“I’m glad, but I don’t see how.”

“You’re a stranger down here, that’s why. You’ve got no preconceived ideas about the people here. But at the same time, you’ve got the opportunity of getting to know things in what I may call a social way.”

“The murderer is a person of good social position,” I murmured.

“Exactly.”

“I’m to be the spy within the gates?”

“Have you any objection?”

I thought it over.

“No,” I said, “frankly I haven’t. If there’s a dangerous lunatic about driving inoffensive women to suicide and hitting miserable little maidservants on the head, then I’m not averse to doing a bit of dirty work to put that lunatic under restraint.”

“That’s sensible of you, sir. And let me tell you, the person we’re after is dangerous. She’s about as dangerous as a rattlesnake and a cobra and a black mamba rolled into one.”

I gave a slight shiver. I said:

“In fact, we’ve got to make haste?”

“That’s right. Don’t think we’re inactive in the force. We’re not. We’re working on several different lines.”

He said it grimly.

I had a vision of a fine far-flung spider’s web….

Nash wanted to hear Rose’s story again, so he explained to me, because she had already told him two different versions, and the more versions he got from her, the more likely it was that a few grains of truth might be incorporated.

We found Rose washing up breakfast, and she stopped at once and rolled her eyes and clutched her heart and explained again how she’d been coming over queer all the morning.

Nash was patient with her but firm. He’d been soothing the first time, so he told me, and peremptory the second, and he now employed a mixture of the two.

Rose enlarged pleasurably on the details of the past week, of how Agnes had gone about in deadly fear, and had shivered and said, “Don’t ask me,” when Rose had urged her to say what was the matter. “It would be death if she told me,” that’s what she said, finished Rose, rolling her eyes happily.

Had Agnes given no hint of what was troubling her?

No, except that she went in fear of her life.

Superintendent Nash sighed and abandoned the theme, contenting himself with extracting an exact account of Rose’s own activities the preceding afternoon.

This, put baldly, was that Rose had caught the 2:30 bus and had spent the afternoon and evening with her family, returning by the 8:40 bus from Nether Mickford. The recital was complicated by the extraordinary presentiments of evil Rose had had all the afternoon and how her sister had commented on it and how she hadn’t been able to touch a morsel of seed cake.