“Oh, thank you,” said Tuppence and went disconsolately down the stairs.
She had arranged to meet Tommy for lunch in a small Restaurant in Soho and there they compared notes.
“I have seen that fellow, Rice. It is quite true he did see Una Drake in the distance at Torquay.”
“Well,” said Tuppence, “we have checked these alibis all right. Here, give me a bit of paper and a pencil, Tommy. Let us put it down neatly like all detectives do.”
They looked at each other.
“Well, it looks to me as if Blunt’s Brilliant Detectives are beat,” said Tommy.
“Oh, we mustn’t give up,” said Tuppence. “Somebody must be lying!”
“The queer thing is that it strikes me nobody was lying. They all seemed perfectly truthful and straightforward.”
“Yet there must be a flaw. We know there is. I think of all sorts of things like private aeroplanes but that doesn’t really get us any forwarder.”
“I am inclined to the theory of an astral body.”
“Well,” said Tuppence, “the only thing to do is to sleep on it. Your subconscious works in your sleep.”
“H’m,” said Tommy. “If your subconscious provides you with a perfectly good answer to this riddle by tomorrow morning, I take off my hat to it.”
They were very silent all that evening. Again and again Tuppence reverted to the paper of times. She wrote things on bits of paper. She