The Greatest Murder Mysteries - Dorothy Fielding Collection. Dorothy Fielding

had driven Mrs. Lane off to the concert in the little two-seater that really belonged to Miss Charteris, but which either of the girls, or, at a pinch, Mrs. Lane, used.

      "They can all drive, then?"

      "Most women can nowadays," Thornton said easily.

      "Yes, but how?" Pointer replied. "I don't suppose the colonel ever lets them take out that big car of his?"

      There was no reply.

      Pointer drifted out of the room again. He felt that Thornton was not a man in front of whom to drop a card and expect him to be unaware of its suit.

      Half an hour later the telephone bell rang. Mr. Brown was wanted by a friend. The friend went on to say that he had found one of the books rather dog-eared, and was bringing it down for him to look at. He might, or might not, want it.

      Pointer rang off and made his way to the handsome old inn in Medchester Main Street. Smoking in front of the entrance, he was hailed by a motor cyclist, who waved a kit-bag at him and followed his slow steps up to a bedroom that Brown had just engaged.

      There Watts spread out a dark blue silk dress with velvet embossed flowers in high relief. It was one of those modern affairs that can be drawn through a napkin ring and looked rather as though some one had tried that experiment on it quite recently.

      "Hotel sneak-thieves must get their living easy," Watts said, standing back. "Lady Maxwell was out, so was her maid. I found this in a package done up as though for the cleaners. I put something else in instead. What do you think of it, sir?"

      Pointer was running the soft material through his fingers. He could find no stains, but he felt several stiff places. Turning up the electric light, they showed as purple splotches.

      He dropped a little guaiacum solution, and then a few drops of peroxide on one place. Up rose at once a bead of a beautiful bright blue.

      "The stiff places are blood right enough." Watts folded up the dress again.

      "Humph!" Pointer said, and decided to keep the frock for the moment.

      It was late in the afternoon when he drove up to a house in Bayswater, where he shared rooms with a bookbinder friend. O'Connor was his one real confidant, for the Irishman had done some first-class work as a secret service agent during the war, and Pointer could rely on his discretion. Just now he wanted to rely on more than that.

      O'Connor had a collection of pencils and inks unrivalled even by Scotland Yard. The pencil that Pointer had found in Thornton's car puzzled him. It made only a thick, oily smear when tried on paper, yet it had evidently been used about one-third down.

      O'Connor tried it on his thumb.

      "It marks all right like that," Pointer said, "but it's a kind I've never met before."

      "I have." O'Connor went to a Wellington cabinet. He turned the Chubb lock, and after a minute laid before his friend another pencil.

      "Try that, and see if it isn't the same kind."

      It behaved in exactly the same way. The name, Cos tallied.

      "What sort of thing is it?" Pointer asked curiously.

      "Writes on skin. French surgeons use them a good deal, I believe, to explain to their students just what they're going to do before they cut up a patient. I had a case during the war of a boy with a message written or his back with one of these. That's how I recognised it. And what's the meaning of your blowing in with this implement when you're on your leave?"

      "If you care to come down with me in my car to a town called Medchester, I'll spin you a yarn. It's a hop, skip and jump affair, or I would wait and have supper here. Just let me send off some telephone messages first."

      O'Connor doubled his long legs in beside his friend and Pointer drove off for the Barnet road.

      He gave the other a brief summary of the facts as they sped along. When he got to the marks on the green balustrade of the summer house, O'Connor struck. "You think she was killed there? Flung off the top of that lookout?"

      Pointer nodded "I do."

      "Was she as lovely as the papers make out?" the Irish man asked irrelevantly.

      Pointer slowed up for a second and handed him a photograph that he had annexed. O'Connor stared at it.

      There is something infinitely touching in beauty, in spite of all that saw or tale may say of its deceitful quality, the heart knows better. Knows the contrary.

      Knows that here before it is Truth, is Abiding Reality. Is a message faint and dim, which the soul has managed to get through to mind, or body, or character—rarely to all three—and of which we see but the blurred record.

      O'Connor handed back the portrait without a comment. He looked moved.

      "Glad it's you! You'll get him yet, or her! But what beats me is why was the body moved? Sure it was a perfectly good accident. She just overbalanced herself. I call it a capital murder. Why botch it by taking her off to the sand-pit? It looks inexplicable, it does that—so far as you've told me the story."

      "And so far as I know the story. I found the carrier later on which she was moved. It's practically a shed door mounted on a pair of old-fashioned bicycle wheels. A man pushed it, a woman walked behind, steadying it."

      "A woman! It must be a woman in a million to stand in with such a crime! And where's the motive?" demanded O'Connor, as though Pointer had it in his pocket. "Jealousy, of course," he assured himself, "though it's a bit carefully worked out for that. Yet that might depend on the man—" His voice faded off into thought.

      "Now, Jim," Pointer said briskly, "that's the end of the links that fit together, even though poorly. Here comes a jumble of odd bits. And odd, they are!"

      He told of the blood in between the wiped tiles of the broken flower-pots.

      "A fearful struggle must have taken place on that same side of the summer house last night. But what sort of a struggle? The plants aren't trodden into the earth, except a few found stuffed into the stove. The rest were broken off horizontally. A lasso? It's a fantastic thought, but so's the nature of the damage done. You'd expect a powerful snake to leave traces like that, supposing some one had tried to capture it."

      O'Connor sat rigid.

      "Another tragedy, or attempted tragedy?" he asked finally.

      Pointer pursed his lips.

      "You think it was the murderer and the girl herself?" O'Connor asked under his breath. "Sure that would be a terrible thought! A lovely young thing like that, struggling for her life within a stone's throw of home, and help and then losing it."

      "I don't believe it happened that way." Pointer looked far ahead of him. "Apart from anything else, I can't think her face would look as peaceful as it does, if death hadn't been instantaneous. The doctors will tell us that at the inquest for certain, of course, but I think she was looking up at the sky when the end came. I'm sure I hope so. For bear in mind that the girl hasn't a scratch on face or hands, except such as would be made by the branches of a tree on one wrist, nor her frock a crumple bar that cut-out place. But none the less, the fact remains that an awful tussle of some sort went on close to where she fell."

      "Could the struggle have come first, and she got away, rushed up those outside stairs you spoke of, got to the top, and then been flung over by whoever was after her?" O'Connor was intensely interested.

      "Then why didn't she cry out?" Pointer asked. "If it was some one else, why didn't they shout for help? The damage looks as though done by men. Footprints, as we mean the word, there are none, but still... Now, as I see it, this is a sort of side-show, for it took place after the murder, but it evidently occupies some vital place in the mystery, or why is nothing known about the man or his fate. To my mind, he is in all probability connected with a letter that the colonel received at lunch on Wednesday, and thought afterwards had blown out of his study window, and been picked up by the under-gardener. Thornton spoke of the colonel's marked discomposure when he read it. Suppose that letter, which