The feline and gingery Miss Merrion left the room.

‘Very refined,’ remarked Inspector Kelsey. He mimicked the lady’s mincing tone. ‘Really I could not say.’

A plump girl, slightly out of breath, with dark hair, rosy cheeks and dark eyes goggling with excitement, bounced in.

‘Miss Merrion sent me,’ she announced breathlessly.

‘Miss Higley?’

‘Yes, that’s me.’

‘You knew Elizabeth Barnard?’

‘Oh, yes, I knew Betty. Isn’t it awful? It’s just too awful! I can’t believe it’s true. I’ve been saying to the girls all the morning I just can’t believe it! “You know, girls,” I said, “it just doesn’t seem real. Betty! I mean, Betty Barnard, who’s been here all along, murdered! I just can’t believe it,” I said. Five or six times I’ve pinched myself just to see if I wouldn’t wake up. Betty murdered…It’s—well, you know what I mean—it doesn’t seem real.’

‘You knew the dead girl well?’ asked Crome.

‘Well, she’s worked here longer than I have. I only came this March. She was here last year. She was rather quiet, if you know what I mean. She wasn’t one to joke or laugh a lot. I don’t mean that she was exactly quiet—she’d plenty of fun in her and all that—but she didn’t—well, she was quiet and she wasn’t quiet, if you know what I mean.’

I will say for Inspector Crome that he was exceedingly patient. As a witness the buxom Miss Higley was persistently maddening. Every statement she made was repeated and qualified half a dozen times. The net result was meagre in the extreme.

She had not been on terms of intimacy with the dead girl. Elizabeth Barnard, it could be guessed, had considered herself a cut above Miss Higley. She had been friendly in working hours, but the girls had not seen much of her out of them. Elizabeth Barnard had had a ‘friend’ who worked at the estate agents near the station. Court & Brunskill. No, he wasn’t Mr Court nor Mr Brunskill. He was a clerk there. She didn’t know his name. But she knew him by sight well. Good-looking—oh, very good-looking, and always so nicely dressed. Clearly, there was a tinge of jealousy in Miss Higley’s heart.

In the end it boiled down to this. Elizabeth Barnard had not confided in anyone in the caféas to her plans for the evening, but in Miss Higley’s opinion she had been going to meet her ‘friend’. She had had on a new white dress, ‘ever so sweet with one of the new necks.’

We had a word with each of the other two girls but with no further results. Betty Barnard had not said anything as to her plans and no one had noticed her in Bexhill during the course of the evening.

Chapter 10

The Barnards

Elizabeth Barnard’s parents lived in a minute bungalow, one of fifty or so recently run up by a speculative builder on the confines of the town. The name of it was Llandudno. Mr Barnard, a stout, bewildered-looking man of fifty-five or so, had noticed our approach and was standing waiting in the doorway.