Police at the Funeral

Chapter 9 Dirty Linen

At nine o'clock that evening Mr Campion felt that beside the classical ordeals by fire and by water there should now be numbered the ordeal by dinner at Socrates Close. He could quite understand that no ordinary catastrophe could prevent its solemn ritual taking place, but he realized that its awe-inspiring progress was not lightened by the tragedy hanging over the house.

It was a devastating meal.

The dining-room was a large square apartment with crimson damask wallpaper and red plush curtains. Dark paint and a Turkey carpet did not tend to brighten the scheme of decoration, and, as Joyce remarked later, one felt overfed upon entering the room.

The large oval table was a veritable skating-rink of Irish damask, and upon it there was set out every night a magnificent array of plate, the cleaning of which occupied the entire life of an unfortunate small boy in the servants' quarters. It was here that for the first and last time in his life Mr Campion made the acquaintance of those silver-plated cornucopias which, in Victorian times, were supplied to the diner filled with hot water, so that he might warm his spoon before partaking of that greasy delicacy called thick soup.

On this particular occasion the great room seemed very empty and Campion realized that the two spaces at the table were made all the more conspicuous by the fact that the others had not altered what had evidently been their usual places for many years. Thus, Great-aunt Faraday sat at the head of the table in a high-backed arm-chair. Her black taffeta gown was cut with elbow sleeves, although her tiny forearms were covered by the frill of cream Honiton, which matched her fichu and the cap she wore.

William sat at the foot of the table, some considerable distance away from his mother and separated from her by an immense baroque silver fruit-stand, which miraculously changed into a flower vase at its upper extremity.

Aunt Kitty sat next to William on his right, while Joyce was immediately upon Great-aunt Caroline's left. Mr Campion himself had the place of honour upon his hostess's right, and the rest of the table was distressingly and pointedly empty.

Aunt Kitty's black evening gown, cut square and unfashionably low in the manner of 1909 or so, presented an appearance that was positively funereal, and even Joyce in her simple black dinner frock, emphasized the solemnity of the occasion.

Mr Campion began to regard his own dinner-jacket as a garment of sorrow and William's bright pink face as a touch of unwarrantable levity in the sombre colour scheme.

The long meal, Mrs Beeton's complete Friday menu for April in non-Roman Catholic households, was depressing rather than fortifying, and Great-aunt Caroline's hard and fast rules of general conversation almost defeated Mr Campion's effervescent spirit. In the long silences he had plenty of time for observation.

There were several minor peculiarities in the setting of this unnerving ceremony, one of which was the fact that each diner had his own complete set of condiments, a circumstance which somehow increased the aloofness of the participants.

Another oddity was of a more cheerful variety.

Directly facing Mr Campion, hung unsuitably beneath a large steel engraving of Ely Cathedral, was a red plush frame, in which reposed a coloured enlargement of a photograph of a bewhiskered gentleman in the regalia of some obscure and patently plebian order or society. Mr Campion noticed with delight that this gentleman's hand rested upon a large pewter mug from the top of which there emerged much painted foam. It was not at all the trophy which one would have associated with Great-aunt Caroline or her household, and he wondered how it had come there.

When at last the meal came to an end the company trooped into the great drawing-room, the famous drawing-room of Socrates Close of the 'eighties. Although its style of decoration had not been altered since that time it was still a beautiful room. Faded brocades and fussy ornaments abounded. The furniture was hard, misshapen and uncomfortable. But like everything that is perfectly in period, it had a charm of its own.

Aunt Caroline sat down beside an occasional table and turned to Aunt Kitty.

'I think we will play chess as usual, my dear,' she said.

Aunt Kitty sat down obediently while William advanced solemnly towards a bureau whose panels displayed two bouquets, painted, Mr Campion felt, rather by a botanist than a garden lover. From this cupboard William produced a chessboard and a box of carved ivory men.

Mr Campion realized that he was looking upon a nightly ritual, and waited, not without apprehension, to see where he himself fitted into this ceremony.

Uncle William was showing signs of anxiety. He did not sit down, but stood watching his mother as her tiny white fingers set the red chessmen into line. At last he spoke.

'I thought Campion and I might smoke a cigar in the library, Mother?' he said inquiringly.

Great-aunt Faraday raised her little black eyes to her son's face.

