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tatterdemalion Inverness there hung, like the odor of Turkish shag, all the vanished vigor and rectitude of the Empire.
    "Now, sir-" Noakes put in, reproachful; or was it Woollet?
    "The police, I say," the old man said, innocent and serene, "seem fairly certain that it was you who surprised Mr. Shane as he was carrying Bruno off, and murdered him. Whereas I believe that it was another, a man-"
    The old man's avid gaze now found its way to Reggie's black brogues, bright with the shine she had given them that morning, when the day had promised nothing out of the ordinary.
    "-with feet a good deal smaller than your own."
    Reggie's face slipped-that disappointed face, smooth as a kneecap. Motionless except where it twisted up at one eyebrow and down at one corner of the mouth. Now, for an instant, it fell away, and he grinned, like a boy. He pulled his great big feet from under the table and stuck them straight out in front of him, marveling as if for the first time at their appalling size.
    "That's what I've been telling these two!" he cried. "Yes, all right, another day and I'd have had that bird sold and Fatty paid, and off my back. But the idea wasn't original with me. It's Parkins you should have in here. It was in his wallet that I found Black's card."
    "Parkins?" the old man looked to the policemen, who shrugged, and then at her.
    "My oldest lodger," she said. "Two years last March." She had never quite trusted Mr. Simon Parkins, she realized, though to all appearances there was nothing in the least exceptionable or shady about him. He rose at the same late hour each morning, went off to study his rolls or rubbings or whatever it was he pored over in the library at Gabriel Park until long past nightfall, and then returned to his room, his lamp, and his supper, warmed over, under a dish.
    "Are you in the habit of studyin' the contents of Mr. Parkins's wallet, then, Reg?" said Noakes or Woollett, affably though with a hint of trying too hard, as though he felt the chance to fix Reggie with a murder charge slipping away and hoped to fix him with something else before it was too late.
    The old man's head turned toward the policemen with an audible snap.
    "I beg you gentlemen also to consider that my days are numbered," he said. "Pray don't ask superfluous questions. Does Parkins take an interest in the bird?"
    The question was directed at her.
    "Everyone took an interest in Bruno," she said, wondering why she referred to the parrot in the past tense. "Everyone except poor Mr. Shane. Isn't that strange?"
    "Parkins takes an interest, all right," Reggie said. The sullenness to which he had at first treated the old man was all gone. "He was always jotting things in his little notebook. Every time the bird started in on those damned numbers."
    For the first time since their arrival at the police station, the old man looked truly interested in what was happening. He rose to his feet with none of the moaning and muttering that had attended this action hitherto.
    "The numbers!" He laid his hands together palm to palm, arrested between prayer and applause. "Yes! I like that! The bird was wont to repeat numbers."
    "All bloody day long."
    "Endless series of them," she said, failing even to notice the expletive, though it made one of the policemen wince. She realized now that she had indeed many times seen Parkins pull out a small paper notebook and copy down the numeric arias that emerged from the uncanny clockwork snapping of Bruno's black bill. "One to nine, over and over again, in no particular order."
    "And all in German," Reggie said.
    "And our Mr. Parkins. He is presently employed in what line of work? A commercial traveler, like Richard Shane?"
    "He is an architectural historian," she said, noticing that neither Noakes nor Woollett was bothering to write anything down. To look at them, those sweating hulks in their blue woolen coats, they might not even have been listening, let alone thinking. Perhaps they felt it was too hot to