An air of puzzled bewilderment came over her face. She frowned and gazed hard at the document, her eyes puckering up in surprise.

“But…but…I don’t understand,” she said.

“What don’t you understand?” asked Henry patiently.

“My father always wrote everything in blue ink in the past,” she said. “It was a little fad of his. But there was some trouble about a book that he wrote in the summer of 1936. The girl who typed it out from his written manuscript said that his bright blue ink—just this colour, you know—was trying to her eyes.” She paused.

“Go on,” said Henry.

“In the autumn of 1936, my father told me to throw away the blue ink, and get in a supply of the more usual blue-black. You know, the stuff that goes black when it’s been dry for a few hours.”

“I know.” Henry was all excitement now. This was the real thing, he told himself. At last it began to look as if they were on the track of something big!

“And at the time that the will was written there was no blue ink in the house!”

They looked at each other in silence. Sarah sniffed, and said: “Well; what are you going to do about it? Some fishy work going on there, I’ll be bound.”

“I don’t quite understand it,” Henry admitted frankly. “It just doesn’t seem to make sense. Why, if your father had no blue ink, did he go to the trouble of making his will in ink of that colour?”

“But…but…d-d-don’t you see?” Violet Arnell stammered in her excitement.

“I’m afraid I don’t. It’s a very remarkable business, but I can’t see what it means,” said Henry, a puzzled frown creasing his forehead.

“It means,” said Violet in impressive tones, “that my father did not write that will.”

“Oh, come, come, Miss Arnell,” Henry protested. “I don’t think that you can exactly say that. After all, what grounds have you for saying—”

Violet interrupted him. “My father,” she said again, “did not write that will.”

“Mightn’t there be a fountain-pen knocking about somewhere with some of the blue ink left in it?” was Henry’s next suggestion. “After all, it was only a few months from the time that the blue ink was thrown away. And there might easily be some left in a fountain-pen.”

“My father never used a fountain-pen,” she explained. “He was a very old-fashioned man in some ways, and he had a rooted objection to fountain-pens—said they made everyone write alike. He used an old steel-nibbed pen. And, although I have a fountain-pen, I never used the blue ink. I disliked the colour.”

“Well, it is, of course, possible,” said Henry. “And now, Miss Arnell, we may as well investigate this will a little further. I presume that Inspector Shelley has tested it for finger-prints?”

“Yes.”

“Any found?”

“No.”