“Miss Pinkerton speaking,” she said, and on hearing the inspector’s voice was instantly covered with confusion.

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I

The night it happened Mother was giving a dinner party for the Mayor. I had no idea why she was giving a party for the Mayor. So far as I knew she had never even seen the man. But I knew what nobody else did that night. It was what you might call her last fling. Although the news wasn’t out, she had offered the place to the government for a convalescent home, and after six months it had been accepted.

Mother is just Mother, and my brother Larry and I let it go at that. She has her own idea of how to amuse herself. Once I remember she brought out a part of the circus for a charity benefit, and it took three years to repair the lawns.

I must say the farewell party was quite in character. We managed to seat two hundred people hither and yon, and when a mounted policeman took his place in the driveway and the Mayor drove up with a screaming escort of motorcycle officers, there was a whole battery of photographers outside the gates. They had not been allowed inside, and from a distance it looked like summer lightning, all flash and no noise.

That was the point of the whole business. Nobody was allowed inside the grounds without being identified, and Alma Spencer, Mother’s friend, companion, secretary and general watchdog, checked the guests off her lists as they entered the house. It appeared that the Mayor had been threatened with assassination or something of the sort, and he was making the most of it. The result was a policeman at all the doors except the front one, and the mounted policeman was to keep an eye on that.

Not that the Mayor was assassinated. He is still alive and running for office again. But I just want to point out that the house was a fortress that night.

Well, the party ended, as everything must eventually. I had loathed it from start to finish. Larry had been frankly bored, and only Mother seemed her usual self. I can still see her, standing in the wreck of the house after the sirens had shrieked away and the last guest had gone. It was a warmish October night, and she was in the marble rotunda which the architect playfully called our hall. Someone had had the idea of dipping the goldfish out of the basin around the fountain with a soft hat and putting them in a champagne bucket. I remember rescuing them, torpid from the melted ice but still alive.

Mother had stepped out of her slippers, which let her down to her normal five feet two inches, and she had taken off her diamond collar, which has been too tight for the last ten years, and was holding it in her hand.