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“And you didn’t find anything. It rather looks, doesn’t it, as though there isn’t anything to find? Our idea that Rawlinson planted these things on his sister seems to have been wrong.”
    â€œOther people appear to have the same idea.”
    â€œIt’s a bit obvious really … Maybe we are meant to take the bait.”
    â€œCould be. Any other possibilities?”
    â€œPlenty of them. The stuff may still be in Ramat. Hidden somewhere in the Ritz Savoy Hotel, maybe. Or Rawlinson passed it to someone on his way to the airstrip. Or there may be something in that hint of Mr. Robinson’s. A woman may have got hold of it. Or it could be that Mrs. Sutcliffe had it all the time unbeknownst to herself, and flung it overboard in the Red Sea with something she had no further use for.
    â€œAnd that,” he added thoughtfully, “might be all for the best.”
    â€œOh, come now, it’s worth a lot of money, sir.”
    â€œHuman life is worth a lot, too,” said Colonel Pikeaway.

Five
L ETTERS FROM M EADOWBANK S CHOOL
    L etter from Julia Upjohn to her mother:
    Dear Mummy,
    I’ve settled in now and am liking it very much. There’s a girl who is new this term too called Jennifer and she and I rather do things together. We’re both awfully keen on tennis. She’s rather good. She has a really smashing serve when it comes off, but it doesn’t usually. She says her racquet’s got warped from being out in the Persian Gulf. It’s very hot out there. She was in all that Revolution that happened. I said wasn’t it very exciting, but she said no, they didn’t see anything at all. They were taken away to the Embassy or something and missed it.
    Miss Bulstrode is rather a lamb, but she’s pretty frightening too—or can be. She goes easy on you when you’re new. Behind her back everyone calls her The Bull or Bully. We’re taught English literature by Miss Rich, who’s terrific. When she gets in a real state her hair comes down. She’s got a queer but rather exciting face and when she reads bits of Shakespeare it all seems different and real. She went onat us the other day about Iago, and what he felt—and a lot about jealousy and how it ate into you and you suffered until you went quite mad wanting to hurt the person you loved. It gave us all the shivers—except Jennifer, because nothing upsets her. Miss Rich teaches us Geography, too. I always thought it was such a dull subject, but it isn’t with Miss Rich. This morning she told us all about the spice trade and why they had to have spices because of things going bad so easily.
    I’m starting Art with Miss Laurie. She comes twice a week and takes us up to London to see picture galleries as well. We do French with Mademoiselle Blanche. She doesn’t keep order very well. Jennifer says French people can’t. She doesn’t get cross, though, only bored. She says “Enfin, vous m’ennuiez, mes enfants!” Miss Springer is awful. She does gym and P.T. She’s got ginger hair and smells when she’s hot. Then there’s Miss Chadwick (Chaddy)—she’s been here since the school started. She teaches mathematics and is rather fussy, but quite nice. And there’s Miss Vansittart who teaches History and German. She’s a sort of Miss Bulstrode with the pep left out.
    There are a lot of foreign girls here, two Italians and some Germans, and a rather jolly Swede (she’s a Princess or something) and a girl who’s half Turkish and half Persian and who says she would have been married to Prince Ali Yusuf who got killed in that aeroplane crash, but Jennifer says that isn’t true, that Shaista only says so because she was a kind of cousin, and you’re supposed to marry a cousin. But Jennifer says he wasn’t going to. He liked someone else. Jennifer knows a lot of things but she won’t usually tell them.
    I suppose