‘You’re telling me!’ said Gavin. ‘What’s the matter with this room, Buckle?’ he suddenly demanded, turning off to address his expert. ‘Can’t we get cracking?’
‘Nothing’s the matter, sir, except that every single print has been wiped off everything,’ replied the fingerprint expert, straightening himself from a kneeling position beside the wardrobe drawer.
‘Have you tried the jerry?’ Laura indelicately demanded. Buckle unearthed the repository and carefully tested it, using a dark-tinted powder on its glaze.
‘Nothing doing,’ he said at last. ‘And there isn’t another thing, sir. I’ll say that whoever used this room last must have had prints on record, sir. Very wily birds, to have covered their tracks as well as this, I reckon.’
‘Guilty consciences, too,’ said Gavin. ‘Cheer up, Buckle! Better luck in the next room, I dare say.’ He led the way to the bedroom Miss Carmody had occupied. Here the conditions were vastly different. Miss Carmody’s room was practically knee-deep in fingerprints, as Laura chose to express it. The prints, announced Gavin with considerable confidence, belonged to three or four different people. Buckle agreed.
‘Miss Carmody, the housemaid, and the porter who brought down the luggage (those on the finger-plate of the door, sir), and a set belonging to some other person who came in.’
‘Crete Tidson,’ said Gavin, ‘very likely.’
‘So, if some of these are Crete Tidson’s fingerprints, she can’t have anything to hide,’ suggested Laura.
‘If she had anything to hide, her prints wouldn’t be in this room at all,’ agreed Gavin. ‘Even so, it doesn’t get us much further. We shan’t find Tidson’s prints on the stone if he’s the murderer. Still, there are other possibilities. Now we’d better do Mrs Tidson’s room – she didn’t share with her husband – and if she’s left prints we may take it she’s nothing to hide.’
Crete’s room, however, was as bare of prints as the first room which had been tested.
‘Damn!’ said Gavin. ‘Ah, well, these we’ve got will have to be compared with the prints we’ve found on our collection. If anything tallies, we may be a step further on, and we may not. Plenty of people pick up stones and heave them into a river, goodness knows!’
‘The only thing is,’ said Laura, ‘that there aren’t all that number of biggish stones on the river banks for people to pick up and heave. Can’t you get something from that?’
‘True for you, we might be able to,’ said Gavin. ‘Anyway, we have to wait and see.’
Waiting and seeing produced a definite result. One of the inspector’s collection of large, heavy stones bore undoubted traces of blood. It also bore Connie Carmody’s fingerprints. It was also very neatly labelled Weir.
‘Oh, Lord!’ said Gavin, as much dismayed by this discovery as even Laura could have wished. ‘Here’s a pretty how-de-do, I don’t think! What are we going to do now?’
‘We must see whether it’s human gore,’ said Laura, with vivid recollections of the smell of the very dead dog. Gavin brightened; then he resumed his former lugubrious expression. ‘Even if it is the dog, it’s a bit of a pointer,’ he said. ‘Mrs Bradley has said several times that practice makes perfect, you know. And someone who knew that Connie had killed the dog moved it to where we found young Biggin.’
‘That surely lets Connie out?’ said Laura. ‘And, anyway, you’ve still some of your big stones to test.’
‘Scores, if not hundreds,’ Gavin replied. ‘But, before I go any further, I suppose I shall have to interview this Connie – confound her for a red-herring and a nuisance!’
‘The sooner the better,’ Mrs Bradley agreed when she was asked. ‘Let us go to Lewes at once. This ought to be cleared up immediately. We must frighten the life out of Connie, although I hesitate to add “for her good.”‘
‘For the good of the general public, I should have thought,’ said Laura. ‘Honestly, the girl must be demented.’
‘Oh, she is not quite as bad as that! Let us agree that she has become slightly abnormal.’
‘Life with Auntie Prissie? Morbid streak emphasized by unsympathetic atmosphere? Persecution mania—?’
Mrs Bradley cackled.
‘But not engendered by the aunt,’ she said. ‘Connie’s condition is largely the result of shock. Of two successive shocks, in fact.’
‘How come?’
‘Connie learned, for the first time, at the dangerous age of thirteen, that her life and that of young Preece-Harvard were destined to flow in very different channels. What she was not told – thanks to a streak of unselfishness oddly mixed in with Mrs Preece-Harvard’s character – is that she is young Arthur’s half-sister, the illegitimate daughter of his father. There followed for Connie, immediately upon this realization, the further shock of the parting, abrupt and cruel, from this half-brother, whom she loved with a passion deeper than that of a mother.’
‘Since then she’s turned round on Arthur P-H, though, and would like to kill him,’ said Laura. ‘Inversions, and so forth, I take it. Ah, yes, I get it all now.’
‘I don’t know whether you do,’ said Mrs Bradley. ‘Think it over, and don’t be misled. I have had no reason to alter my opinion that Connie would rather die than harm that boy. She does not, of course, feel the same about Mr Tidson.’
‘Why are you keeping her more or less of a prisoner? And why have we got to have her with us for a bit?’
‘Well, I’m afraid for Connie. She is not, in one sense, completely responsible for her actions.’
‘But isn’t she going to start a job, or something?’
‘I only wish I thought so! Now, before we leave Winchester, there is one thing I would very much like to do.’
‘Set that man free. He’s bound to be let go, though. They can’t pin anything on him.’
‘He’s a strong-willed fellow,’ said Mrs Bradley. ‘He’s fond of his wife, I think, and doesn’t want to hurt her unnecessarily.’
‘So he gets himself arrested for murder on the word of that awful Grier woman! Can’t see much chivalry in that!’
‘I think he may have chosen the lesser of the two evils. But my lawyer is going to try to get at him.’
‘Ferguson?’
‘Yes. He has had one interview already. It was abortive. Here is Ferguson’s report. It is just what I had expected. Never mind! He will try again.’
Laura opened the envelope which Mrs Bradley handed her.
‘He won’t see me. He won’t see anybody,’ wrote Mr Ferguson. ‘He says he does not wish to be legally represented; that he did not commit the murder, and that the police can fry in hell.’
‘Well, that’s that,’ said Laura, folding up Mr Ferguson and handing him back. ‘Now what?’
‘Now we do what I have been waiting to do – but we could not do it whilst the Tidsons were here – we interview the young woman who is the cause of all the trouble.’
‘The naiad?’
‘No. The missing sweetheart. The woman that this stupid, chivalrous Potter really was visiting that night.’
‘Oh!’ said Laura. ‘What a hope!’
‘Of finding her, do you mean? I have every hope. She has a jealous husband or cruel parents, she is known to Mrs Grier, and she may have left Winchester since the murder of little Grier.’
‘How do you know?’
‘I don’t know – in the sense you mean.’
‘I think I understand. She was with Potter on the night and at the time of the murder. She has been too scared, because of husband or parents, to come forward and give the chap his alibi, and, because she’s a coward (as aforesaid) she’s cut and run. Is that it?’