“Bill is saving you from more talk,” I told her. “As for his doing it, you ought to know him better. What about this woman Don ran away with, Lydia? Who was she?”

“I don’t really know. It’s a long time ago. She was in his office, a stenographer. He didn’t stay with her long. He couldn’t stick to any woman. Anyhow, so far as I know she’d been a nice girl, decent and all that.” The subject seemed distasteful to her, so she dropped it. “Pat, do you think Don was here before he came back?”

“What makes you think that?”

“I don’t know,” she said vaguely. “That playhouse at the Cloisters hadn’t been built when he went away, yet he seemed to know about it.”

We talked until late that night. She was shocked but grieving. Most of all she was worrying about Bill Sterling. He had a motive. Who else had? Not that she believed he was guilty, of course, but she was afraid of the police, especially of Hopper, who had been questioning her. He didn’t know Bill as Jim Conway did. But she had had an angle on that drowning of Don’s which I had not thought of. She did not believe he had been meant to go into the swimming pool.

“It only made it harder,” she had said. “There was sure to be an autopsy and they would know he had been drowned. There were so many other ways to kill him. If he was to be drowned, why not put him in the river? Pat, why on earth would Don go to the playhouse anyhow? Was it to meet somebody?”

“He might have been unconscious when he was taken there, Lydia.”

“I don’t believe it. He went there for some purpose of his own. And it was to hide that purpose that he was taken away later and thrown where he was found.”

Before I left we went upstairs to Don’s room. It was much as he had left it: the chintz-covered chair by the window with the cigarette box on a little taboret beside it, the old maple three-quarter bed with its narrow posts and ruffled Swiss curtains, his silver brushes on the maple low-boy, his cigarettes on the table beside his chair.

“I don’t suppose there is anything here,” she said dully. “I’ve searched every inch of it. So have the police.”

But she was wrong. In the closet were the suits she had mentioned, and also a coat, a brown one with almost invisible red stripes in it.

“What’s the coat?” I said. “You didn’t mention it.”

“I forgot it. The trousers were worn out, he said. He never wore it.”

I took it out and looked at it. No doubt it had already been examined, and certainly the pockets were empty. Like the others it had been made in England, and the Bond Street tailor’s name was in the pocket. But there was something else there, something the police had probably thought was a number written in by the tailor himself.