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questions. Miss Carver, will you wake up your guardian and your aunt, and tell them to be in readiness?”
    When Boscombe fussily ushered them in, apologizing for the disorder of his place as though there had been no dead man across the threshold and as though the place were really disordered, Melson found himself even more puzzled and disturbed. Puzzled, because Boscombe did not look the sort of man who would be interested in pistol-silencers. A shrewd little man, Boscombe; shrewd, probably hard under his surface mildness; bookish—if the walls of the room were any indication—and with a way of talking like a butler in a drawing-room comedy. Many nervous and self-conscious people talked just like that, which was another indication. Very neat, in his black pyjamas and grey wool dressing-gown and thick fleece-lined slippers; what the devil was the suggestion? Like a cross between Jeeves and Soames Forsyte.
    And Melson was disturbed because both these men were lying about what they knew. Melson felt it; he would have sworn to it; it was a palpable atmosphere in the room as well as in the hostility of Mr. Peter Stanley. He grew even more uncomfortable as he looked at Stanley in full light. Stanley was not merely hostile: he was ill, and he had been ill long before this night. A big shell of a man, with nerves jerking like wires at the corners of his eyes, he worked his heavy loose jaw with a loose chewing motion. His baggy clothes were good, but frayed about the sleeves, and his tie was skewered round under the corner of a high old-fashioned collar. He sat down in a Morris chair at one side of the table and took out a cigarette.
    “Well?” he said. His bloodshot eyes followed Dr. Fell as the latter peered slowly round the room. “Yes, I suppose the place is comfortable enough—for a murder. Does it tell you anything?”
    It told Melson nothing, at the moment. It was a big room with a high ceiling, a ceiling sloping slightly towards the rear, and pierced by a skylight. All but a little of the skylight, where two panes were open for ventilation, was shrouded by a black velvet curtain held against it on sliding wires. Curtained also were two windows at the rear of the room. In the left-hand wall was a door which apparently led to a bedroom. Bookshelves ran around the rest of the wall space, to the height of a man’s shoulder; above them hung irregularly a series of pictures which Melson noted in some astonishment to be Hogarth’s “Rake’s Progress” in skillful copies. You noticed irregularities in this room’s neatness—or certain other things might have gone unobserved. The circular centre table had its student’s lamp exactly in the middle; on one side stood an hour-glass and on the other an old brass box into whose filigree design were woven curious greenish crosses. At the left of the table was a great padded chair, a sort of throne with large wings and a high back, across from the chair in which Stanley sat. Although there was a scent of tobacco smoke in the room, Melson noted the curious fact that all the ashtrays were scrubbed clean; and no glasses were set out, despite the array of bottles and glasses on the sideboard …
    Damn it, the whole picture was somehow wrong ; or, reflected Melson, was he merely being a fool with too much subtlety? From the direction of the bedroom he could hear Pierce’s voice, presumably on the telephone. As he glanced round, those queer greenish crosses on the discoloured brass of the box were reflected again. Up against the wall of the doors by which they had entered, and folded round so as to make nearly a complete enclosure, was a gigantic screen in panels of stamped Spanish leather. The panels, enclosed in a design of brass studding, were alternately black, with gilt figures of flames painted on them, and yellow with red or saffron crosses.
    A doubtful memory stirred in Melson’s brain: the word sanbenito. Now what was a sanbenito ? For this screen interested Dr. Fell. The