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‘Haven't an idea, sir,' Bobby answered. ‘Doesn't seem likely and yet somehow I thought he meant it.'

‘Nasty for us if it happens after we've been warned and practically asked for protection,' mused Mitchell. ‘I must send Gibbons or someone to have a chat with him and report. Or I wonder if it means that he intends to murder Marsden and that's the first step.'

‘But why should he?' Bobby asked, startled, for this was an idea quite novel to him.

‘Why should anyone?' retorted Mitchell. ‘People commit murders for all kinds of reasons, but never for a really adequate reason, because there is no adequate reason for committing a murder. But in this case, it is possible Marsden may know something; apparently he has been dropping hints like that to some of our men, only with the usual addition that he can't say anything till he's sure. But if he does, Carsley may mean to do him in and then claim it was self-defence and call us to prove he had asked for protection. When are you for duty next?'

‘Two p.m. to-day, sir.'

‘I'll ring up your inspector and ask him to put another man on in your place. You can spend your time hanging round “The Green Man”, trying to see if you can find the man you saw last night or anything about him. It's important to know what he really said to Lester. I'll circulate your sketch but you will have the best chance to identify him as you've seen him. Keep up your connexion with the servants at “The Cedars” too. It may be useful. Report to-morrow to Inspector Gibbons. I've had enough,' said Mitchell, sighing gently, as he regarded the neglected piles of paper on his desk, ‘of telling you to report to me personally.'

So the rest of the day Bobby spent hanging about ‘The Green Man'; flirting with the barmaid, who brought to that operation a mechanical dexterity that would have enabled her, one felt, to flirt with the Albert Memorial had professional exigencies required it; in chatting with other customers on such matters of current interest as the last football season, the coming football season, and the newest rumour of the latest attempt to dope the most recent greyhound favourite; and in drinking beer till he was reduced to the incredible condition of actually loathing the sight of the stuff!

His persistent efforts, however, met with no success. The barmaid confirmed the statement that the customer Bobby seemed to think might be the dear old friend he had not met for years had been occasionally in possession of complimentary theatre tickets, but for what theatre she did not know. For her part, she preferred the pictures – Constance Bennett, now, and for a moment the barmaid almost forgot her professional poise and dignity in a touching human enthusiasm. One or two of the other customers had also chatted with him occasionally, and could report that he was rather fond of muttering vague threats against someone against whom apparently he cherished a grievance, but as there is nothing on earth so absolutely devoid of all interest as other people's grievances no one had paid him any attention or had any idea to what or to whom he referred. Nor did it seem that here he had ever spoken of, or made any reference to, that murder of Sir Christopher Clarke, about which on the night it happened he had shown himself so excited and so interested at the other ‘Green Man'. Bobby thought it barely possible this silence was not without its significance. But no one knew anything else about him, or had any idea of either his name, his address, or his occupation.

It was therefore with the knowledge that he would have little to report to Inspector Gibbons in the morning that Bobby, after closing time, made a somewhat depressed way to the nearest tube station.

‘They'll pack me off straight back to my beat, I expect,' he decided, and then he wondered if he could get permission to make inquiries at the different theatres in the hope that if the man he was looking for was really connected with the stage, he might be traced that way. ‘Wonder,' he thought, ‘if it could be this old boy who bolted over the garden wall next door the day of the murder – if he did it, the excitement might have made him young and active again for the time. Only then would he have quietly gone off to get a drink and tell everyone it wasn't a murder? – and what the dickens can they all mean by talking about it's not being a murder when it's perfectly certain it was?'

Absorbed in these thoughts Bobby nearly forgot to alight at the station he had booked to, the one nearest to ‘The Cedars'. It was thither he made his way and when he tapped at the back door of the house, he received his usual warm welcome. Evidently they had been expecting him, in spite of the lateness of the hour, and the cook said it made them all feel so safe to know he was always there and always watching. ‘Always there and always watching' seemed to Bobby somewhat to exaggerate the case, but he made no attempt to correct her.

