“There’s a bat in that room where the old lady was,” he said. “It was hanging to a curtain, and it acts like it’s going crazy.”

“It hasn’t a thing on me,” said the inspector, and sighed.

It was bright daylight when Courtney Brooke arrived. He looked tired and puzzled, and like Susie he showed evidence of having been caught in the storm. His collar was crumpled and his necktie a limp string.

“What’s wrong?” he said. “I’ve just come back from the hospital. Is Mrs. Fairbanks—”

“Mrs. Fairbanks is dead,” said the inspector dryly. “She was murdered last night.”

The doctor stiffened and looked wildly at Hilda.

“Murdered! All I ordered for her was a sleeping tablet if she couldn’t sleep. If she got anything else—”

“She was stabbed. Not poisoned.”

The full impact seemed to strike him with that. He sat down, as though his legs would not hold him.

“I’d like an account of what you were doing last night, doctor,” said the inspector smoothly. “Begin, if you please, with Mrs. Garrison’s trouble, when you were sent for. You decided to give her a hypodermic. Then what?”

He made an effort to collect himself.

“I didn’t notice the time. She was having pain. She was afraid of a miscarriage. I asked the nurse here to get me some sterile water. She went downstairs. It took some time, and I—”

“You remained outside Mrs. Fairbanks’s door during all that time?”

He looked unhappy.

“Well, yes and no,” he said. “I went back and spoke to Janice Garrison. She had been uneasy about her father. Her stepmother said he had left her, but she didn’t believe it. She thought something had happened to him.”

“Did you stay in the hall? Or did you go into Miss Garrison’s room?”

“I went in. I was there only a minute or two. Long enough to reassure her.”

Hilda spoke.

“You agreed to guard the door,” she said. “Like Cerberus. You remember?”

“Well, look,” he said reasonably. “Only the family was in the house. Nobody would have had time to get in from the outside. And it was poison she was afraid of. Not—being stabbed.” He became suddenly conscious of his appearance. He put a hand to his collar. “Sorry I look like this,” he said. “The fellow who brought me was on the steps. He wouldn’t let me in the house.”

The inspector eyed him.

“Never mind how you look. This isn’t a party. It’s a murder investigation.” He cleared his throat. “That’s all, is it? You stepped into Miss Garrison’s room and out again. Right?”

“I might have been there five minutes,” he admitted. “I’d been telephoning around for her, and—”

“You saw nothing whatever that might be useful? Nobody moving about?”

For an instant he seemed to hesitate, and Hilda remembered the coffee spilled in the saucer and his strange expression as she came up the stairs. But he shook his head.

“Nothing,” he said.

He had gone home after giving Eileen the hypodermic, he said. It was raining a little, and he had taken the short cut by the stable and the break in the fence. He saw no one lurking there. And he was in bed asleep when a man from Joe’s Market rang the bell and said a woman had had an accident at the corner.