'Certainly, William,' she said. 'Mr Campion, if I should have retired by the time you return, the rising gong rings at a quarter to eight. Have you everything in your room that you require?'

Mr Campion, who had risen to his feet the moment that she addressed him, bowed instinctively.

'Everything is most charming,' he said.

Mrs Faraday seemed to consider that he had made the right reply, for she smiled at him and nodded to William, who, grateful at the release, which seemed to be unexpected, hustled Campion out of the room.

'The morning-room's more comfortable,' he said in a rumbling whisper. 'Library always reminds me of the governor, God bless him. Never saw him at his best in the library.'

They crossed the hall, therefore, and entered the morning-room, in which a bright fire still burned.

'Sorry I can't offer you a drink,' said Uncle William, blowing a little in his embarrassment. 'The key of the tantalus has been removed again, I see. When people get old, you know, they get ideas in their heads. I'm no drinker myself, but--well, anyway, have a cigar.'

He produced a box from the sideboard and when the little ceremony of lighting up had been completed he sat down again in one of the green leather arm-chairs and looked across at Campion with hunted little blue eyes, incongruous in such a large pink face.

'Andrew used to sit in that chair you've got,' he remarked suddenly. 'I suppose the funeral will take place on Monday? Not a lot of flowers about at this time of year.' He checked his meandering wits sharply and took refuge in a suitable sentiment. 'Poor Andrew,' he said, and coughed.

Mr Campion remained silent, looking more vague than ever in a blue haze of cigar smoke. Uncle William's thoughts were racing tonight, however, leading him a fantastic dance from one subject to another, and presently he spoke again.

'Damn bad-tempered, evil-minded fellow, all the same,' he said angrily. 'No insanity in the family, thank God, or might have suspected a touch of lunacy--kindest thought.' He paused and added with a grotesque droop of a baggy eyelid: 'Drank like a sponge, under the rose.'

There was no cosiness in the breakfast-room. The lights were not shaded, but sprouted unadorned from a brass water-lily floating upside down in the white expanse of ceiling and their cold blaze presented an atmosphere of hygienic chill which even the bright fire could not dispel.

Mr Campion began to understand Marcus's remark of the previous evening: 'If I lived in that house I might easily feel like murder myself.' That atmosphere of restraint which is so racking in adolescence was here applied to age, and Campion experienced a fear of stumbling upon some weak spot where, beneath the rigid bond of repression, human nature had begun to ferment, to decay, to become vile. There was no telling what manner of secret lay hidden in the great house rising up over his head, yet he was acutely conscious of its existence.

He was brought down to earth again by the entrance of the stalwart Alice, who bore a silver tray with glasses and a decanter and syphon. She set it down on the table without a word and he noticed that she did not glance at either of them, but hurried out again as noiselessly as she had entered. Then he caught sight of the other man's face and humour was restored.

Uncle William evidently regarded the intrusion as some sort of apparition. His astonishment was only equalled by his delight, and he rose to do the honours with an almost childlike satisfaction.

'The old lady doesn't forget when we've got guests in the house, thank the Lord,' he said, sitting down again with his glass. 'Hang it all! when a fellow's gone through what we've gone through today he needs a drink. I'm going out for a walk in a moment. You'll be all right, I suppose?'

He looked at Campion hopefully and appeared relieved at the other's hearty reassurance. He swallowed a large whisky and soda and was about to make some final remark when Joyce reappeared.

'Hullo,' she said in surprise, 'going out?'

Uncle William coughed. 'Thought I'd just have a constitutional,' he said. 'Haven't had any exercise today. That damned policeman kept me in all this morning chatting.'

Joyce looked astounded, but she said nothing, and when the old man went out she took his seat, and Campion noticed that she held a cigarette-case. He took out his own hastily.

'I say, is this allowed?' he said, as he gave her a light. 'Permit me to cure you of the tobacco habit in five days. Taken in curry, no one can tell my secret preparation from garlic.'

Joyce laughed politely. 'This is an indulgence,' she said. 'I'm allowed to smoke occasionally by a special dispensation. Authority winks its eye. As a matter of fact it's rather sweet. Every evening after dinner Great-aunt Caroline tells me I may go upstairs to write my letters. I didn't understand it at first, but she told me that she had heard that young people nowadays enjoyed a suitably scented cigarette. It's quite respectable, you see. Even the Queen smokes sometimes, they say. But she thought I ought to have my cigarette in private, so as not to set a bad example to the aunts.' She paused and shot a quick level glance at him. 'It's all rather beastly, isn't it?' she said.