Then Lewis produced his excellent whisky, the cook consented to join them in a thimbleful, not more – discipline and decorum alike forbade that the parlourmaid, the housemaid or the ‘tweenie' should be offered any such opportunity – and, on the conversation becoming general, and even animated, Bobby learnt it was now settled that Miss Brenda's wedding was to take place almost immediately, that it was to be a very quiet affair, that a perfect whirl of preparation was already in full progress. All the household agreed that the difference in Miss Brenda was wonderful. She seemed so much more natural, more human in every way. It was, all the women agreed, a kind of wakening, as though her love for Mark Lester had brought to her a new life, leaving all the old existence behind.

‘Changed her it has,' Lewis agreed, ‘so you wouldn't hardly think it was the same girl. You could almost say it was as if she had just come alive, if you know what I mean.'

‘A week ago,' declared the cook, ‘I thought she was only taking Mr Lester because the master said so, and of course she had to do what he said, not having nothing of her own like, and her only a stepdaughter he could have turned into the street any minute. But now–'

She paused, and the ‘tweenie' said ecstatically:

‘Now she worships the ground he treads on.'

‘Don't you go for to take the words out of my mouth, my girl,' said the cook crossly, and if only there had been any household task the cook could have thought of that wanted doing, the ‘tweenie' would have been dispatched then and there to attend to it.

‘But why,' interposed Bobby, ‘why should he be so keen on Miss Brenda marrying?'

The general opinion seemed to be that Miss Brenda, with her quiet, sombre ways, her trick of remaining still and silent and yet somehow supremely vital and aware, had, as people are fond of saying without quite knowing what they mean, ‘got on Sir Christopher's nerves'. And Lewis was also of opinion that he felt his own daughter, Miss Jennie, was rather put in the shade by Brenda's quiet intensity of manner.

‘There was something about her,' Lewis said, ‘that made you always know she was there and yet she wasn't either, if you know what I mean.'

Bobby confessed that he didn't altogether, and Lewis tried again.

‘In the house where I began my career,' he said, ‘the lady had a daughter what turned into a nun finally, poor soul. But before we knew what was wrong, we used to notice she had that same way of standing very still, of seeming to be there and yet not there, as if there was something so much on her mind there was nothing else that mattered.'

‘Do you mean Miss Brenda is religious?' Bobby asked.

‘Oh, no,' said Lewis, and he and the others all smiled a little at the suggestion. ‘Never goes near a church, she don't. It used to worry Miss Jennie quite a lot. She got the clergy once or twice to come and talk to Miss Brenda, and Miss Brenda would just sit and listen, and never say one word, but just look, and you could see the poor man get more and more hot and red and uncomfortable, and then he would say: “Could they pray together?” and she wouldn't say a word, but just look and look, and off he'd go, wiping his forehead most like. I heard one of 'em say once she was the sort they burned for a witch in the old days, and you could tell he was thinking it wasn't such a bad idea, neither.'

‘You mean she's a bit absent-minded?' Bobby asked, doing his best to understand.

But at that they all laughed outright.

‘There's never a pin dropped but she knows it,' Lewis declared, ‘and what's more, you always know she knows.'

‘But always as nice and pleasant a lady as you could want in a house,' the cook added, ‘a lady as is a lady, which is what some isn't.'

‘I've nothing against either young lady,' declared Lewis, ‘only with Miss Jennie, you know where you are, you know all about her, but Miss Brenda – somehow you don't notice the other one if she's there. What I say is, poor Sir Christopher noticed it, too, and didn't like it, thought his own girl was being put in the background, if you know what I mean.'

‘But Miss Brenda had no claim on him,' Bobby remarked; ‘if he felt like that, he could have sent her away any time he wanted to?'

‘He thought too much of her ma to do that,' asserted the cook.

‘It wasn't that at all,' insisted Lewis, whom a third sampling of that excellent whisky was making both talkative and dogmatic, ‘he was afraid of her, that's what it was. God knows why, but it's a fact. I've seen him pretending to read the paper and watching her all the time, and her sitting there as still and silent as ever, so you felt he could have screamed and run. We were all afraid of her, as far as that goes, if you know what I mean. But not like him.'

