I can’t tell you coherently the events of the next twenty-four hours. Various incidents stand out, unrelated to other incidents.

I remember Joanna coming home, very white and drawn, and of how I tried to cheer her up, saying:

“Now who’s being a ministering angel?”

And of how she smiled in a pitiful twisted way and said:

“He says he won’t have me, Jerry. He’s very, very proud and stiff!”

And I said: “My girl won’t have me, either….”

We sat there for a while, Joanna saying at last:

“The Burton family isn’t exactly in demand at the moment!”

I said, “Never mind, my sweet, we still have each other,” and Joanna said, “Somehow or other, Jerry, that doesn’t comfort me much just now….”

IV

Owen came the next day and rhapsodied in the most fulsome way about Joanna. She was wonderful, marvellous! The way she’d come to him, the way she was willing to marry him—at once if he liked. But he wasn’t going to let her do that. No, she was too good, too fine to be associated with the kind of muck that would start as soon as the papers got hold of the news.

I was fond of Joanna, and knew she was the kind who’s all right when standing by in trouble, but I got rather bored with all this highfalutin” stuff. I told Owen rather irritably not to be so damned noble.

I went down to the High Street and found everybody’s tongues wagging nineteen to the dozen. Emily Barton was saying that she had never really trusted Aimée Griffith. The grocer’s wife was saying with gusto that she’d always thought Miss Griffith had a queer look in her eye—

They had completed the case against Aimée, so I learnt from Nash. A search of the house had brought to light the cut pages of Emily Barton’s book—in the cupboard under the stairs, of all places, wrapped up in an old roll of wallpaper.

“And a jolly good place too,” said Nash appreciatively. “You never know when a prying servant won’t tamper with a desk or a locked drawer—but those junk cupboards full of last year’s tennis balls and old wallpaper are never opened except to shove something more in.”

“The lady would seem to have had a penchant for that particular hiding place,” I said.

“Yes. The criminal mind seldom has much variety. By the way, talking of the dead girl, we’ve got one fact to go upon. There’s a large heavy pestle missing from the doctor’s dispensary. I’ll bet anything you like that’s what she was stunned with.”

“Rather an awkward thing to carry about,” I objected.