Detective Abbott looked up.

“It seems to me, sir, that she admits the first visit because she doesn’t mind admitting that she hit Craddock over the head with the decanter, but she won’t admit the second visit because she then either shot Craddock herself or saw someone else shoot him.”

“Mr. Peter Renshaw?”

“Not necessarily-” He hesitated.

“If you’ve got anything to say, say it!”

“It was something that struck me as rather curious.”

“When?”

“Yesterday-just before I brought Miss Challoner in to you. She was talking to Miss Fenton at the open door of number seven, and Miss Fenton was trying to get her to come in. Well, just as I said that you would like to see her, the sitting-room door opened and Mavis Grey came out. Renshaw was behind her, and I’m pretty sure they’d been quarrelling. Both of them had the look of it, and the girl was in a hurry to get away. Well, this is what I noticed. She was in a hurry, but she wasn’t in such a hurry that she would pass Miss Fenton. She would have had to touch her, you know, and she wouldn’t do it. She baulked, and when Miss Fenton did move she shied past her just like a horse does when it’s scared. I thought it was odd, sir.”

“Might only mean she’d been quarrelling with Mr. Renshaw about Miss Fenton.”

Without speaking, Detective Abbott registered a polite rejection of this theory.

The Inspector said somewhat testily,

“Number three is Miss Lucy Craddock. Very suspicious behaviour indeed. She disapproves of Mr. Craddock’s attentions to her niece, quarrels with him, and is told she will have to turn out of her flat. Instead of leaving Victoria at seven-thirty-three as she had planned, on a trip to the Continent, she puts her luggage in the cloakroom and goes off to find Miss Mavis Grey. She calls at Mr. Ernest Grey’s house in Holland Park at a quarter to nine, and is told that Miss Grey is out. Between then and a quarter past three in the morning, when she arrives at Miss Challoner’s flat in Portland Place, we haven’t been able to trace her movements. She was probably trying to find Miss Grey. She may have come back here to find her, or she may not. All we know for sure is that she was looking for her, and that when she turned up at Miss Challoner’s she was in an unhinged and distracted condition. Her doctor says she won’t be fit to make a statement for a day or two. Fingerprints which correspond to what are probably hers, taken from objects in her own flat, have been found on the back of one of the chairs in here. But as Miss Bingham saw her leave this flat in the afternoon that doesn’t prove anything.”

“She may have wandered in and found him dead. That would account for the shock.”

“Then why didn’t she raise the house? What would you expect a timid old lady to do? Yell her head off and rouse the house. Why didn’t she do it? And I say the answer to that is, either she shot him herself, or she saw the person who shot him and she didn’t want to give him away.”

“Him-or her-” said Detective Abbott in a meditative voice.

Inspector Lamb looked at him sharply. After a moment he said,

“Number four-Miss Lee Fenton. Nothing against her except these.” He tapped a sheet covered with fingerprints.

“The room was fairly plastered with them-both sides of the hall door, both sides of this door, backs of three chairs, and the mark of her whole hand on the corner of this writing-table. Now she couldn’t have been in in the afternoon, because she didn’t get here till eight o’clock, and then, she says, she had a bath and went straight to bed. Then there are those footprints. Peterson swears that they were the marks of a naked foot and quite distinct when he found the body. By the time he came back with Rush they were nothing but bloodstained smears. Now they weren’t Miss Grey’s footprints, because she was wearing silver shoes when Miss Bingham saw her-and, by the way, those shoes have never been found, so it’s likely they were badly stained. All she’ll say is that they were old, and that she threw them away.”

“She might have dropped them in the river,” said Detective Abbott.

The Inspector nodded.

“She probably did. It’s handy, and even if they’re fished up now, the stains will be out of them, and we don’t get any farther than what she says-that she threw them away. Well, we’ve rather got off Miss Fenton, but there isn’t anything to get back to except those prints-and the way she looks. Talk about shock-that young woman’s had one if I’m not very much mistaken.”

“She may have been fond of Craddock,” Detective Abbott put forward the suggestion blandly.

“Then she was the only one of the lot that was.”

“You never can tell, sir.”

The Inspector turned over the papers in front of him with a frown.

“The other prints found in here, besides Mr. Craddock’s own, are Peterson’s, Rush’s-he says he was in here speaking to him in the early afternoon-and a set of prints at present not identified-four fingers and a thumb of a man’s left hand on the door of this room at a height of four foot seven. That means a man of about six foot. Also the same left-hand print from two places on the banisters-one just at the first turn as you go down, and the other near the bottom. These prints are very important indeed, as they point to the presence of another person, as yet unidentified, who may have been the murderer. Well, there we are. Go along down and see if that charwoman’s come back-what’s her name-Mrs. Green. Lintott checked up on her, and the people in the house where she lodges say she came home about half past nine on the evening of the murder so much the worse for liquor that they had to help her to bed. She lay all day yesterday, and she’s supposed to be coming back today. Go and see if she’s come. There’s a point or two I’d like to ask her about.”

Chapter XXII

Mrs. Green came in in her old Burberry with her battered black felt hat mournfully askew. The port-wine mark on her cheek showed up against the puffy pallor of the rest of her face. Her grey hair fuzzed out wildly in all directions. About her neck she wore, in lieu of the crochet shawl reserved for “turns,” the aged black feather boa which marked a return to the normal. A sallow handkerchief was clasped in one hand. On being invited to sit down she gulped and applied it to her eyes.

“Thank you kindly, sir. I’m sure it’s all so ’orrible, I don’t hardly know where I am. And on top of one of my turns too, and this one so bad, and if it hadn’t been for the mite of brandy I come by just in time there’s no saying whether I’d be here now.”

The Inspector relaxed.

“Ah-it takes a good bit of brandy to pull you round out of one of those turns, doesn’t it, Mrs. Green?”

Mrs. Green wiped her eyes.

“If it’s Mrs. Smith where I lodge that’s been telling your young man that I drink, then she’s no lady,” she said with dignity. “I don’t wish her nor no one else to go through the h’agony that I go through when I gets one of my turns, and what they told me in the ’orspital was to take a mite of brandy and lay down quiet, and so I done. And if I’m to get the sack for it, well, it’s a cruel shame, and maybe they won’t find it so easy to get a respectable woman to come into an ’ouse like this, what with murders and goings on. And if it comes to getting the sack, there’s more than me was for it, if it wasn’t for Mr. Craddock being done in.”

“And what do you mean by that, Mrs. Green?” said the Inspector.

Mrs. Green eyed him sideways.

“There’s those that gives themselves airs and talks haughty now that’d be singing on the other side of their mouth if it wasn’t for pore Mr. Craddock lying a mortual corpse at this moment instead of standing up on his two feet and telling them to be off out of here because they wasn’t wanted any longer.”

“I really think you had better tell me what you mean, Mrs. Green.”