‘ “That has happened fairly often,” I said. “To save anyone from drowning is not an easy affair.”

‘ “It seems so awful,” continued Miss Barton. “We only arrived yesterday, and were so delighting in the sunshine and our little holiday. And now this—this terrible tragedy occurs.”

‘I asked her then for particulars about the dead woman, explaining that I would do everything I could for her, but that the Spanish authorities would require full information. This she gave me readily enough.

‘The dead woman, Miss Amy Durrant, was her companion and had come to her about five months previously. They had got on very well together, but Miss Durrant had spoken very little about her people. She had been left an orphan at an early age and had been brought up by an uncle and had earned her own living since she was twenty-one.

‘And so that was that,’ went on the doctor. He paused and said again, but this time with a certain finality in his voice, ‘And so that was that.’

‘I don’t understand,’ said Jane Helier. ‘Is that all? I mean, it’s very tragic, I suppose, but it isn’t—well, it isn’t what I call creepy.’

‘I think there’s more to follow,’ said Sir Henry.

‘Yes,’ said Dr Lloyd, ‘there’s more to follow. You see, right at the time there was one queer thing. Of course I asked questions of the fishermen, etc., as to what they’d seen. They were eye-witnesses. And one woman had rather a funny story. I didn’t pay any attention to it at the time, but it came back to me afterwards. She insisted, you see, that Miss Durrant wasn’t in difficulties when she called out. The other swam out to her and, according to this woman, deliberately held Miss Durrant’s head under water. I didn’t, as I say, pay much attention. It was such a fantastic story, and these things look so differently from the shore. Miss Barton might have tried to make her friend lose consciousness, realizing that the latter’s panic-stricken clutching would drown them both. You see, according to the Spanish woman’s story, it looked as though—well, as though Miss Barton was deliberately trying to drown her companion.

‘As I say, I paid very little attention to this story at the time. It came back to me later. Our great difficulty was to find out anything about this woman, Amy Durrant. She didn’t seem to have any relations. Miss Barton and I went through her things together. We found one address and wrote there, but it proved to be simply a room she had taken in which to keep her things. The landlady knew nothing, had only seen her when she took the room. Miss Durrant had remarked at the time that she always liked to have one place she could call her own to which she could return at any moment. There were one or two nice pieces of old furniture and some bound numbers of Academy pictures, and a trunk full of pieces of material bought at sales, but no personal belongings. She had mentioned to the landlady that her father and mother had died in India when she was a child and that she had been brought up by an uncle who was a clergyman, but she did not say if he was her father’s or her mother’s brother, so the name was no guide.