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sir,” said Superintendent. “In fact, I fancy myself the young gentleman must have had one over the eight, as the saying goes. What made him ram the wall just where he did I can’t imagine, if he was sober at the time.”
    “Just high spirits, I expect,” said Sir Charles.
    “Spirits it was, in my opinion, sir.”
    “Well, thank you very much, Superintendent. Any objection to our going and having a look at the Abbey, Colonel Johnson?”
    “Of course not, my dear sir. Though I’m afraid you won’t learn much more there than I can tell you.”
    “Anybody there?”
    “Only the domestic staff, sir,” said Crossfield. “The house-party left immediately after the inquest, and Miss Lyndon has returned to Harley Street.”
    “We might, perhaps, see Dr. - er - Davis, too?” suggested Mr. Satterthwaite.
    “Good idea.”
    They obtained the doctor’s address, and having thanked Colonel Johnson warmly for his kindness, they left.

Three Act Tragedy
    8
    As they walked along the street, Sir Charles said:
    “Any ideas, Satterthwaite?”
    “What about you?” asked Mr. Satterthwaite. He liked to reserve judgment until the last possible moment.
    Not so Sir Charles. He spoke emphatically:
    “They’re wrong, Satterthwaite. They’re all wrong. They’ve got the butler on the brain. The butler’s done a bunk - ergo, the butler’s the murderer. It doesn’t fit. No, it doesn’t fit. You can’t leave that other death out of account - the one down at my place.”
    “You’re still of the opinion that the two are connected?”
    Mr. Satterthwaite asked the question, though he had already answered it in the affirmative in his own mind.
    “Man, they must be connected. Everything points to it ... We’ve got to find the common factor - someone who was present on both occasions - ”
    “Yes,” said Mr. Satterthwaite. “And that’s not going to be as simple a matter as one might think, on the face of it. We’ve got too many common factors. Do you realise, Cartwright, that practically every person who was present at the dinner at your house was present here?”
    Sir Charles nodded.
    “Of course I’ve realised that - but do you realise what deduction one can draw from it?”
    “I don’t quite follow you, Cartwright.”
    “Dash it all, man, do you suppose that’s coincidence? No, it was meant. Why are all the people who were at the first death present at the second? Accident? Not on your life. It was plan - design - Tollie’s plan.”
    “Oh!” said Mr. Satterthwaite. “Yes, it’s possible ... ”
    “It’s certain. You didn’t know Tollie as well as I did, Satterthwaite. He was a man who kept his own counsel, and a very patient man. In all the years I’ve known him I’ve never known Tollie give utterance to a rash opinion or judgment.”
    “Look at it this way: Babbington’s murdered - yes, murdered - I’m not going to hedge, or mince terms - murdered one evening in my house. Tollie ridicules me gently for my suspicions in the matter, but all the time he’s got suspicions of his own. He doesn’t talk about them - that’s not his way. But quietly, in his own mind, he’s building up a case. I don’t know what he had to build upon. It can’t, I think, be a case against any one particular person. He believed that one of those people was responsible for the crime, and he made a plan, a test of some kind to find out which person it was.”
    “What about the other guests, the Edens and the Campbell’s?”
    “Camouflage. It made the whole thing less obvious.”
    “What do you think the plan was?”
    Sir Charles shrugged his shoulders - an exaggerated foreign gesture. He was Aristide Duval, that master mind of the Secret Service. His left foot limped as he walked.
    “How can we know? I am not a magician. I cannot guess. But there was a plan ... It went wrong, because the murderer was just one degree cleverer than Tollie thought ... He struck first ... ”
    “He?”
    “Or she. Poison is as much a woman’s