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compunction if you make a single false move.”
    Later, when Mr. Jones had been taken away by the police, and Mary Merrill, hysterical but otherwise not much harmed, restored to her father, Fen went round to the back garden, where he found an engaging female urchin wandering about eating a large bar of chocolate cream.
    “That was jolly good,” he told her, handing over the promised ten-shilling note. “When you grow up, you ought to go on the stage.”
    She grinned at him. “Some scream, mister, eh?” she said.
    “Some scream,” Fen agreed.
     
    And: “It’s obvious,” he said to the reverend mother over lunch next day, “that Mary Merrill made friends with Jones soon after she came here, and got into the way of visiting him pretty well every afternoon. No harm in that. But then he found out who her father was and began envisaging the possibility of making some easy money.
    “What actually happened, I understand, is that Mary, on that last visit, took fright at something odd and constrained in his attitude to her, and succeeded in slipping away while his back was turned. Whereupon he very stupidly followed her (in his car, except for the last bit) and tried to grab her when she was already quite close to home.
    “She eluded him again, and ran to Sister St. Jude for protection. But by that time Jones had gone too far for retreat to be practicable or safe; so he ran after her, struck Sister St. Jude down with his stick, and this time really did succeed in capturing Mary, knocking her out, and so getting her back to his house.
    “Whether the dandelion part of it belongs to that particular afternoon, or to some previous one, one doesn’t know, but whichever it was, Sister St. Jude clearly noticed the flower and equally clearly realized, even in her illness and delirium, that it provided a clue to—”
    “Wait, please,” the reverend mother implored him faintly. ‘Did I hear you say ‘dandelion’?”
    And Fen nodded. “Yes, dandelion. English corruption of the French dent-de-lion —which of course means a lion’s tooth. But Sister St. Jude’s vocabulary was limited: she didn’t know the English name for it. Therefore, she translated it literally, forgetting altogether the existence of that confusing, but irrelevant, relic of yours—
    “Well, I ask you: a dandelion, in January, after weeks of hard frost! But Mary Merrill had managed to find one; had picked it and then perhaps pushed it into a buttonhole of her frock. As every gardener knows, dandelions are prolific and hardy brutes; but in view of the recent weather, this particular dandelion could really only have come from a weed in a hot-house within an hour’s walk from here. As soon as I saw Jones’s, I was certain it was the right one.”
    The reverend mother looked at him. “You were, were you?” she said.
    “Well, no, actually I wasn’t certain at all,” Fen admitted. “But I thought that the luck I’d had up to then would probably hold, and I was tired of tramping about, and anyway I haven’t the slightest objection to terrorizing innocent householders so long as it’s in a good cause… may I smoke?”

Gladstone’s Candlestick
    Gina Mitchell, sitting very upright on the edge of her chair, accepted a cigarette, lit it, looked her tutor defiantly in the eye, and announced without preliminary: “I am not a thief. All the evidence is against me, I’ll admit that, but nonetheless it wasn’t me, really it wasn’t me, and what I want is for you to—”
    “Steady,” said Fen. “Take it easy, and don’t try to bully me, please.” But then he smiled; for he liked the girl, and clearly her distress was genuine. “Start at the beginning,” he suggested.
    “Thanks,” she said, trying to speak lightly, and failing. “Thanks. I was hoping you might be willing to listen, and—well, anyway, here’s what happened…”
    Gina had only two living relatives, she said: her grandfather, Lord Stretham, who lived at Horton Manor, a few