The Footsteps That Stopped (Musaicum Murder Mysteries). Dorothy Fielding

accident. You forget the butter under Mrs. Tangye's wedding rings," Pointer spoke very seriously.

      "You overwhelm me with confusion, so I had!" Wilmot spoke in mock consternation. "Is this the sort of rock on which a police inquiry is built? I've no idea how that mysterious process begins. Do you inventory the butter on her finger solemnly under the heading of 'Clues of which the Police are in Possession'?"

      "No, no!" Haviland laughed in his turn. "The fact is, we haven't found even the ghost of such a thing as a clue which points to a crime, have we, sir?"

      "And where there's no clue there's no crime?" Wilmot queried.

      "Whose steps stopped in the garden?" Pointer asked. "Tangye would have come on in, if they had been his. At least, so it seems to me. Why was her left hand so buttery that it left such clear prints on her revolver and yet none on her fork?"

      Haviland turned to him quickly.

      "You spoke before of her prints on the Webley as being odd, sir? In what way, in fact?"

      "I can tell better when I have studied the enlargements," was the evasive reply.

      There was a short silence. This was different from theorising beforehand. The Chief Inspector was looking over the fields. Was the Hark, Hallo! coming? It all lay with the young man leaning with folded arms on the low parapet of the bridge and staring straight before him with level, quiet eyes.

      Haviland fidgetted with a cigar. "Of course," he said dubiously, "it's a question of finding out what's essential and what isn't..."

      Wilmot gave a short laugh. "Be able to do that, Haviland, and you'll be a god, not a policeman."

      "Still, as a matter of fact," Haviland went on doggedly, "that is what has to be done."

      "And pray what is the essential fact or facts here?" Wilmot asked indulgently.

      Pointer answered for the Superintendent, "The most essential thing in, this case is to find out exactly what happened on Sunday. When the break occurred."

      "Break?"

      "Between the old Mrs. Tangye and the new Mrs. Tangye. Between the woman who went on as always, and the woman who apparently changed her habits so much."

      "She seems to've quarrelled with Tangye on Monday as usual," Wilmot reminded him.

      "True," Pointer had to smile at the other's tone. "Yet she first began then to prepare for her coming departure."

      "Safe word that. We can all meet on it," Wilmot murmured approvingly.

      "Apparently, only apparently, of course," Pointer went on, "she seems to've been her usual self till Sunday morning."

      "Till that letter she read," Haviland breathed.

      "Until she went to Tunbridge Wells at any rate. Possibly that decision itself marked the beginning of the change. For when she gets back she goes to bed. She starts next day weeding out her wardrobe; the day after she tears up her private papers. It looks to me as if something had happened down at that flower-show."

      "Sunday," Wilmot repeated meditatively. "I don't follow you there, Pointer. The break, as you call it—the breaking-point would be nearer the mark, I think—occurred in my judgment, not between two Mrs. Tangyes, but between her and her husband, and took place Monday afternoon. You say she had changed by Monday. I can't see any change before that talk or quarrel, with her husband about five in the afternoon. On Monday morning she had had her hair waved, says Florence. We know that in the afternoon, she took a vivid interest in her new evening-dress. Those preparations on which we all lay so much store, though we read them differently, only began after she had seen and talked with her husband at tea-time."

      "No, not quite," Haviland corrected, "as a matter of fact she went out and left word before five with Carter Patterson to take her trunk to the Salvation Army's old clothes department. Before her husband got home from his weekend."

      Wilmot did not know this. It altered his argument as he at once said.

      "And you think what happened on Sunday when she was away from home so important, do you sir?" Haviland asked, "More so, in fact, than the letter itself, which sent her down there?"

      "We may be able to guess the letter from what took place. But not the other way round. Was the show the sort of thing that would get into the papers, Wilmot? London papers?"

      "You mean would any reporters be sent down to Tunbridge who might be able to help us? Not one." Wilmot explained that orchid shows in country towns, even big ones like this affair, would never get beyond a line or two, and those would be telegraphed up by some local amateur enthusiast, who would also, in all certainty, write the articles in the more important country papers. The exhibition firms supplying the smaller ones with data.

      "The show on Sunday is one essential then, sir. Are there any others?" Haviland had been meditating on the Chief Inspector's words.

      But Pointer did not answer directly. He seemed to be thinking aloud.

      "Monday afternoon, when Miss Saunders is absent, Florence is sent off too on an errand, and Olive is told that Mrs. Tangye's not at home to any one before five o'clock, and is given a stiff bit of mending to do. In other words, Mrs. Tangye secures herself from interruption Monday afternoon. Then next day, yesterday, Miss Saunders is sent out. She's the only one in the house who can come and go as she likes, remember. She generally has tea with Mrs. Tangye of course—"

      "And Mrs. Tangye gives particular orders for an uninterrupted chat with her special friend." Wilmot spoke impatiently. "My dear fellow, no one could accuse you of swallowing camels, but you certainly do go for any gnat in sight."

      "Doesn't Mrs. Tangye's partiality for having tea in an impossible room strike you as peculiar?" Pointer countered.

      Haviland stared. Wilmot permitted himself to look puzzled.

      "Senseless whim," he murmured, "but not necessarily criminal, I should have thought."

      "Not necessarily senseless," Pointer replied with a faint smile.

      "You think the smoky fire—but would that weigh much, in fact, with a desperate woman—sick of life—?" groped Haviland.

      "It would weigh heavily with a woman expecting a visitor," Pointer reminded him. Haviland stepped away to let a perambulator come up and pass them.

      "In the plan which the Superintendent drew of Riverview," Pointer went on in his absence, "Haviland's an excellent officer, very thorough along his own lines. He has a quick eye."

      "He has—for a fact," Wilmot laughed, and Haviland, catching the last word, grinned.

      "I'm an Essex man," he said in excuse, as he turned to Pointer when the bridge was empty again, "you were saying, sir?"

      "That in your plan the morning-room shows as the only one in the house which can be entered directly from the garden, without having to pass any other window. Now, adding this interesting detail to the unusual fondness of Mrs. Tangye for a smoky room yesterday, and you get quite an intriguing little sum."

      "You might, if they belonged together," Wilmot agreed cautiously, "but if you add the density of the atmosphere to the distance from the earth to the moon, your result's not likely to be of much practical use."

      "That's what I thought when I learnt from the evidence at the inquest that Mrs. Tangye had been expecting a visitor. An expected caller drew a straight line through my sum. This cable of Mrs. Cranbourn's, however, reverses that. Or rather, what seems like a stroke through the whole, becomes one of it's most important items."

      "Are we at last to be permitted to glimpse your meaning—to fathom the mysterious depths with which you credit that fact?" Wilmot screwed up his eyes. A sign of close attention.

      "Remember the situation of the morning-room. Mrs. Tangye's sticking to it in spite of discomfort, and add the new fact that very definite instructions were given by her that she was not at home yesterday, except to a certain, very carefully specified lady, who quite positively couldn't