They let her think that. She was not told that it had probably been jerked from under her, or of the savage attack on her with the flashlight.

Hilda saw the inspector later that morning, sitting across from him, and placing on the desk between them the piece of muslin, the gloves, a small can of white paint, and the piece of charred rope. Fuller eyed them solemnly.

“You’re slipping,” he said. “No snakes? No guinea pigs?”

He looked tired. He had slept badly, and it almost annoyed him to see Hilda, bland and fresh, her hands neatly folded in her lap.

“You’re not human,” he said. “And what in God’s name does all this stuff mean?”

“Somebody tried to kill Janice Garrison last night.”

He almost leaped out of his chair.

“What?” he yelled. “And you didn’t call me? See here. I’ll be damned if I’ll have you running this case. You’ve let one murder happen, and now you tell me—”

He choked, and Hilda looked more bland than ever.

“I thought you needed your sleep,” she said calmly. “And the family didn’t want you.” She smiled faintly. “They said they had had enough of you to last a long time.”

“Who said that?”

“I think it was Carlton.”

She told her story after that, the attack on Jan, her own discovery of the girl, being locked in Amos’s rooms, and Carlton coming to the rescue.

“So he was downstairs, was he?”

“He was. Probably getting a drink.”

Fuller leaned back in his chair.

“You don’t think he is guilty, do you?”

“I think he was fond of his mother.”

Their eyes clashed, the inspector’s hard, Hilda’s blue and childlike, and stubborn.

“He had the motive and the opportunity.”

“You couldn’t get an indictment on that, could you? No grand jury—”

“All right,” he said resignedly. “Now what’s all this stuff?”

Hilda smiled.

“I don’t know about the rope. Not yet, anyhow. But suppose you wanted to scare an old lady, maybe bring on a heart attack. And suppose she’s afraid of bats. Other things, too, like rats. You might get a supply of them, put them in an old birdcage covered with a piece of muslin and hide them where nobody ever went.”

“The cupola?”

“The cupola. But bats—and other things—have teeth. At least I think so. So you use a pair of heavy gloves. You might look at those gloves. They have small holes in them.”

“Where would you get the bats—and so forth?”

“Out of the cupola itself. I didn’t see any. I probably scared them away. But there’s a butterfly net in the loft. I suppose it would be possible.”

He threw up his hands.

“All right. You win,” he said. “But how did they get into the room?”

“I imagine that’s where the paint comes in,” she said tranquilly.

She was there for some time. When she got up the inspector went to the door with her. Always she amused him, often she delighted him, but that morning there was a new look of admiration in his eyes.