'It's queer,' he said guardedly. 'I suppose this is the last household in England of its kind?'

The girl shuddered. 'I hope so,' she said. 'Dinner was pretty dreadful, wasn't it? It's like that every night, only usually, of course, the--the others are there, too.'

'I enjoyed my dinner,' said Mr Campion valiantly. 'But my etiquette book rather let me down. It says that light conversation may be effectively introduced while passing the cruet. In this, of course, I was frustrated, as we all had our own cruets. Otherwise, no doubt, I should have been the life and soul of the party.'

Joyce reddened. 'Yes, those salt-cellars are an awful admission of uncharitableness, aren't they?' she said. 'They were Andrew's fault. Some time ago, just after I first came, in fact, there was a disgraceful scene one night when Andrew refused to pass Julia the pepper; pretended not to hear her. Finally, when she insisted, he sulked like a child and said she had quite enough in her composition, without adding any more. Julia appealed to Aunt Caroline and there was a sort of nursery row. The next day everybody had their own condiments, and it's been like that ever since. It's one of those silly stupid petty little things that are a constant source of irritation to the flesh.'

Mr Campion was more shocked than he cared to admit by this slightly comic revelation, and he took refuge behind a barrier of cigar smoke. The girl went on holding her cigarette limply in her fingers as she stared into the fire.

'I suppose you noticed that photograph of Uncle Robert, too?'

'Who?' said Mr Campion, appalled at the possibility of yet another implicated relative.

A faint smile passed over the girl's face. 'Oh, you needn't be alarmed,' she said. 'He's safely dead, poor darling. He was Aunt Kitty's husband. And my mother's brother,' she interpolated a little defiantly. 'That photograph was taken when he was a young man. It was probably considered funny then. He was president of some early frothblowers' association, or something.' She paused and eyed Mr Campion squarely. 'The family always considered that Aunt Kitty married beneath her. She didn't, though, as a matter of fact; not in my opinion, anyhow. Uncle Robert was a doctor with a poor practice. Well, Aunt Kitty kept that photograph and had it enlarged. Uncle Robert was rather proud of it, I believe, and it used to hang in his den. And when he died Aunt Kitty brought it here with her. Nothing would ever have happened about it if Uncle Andrew hadn't found it. He was like that, you know; always poking about into other people's things. He saw it on her dressing-table one day and insisted that it should be hung in the dining-room. He was so clever about it that Aunt Kitty was rather flattered. It was the first time that anyone had ever shown any enthusiasm for Uncle Robert and she was pitifully fond of him, poor darling.' She sighed. 'Everyone else saw, of course, just what Andrew meant them to see, another evidence of Uncle Robert's vulgarity. Uncle Andrew used to call it "the mortification" when Aunt Kitty wasn't in earshot.'

'And no one took it down?' said Mr Campion.

'Well, no. You see, Uncle Andrew had made Aunt Kitty rather proud by hanging it there. You can see what a silly old dear she is. She doesn't see half that's going on around her. Great-aunt Caroline never seemed to notice the photograph, but Andrew enjoyed the annoyance it gave to everyone else. I know it's wrong to talk about him like this now he's dead, but you can see the sort of man he was.'

'Not a beautiful soul,' murmured Mr Campion.

'He was a beast,' said the girl with unexpected vehemence. 'Fortunately the others combined sometimes to keep him quiet. He had a devil, if you know what I mean,' she went on, speaking earnestly. 'If he had been allowed to have his own way he would have driven everyone off their heads. As it was, he moved even the meekest of us to a sort of frenzy of loathing at times.'

She was silent for some moments and her mouth twitched nervously. It was evident that she was making up her mind to a confession of some sort. Suddenly it came.

'I say,' she said, 'I'm terribly frightened. After all, when a thing like this happens, ordinary family loyalty and restraint and things like that don't count much, do they? I'm afraid one of us here has gone mad. I don't know who it is. It might be a servant, it might be--anybody. But I think they're made in the--well, you know, the modern secret way, and they've killed Andrew because they couldn't stand him any longer.'

