“Well,” Henry admitted somewhat unwillingly, “I must say that I have an idea that a woman had been talking to the man before he died. But I couldn’t swear to it. You see, there are so many people in that Reading Room that it might easily be a mistake on my part. Some perfect stranger might trip over the man’s chair, and pause to apologise. That might easily account for the fact that I thought a woman was talking to the man. Or,” he concluded somewhat lamely, “there may not have been any one there at all.”

“Got that, Cunningham?” asked Shelley. His assistant nodded.

“Only one thing, sir,” he added.

“Yes?” Shelley was always prepared to take a hint of a useful line of investigation.

“Do you think Mr. Fairhurst could be induced to remember the sort of clothes the lady was dressed in?”

Henry looked from one detective to the other with some surprise. What on earth would these men ask next? How did they expect him to remember the attire of a lady of whose very existence he was not certain?

Yet he found himself answering. “I have a definite impression of a youngish lady, rather pretty, and dressed in some sort of dark jumper and skirt,” he said. “Further than that I’m afraid I cannot go.”

“Very useful, Mr. Fairhurst,” was Shelley’s comment. “Very useful indeed. I expect we’ll lay our hands on that young lady before many hours are past; then maybe we shall be wiser than we are now on the subject of Arnell’s death.”

“Arnell?” Henry’s tone was interrogative.

“Oh, yes.” Shelley smiled, and his smile transformed that somewhat grim face, with its eyes of steel grey, into a new countenance, friendly and inviting confidences—a deceptive change that had, in its time, been the undoing of many a criminal.

“Professor Julius Arnell,” he went on. “That’s the fellow’s name. Does it mean anything to you?”

“I know his work, of course,” said Henry.

“What sort of work?” Shelley could be crisp enough in his utterance when he felt himself to be on the track of some useful information.

“He was probably the world’s greatest authority on the minor Elizabethans,” said Henry. “He had written many books on the lesser dramatists of that time, and he was, I believe, Professor of English Literature at one of the provincial universities. I never remember seeing him in the Reading Room before, however. Possibly he was able to come up only now and then. I expect he had to do a good deal of lecturing in connection with his post at Portavon—yes, that’s where he was—as they usually work their staff pretty hard in those places.”

“Did he have any enemies?” Shelley whipped the question out, like a rifle bullet.