“I feel old, Pat,” she said. “Old and tired. I had hoped to see my grandchildren, but I suppose I never will. If only you and Tony—”

Amy came back then. I had closed the safe and the panel by that time, and unlocked the door; but she looked suspicious.

“What’s the conspiracy?” she demanded. “You two look as though you had been plotting something. Out you go, Pat. If you want to stir up trouble, go to Mrs. Tony. She likes it.”

Things were still moving, of course, although inside the house we knew nothing about them. It was about that time, for example, that Jim Conway searched Evans’s room again. The fact that the police had interrogated Tony and were searching for his gun had reached Jessie McDonald. She was resentful, and at first she refused to admit him.

“I’ll thank you not to be bothering me,” she said, fixing him with cold Scottish eyes. “I’m house-cleaning for the winter. But I’ll say this: if the police would keep their nebs out of this, honest folk might sleep at night.”

“Honest folk don’t have to be afraid of the police, Mrs. McDonald,” he told her amiably.

He had not expected much. Certainly he had not expected what he found. Evans’s carpet had been lifted and was hanging in the yard, and under the bed he discovered a loose board. Over Jessie’s indignant protests he pried it up, to reveal that it was a cache of sorts. When at last he got up he held a small savings bankbook in his hand. It looked unimportant at first. He eyed it glumly. Then he opened it, and his eyes almost popped out of his head.

It showed that over a period of ten years or more Evans, in addition to his normal savings, had deposited at regular intervals a total of some eighteen thousand dollars.

“You see what it looked like, Pat,” he said later. “He’d put by a hundred and fifty dollars a month for all that time. He got eighty dollars a month and his room, and it cost him about forty to live. Where did he get the rest?”

He showed the book to Jessie, who seemed bewildered, and later he called the bank in town. Yes, Evans had made the deposits. Always in cash. No, there had been no withdrawals. The money was still there.

Thus Evans came back into the story, and Jim, sitting back in his office chair, tried to fit him into it. It looked like blackmail, but blackmail of whom?

He went back over his notes: Don’s murder, Bill’s arrest, the attempt on Bessie’s life.

“Bessie was out,” he said. “She’d only been married to Tony five or six years. Lydia was out. She had just enough to live on. Anyhow, I couldn’t see her paying blackmail to anybody. Same with Mrs. Wainwright. She could have paid it, but she wouldn’t be likely to have kept him around the house in that case. Even Tony was only twenty when it began. So what?”