I managed to raise it, then crawled inside and stood, breathing very hard, on the carpet of the deserted room. As the maid had said, the room had been stripped since de Mauxville left. No sheets, no towels. There were still papers on the desk in a neat pile. I went through them but found only a three-day-old copy of the Times, and some sporting magazines. His wastebasket had been emptied. No telltale marks on the blotting paper. I looked under his bed but the floor was spotless. I opened the chest of drawers but they only contained some rather gray undergarments and a pair of socks in need of darning. The handkerchiefs, however, were embroidered with a crest. Then I went through his wardrobe. A dinner suit was hanging there, and a couple of clean white shirts. I tried the pockets of the dinner jacket and found nothing. But when I put it back on the hanger, it just didn’t hang correctly. Gentlemen’s suits should be tailored to perfection and not droop. I tried pockets again and found that the lining was torn on one inside pocket. I traced down the tear in the lining and brought out a roll of paper. I let out a gasp when I saw what it was: a tight roll of banknotes—five pound notes, hundreds of them—well, maybe not hundreds but a big fat wad of them. I stood there staring at the money. To someone like me, who had been penniless most of her life, it represented a fortune. Who would know if I took it? The words echoed through my head. Ill-gotten gains of a dead man—surely nobody would ever find out. But then my ancestors, both sides of them, triumphed. Death Before Dishonor.

I was about to put them back when I realized I might be handling evidence and I was busily leaving my fingerprints all over them, and all over the room! I couldn’t believe my stupidity. I didn’t know whether the police could test things like money for fingerprints, but I wasn’t going to take a chance. Hastily I wiped the roll with my apron and put it back. Then I went around the room, wiping every surface I had touched.

There was a notepad beside the telephone. It appeared unused, but as the light struck it I could tell that there was an imprint on the top sheet as if the writer had pressed too hard as he wrote. I went over to the window and held the sheet up.

It said, R—10:30!

I wondered if the police had torn off that top sheet. Even the least intelligent policeman would be able to deduce that R meant “Rannoch.” Things didn’t look good for Binky unless I could find out where these large sums of money came from.