re was a note of hauteur in her
voice.

"I mean this," said Tarling steadily. "What is Mr. Milburgh to you?"

Her hand went up to her mouth and she looked at him in wide-eyed
distress, then:

"Nothing!" she said huskily. "Nothing, nothing!"

CHAPTER XVIII

THE FINGER PRINTS

Tarling, his hands thrust into his pockets, his chin dropped, his
shoulders bent, slowly walked the broad pavement of the Edgware Road on
his way from the girl's hotel to his flat. He dismissed with good reason
the not unimportant fact that he himself was suspect. He, a comparatively
unknown detective from Shanghai was by reason of his relationship to
Thornton Lyne, and even more so because his own revolver had been found
on the scene of the tragedy, the object of some suspicion on the part of
the higher authorities who certainly would not pooh-pooh the suggestion
that he was innocent of any association with the crime because he
happened to be engaged in the case.

He knew that the whole complex machinery of Scotland Yard was working,
and working at top speed, to implicate him in the tragedy. Silent and
invisible though that work may be, it would nevertheless be sure. He
smiled a little, and shrugged himself from the category of the suspected.

First and most important of the suspects was Odette Rider. That Thornton
Lyne had loved her, he did not for one moment imagine. Thornton Lyne was
not the kind of man who loved. Rather had he desired, and very few women
had thwarted him. Odette Rider was an exception. Tarling only knew of the
scene which had occurred between Lyne and the girl on the day he had been
called in, but there must have been many other painful interviews,
painful for the girl, humiliating for the dead millionaire.

Anyway, he thought thankfully, it would not be Odette. He had got into
the habit of thinking of her as "Odette," a discovery which had amused
him. He could rule her out, because obviously she could not be in two
places at once. When Thornton Lyne was discovered in Hyde Park, with
Odette Rider's night-dress round about his wound, the girl herself was
lying in a cottage hospital at Ashford fifty miles away.

But what of Milburgh, that suave and oily man? Tarling recalled the fact
that he had been sent for by his dead relative to inquire into Milburgh's
mode of living and that Milburgh was under suspicion of having robbed the
firm. Suppose Milburgh had committed the crime? Suppose, to hide his
defalcations,