do you ask?"

"Where did you see it last?"

The girl closed her eyes and shivered.

"In mother's room," she said. "Oh, mother, mother!"

She turned her head to the cushion of the chair and wept, and Tarling
soothed her.

It was some time before she was calm, but then she could give no further
information.

"It was a shoe that mother liked because it fitted her. We both took the
same size...."

Her voice broke again and Tarling hastened to change the conversation.

More and more he was becoming converted to Ling Chu's theory. He could
not apply to that theory the facts which had come into his possession.
On his way back from the nursing home to police headquarters, he reviewed
the Hertford crime.

Somebody had come into the house bare-footed, with bleeding feet, and,
having committed the murder, had looked about for shoes. The old slippers
had been the only kind which the murderer could wear, and he or she had
put them on and had gone out again, after making the circuit of the
house. Why had this mysterious person tried to get into the house again,
and for whom or what were they searching?

If Ling Chu was correct, obviously the murderer could not be Milburgh. If
he could believe the evidence of his senses, the man with the small feet
had been he who had shrieked defiance in the darkness and had hurled the
vitriol at his feet. He put his views before his subordinate and found
Whiteside willing to agree with him.

"But it does not follow," said Whiteside, "that the bare-footed person
who was apparently in Mrs. Rider's house committed the murder. Milburgh
did that right enough, don't worry! There is less doubt that he committed
the Daffodil Murder."

Tarling swung round in his chair; he was sitting on the opposite side of
the big table that the two men used in common.

"I think I know who committed the Daffodil Murder," he said steadily.
"I have been working things out, and I have a theory which you would
probably describe as fantastic."

"What is it?" asked Whiteside, but the other shook his head.

He was not for the moment prepared to reveal his theory.

Whiteside leaned back in his chair and for a moment cogitated.

"The case from the very beginning is full of contradictions," he said.
"Thornton Lyne was a rich man--by-the-way, you're a rich man, now,
Tarling, and I must treat you with respect."

Tarling smiled.

"Go on," he said.

"He had queer tastes--a bad poet, as is evidenced by his one sl