“I just think this is a fool’s errand,” he said. “Maybe Sherlock Holmes could look at the smallest of clues and know everything, but we can’t. We can’t question everybody in nearby towns, look through police records, hospital records—all the things one would need to do to come up with possible suspects for a murder like this. And even then—if our murderer is a twisted reclusive chap, brooding and plotting from his bedroom, we may have no way of finding him until he makes a mistake.”

“You think he’ll make a mistake?” I asked.

“They always do in the end,” Granddad said. “He can wipe away fingerprints, work hard to make every death look like an accident, but in the end he’ll slip up.”

“I’d still like to look at the other crime scenes for myself,” I said. “And since we have the car, why not?”

“Because it’s cold,” Darcy said.

After a mile or so I had to agree with him. Monty’s motor was an open-topped Alvis Tourer, so we were exposed to the freezing wind. It wasn’t so bad in the front seat, behind the windshield, but I was perched in the poor excuse for a backseat and the wind hit me full in the face. We sat huddled together as we climbed a hill and then down again into Newton Abbott. I noticed that Klein’s Jewelers had a notice saying Closed on the front door. The robbery had clearly upset Mr. Klein enough that he hadn’t felt like opening his shop again. We found the telephone exchange with two girls working at a makeshift switchboard at a table, while the other end of the room was a blackened mess of burned-out wires. We made Darcy our spokesman, sensing correctly that girls like that would be more willing to talk to a handsome man. And after his initial questions they glanced at him shyly and said they’d do anything they could to help “poor Glad.”

“I always said she had it coming,” one of them said, looking at the other for confirmation. “She loved to listen in on the calls and she was a terrible gossip, wasn’t she, Lil?”

The other nodded. “I told her she was going to get in trouble one day for repeating things like that.”

“Did she ever repeat to you any of the things she’d heard?” Darcy asked.

“She did sometimes—you know, if someone was seeing somebody else’s wife. She liked that kind of thing. Crazy about the pictures, she was—romance and drama.”

“So you think that what happened to her wasn’t an accident?” I asked carefully.