of furniture and looked round with a startled expression.
“A bit solid for a box spring, isn’t it?” he asked, and continued his investigation, tearing down the bed valance.
Presently he was rewarded by finding a small eyelet hole in the side of the mattress. He took out his knife, opened the pipe cleaner, and pressed the narrow blade into the aperture. There was a click and two doors, ludicrously like the doors which deaden the volume of gramophone music, flew open.
Whiteside put in his hand and pulled something out.
“Books,” he said disappointedly. Then, brightening up. “They are diaries; I wonder if the beggar kept a diary?”
He piled the little volumes on the bed and Tarling took one and turned the leaves.
“Thornton Lyne’s diary,” he said. “This may be useful.”
One of the volumes was locked. It was the newest of the books, and evidently an attempt had been made to force the lock, for the hasp was badly wrenched. Mr. Milburgh had, in fact, made such an attempt, but as he was engaged in a systematic study of the diaries from the beginning he had eventually put aside the last volume after an unsuccessful effort to break the fastening.
“Is there nothing else?” asked Tarling.
“Nothing,” said the disappointed inspector, looking into the interior. “There may be other little cupboards of this kind,” he added. But a long search revealed no further hiding-place.
“Nothing more is to be done here,” said Tarling. “Keep one of your men in the house in case Milburgh turns up. Personally I doubt very much whether he will put in an appearance.”
“Do you think the girl has frightened him?”
“I think it is extremely likely,” said Tarling. “I will make an inquiry at the Stores, but I don’t suppose he will be there either.”
This surmise proved to be correct. Nobody at Lyne’s Store had seen the manager or received word as to his whereabouts. Milburgh had disappeared as though the ground had opened and swallowed him.
No time was lost by Scotland Yard in communicating particulars of the wanted man to every police station in England. Within twentyfour hours his description and photograph were in the hands of every chief constable; and if he had not succeeded in leaving the country — which was unlikely — during the time between the issue of the warrant and his leaving Tarling’s room in Hertford, his arrest was inevitable.
At five o’clock that afternoon came a new clue. A pair of ladies’ shoes, mud-stained and worn, had been discovered in a ditch on the Hertford road, four miles from the house where the latest murder had been committed. This news came by telephone from the Chief of the Hertford Constabulary, with the further information that the shoes had been despatched to Scotland Yard by special messenger.
It was half-past seven when the little parcel was deposited on Tarling’s table. He stripped the package of its paper, opened the lid of the cardboard box, and took out a distorted-looking slipper which had seen better days.
“A woman’s, undoubtedly,” he said. “Do you note the crescent-shaped heel.”
“Look!” said Whiteside, pointing to some stains on the whitey-brown inner sock. “That supports Ling Chu’s theory. The feet of the person who wore these were bleeding.”
Tailing examined the slippers and nodded. He turned up the tongue in search of the maker’s name, and the shoe dropped from his hand.
“What’s on earth the matter?” asked Whiteside, and picked it up.
He looked and laughed helplessly; for on the inside of the tongue was a tiny label bearing the name of a London shoemaker, and beneath, written in ink, “Miss O. Rider.”
XXX. Who Killed Mrs. Rider?
The matron of the nursing home received Tarling. Odette, she said, had regained her normal calm, but would require a few days’ rest. She suggested she should be sent to the country.
“I hope you’re not going to ask her a lot of questions, Mr. Tarling,” said the matron, “because she really isn’t fit to stand any further strain.”
“There’s only one question I’m going to ask,” said Tarling grimly.
He found the girl in a prettily-furnished room, and she held out her hand to him in greeting. He stooped and kissed her, and without further ado produced the shoe from his pocket.
“Odette dear,” he said gently, “is this yours?”
She looked at it and nodded.
“Why yes, where did you find it?”
“Are you sure it is yours?”
“I’m perfectly certain it’s mine,” she smiled. “It’s an old slipper I used to wear. Why do you ask?”
“Where did you see it last?”
The girl closed her eyes and shivered.
“In mother’s room,” she said. “Oh, mother, mother!”
She turned her head to the cushion of the chair and wept, and Tarling soothed her.
It was some time before she was calm, but then she could give no further information.
“It was a shoe that mother liked because it fitted her. We both took the same size…”
Her voice broke again and Tarling hastened to change the conversation.
More and more he was becoming converted to Ling Chu’s theory. He could not apply to that theory the facts which had come into his possession. On his way back from the nursing home to police headquarters, he reviewed the Hertford crime.
Somebody had come into the house barefooted, with bleeding feet, and, having committed the murder, had looked about for shoes. The old slippers had been the only kind which the murderer could wear, and he or she had put them on and had gone out again, after making the circuit of the house. Why had this mysterious person tried to get into the house again, and for whom or what were they searching?
If Ling Chu was correct, obviously the murderer could not be Milburgh. If he could believe the evidence of his senses, the man with the small feet had been he who had shrieked defiance in the darkness and had hurled the vitriol at his feet. He put his views before his subordinate and found Whiteside willing to agree with him.
“But it does not follow,” said Whiteside, “that the barefooted person who was apparently in Mrs. Rider’s house committed the murder. Milburgh did that right enough, don’t worry! There is less doubt that he committed the Daffodil Murder.”
Tarling swung round in his chair; he was sitting on the opposite side of the big table that the two men used in common.
“I think I know who committed the Daffodil Murder,” he said steadily. “I have been working things out, and I have a theory which you would probably describe as fantastic.”
“What is it?” asked Whiteside, but the other shook his head.
He was not for the moment prepared to reveal his theory.
Whiteside leaned back in his chair and for a moment cogitated.
“The case from the very beginning is full of contradictions,” he said. “Thornton Lyne was a rich man — by-the-way, you’re a rich man, now, Tarling, and I must treat you with respect.”
Tarling smiled.
“Go on,” he said.
“He had queer tastes — a bad poet, as is evidenced by his one slim volume