'Aunt Julia?' inquired Mr Campion gently.

She lowered her voice. 'That's it,' she said. 'That's what's terrifying me. If it was just Andrew, somehow I don't think I should care awfully, now that I know what's happened to him. But now that Aunt Julia's--been killed, it shows that the thing I've been afraid of all along has started. If a lunatic starts killing he goes on, doesn't he? Don't you see, it may be anyone's turn next?'

Campion glanced at her sharply. This was the second person in the family who had put forward this suggestion.

'Look here,' he said, 'you'd better go and stay with Ann Held.'

She stared at him, and he wondered whether she was going to laugh or be angry and was relieved to see her smile.

'Oh no,' she said. 'I'm not afraid for myself. I don't know why it is,' she went on calmly, 'but I feel that it's all nothing to do with me. This is the older generation's affair; I just don't count. I feel that I'm just looking on at something that is working itself out. Oh, I can't explain!'

Mr Campion threw the stub of his cigar into the fire. 'I say,' he said, 'I ought to have a look at those two bedrooms tonight. Uncle Andrew's and Aunt Julia's. Do you think you could fix it?'

Joyce glanced at him sharply, a hint of alarm in her eyes. 'We could sneak up now,' he said. 'There's a good hour before Great-aunt goes up to bed. Hullo, though, I forgot. The police locked the doors.'

The pale young man before her grinned. 'If you could find me a hairpin,' he said, 'I don't think we need let that worry us. Don't be alarmed. I've got permission from my celebrated detective friend, the Arch Hawk-Eye himself.'

Joyce looked at him in astonishment. 'You don't really mean that, do you?'

'A hairpin or any piece of wire would do,' said Mr Campion. 'This house is probably full of hairpins. Aunt Kitty's crowbar variety would do nicely. Your own are a bit flimsy, I should think.'

Joyce rose to her feet. 'Come on then,' she said. 'I know it sounds silly, but you'd better creep upstairs, because the servants are rather alarmed already. There are one or two plain-clothes men still hanging about the garden, you know, and, anyway, the staff has been put through a minor inquisition this evening.'

'Too bad,' he sympathized. 'That's the worst of the police. You can't keep 'em out of the kitchen. It comes of keeping comic papers in the waiting-room at the Yard, I've no doubt.'

The light in the upper hall was subdued. The plan of the rooms on the first floor was much the same as below. Thus, Great-aunt Caroline's bedroom was directly above the drawing-room, with Joyce's room beside it over the morning-room. There was a bathroom directly above the Queen Anne sitting-room, and Kitty and Julia had rooms side by side over the library. In the other branch of the L, William's room, Andrew's room and the spare room, which had been allotted to Campion, ran side by side over the dining-room and kitchen, with the service staircase beyond. All these rooms gave on to a corridor whose windows overlooked the drive. The servants' rooms and attics were on the second floor.

As they reached the upper hall the girl laid her hand on Campion's arm.

'Wait a minute,' she said. 'I'll get you the hairpin. Aunt Kitty won't mind me borrowing one of hers.'

Left alone in the softly lighted, thick carpeted hall, with its dark paint and carved oak furniture, Campion, who was by no means a nervous man, was seized by a sudden revulsion of feeling which he could not explain. It was not so much a terror of the unknown as a sense of oppression brooding over the house, a suffocated feeling as if he were set down inside a huge tea-cosy with something unclean.

It was evident that the girl experienced much the same feeling, for she was very pale and inclined to be jumpy when she came out to him a moment later, a coarse black hairpin in her hand.

'Where first?' she whispered.

'Andrew's room,' murmured Campion. 'Are you coming with me?'

She hesitated. 'Shall I be any use? I don't want to be in the way.'

'You won't be in the way, if you don't mind coming.'

'All right.'

They moved silently down the corridor and the girl paused before the centre door of the three which led off it.

'Here we are,' she said. 'That's your room on the left and Uncle William's on the right. This is Andrew's.'

Mr Campion took the hairpin and squatted down before the keyhole.

'This parlour trick of mine must not be taken as representative,' he said. 'Some people laugh when they see it and some people kick me out of the house. I don't often do it.'

All the time he was talking his fingers were moving rapidly, and suddenly a sharp click rewarded his labours and he stood up and regarded her shamefacedly.

'Don't tell Marcus,' he whispered. 'He's one who wouldn't laugh.'

