“He stays on in the city, and he hires a drive-it-yourself car. He hangs around the Cloisters at night, but it’s no good. So at last he knocks Evans out and takes his keys. You know the rest of that. He knew about the old man’s job, of course. He’d eloped with his daughter!

“All right. Grant all that. Then who had killed him? I was pretty sure Tony didn’t know the story, if there was one. Even if he had he wasn’t the sort to kill his own father. So what? Had Maud Wainwright done it? She might. Here she was, sitting pretty with the Wainwright money, and if my guess was right she had no right to it. Nor had Tony. It was understandable too, if she’d done it and then shot herself. But I was sure her death was murder, not suicide.

“You see how it went. Here was Bessie. She liked money a lot better than she cared for her own soul. Suppose she knew the story? She’d been pretty intimate with Morgan in France. She’d almost certainly seen the scar. ‘What’s that?’ ‘Initials of my wife, my dear. Name was Jessica Maud.’ You see how it could have been worked. How many Jessica Mauds are there, do you suppose? And little Bessie with her baby face—sorry, Pat, but it was a baby face—getting busy. ‘What did she look like? Where is she now?’ He didn’t know. He hadn’t seen her or heard of her for so many years. But if he mentioned how she looked and that hair of hers, Bessie could be pretty certain.

“He’d told her about Margery. All Bessie saw in her was a source of extra income by blackmail. But if Maud was still his wife, that was pretty bad news. What, lose the Wainwright money! Tear Tony away from it and where was she? You can be good and sure Bessie’d have put both Morgan and Maud out of the way before she let that happen.

“Well, you know the rest of it. I got Maud’s early love letters out of the trunk. One or two came from France. They were signed Anthony, but on the back of the envelope was his full name, Anthony Donaldson Morgan. The last one said he was going to the front and didn’t expect to come back.

“He didn’t, of course. He got through all right, but he dropped part of his name and stayed in France.

“Here was Maud keeping his letters and grieving over him. She was that sort. But he doesn’t worry about that. He gets a job in Paris, and—here’s the catch—he divorces her! She doesn’t know it. Nobody knows it. It took me a hell of a time to learn it from the French police. But probably that’s one of the things Morgan wanted to tell her. He’d notified her, but she’d been moving around. When the notifications came back to him he’d just let it ride.

“Well, there’s the picture. He gave up trying to see Maud and went back to New York. But he was still worried about Audrey and Tony. He wrote to Lydia but she sent the letter back unopened. He must have been pretty desperate by that time. Finally he had to play sick to get back, but Lydia kept a pretty cold eye on him. He could have told her about Maud and his first marriage; but I think he was still determined not to spill the beans if he could help it. What he did was smart. He sent for Tony, and Tony told him he had no intention of marrying Audrey. He had a wife already.