“I’ve got to go,” she said. “If Frank goes home and finds I’m gone—I must have been out of my mind to come here.”

“I can telephone, if you like. You can’t leave, of course. They won’t allow anyone to leave the house.”

“You mean—we’re prisoners?”

Hilda’s nerves suddenly snapped.

“Listen,” she said. “There’s been a murder in this house. Of course you’re not a prisoner. But you’re getting back into that bed and staying there if I have to put a policeman on your chest.”

That was the situation when there was a rap at the door. The inspector wanted her, and Hilda went out.

In the old lady’s room nothing had yet been disturbed. Only the detectives were standing there, touching nothing. The inspector nodded at her.

“All right,” he said. “Now look at this room. You know how you left it when Mrs. Fairbanks went to bed. Is anything changed? Has anything been moved? Take your time. There’s no hurry.”

She gazed around her. Everything was different, yet everything was the same. She shook her head.

“Try again,” he insisted. “Anything moved on the table? Anything different about the curtains?”

She looked again, keeping her eyes from the quiet figure on the bed.

“I think Mrs. Fairbanks left that closet door closed,” she said finally.

“You’re not sure?”

“I’m sure she closed it. She always did. But there’s a small safe in it. I think Mrs. Fairbanks opened it at night. I don’t know why.”

“A safe?”

He took out a handkerchief and pulled the door open. He examined the safe, but it was closed and locked.

“Anyone else in the house have access to it?”

“I don’t think so. She was rather queer about it. She didn’t really like anybody to go into the closet, and she locked it when she went out.”

“I suppose this is the closet where—”

“Yes.”

He showed her the knife, still in the dead woman’s chest. She forced herself to look at it, but she was trembling.

“Ever seen it before?”

“I may. I wouldn’t know. It looks like a common kitchen knife.”

“There wasn’t such a knife upstairs, for instance? Lying about.”

She shook her head, and he let her go, saying he would talk to her later. As she went out the men in the hall crowded in, to take their pictures, to dust the furniture and the knife for prints, to violate—she thought miserably—the privacy of fifty years of living. And why? Who in this house would have killed an old woman? No one seeing the household that night could doubt that they were shocked, if not grieved. And who else could have done it?

Her mind was clearer now. The radio had been turned on before young Brooke left, so she was alive then. Who else? Carlton? He had gone in and shut off the machine. He could have carried the knife in his dressing-gown pocket. But—unless he was a great actor—he was almost broken by his mother’s death. He had gone down on his knees by the bed. He—