She smiled at him. 'I know,' she said. 'Who's going in first?'

Mr Campion opened the door slowly and they crept in, closing it silently behind them. The girl switched on the light and they stood looking about them. The room had the cold, slightly stale atmosphere of a closed bedroom in an old-fashioned house. At first sight Campion was startled. It was so different from what he had expected. Apart from a wall of bookshelves in the midst of which there was a small writing-desk, the room might have belonged to a modern hermit. It was large and inexpressibly bare, with white walls and no carpet, save for a small jute bath-mat set beside the bed. This was of the truckle variety, and it looked hard and thinly covered. A simple wooden stand with a small mirror above it served as a dressing-table and supported some half-dozen photographs. The simplicity and poverty of the room compared with the solid comfort of the rest of the house, was startling to the point of theatricality. A cupboard built into the wall was the only sign of clothes room, and a huge iron damper covered the fireplace.

The girl caught a glimpse of Campion's face. 'I know what you're thinking,' she said. 'You feel like everyone else. Andrew liked to play at being the poor relation. This room is one of his elaborate insults to the rest of the family. Yet he liked comfort quite as much as anybody, and for years, I believe, this room was one of the most luxurious bedrooms in the house. Then, about a year ago, Andrew took it into his head to have it all changed. The carpet had to be taken up, the walls stripped and this stage setting of a prison arranged. D'you know,' she went on angrily, 'he used to bring visitors up here to show them how badly he was treated. Of course, the rest of the family was livid, but he was cleverer than they are. He used to make it look as though they were forcing him to live uncomfortably, which, of course, was absolute rubbish. He certainly had a most exasperating way.'

Campion crossed to the bookcase and peered in. The volumes were standing on shelves on which leather dust frills had been nailed. The titles surprised him. It was quite a large library and appeared to be devoted to the best-known works of a certain character. Uncle Andrew's taste in literature appeared to have leant towards classical eroticism, although the more modern psychologists were also well represented. Mr Campion, picking up an early treatise on Sex and the Mind, found that it had been the property of a medical library in Edinburgh, purloined, apparently about thirty years before. He replaced the book on the shelf and turned back into the room.

As he did so he caught sight of one of the few objets d'art it contained. This was a relief of the Laocoön, evidently an ancient rendering of the famous group in the Vatican. But the carver had put something of his own into the work: in place of the noble unreality of the original, there was an imaginative study in horror which, in spite of its small size, seemed to dominate the apartment. Joyce shuddered.

'I hate that thing,' she said. 'Aunt Kitty used to say it made her dream, and Andrew wanted to make her hang it in her room--until she got used to it, he said. He told her a long rigmarole about conquering fear by willpower, and almost persuaded her to take the thing. Probably he would have done so if Julia hadn't sailed in to the rescue and put her foot down. That was the kind of thing she liked doing. Oh, they're all so petty! Aunt Caroline's strict, but she's strict in a big way.'

Meanwhile Mr Campion continued to wander round the room. He peered into the clothes cupboard, opened the desk, and finally came to a full stop before the dressing-table. An exclamation escaped him, and he picked up a photograph of a clerical personage, a white-haired and benevolent figure. It was inscribed: 'To my old friend Andrew Seeley, in memory of our holiday in Prague. Wilfred.'

Joyce looked over Campion's shoulder. 'He's a bishop,' she said. 'Andrew was secretly very proud of knowing him so well, I think. He used to hint that they had the wildest holiday together. Why are you staring at it? Do you know him?'

'I did,' said Mr Campion. 'He's dead, poor old boy. That's my sainted uncle, the Bishop of Devizes. He wasn't the sort of old bird to go gay on a holiday in Prague, although he knew more about dry-fly fishing than any man alive, I believe. But that isn't the really extraordinary thing about this photograph. The odd thing is that this isn't his handwriting. It isn't quite his signature. In fact, it's a fake.'

The girl stared at him round-eyed. 'But Andrew said--' she began, and stopped short, a contemptuous expression spreading over her face. 'That's just like Andrew.'

Mr Campion set the photograph down. 'I don't think there's much more to be seen here,' he said, 'and we haven't any too much time. Let's go on, shall we?'

She nodded and they tiptoed out. The relocking ceremony took some minutes, but Julia's door yielded almost immediately.

