Bellingdon said,

“Yes, I believe he did. As a matter of fact, I went round myself. Pegler is a nice old boy. I had met him, and I thought I’d like a word or two with him direct. He remembers seeing two men on the seat, and he didn’t think they had anything to do with one another-says they came separately and left separately. That is all he does seem to have noticed about the one in the dark raincoat, but he remembers the other one stopping and talking about Miss Paine’s portrait. By the way, Pegler says she came back afterwards and he told her how interested this man had been about her picture and her being deaf, and the lip-reading. And he said she looked as if he had said something that upset her, and he hoped she didn’t think he had taken a liberty.”

Miss Silver said, “She had reason to be upset.”

Bellingdon nodded.

“Well, to get back to this man and his description. I don’t think Pegler is any help. He said he was quite a pleasant gentleman- and that was about all there was to it. Height? ‘A bit taller than me, sir. At least that is what I should say.’ Fair or dark? ‘Nothing that you would notice either way.’ Colour of his eyes? ‘Well, I couldn’t really say, sir.’ And when you put all that together you’ve got something that would fit any man that wasn’t extra tall or extra short, or that hadn’t got red hair, or a beard, or a moustache, or something that stuck out so that you couldn’t miss it.”

Miss Silver agreed. Bellingdon went on.

“So we get back to the murderer. Why was he so much afraid of being identified that he must do murder? As the Chief Inspector has suggested, a motor-cyclist’s cap and goggles would flummox anyone who wasn’t an intimate. There you have it, Miss Silver-he wouldn’t trust any disguise to shield him from the man he was going to rob. Perhaps it was his voice that would have given him away-voices are very individual. I don’t know, but there must have been some reason why he preferred what he called a certainty and was perfectly prepared to shoot two people if there had been two in the car. There is another reason why I am forced to believe him to have been in close touch with my family circle. It was only in that circle that anyone knew when the bank would be handing over the necklace. I suppose you have heard about the necklace?”

She turned the soft mass of wool upon her lap. The delicate fern pattern displayed its fronds for a moment and then fell lightly together again.

“Yes, Mr. Bellingdon, I have read about the necklace. An interesting and well-written account of a beautiful and valuable piece.”

He gave a short grim laugh.

“A paste copy would be as beautiful, and no one would do murder for it. I say that to myself, and I’ve said it to my daughter, but all the time there’s something in me that won’t tolerate a fake.”

Miss Silver looked up brightly.

“That is because it carries with it the suggestion of fraud. But if you call it a copy or let it stand on its own merits of design and craftsmanship, the stigma vanishes.”

He shook his head.

“If I can’t have a Rembrandt I don’t want a copy. Not rational, but there are plenty of us all in the same boat. Which is why the price of the real thing keeps on going up, and why murder was done for my necklace in Cranberry Lane a couple of days ago. Well, we’ve run off the rails. I was saying there had got to be a contact with my family circle, so I had better tell you something more about it. To start with, I am a widower, and I have a daughter-twenty-four last birthday-married a couple of years ago, not exactly against my will, but certainly against my wish. Nothing much against him-nothing much to him. Rackety young fellow whose idea of amusing himself was to drive as near a hundred miles an hour as his car would let him, and when he wasn’t doing that to spend as much money as possible in the shortest possible time. He finished up by crashing over a precipice in the Austrian Tyrol and leaving Moira a widow just about the time she was beginning to think she’d have done better to take my advice. Well, there she is-Moira Herne.”

Miss Silver said, “Excuse me, Mr. Bellingdon-” She went over to the writing-table, took from a drawer a bright blue exercise-book and a neatly pointed pencil, and came back to her chair. Her knitting laid aside for the moment, she headed a page with the words The Bellingdon Necklace, placed Moira Herne’s name on the left-hand side of the next line, and entered the particulars which Mr. Bellingdon had just imparted. When this had been done she said “Yes?” in an interrogative manner and waited for him to go on.

He said abruptly, “I have a service flat in town, but my home is at Merefields near Ledlington. Cranberry Lane is a short cut to it from the London road. It is a comfortable old-fashioned house, and I am lucky in having a good staff. The butler and cook have been with me for twenty years. They are husband and wife. The name is Hilton.”

Miss Silver wrote it down.

“Then there’s my secretary, Hubert Garratt. He has been in my employment for ten years, but I have actually known him for a great deal longer than that.”

Miss Silver held her pencil suspended.

“His death will have been a personal loss?”

“He is not dead.”

“The shot was not a fatal one?”

“Oh, yes, it was fatal all right. The person who was shot was not Hubert Garratt.”

“The papers-”

“The papers had got hold of the wrong end of the stick. What information they had was correct, but it didn’t go far enough-and don’t bother about my mixing my metaphors, because I’ve never been able to worry about that. I was earning my living when I was fourteen, and the books I bothered with were the ones that were going to help me to earn it. But to come back to Hubert Garratt. I wrote and told the bank he’d be fetching the necklace at twelve noon on Tuesday. Now the people who knew that were myself and the bank, Hubert Garratt, my daughter, and two other people. Early on Tuesday morning I was told that Garratt was ill. Since the war he has a tendency to asthma. I went to see him, and found him quite disabled, and told him he wasn’t to attempt to go for the necklace. I rang up the bank, spoke to the manager, and told him there was a change and I was sending Garratt’s assistant, a young fellow called Arthur Hughes. The manager took the precaution of ringing off and then ringing me back, and I gave him Arthur’s description and said he would show a letter from me naming him as Garratt’s substitute. Well, that all went off without a hitch. Arthur left the bank with the necklace, but he was shot dead in Cranberry Lane.”

Miss Silver confided these details to the blue exercise book. Bellingdon watched her with an odd look upon his face. The pale blue knitting and the bright blue book, the pencil, the hair-net, the brooch which fastened the front of her olive-green cashmere, a rose carved out of a black bog-oak with an Irish pearl at its heart, all combined to make as unlikely a picture of a private detective as he could well imagine. He thought he could transplant her to Merefields without there being the slightest risk of her being taken for one. When she had finished writing she looked up.

“And the other two people who were aware that the necklace was being fetched-was Mr. Hughes one of them?”

“Well, no, he wasn’t. As far as I know, he knew nothing about the plan until I called him in and told him he would have to go to the bank for me instead of Garratt.”

“You say as far as you know, Mr. Bellingdon.”

“Oh, that? It meant nothing. Garratt said he didn’t mention it, and no one else would.”

“And the other two people were?”

He made a mental note that she could be pertinacious.

“One of them is a guest in the house, and the other-there could be no possible connection.”

Miss Silver gave a gentle cough.

“If I am to help you, Mr. Bellingdon, it would be better that I should have all the facts. As Lord Tennyson so wisely says, ‘So trust me not at all or all in all.’ ”