“He certainly helped to do it, by letting James the house in Daylesford Gardens. That may be just coincidence, of course. But if you could have seen him on the day we discovered the body—I tell you, Frant, that boy knows something! The question that’s worrying me is—does he know that he knows it?”

There was silence for a space, broken only by the faint scratch of the inspector’s pen travelling over the paper. Another sheet was added to the pile, and then the two men sat without speaking, each absorbed in his thoughts.

“Then there’s Crabtree,” said Frant at last.

“Crabtree? Yes, of course, the servant. We mustn’t forget him. Let’s see, his motive is Harper’s—at one remove further this time. He was at Daylesford Gardens, and we only have his word for it that he left on Friday morning. He might have stayed there all day and finished Ballantine off when he came in with James.”

“That makes him an accomplice of James,” said the sergeant.

“Not necessarily, though it looks like it. But James might have left Ballantine behind him alive and well, and then Crabtree took the opportunity to kill him and fill his pockets with whatever cash Ballantine had on him. With some of the money he goes to Spellsborough races, and the rest he gives to Harper who, in return, promises him a good job, in Kenya probably. How does that strike you?”

“Not very favourably, I must say.”

Mallett laughed. “Nor does it me,” he admitted. “But you see that, given the right assumptions, there’s not one of them we can’t make a case of sorts against. And we know perfectly well that they’re assumptions no jury in the world would be prepared to make. And all the time we’re no nearer than we were at the start to answering the two questions we’ve got to answer before we have the full history of this crime—who was Colin James, and why did Ballantine go to Daylesford Gardens?”

“They’re a mixed bag of suspects,” said Frant, stirring the little sheaf of papers with his finger.

“Yes, but they’re all connected in one way or another. Beginning with James, you have Crabtree who kept house for James, Harper who got the job for Crabtree, Fanshawe who was Harper’s father’s friend, Du Pine who is afraid of Fanshawe, and Eales who does some dirty work for Du Pine. Add Mrs. Eales to the chain and you bring it back to Ballantine.”

“Well, we wanted to find the connection between James and Ballantine,” said the sergeant with a grin, “and here it is. But it is a desperately roundabout one.”

“Yes, it’s rather like the old woman and the pig who wouldn’t get over the stile. But we’ve still got another suspect to put on the list.”

“You mean Mrs. Eales?”