Seen directly after the late Uncle Andrew's den, Miss Julia Faraday's bedroom was an overbearingly cluttered apartment. It was crammed full of furniture of every possible description, and achieved fussiness without femininity. The two large windows had three sets of curtains each; Nottingham lace gave way to frilled muslin and frilled muslin to yellow damask looped up with great knots of silk cable which looked as though it would have held a liner. The keynote of the whole scheme of decoration was drapery.

The fireplace was surrounded with loops of the same yellow damask, and the bed, the focusing point, the rococo pièce de résistance of the whole room, was befrilled and befurbelowed until its original shape was lost altogether.

The bed interested Mr Campion from the beginning, and he stood looking at it with respectful astonishment.

'They call that an Italian brass bed, for some reason or other,' Joyce volunteered. 'I think it's because of those wing bits with the curtains on. You see, they move backwards and forwards and keep the draught out. Not that there ever is a draught in this house.'

The young man advanced towards the monstrosity and stood with a hand resting on one of the huge brass knobs which surmounted each post. For some moments he stood staring in front of him at the tapestry-hung brass railings beyond the expanse of eiderdown, and he turned and surveyed the rest of the room.

It was evident to a practised eye that a very thorough search had been made already. Glancing at the pantechnicon of a wardrobe with its quadruple doors, he realized that the police must have leapt upon this as a possible source of discovery, and he knew better than anyone that to search after a Yard man is so much waste of time. Yet somewhere in this room there was, he felt sure, some trace of the poison which had killed Aunt Julia. Joyce broke in upon his meditations.

'You never knew her, did you?' she said. 'All these are photographs of her.' She pointed to an array of ornamental frames above the mantelshelf. They were all of them, portraits of the same woman in various stages of maturity, beginning with a heavy-featured girl laced uncomfortably into unbecoming garments and progressing gradually into corpulent middle age. The final portrait showed a grey-haired, stern-faced woman, whose lines of bad temper from her nose to her mouth were so deep that even the photographer had been unable to conceal them.

'She'd got much thinner lately,' said Joyce. 'And I think her temper had got worse, too. She may have been ill. Perhaps--perhaps it was suicide after all.'

'Perhaps,' agreed Mr Campion. 'That's what we've got to find out before we go outside this room. In fact, at this point a little elementary brain-work is indicated. After all, deduction is only adding two and two together. Look here, how does this sound to you? Aunt Julia was not the sort of person to take her own life. As far as we know she was poisoned by conium, which is one of the oldest, simplest forms known to man, and is simply another name for hemlock. It is also practically tasteless in tea.' He paused and regarded the girl steadily. 'Now Aunt Julia seems to have been in the habit of putting something in her tea every morning,' he said. 'We know that, because Alice had noticed a sediment in the bottom of her cup every day for the last six months. Therefore it's quite reasonable to suppose that Aunt Julia put the poison which killed her into her tea this morning under the impression that it was her usual dose of something or other. Now, what we have to find out sooner or later is whether she made a mistake off her own bat or whether someone intended her to make a mistake.'

Joyce nodded. 'I see,' she said.

'Personally,' said Mr Campion, taking off his glasses, 'I don't see how it could have been a genuine mistake if the poison was conium. It's simple enough to get hold of, but it's got to be prepared. However, the first step is to find out what it was that Aunt Julia put in her tea every morning. Some sort of patent medicine, obviously. That's Inspector Oates's idea, I believe. But what it was and where it is is still a mystery. You see, there's no trace of it. Neither Aunt Kitty nor Alice had ever heard of her taking anything regularly. Had you?'

Joyce shook her head. 'No. As a matter of fact, great-aunt does the dispensing for the whole family. There's a medicine chest in her room, and the only other thing is a first-aid box in the upper hall. What sort of patent medicine were you thinking of?'

Campion considered. 'Well, some sort of health salts, I suppose. You know--"Take as much as you dare and leap over the next gate grinning dangerously"--vide press. The only thing against that theory is that there aren't any health salts about, no empty tins or packets or anything. The Inspector has been over this room, and that means that there is no place large enough to contain a tin, say as large as a fifty Gold Flake, that has not been explored. They'll probably start on the rest of the house tomorrow if we don't spot it tonight.'

