‘Pity,’ said Maisry, ‘but one couldn’t have expected anything else. Oh, well, we shall have to find another line of country if we want to proceed in the direction of Swansea.’ He had risen to go when there came a respectful tap on the door.
‘That sounds like George,’ said Dame Beatrice. ‘The indoor servants do not knock.’
It was indeed the chauffeur although, as it was his afternoon off, he was not in uniform but was wearing a grey suit of respectable cut and a rather natty light-blue shirt with an orange-coloured tie.
‘Excuse me, madam,’ he said, ‘but I’m told you would be requiring the note which Mrs Schumann sent to Madame Lemaître. I have it here.’ He produced it from behind his back and offered it to Dame Beatrice.
‘Celestine told us she had thrown it away,’ said Dame Beatrice, taking the envelope and handing it to Maisry.
‘There not being a fire in the kitchen owing to clement weather at the time, madam, Madame Lemaître tossed it into the small rubbish bin with the lid which can be manipulated by a pressure from the foot. Having my own ideas about the letter, I offered to empty the little receptacle into the dustbin instead of Zena going out in the dusk with it, her being nervous about these murders, and, out of sight of the kitchen window, I abstracted the letter and have retained it.’
‘Wonderful, George, but why?’
‘It struck me as a rather peculiar letter, madam, for a lady who had sat at your table to write to one of your domestic staff.’
‘How right you are, George, as always. This letter is going to prove helpful to Detective-Inspector Maisry.’
‘Mighty helpful,’ said Maisry. ‘Now we really can get cracking,’ he added, when George had gone. ‘I’m sorry your Chief Constable has tied Phillips up with another case. He’d be interested in this fingerprint business. It may give us some concrete evidence at last, and we could certainly do with some. Of course, if it goes blue on us we may have to go back to my idea that we are looking for more than one murderer.’
‘But you no longer think there are three?’
‘Oh, no. I’ve washed young Schumann right out of it. James is the nigger in the woodpile. There’s no doubt left in my mind that Mrs Schumann killed her daughter in order to get him, and did for Maria Machrado before she could vamp him – not that I should have said there was any fear of that!’
‘Oh, I am sure there was not.’
‘The trouble about this fingerprint business,’ went on Maisry, more as though he were talking to himself than to Dame Beatrice, ‘is the fact that these are on paper. I’m not a fingerprint expert – that’s for the backroom boys in the forensic laboratory – but I do know enough to realise that whether we have any luck or not depends very largely on the absorbent properties of the paper she used. She was cagey enough not to use the same kind for both letters. This one is on a white unlined sheet. The one in our previous possession, the one she sent to the newspaper, is also on unlined paper, but the colour is light blue and the sheet is a different size. That, in itself, won’t matter a bit, so long as the prints correspond, but, at this lapse of time, we’ll be lucky to get any identifiable prints on either document, and, anyway, one is of no use without the other.’
‘You mean that paper, being an absorbent material …’
‘Exactly. Everybody’s fingers perspire to a certain extent, and, after a time, the damp from those fingers impregnates the paper and makes the prints useless from the point of view of identification. If this has happened on these letters, cold iodine fumes may be the answer. Anyway, now we know who she is, we’ll nobble her one way or another.’
‘I’m doubtful whether Mrs Schumann will have left fingerprints on those letters, anyway,’ said Laura, when she and her employer were discussing Maisry’s visit. ‘If I’d been in her place, I should have rested my hand on blotting-paper when I wrote to the newspaper, and then put on thin gloves before I folded the letter and stuck it in the envelope. As for the letter to Celestine, it wouldn’t matter how many of her prints were on that. She signed it in her own name, and there’s never been any query as to where it came from. So long as the same prints are not on both letters, she’s as safe as houses.’
‘Houses have been known to be undermined,’ said Dame Beatrice, ‘but I confess that my faith in the fingerprint clue is less strong than it was.’
There was no fingerprint clue. There were no fingerprints except those of the office staff at Swansea on the letter whose advertisement the unfortunate Irish girl had answered, and of the advertiser’s reply to her there had never been any sign, for, except for the half of the return ticket to Swansea which at first had seemed a valuable piece of evidence, her sodden handbag had been found empty. Police, assisted by willing helpers from among the campers who had been staying in the vicinity of the pond in which the victim had been found, discovered the girl’s suitcase about a mile and a half from the body. It had been hidden at the entrance to a culvert which bridged a stream.
The girl’s landlady in Swansea identified its contents as having been those of her lodger, but nothing was found which could provide a pointer to the killer. The letter which, presumably, had caused the girl to travel to Hampshire, must have been in the handbag and was never found.
(3)
‘Well,’ said Maisry, reporting the failure of his mission to the Chief Constable, who had been dining with
