to this place Field End to shoot a man I’d never seen, do you?”

In her own mind she said, “I don’t think you fell downstairs.” She didn’t say it aloud. She went on looking at him and she went on thinking. He could have faked that fall- thrown something down, clattered down the last few steps and made quite a noise, bumping and calling out without really being hurt at all, and if he wasn’t hurt he could have climbed out of his bedroom window. And the motorbike needn’t have been put away. He could have left it handy and wheeled it out when something heavy was passing along the road. She didn’t want to have these thoughts, but they were there in her mind. She was to wonder afterwards whether Sid knew they were there, because quite suddenly he changed. The smile that had charmed her came into his eyes. He edged his chair round a bit and slipped his hand inside her arm, running it up and down with the caressing touch which had set her heart beating, beating.

Now she was too cold to feel anything at all-too cold, and too much afraid. Presently there would be the sense of loss, the sense of shame, but for this moment there was only the fear and the bitter cold.

For the first time since she had met him she counted the moments until she could get away from his look, his touch. It was the only relief that she could hope for.

FRANK ABBOTT dropped in at Field End on Tuesday morning. He asked for Miss Silver, and she came to him presently with her knitting-bag on her arm and the white woolly shawl now two thirds of the way towards completion wrapped up in a soft old face-towel-one of those fine white ones with a diaper pattern on it now quite out of date and superseded by cleansing tissues. The much faded date in the corner of this one was 1875, and it had been part of the wedding outfit of an aunt.

Miss Silver took out the shawl, spread the towel over her knees, and turned her attention to Frank.

“The enquiries about Sid Turner? Have they had any success?”

He gave a faint shrug.

“Beyond producing considerable alarm and despondency in Maudsley’s office I should say none, if it were not for the fact that to have a perfectly good alibi for Tuesday night is in itself a suspicious circumstance.”

Miss Silver inserted a second needle into the fluffy white cloud on her lap and began to knit with her usual smoothness and rapidity.

“Sid Turner has an alibi?”

“Certainly. You will remember we agreed that he would have one. Blake went down, or shall I say up to Pigeon Hill and saw his landlady and her husband. Retired railwayman and his wife. Nothing against them. Sid has lodged with them for about six months. Mr. Jenkins said he was all right, and Mrs. Jenkins said he was ever so nice. The alibi consists in his coming in to fetch a raincoat about nine o’clock on Tuesday evening, catching his foot in it, and falling down the best part of a flight of stairs. The Jenkinses depose to finding him unconscious in the hall. They roused him with brandy, and Jenkins helped him to bed. There were no bones broken, and he said he didn’t want a doctor. Mrs. Jenkins produced a couple of sleeping-tablets and told him to knock on the floor if he wanted anything. He replied that all he wanted was to be left alone to go to sleep. So they left him. As you are about to observe, he could have got out of the window and just made Lenton on his motorbike in time to ring Jonathan up from there.”

Miss Silver gave a faint doubtful cough.

“It would have been running it very fine, and he would be taking the risk of the Jenkinses looking in to see how he was before they went to bed.”

Frank nodded.

“According to Blake there wasn’t any risk of their doing that. They sleep in the basement and Jenkins keeps off the stairs as much as he can. He’s got a dicky foot, which is why he left the railways, and Mrs. Jenkins weighs about seventeen stone.”

Miss Silver’s needles clicked.

“Did Inspector Blake see Sid Turner?”

“He wasn’t at home. Asked where he was likely to be, Mrs. Jenkins bridled and said she wouldn’t wonder if he was at the Three Pigeons. Very friendly with the lady there he was-a Mrs. Marsh. Her husband had been dead about a twelvemonth, and there were those who thought she might be going to make it up with Sid. And he’d be doing well for himself if she did. Nice bit of money the husband had left her, to say nothing of the pub.”

“So Inspector Blake went round to the Three Pigeons? Was Sid Turner there?”

“He was, and so were a lot of other people. And do you know what they were doing? Celebrating Sid’s engagement to Mrs. Marsh-drinks on the house and a good time being had by all. Sid is a quick worker!”

Miss Silver looked thoughtful.

“If one of the girls in Mr. Maudsley’s office was friendly with him to the point of giving away confidential information, do you not suppose that she would have let him know about Inspector Blake’s visit to the office?”

“She probably did. Why?”

“I was thinking that it would be a clever move to announce his engagement to this Mrs. Marsh. It would cast doubts on the likelihood of his having had designs upon Mirrie and upon anything she might have inherited from Jonathan Field.”