“I’m all right, Susie,” Carlton said mildly. But she was not to be placated.

“Why didn’t you take that nurse of yours? Or Frank Garrison? Or me? I could have told you some of the things that have been going on.”

“Oh, shut up, Susie,” Carlton said wearily. “There’s been too much talking as it is.”

They were in the house by that time. He gave her a warning look, and she subsided quickly.

“What’s been going on?” the inspector inquired.

“Marian’s back, if that interests you. She raised hell until Eileen got out.” She lit a cigarette and grinned at him. “Nice place we’ve got here,” she said airily. “Come and stay sometime, if you ever get bored.”

He left them downstairs, Susie mixing a highball and Carlton lighting a pipe. It would have been quite a nice domestic picture, he thought, if he had not known the circumstances.

Hilda was in her room when he went up the stairs. She was standing by her window, looking out, and her suitcase was packed and closed on a chair. He scowled at it.

“You’re not leaving,” he said. “I need you here.”

“I have no patient.”

“You’ll stay if I have to break a leg. Get young Brooke to put the girl to bed. Nervous exhaustion. Anything, but you’re staying.” He looked at her. “Anything attractive outside that window?”

“No. I was just thinking.”

“About what?”

She had assumed again her cherubic look, and he eyed her with suspicion. “Not much. Just a can of white paint.”

“What?”

“A can of paint. Of course people do queer things when they’re worried. They play solitaire, or bite their fingernails, or kick the dog. I knew one man who cut down a perfectly good tree while his wife was having a baby. But paint is different. It covers a lot of things.”

“I see. Who’s been painting around here?”

“Carlton Fairbanks. This morning. He nailed the screens shut and then painted over the marks he made.”

“Very tidy,” said the inspector.

“But he fastened his mother’s screens weeks ago. I would like to know whether he painted them, too.”

He laughed down at her indulgently.

“What you need is a night’s sleep,” he told her. “Go to bed and forget it. And remember, you’re not leaving.”

But she was stubborn. She wanted to see Mrs. Fairbanks’s screens, and at last he unsealed and unlocked the door, and gave her the key. The room was as it had been left, the bedding thrown back, print powder showing here and there on the furniture. She went straight to a window.

“You see, he didn’t.”

“I’m damned if I know why that’s important.”

“I don’t know myself. Not yet.”

“All right. Go to it,” he told her, still indulgent, and left her there, a small intent figure in the ghostly room, still gazing at the screens.

He yawned as he got into his car. The crowd outside the fence had practically disappeared. Only a scant half-dozen men still stood there, the die-hards who would not give up until all hope of further excitement was over. He did not notice them. What on earth had Hilda meant about white paint? What had white paint to do with the murder? The thing nagged him all the way back to his office and later on even to his bed.