The Greatest Murder Mysteries - Dorothy Fielding Collection. Dorothy Fielding

face in particular had been cut and cut again. There was something cruel about the way that the damage been done. It suggested a ferocious pleasure. But nothing could undo the fact that it was a three-quarter size painting of Miss Charteris.

      In her pale peach silk frock with a knot of pink and the camellias on one shoulder tied with silver, and another gleam of silver at one hip, she sat in a gilt arm-chair, her white shoulders coming up like a tea rose from gold shadows around her. One hand toyed with a line of deep purple amethysts that ran around her neck on to her knee. The men gazed long at it. Bellairs caught something of a Rose whom even the superintendent had never seen. The young face was turned up, a wistful, eager, inquiring gaze, and the effect, considering the darkness even then about to close around that head, was tragic.

      Harris's eyes were dim as he moved away.

      "It doesn't seem possible," Pointer said at length, "that the man who painted this had anything to do with the murder of the girl there on that canvas. No, it doesn't seem possible."

      "Mr. Bellairs gave my boy Arty French lessons, and helped him to get his first place in town." The superintendent spoke as though that clinched the certainty of the young man's innocence.

      "My boy Arty" lay with many another father's only son in one of those corners of France that are for ever England, but to the superintendent he still lived on.

      "As for the picture, painted by Bellairs right enough, but signed by—" Pointer began wrapping the torn picture in paper.

      "Signed?" asked the literal Harris.

      "Someone learns of these meetings," Pointer went on, "and gets them to open that front door at last. Then the canvas is chopped up. Now I wonder who would be likely to do all that?" He looked at Harris with a smile.

      "Sort of thing one might expect of the count." Harris began to think that he, too, might have distinguished himself in the detective line.

      Pointer was off again, continuing his search of the room. He stopped before one of the windows by the side door. The pulley arrangement was out of order. Some one had not waited to find out which acorn, the black or the gold, would open the heavy velvet curtains, but had jerked them apart, and the cords almost off the eyelets. He looked at the sill and then at the other window-sills. Only one showed those newly-made scratchings.

      Stooping, he picked up an amethyst bead, and an opened link of silver chain. He examined the catch of the casement window.

      "Looks as if she caught her chain of beads on that as she jumped out of the window—probably at the time that the Count was performing his fantasia on the front door. I wonder how she made her way home?" Pointer mused.

      "I particularly questioned Maud about Miss Rose's shoes when she saw her at ten, as you told me," Harris put in. "She says they were quite clean."

      "That means some one must have taken her home in a car. There were no taxis going begging Thursday night in Medchester, because of the concert. And, by the way, Harris, I wish you'd ask about, and find out, who really saw Miss Scarlett or Mrs. Lane there, and whether at the beginning, middle, or end of the entertainment. Try Doctor Metcalfe."

      Harris's eyes bulged his question.

      "Oh, just as a matter of routine. Just to check off all statements."

      Harris made a note of it.

      "It wouldn't be Miss Scarlett, in any case, who drove her cousin home," he assured the other. "She never drives at night. Too timid. Mrs. Lane now, she likes a bit of a risk all right."

      Pointer thought of the garden mould on Sibella's shoe-buckles. But he went on with his work, testing each piece of furniture by laying hold of the back, and shaking it vigorously. When he did this to the table, a leg promptly parted company.

      Harris, with a householder's feeling for another's property, would have stooped with an exclamation, but Pointer grasped his arm.

      "Hold hard a minute. Your finger-prints aren't wanted, old chap!" Pointer lifted the leg as though it were a blazing faggot, and looked carefully at the break. It had been wrenched off the table, and very recently. He tested it for finger-prints and smiled a little as he looked at them.

      "By the look of it, some one swung this around his head like a club. Now let's see." He opened his notebook. "They're Count di Monti's," he said after using a magnifying glass for some very careful minutes.

      "When did you get his?"

      "This afternoon he took a glass of soda water. Remember? I took care of that glass afterwards. So now we stand like this. We think Miss Charteris was here because of her frocks, the portrait, the fruit tray, and the marks on the window. We know di Monti was here, and in a fury because of these prints. The other finger-prints sprinkled all about so freely will doubtless turn out to be those of Bellairs himself. And now I'm done here."

      At Medchester police station they found that Inspector Rodman had carried out Pointer's instructions very successfully.

      Lady Maxwell had been informed that a navy evening frock of hers had been found among some stolen property which the police had just recovered.

      The lady was both surprised and impressed by the speed with which it had been traced to her. Rodman had merely told her that "the force has its own ways, madam," with some inward amusement as to exactly what those ways had been.

      He wanted to know whether it had been as crumpled as now when last seen.

      Lady Maxwell thought that it had been shamefully treated by the thieves. The maid thought that the ill-treatment had taken place at Stillwater House. Between the two, of them, Rodman, listening avidly, and putting a few questions now and then, had managed to get a clear account.

      The frock was quite new. Lady Maxwell had worn it for the first time at dinner at Stillwater House on Thursday and torn it. As the frock had cost some thousands of francs, simple though it looked, she had gladly accepted Mrs. Lane's offer to send it for her next morning to a woman in Medchester who did beautiful "invisible mending."

      After dinner, when she went to her rooms, her maid had folded it up and laid it on the hall table for Mrs. Lane to see to in the morning. And when the terrible accident to Miss Charteris decided her mistress to hurry away, the maid found it still on the table, but tightly rolled up in paper, and very crushed.

      Mrs. Lane, had come up herself a little later, and offered to still have it mended in Medchester. She had pressed Lady Maxwell to accept her offer, but that lady finally decided to take it to town with her.

      Its loss from the hotel had been discovered at once, but it was believed that by some oversight it must have been taken to the cleaners.

      Rodman's explanation, such as it was, evidently cut short a very promising triangular duel between mistress, and maid, and cleaner.

      "So we now know that the frock might have been slipped on by any of the women in Stillwater House that night," Rodman muttered.

      Pointer nodded. "Just so."

      He proceeded to give the two police-officers a straight, condensed account of what he had found yesterday morning at the summer house down by the lake.

      Harris said afterwards that if he hadn't had the presence of mind to catch hold of his jaw it would have fallen off altogether.

      Even Rodman gaped.

      "So those beads that were found by the sand-pit must have tumbled out of Miss Charteris's frock when they lifted her body off the truck."

      Barns remembered the two brought him.

      "Now," Pointer finished, "we want to find out three things of almost equal importance.

      "First, who was the man of the summer house. He was not of what I call the Stillwater circle. That is, he wasn't the colonel, nor Mr. Thornton, nor Mr. Bellairs nor Count di Monti, nor Mr. Bond, nor Mr. Cockburn, nor any of the menservants. I've seen all their fingerprints by now."

      He went on to speak of the probable connection between the stranger and the letter