Mrs. Stone did not appear to be at all a likely person to have left the note. Difficult to imagine that she could have anything to communicate which would either raise or depress a young woman’s spirits. When it appeared that she had not even passed the house, he was put to it to possess his soul in patience, but possess it he did. Sifting out all the odds and ends of what could hardly be called a statement, most of the people whose life histories Miss Ora touched upon and whose characters she dissected could be ruled out for the same reason as Mrs. Stone -they had not actually passed the house. It was therefore impossible that they should have delivered the note. Of those who had passed the house, there were three or four men on their bicycles who came home to their dinners and afterwards returned to their work. These also could be ruled out. There was Jimmy Stokes, who had bowled an iron hoop from one end of the street to the other, with his mother calling out to him that he would be late for school-but he was never out of Miss Ora’s sight.

And there were three members of the Random family. Mr. Arnold Random had passed the house whilst his sister-in-law was in Mrs. Alexander’s shop. After walking the whole length of the street he had gone in at the lych gate and disappeared in the tunnel of yew which led up to the church. It was about half an hour before he returned. The Inspector gathered that there was nothing very unusual about this. He played the organ, and he had a key to the church. Friday evening between nine and ten was his usual time for practising, but of course there was nothing to prevent him from going in at other times. Miss Ora wondered whether Mrs. Ball didn’t find it trying at the Vicarage, the church being so near and an organ having that booming kind of sound. She really wouldn’t have liked it herself, but if you married a clergyman, she supposed you had to get used to that kind of thing.

And then there was Edward Random. He had passed the house on two occasions. During the morning, when he joined his stepmother, accompanied her to the Vicarage, and presently came back alone. And in the afternoon, when he passed by only just before the note-if there really was a note-had been taken from the letter-box by Clarice Dean.

Three members of the Random family, and so far nothing to connect any of them with the girl who had been drowned.

Except that Edward Random had found the body.

He went presently to the room which had been occupied by Clarice Dean. Rather dark, rather gloomy-much too full of furniture. The dead girl’s trunk under the window, her clothes in a vast mahogany chest of drawers, or small and lost in the cavernous wardrobe. It did not take him long to go through them-a couple of coats and skirts and a woollen dress, a bright dressing-gown, a girl’s flimsy underclothes. The trunk was empty except for a suit-case, also empty, which had been put inside it. In the left-hand top drawer of the chest of drawers there was a writing-pad, a packet of envelopes, and a fountain pen. There were no letters.

It was when he passed the fireplace for the second time that he noticed that there was something white under the bars of the old-fashioned grate. He knelt down and retrieved a screwed-up sheet of paper. Unfolding it with meticulous care, he discovered it to be not only crushed but torn. A slight fall of soot from the chimney had blackened it, but the few typed lines were fairly legible. They ran:

“All right, let’s have it out. I’ll be coming back late tonight. Meet me at the same place. Say half past nine. I can’t make it before that.”

The signature had been torn right through. It had consisted of two initial letters. The first one was rather badly damaged, the torn edge rubbed and blackened by the soot. The letter might have been any one of several. There was a just discernible cross stroke half way down which might have formed part of an A, and E, or an F. The second letter might, or might not, be an R.

CHAPTER XIX

Susan spent a dusty morning finishing up the Victorian novelists. There seemed to be an incredible number of them. An entire set of Mrs. Henry Wood, including no less than three copies of the famous East Lynne. A notorious tear-jerker- but three copies! There were also sets of Charlotte M. Yonge, an author beloved by Susan’s Aunt Lucy, and whose descriptions of vast Victorian families she herself had always found enthralling. There they were, in their original editions, and obviously well read. She remembered to have heard that strong men in the Crimea with death and disease running riot all about them had wept when the ill-fated Heir of Redclyffe died upon his honeymoon.

There was something tranquilizing about the ebb and flow of these family histories, even when they dealt with such tragedies as this. The people who died in them would all have been dead anyhow today. The people who lived in them were really still very much alive. Susan found herself dipping here and there, relieved to get away from the thought of Clarice Dean drowned only last night in the watersplash. She hadn’t known her very well, and she hadn’t liked her very much. No, she hadn’t really liked her at all. But she was a girl, here in Greenings, and if she hadn’t drowned herself, then somebody had drowned her. It gave you a horrid cold feeling. And then for it to be Edward who found the body-

She went on dipping, and trying to forget about Clarice Dean.

Edward was out all day. Susan and Emmeline had lunch together. They discussed the now urgent problem of finding homes for Amina’s kittens.

“And of course I would love to keep them, but if Arnold is really going to turn us out-”

“Darling, you can’t possibly keep them! You have eleven cats already!”

Emmeline looked at her wistfully.

“Is it really eleven? I find them so difficult to count.”

“It is. And there will be floods of more kittens before you can turn round. I think they would take one up at the Hall, and Mrs. Alexander says her sister-in-law in Embank would have one if it is really pretty.”

“They are all pretty,” said Emmeline fondly. “Amina’s kittens always are. I don’t think I can bear to part with them. Arnold hasn’t said anything more about my going, so I think perhaps he didn’t really mean it. Jonathan always did say that he was like that-doing things in a hurry, you know, just to bolster himself up and make himself believe he had one of those strong, ruthless characters. But he isn’t really like that at all. My dear Jonathan was a very good judge of character, and of course Arnold being his own brother, he did know him very well. So I think perhaps that was just a bit of make-believe-telling me I must go. I think he was put out about the garden being untidy -and the cats-and Edward coming here. Especially about Edward. You know, Susan, I quite thought there was something he was afraid of about Edward. Of course people have been saying that he ought at least to give him a share of what James left, and it might have been that. But he went away very quickly when I asked him why he was afraid of Edward coming back.”

Susan was looking surprised. She said,

“Afraid-”

“Oh, yes, I think so. And perhaps my saying it showed him that it wouldn’t do. People would blame him a good deal if he turned me out, and I expect he will have thought of that by now. So I really think I might keep the kittens. Don’t you?”

Neither of them mentioned Clarice Dean.

At two o’clock Susan went back to the Hall, where she encountered a really horrifying book about a man who was transported to Australia in the old Botany Bay days. It was called For the Term of His Natural Life, and dipping into it felt exactly like opening the door upon a hurricane in which all the forces of evil were let loose. It was some time before she could get the door shut again.