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certainly knew about her, and sympathised with the ordeal she had been through.”
    “I believe that is so. You could ask her about that yourself, of course.”
    “Were there any other foreigners in the hotel?”
    “The staff or the residents? None of the residents, I believe. The waiter is an Italian.”
    “I take it,” said McCann, “that in the course of your ordinary investigations, everybody in the hotel would have been scrutinised.”
    “That is correct.”
    “And you had nothing on the proprietor or his staff.”
    “If I understand your question, you mean had they at any time done anything to render themselves liable to criminal prosecution? The answer is No.”
    “Could you take it a little further than that? Had you any reason at all – I wasn’t referring only to actual criminal offences – had you any reason to suspect that the proprietor or any of his staff might have had any hand in this murder?”
    “On the contrary,” said Hazlerigg. “All the evidence we have scrutinized to date would seem to exculpate them. I have only read the evidence, you understand, but that is my opinion.”
    “I see,” said McCann. “And the guests.”
    “There were only seven guests at the hotel. A family party of three – who were coming into the hotel actually at the moment the crime was discovered – and two others, a clergyman and his wife, who came in later. We have not paid a great deal of attention to them – beyond the usual routine checkup. The two guests actually in the hotel – I think you have read their evidence.”
    “Colonel Trevor Alwright and Mrs. Roper?”
    “Yes. Well, if I may employ the expression you used a moment ago, we have certainly got nothing ‘on’ either of them.”
    McCann thought this out carefully.
    “I might add,” went on Hazlerigg, “that Colonel Alwright – now retired – has an extremely good record at the War Office, where he was in charge of interdepartmental postings for many years, and gained an O.B.E. for his valuable services during the war.”
    The look with which Hazlerigg accompanied this statement halted McCann as effectively as a blow under the heart.
    It had really, he reflected, been very neatly done.
    Sergeant Crabbe’s report would be a beautifully innocuous document. It could be produced, at any time, in support of Hazlerigg’s discretion.
    A straight tip had been passed, nevertheless.

 
Chapter Seven
     
    “I tell you,” said Major McCann, “he practically shouted it in my ear. He wrote it in letters a yard high and pushed it right under my nose.”
    “I still don’t see it,” said his wife.
    She dipped some more glasses into a tub of hot water, pulled them out in a bunch, held them under the cold tap and handed them to McCann, who started to polish them.
    “Listen, sweetest,” said McCann. “First of all I asked him if he had anything on any of the staff at the hotel. Before he would even answer that one, he carefully defined what he meant by ‘on.’ He made it mean ‘Had they ever been the subject of criminal proceedings.’“
    “I understand that,” said Mrs. McCann. “Be careful with those port glasses, the price Mandelbaum charges for them, you’d think they were rare old crystal.”
    “All right. Then we came to the guests at the hotel. There were seven of them, but five were more or less out of it. That left two.”
    “Five from seven leaves two,” agreed Mrs. McCann, to show that her mind was on the job.
    “Those two are Colonel Alwright and Mrs. Roper. Now first Hazlerigg said he’d nothing ‘on’ them. That is they neither of them had actual police records. He then went on to say that Colonel Alwright had a very good name – a very good general reputation. From what he let go it didn’t sound a terribly distinguished military career, but the gist of it was plain enough. He was a good type, an upright steady-going citizen, who might park his car on the wrong side of the road but wouldn’t otherwise bother the