The Private Eye. Ernest Dudley

she didn’t get herself done in. I see she was ’alf strangled, but she come round all right. Who d’you think knocked off ’er sparklers?”

      He stopped talking to look at Craig expectantly.

      “Yes, Mr. Craig,” Eddie said, handing him his drink. “Who did?”

      Craig smiled back at him genially.

      A little later found him once more leaning casually through the cubby-hole of the Rotunda stage door.

      “Perlice don’t seem to have no clue, Mr. Craig,” Fred told him gloomily. “Only thing is, it must have been someone in the theatre. Who else could it have been? No one who I don’t know come through here this afternoon—”

      “How about when you took me along to the dressing room?”

      “Perlice asks me that, but you remember I left you when you went in with her dresser—Mrs. Abbott—and got back here to find the call-boy keeping my chair warm for me. He hadn’t let any strangers through. And even if he had, ’ow could they have got out—without me seeing ’em?”

      Craig gave him a bleak stare and a little later took his unhurried departure.

      Big Ben boomed midnight as, in answer to his ring, the woman opened the door. She regarded him with some suspicion. Then, when he told her who he had called to see, just for a little chat, she said:

      “He’s only just come in.”

      She held the door wider for him.

      “Thanks,” and he followed her along the dingy hall.

      “Visitor for you…,” she called, and he went in, closing the door behind him.

      “What d’you want?”

      Craig took something out of his pocket and threw it on the table between them.

      “Found it outside her dressing room this afternoon,” he said through a puff of cigarette smoke.

      “It don’t prove a thing. I could have lost it there last night, or—”

      “If you had, the cleaners would have swept it up before the matinée.”

      The other started to say something, then broke off, inarticulate.

      Craig paused to survey the tip of his cigarette. “I didn’t connect it with you first time,” he murmured unhurriedly. “Then, you see, Fred was dead sure no stranger had gone in or out of the stage door at the time of the robbery and the penny dropped. You wouldn’t be a stranger to him. He was used to you going in and out with drinks. He never thought of you. That’s what you counted on, just as you counted on that crank’s threatening letter putting them off your track. And of course, Fred wasn’t to know it was your afternoon off.” He indicated the imitation bit of jewellery that winked up at them. “Tonight, it wasn’t in your tie.…”

      There was silence in the room.

      Craig’s voice was almost gentle.

      “Well, Eddie?” All his perkiness gone, Eddie fingered the place where his tiepin had been.

      “All right,” he said, suddenly caving in. “I’ll give myself up. I got the stuff here.…”

      They went along together.