Miss Silver looked at him very directly.

“There was the chance that she might recognize the man who spoke.”

Lamb laughed.

“My dear Miss Silver-what a chance! Even if she connected what he said with the theft of the Bellingdon necklace, what sort of odds were there against her ever coming across him again?”

She said gravely,

“I do not know. They may have been less than we imagine. In this connection, one thing she reported him as saying has remained in my mind.”

“And what was that?”

“It was when he was speaking of the robbery, and what he said was this. ‘I won’t take any chances of being recognized, and that’s final.’ From which I infer that he was someone whom the secretary might recognize.”

Lamb said with impatience,

“He’d have taken precautions against that.”

“So strong a precaution as the murder of the person he feared might recognize him?”

Lamb said impatiently,

“You say he was planning a murder?”

“What else, Chief Inspector, when he said that he was not taking any chances of being recognized, and that all he wanted was a clear stretch of road where no one would turn his head at a shot! There may have been a protest from the man whose lips Miss Paine was unable to see, and then the first man said, ‘I tell you I won’t touch it on any other terms. This way it’s a certainty.’ ”

Frank Abbott said, “Now I wonder if this man really said certainty. If we knew that, it would help to place him, because the ordinary crook would almost certainly have said cert.”

Miss Silver gave a slight reproving cough.

“I am repeating Miss Paine’s own words.”

Lamb leaned forward.

“Yes, yes, we know that you can be trusted to be accurate. But Frank has got a point there, you know. Most men, let alone crooks, would have made it cert. Pity we can’t ask Miss Paine whether she prettied it up, but there it is! What would she be likely to say herself? I mean, what was her own way of speaking-schoolmarmish, or plain everyday?”

In the way of business Miss Silver was not apt to take offence. She let the derogatory “schoolmarm” pass.

“Miss Paine was a plain, downright person, and that was the way she spoke. I think she was repeating to me what she believed herself to have read.”

“You mean she might have mistaken the word?”

“It would be possible that she might have completed it.”

Lamb said,

“Making cert into certainty? Well, there’s no means of knowing one way or the other that I can see, and we’re getting off the track. Seems to me we were talking about what precautions the murderer would have taken against being recognized. You take what Miss Paine got as meaning that he was planning murder as a precaution. At a guess I should have said he’d have used a motorbike for the job. There’s no safer disguise than the goggles and helmet-in fact the whole rig-out.”

Miss Silver’s features expressed a mild firmness. She said,

“He may have done so. Yet he was still afraid of being recognized and was prepared to shoot the secretary to avoid any risk of it. In my opinion this may be a valuable clue. Such a strong apprehension that he might be recognized does to my mind suggest that the murderer was someone in Mr. Bellingdon’s immediate circle. He certainly had inside knowledge of just how and when the necklace would be transferred from the bank.”

“Well, Ledshire have asked us to come in on the job, and Frank will be going down to Merefields. By the way, Mr. Bellingdon will be in town this afternoon. He wants to call and see you. He’ll be coming here first. Would four o’clock suit? He wants to have all that lip-reading business first-hand from yourself. I think he finds it a bit difficult to swallow.”

His tone informed her that the interview was at an end. She rose to her feet.

“Four o’clock will be quite convenient, Chief Inspector.”

Chapter 9

LUCIUS BELLINGDON was quite a personage. Even in a crowd he was liable to be remarked. In Miss Silver’s Victorian sitting-room his big frame and massive features, the jutting chin of the photograph, and an eye decidedly competent to threaten and command, might have been considered overpowering. Miss Silver was interested, but she was not overpowered. She remembered fantastic stories about Mr. Bellingdon’s rise to fame and fortune, she remembered that she had listened to them with scepticism. Now, in his presence, she found them less difficult to entertain. He occupied the largest of her walnut chairs, and occupied it as if it were his own. He wore a town suit, but he looked like a man who spent a good deal of time in the open air. His dark skin had a healthy tan and his eyes were bright. He might easily have been credited with ten years less than the fifty-two which the reference-books accorded him. He leaned forward with a hand on his knee, a strong hand admirably kept, and said in a voice not loud but full of resonance,

“Now do you mind just repeating what Miss Paine told you she-well, I don’t know how to put it, but I suppose I had better say-read. I take it you are convinced that she definitely could and did read what was being said from the motion of the lips. It is a point upon which I have felt some doubt.”

Miss Silver was knitting. The needles moved rhythmically above the pale blue wool in her lap. She said,

“I met her first in a crowded drawing-room. I had talked to her for half an hour without experiencing any difficulty before someone informed me that she was completely deaf. When she came to see me here it was just the same. She did not appear to be at a loss for a moment.”

“The police say they have made enquiries and there seems to be no doubt that she really was deaf, and that she had acquired great proficiency in this lip-reading. So I suppose I must accept the fact that she could see what a man was saying thirty or forty feet away?”

Miss Silver inclined her head.

“Yes, I think you must accept that, Mr. Bellingdon. In any art the performance of an expert must seem surprising.”

Lucius Bellingdon laughed.

“You used to teach, didn’t you? When you said that, I felt as if I were back at school again.”

She gave him the warm smile which had so often won her both confidences and hearts, and said,

“Everything seems difficult until you know how to do it, does it not?”

He nodded.

“True enough. Well now, we’ll take it that Miss Paulina Paine really sat in the Masters galleries and watched two men on a seat about thirty-five feet away. One came in after the other, looked at some of the pictures, and then sat down. After a bit he turned his head and spoke. Now this is where you take over. I want you to repeat what Miss Paine told you she had read from his lips, word for word just as she said it.”

Miss Silver rested her hands upon the cloud of blue wool in her lap. In her mind she reverted to the picture of Paulina Paine sitting just there across the hearth from her and speaking. Her own features took on a listening look as she repeated what had come to her in those short jerky sentences.

“These were her words, Mr. Bellingdon- ‘It’s for tomorrow. The secretary leaves the bank with it at twelve noon. Nothing can be done whilst he is on the main road, but as soon as he turns into the lane, that will be the time. It should be quite easy. When I’ve got the stuff I meet you as arranged, and there we are.’ She said he stopped there, and the other man said something. She could see the muscle moving in his cheek, but she couldn’t see his lips. When he stopped, the first one said, ‘I’m not taking any chances of being recognized, and that’s final. Give me a clear stretch of the lane, and no one on it to turn his head at a shot, and leave the rest to me.’ The other man spoke again, and the first one said, ‘I tell you I won’t touch it on any other terms. This way it’s a certainty.’ The other man put up his hand with a catalogue in it and said something, and the first one said, ‘Then there will be two of them for it, that’s all!’ and he laughed and got up and went over to look at one of the pictures.”