The girl looked round helplessly. 'It seems such a hopeless job,' she said. 'We don't even know what we're looking for.' She eyed Campion curiously. Without his spectacles his appearance had gained at least fifty per cent in intelligence.

He met her gaze. 'You don't think,' he said slowly, 'that Alice could have brought anything into the room, do you? After all, she was the only other person about on this floor at that time of the morning.'

Joyce shook her head vigorously. 'Oh, no. She's such a good soul. She's the last person in the world to do anything like that. She's been here thirty years.'

'Alice knows something,' said Mr Campion. 'She just reeks of a secret. But I don't suppose it's anything to do with this.'

'It isn't.' The girl spoke involuntarily and then flushed scarlet, realizing that she had betrayed herself.

Just for a moment Mr Campion's pale eyes rested upon her face. Then he returned to his deductions.

'This patent medicine we're looking for,' he said. 'Since no one has ever seen it, it must have been hidden by Aunt Julia herself. That gives us a line. Let us put ourselves in her place. Suppose I am a heavy, lazy woman lying in bed. A cup of hot tea is brought to me. I wish to take something from its hiding-place, put it in my tea and return the packet to concealment in the shortest possible space of time and with the maximum of comfort. That leads us directly to the bed.'

He sat down on the bedside chair. 'Reconstruction of crime in the French manner,' he murmured. 'This stuff might be anywhere. Not in the pillows, not in the mattress; these things are moved every day. If it were small enough it might be sewn into the hem of the valance.'

He bent down to examine the frill round the bedstead, but shook his head regretfully.

'No good,' he said. 'No hem at all worth speaking of.' He caught hold of the thick brass bedpost to pull himself up, and as his fingers closed round the unusually thick rod an exclamation escaped him. 'Of course!' he said. 'The hiding-place of my childhood. The squirrel's hole of my earliest years.'

He pointed dramatically to the big brass knobs at the foot of the bed. A short hysterical laugh escaped the girl.

'Of course,' she said. 'I had four little ones on my cot. They're hollow, and they unscrew, don't they? I used to hide bits of slate pencil in mine.'

Mr Campion was already unscrewing one of the immense ornaments.

'This is most likely the one,' he said. 'The bed-table side, you see.'

The great ball was almost as large as a coconut, and screwed on to a threaded iron support as thick as a man's two fingers. It turned easily in his hand. Two or three twists brought it off, and they bent over it eagerly.

'Shake!' The girl hardly recognized her own voice. 'If there's anything there it'll rattle.'

He obeyed her, and a hollow knocking rewarded him. 'I don't see how we get it out,' he began, 'unless--oh, I see.' He put in his finger and caught the end of a red thread of chemist's string just as it was about to disappear into the ball. The next moment he had drawn out a wooden cylinder about three inches long. A little hole had been bored in the screw lid, the string threaded through and a coloured bead knotted on each side to prevent it from slipping. He set the brass knob back on its post, holding his find by the string.

'Look out,' he said. 'Don't touch it. This may be police property now. They're awfully touchy about people meddling with their exhibits.' He carried the cylinder under the light on the dressing-table. The blue wrapper on the box was covered with small print, and they strained their eyes to read it. Aunt Julia's secret lay revealed.

Campion and the girl exchanged glances. 'You were right,' she said. 'Was it a mistake?'

'I don't think it was suicide,' said Mr Campion. 'Look here, I think we may as well open this.' He took out a handkerchief and protected the cylinder with it as he unscrewed the lid. The inside of the cylinder proved enlightening. It held a tube of greaseproof paper folded in zigzag creases, each fold of which had contained a white pellet. About half of these were empty.

Campion stood looking at the remaining pellets through the transparent paper. Finally he replaced them carefully in the box and screwed on the lid.

'This is it,' he said. 'It'll have to go to an analyst, though I don't suppose there's the remotest chance of the rest of these being anything but as convenient and harmless as they're supposed to be. Yet this morning's dose must have been impregnated by the conium or whatever it was.'

The girl looked at him with horror and fear in her eyes. 'Then we've made our discovery?' she said. 'It was murder?'

Mr Campion replaced his spectacles, and, wrapping the box carefully in his handkerchief, thrust it in his pocket.

'I'm afraid so,' he said. 'And murder by someone who knew what no one in the house has confessed to knowing--that Aunt Julia was trying to get her weight down.'