“Think he was telling the truth, sir?”

“Well, I do. Of course there’s no corroboration. There might have been a quarrel, he might have killed her, and he might have been putting on an act for me, but I don’t think so. Simple sort of chap once you got under his skin, and mortal fond of the girl. I think he was telling the truth. Now what have you got for me-anything?”

Frank Abbott stretched his long legs and then sat up.

“Plenty, sir. To begin with, I spent an hour with Maudie. She was kind and instructive. She suggests amongst other things that the Willards would bear investigation. Mr_: Willard was dangling after Carola, and Mrs. Willard washed a perfectly new dress some time between last night and ten o’clock this morning-don’t know what she was wearing when Curtis saw her. Possibility that the dress was stained, and that traces of the stain still remain. She is also very insistent on the antecedents of all flat-holders being dug up. Furthermore, there was quite a piece about Miss Garside being on the rocks. No groceries for a week- all that kind of thing.”

Lamb looked up with his eyes round and bulging.

“As bad as that, was it? We knew she was hard up. Here- where did Miss Silver get all this?”

“She helped Mrs. Smollett wash up, sir.” A smile flickered and was gone. “Well, then, after all that I went round the jewellers-I got a list from Mrs. Jackson-and the second place I went to had the ring. Big shop in the High Street-Allingham’s. Miss Garside brought it in this morning at half past nine, and they bought it. Mr. Allingham said she was an old customer and they never dreamed of there being anything wrong. They had bought other things from her-a couple of diamond brooches and a fine Queen Anne teapot. He showed me the ring, and there were the initials all right-M. B. It looks bad.”

Lamb frowned.

“Looks mad to me. Woman must be off her head to go to a shop where she’s known, with a murdered woman’s ring. I suppose she thought we shouldn’t find out that the rings had been changed. The public’s got an idea that the police are a lot of thick-headed numskulls who can’t see what’s under their noses. And that’s the fault of all these detective novels-a pack of rubbish! Well, we’ll have to go along and see the woman- arrest her, I suppose. There’s a case over the ring anyhow, unless she’s got a much better explanation than I can think of.”

Frank Abbott got up.

“She might have taken the ring, and yet not have had anything to do with the murder. Have you thought of that, sir?”

Lamb nodded.

“That’s on the cards, but not very likely.”

“You remember saying what Maudie’s strong suit was-that she knew people? You said she didn’t make mistakes about them. Well, she says if Miss Garside, who is a very tidy and particular person, had washed the blood off that statuette she would have put it back on the mantelpiece, but that Mrs. Willard, who is clean but very untidy, might very easily have washed it and dropped it back on the sofa. If she handled the statuette before the blood was dry she might have stained her dress, and that would account for her having washed it.”

Lamb got to his feet.

“Look here, Frank, what are you driving at? They didn’t all kill her, did they? I like a case where there aren’t so many people who might have done it. All right, all right-we’ll take ’em one at a time. Mrs. Willard’s on the way down anyhow.”

CHAPTER 42

Mrs. Willard had plugged in her electric iron and was slipping a damp dress over the ironing-board when the bell rang. She looked surprised to see the Chief Inspector and Sergeant Abbott, but not at all disconcerted. She liked doing her ironing in the sitting-room because two of the chairs there were of just the right height to take the board. Well, she supposed that both the men had seen a woman ironing before now, and it wasn’t as if it was underclothes. She led the way into the room and went over to turn the iron off. So easy to forget, and she didn’t want a hole in her board and the flat smelling like a fire. When she straightened up, there they were, both of them, looking down at the damp dress. For the first time something touched her like a cold finger.

The large man who was the Chief Inspector looked up from the dress and said,

“There are just a few questions we should like to ask you, Mrs. Willard.”

She managed a hesitating smile and said,

“Yes?”

“I think you told Sergeant Curtis that your husband left you soon after seven o’clock last night and did not return until this morning.”

Mrs. Willard said, “That’s right.”

She was standing behind one of the big chairs. She put out a hand now and rested it upon the back.

“I’m sorry to put a personal question, but I’m afraid I must ask you if this was in consequence of a quarrel between you.”

She took a moment before she said,

“Well, it was-but it’s all made up now.”

“Was the quarrel about Miss Roland?” Lamb’s tone was very direct.

Mrs. Willard flushed all over her face and made no reply. She stood quite still behind the chair and looked down at her hand.

Lamb said in an authoritative voice,

“Then I take it that you did quarrel about Miss Roland. You can correct me if I’m wrong.”

Mrs. Willard said nothing. She stood there looking down. Her hand had closed on the back of the chair and was gripping hard.

“Mrs. Willard, I can’t force you to answer-I can only invite you to do so. If you have nothing to conceal on your own account, you know that it is your duty to assist the police. Did you leave your flat at any time last night and go up to No. 8? Did you wash this dress because it became stained whilst you were in Miss Roland’s flat?”

Frank Abbott had lifted the right-hand sleeve and turned it over. The stuff was only faintly damp. A red and green pattern straggled over a cream-coloured ground. The colours were fast and had not run at the edges, but on the outside of the sleeve from wrist to elbow the cream was clouded by a stain of brownish red. Frank Abbott exclaimed,

“Look here, sir!”

Mrs. Willard looked up, and the Chief Inspector down. There was a pause before Lamb said,

“A laboratory experiment will prove whether that stain is blood or not. Is there anything you would like to say, Mrs. Willard?”

She took her hand off the chair and came up to the ironing-board.

“It ran up my sleeve when I was washing the little statue,” she said in a meditative tone. “A stain does spread so on silk. I suppose it was the shock, but I forgot all about it till I saw Alfred looking at it this morning. I don’t know what he thought, because I was too tired to talk-I’d been up all night. I just put the dress in to soak and went and lay down-”

Lamb broke in.

“I have to warn you that anything you say will be taken down and may be used in evidence against you.”

They were both looking at her. Abbott had his notebook out.

Mrs. Willard looked down at the stained sleeve and went on.

“Alfred must have just wrung it out and put it in the cupboard to dry. I never thought of his doing that. The stain hasn’t really come out at all-has it?”

Lamb said, “No,” and suddenly she looked up at him with a ghost of her pleasant smile.

“You want me to tell you about it, don’t you? Shall we sit down?”

They sat, the two men on the sofa, Mrs. Willard in her own chair facing them, her manner quite easy and unembarrassed now.

“I suppose I ought to have told you this morning, but I was feeling so dreadfully tired. Of course you must be thinking it strange, my dress being stained like that, but it’s quite simple really. You see, we’ve been married for twenty years, and there’s never been anyone else with either of us. And then Miss Roland took the flat upstairs, and I couldn’t help seeing that Alfred admired her. I don’t want to say anything hard about her now she’s dead, but she was the sort of girl who lays herself out to catch a gentleman’s eye. There wasn’t anything in it, but last night-it’s no good pretending, is it?-we did have words about her, and Alfred went off to his brother’s and stayed away all night.”