‘But I don’t understand!’ Paula said. ‘Why are you in the clear? Are you sure it isn’t some kind of a trick?’

‘No, there’s no trick about it,’ he answered.

‘Why should there be a trick?’ Joseph said. ‘Can it be that you doubted Stephen’s innocence? Your own brother!’

‘How did it come to be in Uncle’s room?’ Paula asked, disregarding Joseph. ‘You may as well tell us, Stephen! We must all have guessed!’

‘Clever, aren’t you? I’m a child in these matters myself, but I gathered from the Inspector that in his opinion it was planted there.’

Paula flashed a look round the table. ‘Yes! That has always stood out a mile!’ she declared.

‘I don’t believe it!’ Mottisfont said, reddening angrily. ‘That’s what you chose to hint from the outset, but I consider it a monstrous suggestion! Are you daring to imply that one of us murdered Nat, and tried to fasten the crime onto you?’

‘It’s so obvious, isn’t it?’ Stephen said.

Joseph, who had been looking from one to the other, with an expression of almost pathetic bewilderment on his face, was so shocked that his voice sank quite three tones. ‘It couldn’t be true!’ he uttered. ‘It’s too infamous! too terrible for words! It was Nat himself who took your case up! It must have been! Good God, Stephen, you couldn’t believe a thing like that of anyone here – staying with us – invited here to – No, I tell you! It’s too horrible!’

At any other time Mathilda could have laughed to see Joseph’s roseate illusions so grotesquely shattered. As it was, the situation confronting them seemed to her to be too grim to admit of laughter. She said in a studiedly cool voice: ‘What gave the Inspector this idea?’

‘The absence of any finger-prints on the case,’ answered Stephen.

It took a minute or two for the company to assimilate the meaning of this, nor did it seem from Maud’s blank face, or from Joseph’s puzzled frown, that its full import had been universally realised. But Roydon had realised it, and he said: ‘It’s the meanest thing I ever heard of! I hope you don’t imagine that any of us would stoop so low?’

‘I don’t know at all,’ said Stephen. ‘I shall leave it to the Inspector to find out.’

‘That’s all very well!’ struck in Paula. ‘But if there were no finger-prints on the case, how is he to find out?’

‘He seems quite optimistic about it,’ Stephen replied.

It now seemed good to Valerie to declare in agitated tones that she could see what they were all getting at, but if anyone thought she had killed Mr Herriard they were wrong, and she wished that she had never been born.

Mrs Dean, whom Stephen’s announcement had cast into a mood of bitter reflection, was forced to wrench herself from her thoughts to frustrate an attempt on her daughter’s part to break into strong hysterics. Valerie cast herself on the scented bosom in a storm of noisy tears, saying that everyone had been beastly to her ever since she had set foot in this beastly house; and, with the exception of Joseph, who fussed about in an agitated and useless manner, the rest of the party lost no time in dispersing.