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extremely pleased with herself. Most people, she thought, would have been so delighted at having identified the trousers that it would not have occurred to them to open the cupboard. Conversely, many others, having opened the cupboard and identified the thumb, would not have thought of examining the trousers.
    ‘There ought to be a stuffed snake somewhere,’ she decided, ‘and possibly a hank of red hair.’
    She found the snake in a discarded and broken meat-safe (the receptacle, she thought, was a clue, in a sense, although it was the wrong kind of safe). She wrote, with rising satisfaction:
    Doctor Roylott’s Swamp Adder. The Speckled Band .
    It began to seem too easy, but after that her hunch failed, for there seemed to be nothing else in the room which had any connexion with the competition. She was leaving to pursue the search elsewhere, when she almost collided with her betrothed.
    ‘Good evening,’ said the handsome young man. ‘Any luck so far? – or doesn’t genius burn to-night, Jo March?’
    ‘Getting on,’ replied Laura, very pleased with herself. ‘How’s the arrogant C.I.D. doing?’
    ‘I’ve got six. It seems pretty simple,’ Gavin replied. ‘But I perceive that you’re feeling smug, so, if you don’t mind, I’m going to have a good look round in here. Vincent Spaulding’s trousers … um … bound to be hiding something behind that cupboard door, I should imagine.’ He opened the cupboard. ‘I spy, with my little eye, the engineer’s thumb, do I not?’
    Complacently he noted it down, and then went straight over to the meat-safe.
    ‘Blow you, Gavin!’ said Laura jealously. ‘That makes you nine out of the ten!’
    ‘I shall fall down on the tenth, I expect,’ said Gavin generously. ‘I have a hunch it’s in here, too. Do you mind if I continue to look around? Don’t let me detain you. I believe you were about to depart.’
    Laura hit him and departed. She was puzzled and perturbed. She respected Gavin’s emotions and understood them, except where she herself was concerned, and she knew that his dismissal of her meant that he was feeling worried about something.
    ‘Oh, bother the competition!’ she suddenly thought. ‘What on earth does this Chantrey man matter? He’s a selfish old pig, except that he’s good to those kids. I don’t see why we should all play silly games just to please him!’ But then she reflected further that, after all, she need not have accepted the invitation, that she had enjoyed her dinner, and, up to this encounter with Gavin, the competition. She went back to the lumber-room which Gavin was still patiently and methodically searching.
    ‘What’s the matter?’ she asked abruptly. He was squatting on his heels beside an open suitcase, but, at the sound of her voice, he stood up, looking even taller than usual in the police uniform of the previous century. He hunched his shoulders, spread his palms, and said:
    ‘Don’t know yet myself, Dog. Something wrong with the set-up here. I’m supposed to be holding a watching-brief on behalf of our host, but it’s not the cagey Sir B. that’s on my mind.’
    ‘What, then? Spit it out to Auntie Laura.’
    Gavin walked to the door and closed it.
    ‘Here it is, then, for what it’s worth … and, spoken aloud, it comes to nothing. Charles Mildren, who’s been telling me his life- story, particularly the bit when Sir B. did him out of a fat part back in 1949, is half-seas over, and that worries me because I’m sure it’s out of alignment. Ethel Mildren is worried stiff, and not only because Charles is blotto. Then, at least half the competitors are not walking round the house at all. Where they are, and what they’re doing, I don’t know, but I do know that two of the rooms which were not originally out of bounds are out of bounds now. It’s no business of mine if people have chosen to take themselves out of the competition, but it seems a bit odd of them to seal off a couple of rooms when