“Nice pool, isn’t it? She’s done well by herself.”

And then the blow and the drowning. The lights off, the body in the pool, the key hung on Bill Sterling’s ring, and Dwight Elliott, after five minutes’ absence, coming back to the bridge table. “How’d you make out, partner?” “Four spades.”

Not a mark on him, his hands calm, his face impassive. Shuffling and dealing, bidding and playing, and his mind busy. The body couldn’t stay there. He would have to get it out, take it away somewhere, as far as possible.

Jim Conway has always believed that after he left that night he undressed in his car, hidden somewhere near by; that he whipped off his coat, shirt, shoes, and trousers, and put on his topcoat instead. And perhaps lost a garter on the way back to the pool. But by that time he had, Jim maintains, a definite plan, helped out by the fact that Don had not been able to dress. This plan was to drop the body in the river so that it would look like suicide. What happened to prevent it was probably the shortage of gas in Lydia’s car. He had to get back up the hill and to his own car again.

In the end he could not reach the river, except where it was thickly settled. So he dropped the body out where it was found, and sped back up the hill. But here something happened which threw out all his calculations. Bill Sterling saw the car and followed it.

He went on, looking wildly for a lane, anywhere to get away from Bill and leave the car. As we know, he left it in the ravine behind the Farm. How he got back to his own car, dressed, and made the city can only be guessed.

Bad as it had been, it was only the beginning. Maud was stricken when she learned that it was Don who had been killed. Elliott tried to see her. For a long time he had wanted to marry her, to cement his own position. When he did see her he urged it again. But Maud was thinking only of Lydia and Audrey. “I can’t let it go on. I must do something.”

He began to see trouble ahead. Not only from Maud. Bessie was talking strangely, hinting to Tony of some secret she knew. Tony went to him. “Secret? About your mother? That’s absurd, Tony. You ought to know better.”

But he was worried. He tried to talk to Bessie. She only laughed at him. “I’ll tell it when I’m good and ready. Not before, and not to you.”

Not in those words perhaps, but something of the sort. That must have been when he tried to kill her as she drove out from town in her car.

Then at last the real blow fell. Maud telephoned him to say she had sent for Lydia. She was to meet her that night at the playhouse. She was taking the envelope he knew about, and a list of her jewels. “I’ve done her a terrible injury. It’s up to her to decide what to do.”