before Miss Larue closed up the case of James Colliver I had
obtained the first actual clue to his movements after he left Mr.
Trent, senior, and came out of the office.

"That clue came from the door porter, Felix Murchison. What careful
'pumping' got out of him was that when James Colliver left the
office he had asked him, Murchison, which was the way to the place
where they made the waxworks, as he'd heard that they were making
a head of Miss Larue to be used in the execution scene of Catharine
Howard, and he'd like to have a look at it. Murchison said that
he told him the figures were made in a glass-room on the top of
the house, and directed him how to reach it. He went up the stairs,
and that was the last that was seen of him.

"Naturally when I heard that I thought I'd like to see the exterior
of the building to ascertain if there was any opening, door or
window, by which he could have left the upper floor without coming
down the main staircase. That led me to beg permission of the
people in the house across the passage there to look from one of
the side windows, and so gave me my first view of the glass-room.
What I saw was exactly what Mrs. Sherman and her daughter saw
yesterday--namely, that spick and span room with the table in the
centre and the vase of pink roses standing on it.

"Need I go further than to say that when I heard of those women
seeing a room that was badly littered a few minutes before suddenly
become a tidy one with a table and a vase of roses standing in
the middle of it, without anybody having come into the place for
the purpose of making the change, I instantly remembered my own
experience and suspected a painted blind?

"When I entered this room to-day and saw the peculiar position of
that blind I became almost certain I had hit upon the truth, and
sent Mr. Narkom to the house across the way to test it. That's
why I pulled the blind down. Why I stumbled and nearly fell into
the tableau was because I had a faint suspicion of the horrible truth
when I noticed how abominably thick the neck, hands, and ankles of
that 'dead soldier' were; and I wanted to test the truth or falseness
of the 'straw stuffing' assertion by actual touch, particularly as I
felt sure that the presence of all these strongly scented flowers
was for the purpose of covering less agreeable odours should the
heat of the weather cause decomposition to set in before he could
dispose of the body. I don't think he ever wa