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kitchen. Alice Flower was in the kitchen cooking the lunch. She had remarkably good hearing for her age, but she never heard Painter go up those stairs. And, believe me, he was a big heavy lout if ever there was one." Archery winced faintly at this but Wexford went on, "Secondly, Mrs. Primero would never have sent the gardener upstairs to poke about in her bedroom. Not unless I'm very mistaken in her character. She would have got Alice to have fetched the money on some pretext or other."
    "She might not have wanted Alice to know about it."
    "That's for sure," Wexford retorted sharply. "She wouldn't have. I said on some pretext or other." That made the parson draw in his horns. Wexford said very confidently, "In the third place Mrs. Primero had a reputation for being rather mean. Alice had been with her for half a century but she'd never given Alice anything bar her wages and an extra pound at Christmas." He jabbed at the page. "Look, she says so here in black and white. We know Painter wanted money. The night before when he hadn't brought the coal he'd been drinking up at the Dragon with a pal of his from Stowerton. The pal had a motorbike to sell and he'd offered it to Painter for a bit less than two hundred pounds. Apparently Painter hadn't a hope of getting the money but he asked his friend to hold on to the bike for a couple of days and he'd contact him the minute anything came up. You're saying he got the money before noon on Sunday. I say he stole it after he brutally murdered his employer in the evening. If you're right, why didn't he get in touch with his friend on Sunday afternoon? There's a phone box at the bottom of the lane. We checked with the pal, he didn't move out of his house all day and the phone never rang."
    It was a very tempest of fact and Archery yielded, or appeared to yield, before it. He said only: "You're saying, I think, that Painter went to the wardrobe after he'd killed Mrs. Primero in the evening. There was no blood on the inside of the wardrobe."
    "For one thing he wore rubber gloves to do the deed. Anyway, the prosecution's case was that he stunned her with the flat side of the axe blade, took the money, and when he came downstairs, finished her off in a panic."
    Archery gave a slight shiver. "Doesn't it strike you as odd," he then said, "that if Painter did it he should have been so transparent about it?"
    "Some are. They're stupid, you see." Wexford said it derisively, his mouth curling. He still had no notion what Archery's interest in Painter might be, but that he was pro-Painter was apparent. "Stupid," he said again, intent on flicking the clergyman on the raw. Another wince from Archery rewarded him. "They think you'll believe them. All they've got to say is it must have been a tramp or a burglar and you'll go away satisfied. Painter was one of those. That old tramp thing," he said. "When did you last see a tramp? More than sixteen years ago, I'll bet."
    "Let's come to the murder itself," Archery said quietly.
    "By all means." Again Wexford took the transcript, gathering with a quick glance the information he needed. "Now, then," he began, "Painter said he went over to fetch the coal at half six. He remembered the time—twenty-five past six when he left the coach house—because his wife said five minutes to go before the child's bedtime. The time's not all that important, anyway. We know it was between twenty past six and seven o'clock that she was killed. Painter went over, chopped some wood and cut his finger. Or so he said. He certainly did cut his finger—cut it deliberately."
    Archery ignored this last. "He and Mrs. Primero belonged to the same blood group," he said.
    "They were both Group O. They weren't quite so accurate about the minute grouping of blood sixteen years ago as they are now. It was handy for Painter, that. But it didn't do him any real good."
    The clergyman crossed his legs and leaned back. Wexford could see he was trying to appear relaxed and making a poor job of