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IV
tin. It was past eleven o’clock—Crump had come in half an hour ago—but
there was still no sign of Gladys. Inspector Neele looked round him.
Whatever Gladys’s training had been, her own natural instincts were slov-
enly. The bed, Inspector Neele judged, was seldom made, the windows sel-
concern. Instead, he went carefully through her possessions.
They consisted for the most part of cheap and rather pathetic finery.
whom he had called upon to assist him, had not been helpful. She didn’t
know what clothes Gladys had or hadn’t. She couldn’t say what, if any-
thing, was missing. He turned from the clothes and the underclothes to the
contents of the chest of drawers. There Gladys kept her treasures. There
were picture postcards and newspaper cuttings, knitting patterns, hints on
beauty culture, dressmaking and fashion advice.
postcards consisted mainly of views of various places where he presumed
Gladys had spent her holidays. Amongst them were three picture post-
cards signed “Bert.” Bert, he took to be the “young man” referred to by
Mrs. Crump. The first postcard said—in an illiterate5 hand: “All the best.
Missing you a lot. Yours ever, Bert.” The second said: “Lots of nice-looking
girls here but not one that’s a patch on you. Be seeing you soon. Don’t for-
get our date. And remember after that—it’s thumbs up and living happy
ever after.” The third said merely: “Don’t forget. I’m trusting you. Love, B.”
Next, Neele looked through the newspaper cuttings and sorted them into
three piles. There were the dressmaking and beauty hints, there were
ence. There were cuttings about flying saucers, about secret weapons,
about truth drugs used by Russians, and claims for fantastic drugs dis-
covered by American doctors. All the witchcraft8, so Neele thought, of our
twentieth century. But in all the contents of the room there was nothing to
give him a clue to her disappearance9. She had kept no diary, not that he
had expected that. It was a remote possibility. There was no unfinished
letter, no record at all of anything she might have seen in the house which
could have had a bearing on Rex Fortescue’s death. Whatever Gladys had
seen, whatever Gladys had known, there was no record of it. It would still
have to be guesswork why the second tea tray had been left in the hall,
and Gladys herself had so suddenly vanished.
Sighing, Neele left the room, shutting the door behind him.
running feet coming along the landing below.
the stairs. Sergeant Hay was panting a little.
“Sir,” he said urgently. “Sir! We’ve found her—”
“Found her?”
“It was the housemaid, sir—Ellen—remembered as she hadn’t brought
the clothes in from where they were hanging on the line—just round the
corner from the back door. So she went out with a torch to take them in
and she almost fell over the body—the girl’s body—strangled, she was,
with a stocking round her throat—been dead for hours, I’d say. And, sir,
it’s a wicked kind of joke—there was a clothes-peg clipped on her nose—”
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