“Did Mrs. Wainwright call you up the day before she died, or just before that?” I asked.

There was some hesitation at the other end of the wire.

“Who do you say you are?”

“Her secretary, Miss Abbott.”

He opened up then, relatively at least. He turned out to be Mr. Brodhead, and said he had known my mother well years ago. That established, we got back to the matter in hand. He lowered his voice. “Well, she did call, Miss Abbott,” he said. “It was a confidential matter, but I have wondered since if I should say something about it. Not that it could have any bearing on her—on what happened to her. But as I said to Mr. Summers, after all if she was in need of money perhaps we should tell it.”

“You can tell me. I won’t talk unless it’s important. Then I shall only tell her son.”

That relieved him, although his voice was still conspiratorial. “I gathered that she wanted to sell her jewels, Miss Abbott.”

“Sell them? All of them?”

“Everything she had.”

I waited for Tony that night and told him. His face was a study. “Why? Why on earth sell her jewels? She had plenty of money.” Then I saw suspicion in his eyes. “Bessie!” he said. “Bessie, of course. She was going to buy her off again. Pat, there are times when I’m hardly answerable for what I do.”

I knew I could not stay much longer. My desk was almost cleared, but he asked me that day to stick it out for a while. He was taking steps about the divorce. He had asked Bessie to go to a hotel in town, had even engaged rooms for her. But she was stubbornly insisting on staying at the Cloisters.

“God knows why,” he said. “But since she does—keep her away from Mother’s things, will you? Hilda says she’s been trying to get at them.”

After that Maud’s rooms were locked, and I kept the keys.

So far as I could see the police were doing nothing. It was as though with Julian’s arrest they had abandoned the case. I was wrong, of course. Hopper was still—or again—hunting for Evans, and down in his office Jim Conway had a drawer in his desk which now and then he opened. He would lay its contents out in front of him and study them.

He gave me the list only the other day.

(a) The slipper and button found in the playhouse pool.

(b) A rough drawing of the scar on Don Morgan’s chest.

(c) The man’s garter Roger had found in the grounds, and which I had given him.

(d) The photographs of the bullets from Tony’s gun.

(e) The scrap of blue paint from the floor of the playhouse pool.

(f) The list of Maud’s jewels, left in the chair by the fire the night she died.

(g) The prints on Maud’s safe, photographed after it was found open, and consisting only of Maud’s and mine.