“You didn’t hear it, going out or coming in?”

“When would that be?” asked Andy cautiously.

“Tonight. Between ten-thirty and, say, twelve o’clock.”

“We go to bed early. At nine or thereabouts. Don’t you think if I’d heard the dirty rascal I’d have been out and after him?”

He went through the cottage after that. Jessie was up, in an old flannel kimono and a speechless state of wrath. There was no uniform to be found, nor anything whatever suspicious; and the two stoutly maintained that Evans had not been back since his disappearance.

“I’d gone on a hunch so far,” Jim said later. “Haines’s description of the old car and an elderly man rang a bell for me. I’d seen Evans once or twice driving the McDonald car, and I took a chance.”

Both Andy and Jessie, however, when told the story about Haines, angrily repudiated any theory that it might have been Evans. “He was no murdering fool,” Andy said. “Nor a thief either. He was welcome to my car, and he knew it. It was never Evans, sir.”

Jim was completely in a fog by that time. He saw Tony’s light on in the main house, and called him from the cottage. Together the two men went over the car again. Apparently the wheel had been wiped. They could find no fingerprints on it.

Tony looked up after examining the broken fender. “There’s one thing sure about this, Conway,” he said, smiling wryly. “Stoddard didn’t do it.”

“No,” Jim agreed. “But who the hell did?”

By evening of the next day the papers had the story. Of course, a policeman without his clothes was manna to the press in a dull season. They seized on it, showing photographs of an embarrassed, unhappy young man, with various captions: Maniac Loose Again—Officer Found Nude—and one alliterative one entitled Cop’s Clothes Confiscated. Curious young men with wads of paper in their pockets wandered around the Hill again, picking up this and that, and it made a rather imposing total. They picked up Bessie’s accident and the bullet holes in her car. They revived the attack on Evans and the missing trousers. They republished shots of the cemetery, and one youth even managed to get into my office and to inquire if it was true that I had been struck with a hatchet and thrown into the Stoddard pool.

The district attorney in a rage sent for Hopper. “What’s all this newspaper stuff about?” he demanded.

“Why don’t you read it? It makes good reading. Maybe some of it’s true.”

“A lunatic! Have you lost your mind? What do you mean, true? What’s a cop losing his clothes got to do with this case? Or somebody with a grudge knocking over tombstones in a cemetery?”

“Well,” drawled Hopper, lighting a cigarette, “I’d say it’s something like this. Maybe somebody’s crazy, maybe not. It’s just possible it’s a nice little game.”

“What sort of game? Are you being funny?”

“Hell, no,” said Hopper. “It might be a coverup for Stoddard. He’s in jail and these things go on happening. What’s the answer? There’s a murderous lunatic at large, so Stoddard can’t be guilty. Either that, or the killer’s still around. Maybe he figures that if Stoddard is acquitted we’ll go hunting for somebody with a mania for stealing pants.”