“No need. I’ll drive myself.”

“You can’t drive the car.”

“Yes, I can.”

I did, too. It hurt, but not too much. I’d washed, shaved, dressed, got the car out and driven to the Symmingtons’ in half an hour. Not bad going.

Megan must have been watching for me. She came out of the house at a run and clutched me. Her poor little face was white and twitching.

“Oh, you’ve come—you’ve come!”

“Hold up, funny face,” I said. “Yes, I’ve come. Now what is it?”

She began to shake. I put my arm round her.

“I— I found her.”

“You found Agnes? Where?”

The trembling grew.

“Under the stairs. There’s a cupboard there. It has fishing rods and golf clubs and things. You know.”

I nodded. It was the usual cupboard.

Megan went on.

“She was there—all huddled up—and—and cold—horribly cold. She was—she was dead, you know!”

I asked curiously, “What made you look there?”

“I—I don’t know. You telephoned last night. And we all began wondering where Agnes was. We waited up some time, but she didn’t come in, and at last we went to bed. I didn’t sleep very well and I got up early. There was only Rose (the cook, you know) about. She was very cross about Agnes not having come back. She said she’d been before somewhere when a girl did a flit like that. I had some milk and bread and butter in the kitchen—and then suddenly Rose came in looking queer and she said that Agnes’s outdoor things were still in her room. Her best ones that she goes out in. And I began to wonder if—if she’d ever left the house, and I started looking round, and I opened the cupboard under the stairs and—and she was there….”

“Somebody’s rung up the police, I suppose?”

“Yes, they’re here now. My stepfather rang them up straightaway. And then I—I felt I couldn’t bear it, and I rang you up. You don’t mind?”

“No,” I said. “I don’t mind.”

I looked at her curiously.

“Did anybody give you some brandy, or some coffee, or some tea after—after you found her?”

Megan shook her head.

I cursed the whole Symmington ménage. That stuffed shirt, Symmington, thought of nothing but the police. Neither Elsie Holland nor the cook seemed to have thought of the effect on the sensitive child who had made that gruesome discovery.

“Come on, slabface,” I said. “We’ll go to the kitchen.”

We went round the house to the back door and into the kitchen. Rose, a plump pudding-faced woman of forty, was drinking strong tea by the kitchen fire. She greeted us with a flow of talk and her hand to her heart.

She’d come all over queer, she told me, awful the palpitations were! Just think of it, it might have been her, it might have been any of them, murdered in their beds they might have been.

“Dish out a good strong cup of that tea for Miss Megan,” I said. “She’s had a shock, you know. Remember it was she who found the body.”