quest, and tall young men with well-tanned faces cursed the day when their tailors had persuaded them to a brown suit. The accident in the tube, dismissed as a coincidence, faded out of the public mind.
Was it a coincidence? I was not so sure. No doubt I was prejudiced—the tube incident was my own pet mystery—but there certainly seemed to me to be a connection of some kind between the two fatalities. In each there was a man with a tanned face—evidently an Englishman living abroad, and there were other things. It was the consideration of these other things that finally impelled me to what I considered a dashing step. I presented myself at Scotland Yard and demanded to see whoever was in charge of the Mill House case.
My request took some time to understand, as I had inadvertently selected the department for lost umbrellas, but eventually I was ushered into a small room and presented to Detective Inspector Meadows.
Inspector Meadows was a small man with a ginger head and what I considered a peculiarly irritating manner. A satellite, also in plain clothes, sat unobtrusively in a corner.
“Good morning,” I said nervously.
“Good morning. Will you take a seat? I understand you’ve something to tell me that you think may be of use to us.”
His tone seemed to indicate that such a thing was unlikely in the extreme. I felt my temper stirred.
“Of course you know about the man who was killed in the tube? The man who had an order to view this same house at Marlow in his pocket.”
“Ah!” said the inspector. “You are the Miss Beddingfeld who gave evidence at the inquest. Certainly the man had an order in his pocket. A lot of other people may have had too—only they didn’t happen to be killed.”