And I'll tell you this. Anyone in the house could have done our little job - could have set the trap for the child and wrecked her room. But it was someone in a hurry? someone who hadn't the time to search quietly."

"Anvone in the house, you say?"

"Yes, I've checked up. Everyone has some time or other unaccounted for. Philip, Magda, the nurse, your girl. The same upstairs. Brenda spent most of the morning alone. Laurence and Eustace had a half hour break - from ten thirty to eleven - you were with them part of that time - but not all of it. Miss de Haviland was in the garden alone. Roger was in his study."

"Only Clemency was in London at her job."

"No, even she isn't out of it. She stayed at home today with a headache - she was alone in her room having that headache.

Any of them - any blinking one of them!

And I don't know which! I've no idea. If I knew what they were looking for in here -"

His eyes went round the wrecked room.

"And if I knew whether they'd found it •1*-…

Something stirred in my brain - a memory…

Taverner clinched it by asking me:

"What was the kid doing when you last saw her?"

"Wait," I said. ». I dashed out of the room and up the stairs. I passed through the left hand door and went up to the top floor. I pushed open the door of the cistern room, mounted the two steps and bending my head, since the ceiling was low and sloping, I looked round me.

Josephine had said when I asked her what she was doing there that she was "detecting."

I didn't see what there could be to detect in a cobwebby attic full of water tanks. But such an attic would make a good hiding place. I considered it probable that Josephine had been hiding something there, something that she knew quite well she had no business to have. If so, it oughtn't to take long to find it.

It took me just three minutes. Tucked away behind the largest tank, from the interior of which a sibilant hissing added an eerie note to the atmosphere, I found a packet of letters wrapped in a torn piece of brown paper.

I read the first letter.

Oh Laurence - my darling, my own dear love… It was wonderful last night when you quoted that verse of t Vnpw it was meant for me, though you didn't look at me. Aristide said, "You read verse well." He didn't guess what we were both feeling. My darling, I feel convinced that soon everything will come right. We shall be glad that he never knew, that he died happy. He's been good to me. I don't want him to suffer. But I don't really think that it can be any pleasure to live after you're eighty. I shouldn't want to!

Soon we shall be together for always.

How wonderful it will be when I can say to you: My dear dear husband … Dearest, we were made for each other. I love you, love you, love you - I can see no end to our love, I - There was a good deal more, but I had no wish to go on.

Grimly I went downstairs and thrust my parcel into Taverner's hands.

"It's possible," I said, "that that's what our unknown friend was looking for."

Taverner read a few passages, whistled and shuffled through the various letters.

Then he looked at me with the expression of a cat who has been fed with the best cream.

"Well," he said softly. "This pretty well cooks Mrs. Brenda Leonides's goose. And Mr. Laurence Brown's. So it was them, all the time…"