‘You’ll have to fix it, then. I wash my hands of it.’

‘Oh, quite. I will let you know the results if I attempt it.’

‘I accept no responsibility, mind.’

‘No, no. I hear there is a meet at County’s Green tomorrow. My nephew has offered to mount me. Shall I go?’

‘Good heavens, yes! We’re not like the Cotswold, of course. Just the local farmers, and ourselves, and so on, with plenty of push-bike adherents, as a matter of fact. But you ought to get quite good fun.’

‘You are not going to the meet?’

‘How can I, with all this on my hands? Anything may break loose at any minute.’

As though to prove the truth of these words, the telephone bell rang, and a calm voice at the other end of the wire announced that the typewriter submitted to Scotland Yard for examination had been purchased in Islington on the twenty-eighth of December. There was no clue to the purchaser, however, who had paid outright for the machine and had taken it away with him.

‘No address, you see. But definitely a man,’ said the Chief Constable. ‘Now to find out whether Emming went to London on that date.’

‘You will find that he did,’ said Mrs Bradley. ‘Moreover, when you do find out that he was in London on that date, it will not help you very much. He wouldn’t have gone for the typewriter himself. He would have sent a special messenger.’

‘Well, we must trace the messenger and get him to describe Emming,’ said the Chief Constable. ‘But it still comes back to the same thing. We can prove, if we stick at it long enough, that Emming typed those letters, but I’m hanged if I see how to pin murder on him.’

‘The woman is the key,’ said Mrs Bradley. ‘We must find some way of getting her to talk.’

‘That must be a legitimate way, then.’

‘I agree, and I already have an idea.’

‘If you mean your ghost-gate theory …’

‘Partly, I do.’

‘Look here, you’re not to land me in the soup!’

‘You have no fear, and I will have no scruples.’

‘Lady Macbeth in person!’

‘No. I have no ambitions.’

‘Not even to be in at the death?’

Mrs Bradley cocked a bright black eye at him.

‘I shall know about that tomorrow,’ she replied.

CHAPTER 20

A View to a Death

‘Nor hedges, ditches, limits, narrow bounds;

I dreamed not aught of those,

But in surveying all men’s grounds

I found repose.’

Thomas Traherne

‘It will be the last run of the season,’ said Jonathan, swallowing scalding tea. ‘I’m glad you’re coming.’

Mrs Bradley, correctly attired in habit and top hat, grinned mirthlessly.

‘I don’t suppose I shall see much of it,’ she observed. ‘I’m too old for these capers.’