The Greatest Murder Mysteries - Dorothy Fielding Collection. Dorothy Fielding

del Greco."

      Rossi was able to give it him, and Cockburn put in an hour's work learning, by a few, very shrewdly-placed questions, from a couple of maids in the flat below, that the rooms upstairs had been empty till after midnight on Thursday.

      He felt quite pleased with himself as he walked away, though Pointer could have told him that servants' testimony against a man of di Monti's position was not a sure move.

      Pointer meanwhile was up in town, too. He had decided to pay the count's rooms in the Albany a visit himself. Watts had gone over them in vain, but the Chief Inspector thought that he might find some neglected trifle.

      The rooms showed more books than Pointer had expected. Besides the inevitable bust of Dante, the Italian tri-colour, and a well-thumbed Carducci, there were books on agriculture, grammars of Tuareg and Arabic dialects, pamphlets on army training, and a host of similar works The only letters were business letters, except a few from his own family in Italy.

      At the back of the boot-cupboard he unearthed a little posy of flowers. Some one had set the boots down on the top of the delicate blossoms. Pointer picked them up with a dim sense of cruelty. The touch told him that they were artificial, but they were beautifully copied from nature. A little bunch of pink and white camellias tied with silver ribbon—the shoulder-knot that Rose had been wearing in Bellairs's portrait of her. They had been flung with such force to the back of the cupboard that their stems were doubled up. The petals were worse yet. It looked to him, it certainly looked to him, as though a boot-heel had crunched on them. Accident or intention?

      Pointer thought a trifle grimly of the patent anguish with which Count di Monti had spoken only yesterday, before himself and the two police-officers, of his dead fiancée's feeling of fear.

      He closed the door and descended the stairs. He was due at the commissioner's shortly. At the entrance di Monti passed him. The Italian stopped at sight of the detective-officer, and a cold smile flickered across his face. A smile with no suggestion of mirth in it.

      "A visit to me?"

      "Another time will do as well. I am due now at New Scotland Yard," Pointer replied civilly.

      Di Monti stood for a second looking at the other without speaking, and Pointer suddenly smelt danger, and very close beside him.

      It was a mad idea that he could be attacked in broad daylight, but he knew it to be a fact. He turned away with a nod, and walked slowly on out of the door past the big gray car. The driver, di Monti's man, watched him sleepily.

      Pointer, thought that he, too, resembled a beast of prey with forest laws and forest passions. He drove on to the Yard with a feeling that things were about to take some definite turn. That smile of di Monti's, like a snake it had crossed that hard face, it meant something. He felt certain that the count had taken some decision at that moment. What one?

      Back at the police station, he learnt that neither Harris nor Rodman had been able to find any one who had seen either Mrs. Lane or Miss Scarlett at the beginning of the concert last Thursday, though at the very end Sibella had slipped in, and Mrs. Lane had taken her seat about the middle of the entertainment.

      "Just so." Pointer handed Harris back the report to file away. "They were off on two different missions. Now, Miss Sibella's evening shoes were pretty well covered with garden mould when I saw them on Friday. I think we may take it that she was the one who helped Miss Rose home from the studio in that little two-seater both use."

      "I shouldn't wonder," Harris said with alacrity. "Shows that she realised how nasty the count might be, for, as I say, she bars night driving."

      "I shouldn't wonder," Pointer quoted with a smile "And now, here's the latest find."

      He laid a sheet of notepaper in front of the superintendent. Harris picked it up.

      "Never saw such a fist in all my life! Whose is it?"

      "The Professor's. It's the letter that Miss Charteris got on Thursday, the one that accompanied the enclosed black-sealed envelope. It's in Italian. Here's what he says."

      He laid down another slip. Harris read in English:

       "B0LZANO HOTEL LAURIN

       "My DEAR DAUGHTER, I am sending you an enclosure with this, addressed to myself, which please keep by you pending future directions. I may want it destroyed. I may not. The weather here is very cold. I wish I had taken your advice and brought my warmer underwear. As you thought, it was quite chilly at Genoa.

       "Your affectionate father,

       "HENRY CHARTERIS."

      "Bit of a sell, eh?" said the disappointed Harris. "And why Italian? His writing would have been enough of a safeguard, I should have thought."

      The date was the Monday before Rose was murdered

      "Lady Maxwell told me that the professor often talked and wrote both to his daughter and to his niece in Italian so as to keep it up. I found this letter tucked between the pages of a new Italian dictionary in Mrs. Lane's bedroom."

      "Hidden?"

      "Or laid away in safe keeping. There's nothing much in the letter itself, except that it seems to point to the importance of the accompanying enclosure, which was, as we were told, addressed to the professor himself. The odd thing is, why was this half-sheet taken? Why did Mrs. Lane buy that Italian dictionary late on Thursday at Jephson's in the High Road? Why was she, or they, so anxious to learn what was in the letter? And Genoa," Pointer paused a moment to fill his pipe, "Genoa! That's not the way the colonel told us three separate times that the professor was going into Italy. If you look at your report, you'll see he says that his brother-in-law was going through Italy by way of Modena-Turin-Milan-Venice. His very insistence struck me as odd. Now, here the professor refers to having been in Genoa, and that not as though it had been an afterthought."

      Pointer stared at the note a little longer.

      "I shouldn't be surprised if Mrs. Lane came so late to the concert because she was in some quiet nook, railway station or bun shop, translating this. It would take her some time The professor's handwriting ought to be forbidden by law. I thought the letter was in cuneiform at first."

      "Instead of being in Medchester. I see." Harris nodded solemnly. "Of course, Mrs. Lane's a newcomer down here." His tone indicated resignation to any blows from that quarter. "You think she's in it, then?"

      "'It' was always the case to all the men engaged on 'It.'"

      "'Fraid so. I think she's the woman who walked in Miss Charteris's shoes on that path to the sand-pit late that same night." Pointer spoke very gravely. "She has a short-stepping gait. Not like Miss Scarlett's stride. And her weight and size of foot would fit the marks."

      "Lady Maxwell wears sixes or sevens," Harris said ungallantly. "I measured her footsteps."

      The door opened, and Rodman saluted.

      "Mrs. Lane's just left for town, sir. The servants say that she told them that the colonel had asked her to look after a furnished house of his some time ago, and that she only waited till the funeral was over before taking up her new duties. Miss Scarlett's going shortly, to stay with Lady Carew at their Devon place. The colonel's remaining on."

      Rodman went back to his observation post at Stillwater House.

      "With Lady Carew! There you are Alf!" Harris said triumphantly. "You wondered, why Sir Henry wasn't at the funeral. I told you he'd gone to Sledmere. The colonel himself dropped that to me. Now you see that there's no ill-feeling."

      "Sir Henry left on Friday afternoon very suddenly for Yorkshire after having backed out nearly a week before at the last moment," Pointer observed.

      "Well, what, of it?"

      Pointer eyed Harris's indignant face with a twinkle.

      "Search me! as the Americans say, and if at the same time you could find the answer to why Sir Henry Carew does not seem to've been notified of Miss Charteris's death, I should be obliged."