‘I should hardly have thought from what I've heard,' Bobby observed, ‘that Sir Christopher was a man likely to be afraid of anyone.'

‘No more he wasn't,' declared the cook stoutly, ‘not him, nor us neither, only what is true about him, poor gentleman, is that he wasn't ever the same after his wife died. That was when Miss Jennie was quite a tiny tot, you know.'

It seemed the cook was the only one of them who had been there in the lifetime of the late Lady Clarke. Sir Christopher had married her very soon after the death of her first husband, Brenda's father. Sir Christopher had been in New York at the time, but had at once left important interests there to return home to do what he could to help the widow and also presumably to urge his suit with her.

‘Fixed it all up, so I heard tell,' remarked Lewis, ‘before her first husband was cold in his grave.'

‘The master was always like that,' declared the cook; ‘never let anything stand between him and what he wanted, small or big. A hard man, too, but it was only after her death he went quite the way he was these last years. Changed him somehow.' She lowered her voice. ‘The night she was buried,' she said, ‘I heard him myself, crying over her coffin like a child, so you could hear him right outside on the stairs, so you would have thought it was tearing him in half. You wouldn't never have thought that of him, would you now?'

‘You wouldn't,' agreed Lewis. ‘It just shows.' He said: ‘Even him as granite and iron was butter to, he had his soft spot once. But after that it must have gone hard as the rest of him, for I never saw sign or trace of it.'

‘All the same it was there,' the cook insisted. ‘He was always a little different with me, along of my having known her, and every year you could tell when the day came round when she died.'

‘If he was so fond of her mother,' Bobby observed, ‘that must have been a great bond between him and Miss Brenda.'

‘Ah, no one ever knew what that one thought,' Lewis said. ‘She was always quiet and still, thinking her own thoughts and never telling.'

‘It was her ma's death changed her,' the cook went on. ‘Until then she was always merry and bright, like any other young thing before their troubles come. But afterwards she went the way she's always been since, silent and still. Even when she was moving about the house seeing to things, she seemed the. same somehow, still and quiet – waiting, I used to think sometimes, waiting for her mother to come back to her.'

‘Quite different now,' said Lewis benevolently, helping himself to the whisky for the fourth time, ‘and I can't say I'm sorry for it, neither. But it's a wonder how different she is, now it's fixed up with Mr Lester.'

‘That's because,' explained the ‘tweenie' in a whispered aside, ‘she worships the ground he treads on.'

‘I suppose it's because he thought so much of her mother he was going to settle such a large sum on Miss Brenda,' Bobby remarked. ‘She loses that now.'

‘Done in, according to law,' said Lewis, ‘same as our legacies – we was all down for a year's wages, “if still in testator's employ” same as we are.'

‘Two hundred extra for me he put down,' added the cook. ‘That was along of my being here when his poor wife died.'

‘Miss Jennie says it'll all be paid just the same,' the parlourmaid interposed. ‘It's only right.'

‘Then Miss Brenda will get her forty thousand, too?' Bobby asked.

‘Well, now, that's what's funny,' the cook replied. ‘Miss Brenda don't seem to want to have it, and Mr Carsley doesn't want her to, neither, though quite agreeable to us having ours.'

‘Nothing funny about that,' Lewis pointed out. ‘Our little bits of legacies don't amount to nothing much, but forty thousand pounds, same as she was to have, that's money.'

‘There's been words about it,' confirmed the parlourmaid. ‘Miss Jennie thinks Miss Brenda won't have the money along of what Mr Carsley said, and it's worrying 'em both. Like a ghost he looks and never sleeps a wink, for you can hear him all night long walking up and down.'

‘What's worrying him,' pronounced Lewis, ‘is that he knows there's some as thinks it's him that did it, along of it putting all that money in their pockets and saving Miss Jennie that's Mrs Carsley now from being cut off without a penny. Not that I believe it myself,' added Lewis generously, ‘but it's the gossip round here.'