The various bedrooms and sitting-rooms had yielded nothing to a careful search. Apparently the tenants had brought little or nothing with them, and all the furniture down to the smallest details had been taken over with the house. A good deal of clothing with the stamp of Marx and Co., High Holborn, had been left behind. Telegraphic inquiries had been already made which showed that Marx knew nothing of his customer save that he was a good payer. Odds and ends, some pipes, a few novels, two of them in Spanish, an old-fashioned pinfire revolver, and a guitar were among the personal property.

“Nothing in all this,” said Baynes, stalking, candle in hand, from room to room. “But now, Mr. Holmes, I invite your attention to the kitchen.”

It was a gloomy, high-ceilinged room at the back of the house, with a straw litter in one corner, which served apparently as a bed for the cook. The table was piled with half-eaten dishes and dirty plates, the debris of last night’s dinner.

“Look at this,” said Baynes. “What do you make of it?”

He held up his candle before an extraordinary extraordinary object which stood at the back of the dresser. It was so wrinkled and shrunken and withered that it was difficult to say what it might have been. One could but say that it was black and leathery and that it bore some resemblance to a dwarfish, human figure. At first, as I examined it, I thought that it was a mummified negro baby, and then it seemed a very twisted and ancient monkey. Finally I was left in doubt as to whether it was animal or human. A double band of white shells was strung round the centre of it.

“Very interesting — very interesting, indeed!” said Holmes, peering at this sinister relic. “Anything more?”

In silence Baynes led the way to the sink and held forward his candle. The limbs and body of some large, white bird, torn savagely to pieces with the feathers still on, were littered all over it. Holmes pointed to the wattles on the severed head.

“A white cock,” said he. “Most interesting! It is really a very curious case.”

But Mr. Baynes had kept his most sinister exhibit to the last. From under the sink he drew a zinc pail which contained a quantity of blood. Then from the table he took a platter heaped with small pieces of charred bone.

“Something has been killed and something has been burned. We raked all these out of the fire. We had a doctor in this morning. He says that they are not human.”

Holmes smiled and rubbed his hands.

“I must congratulate you, Inspector, on handling so distinctive and instructive a case. Your powers, if I may say so without offence, seem superior to your opportunities.”

Inspector Baynes’s small eyes twinkled with pleasure.

“You’re right, Mr. Holmes. We stagnate in the provinces. A case of this sort gives a man a chance, and I hope that I shall take it. What do you make of these bones?”

“A lamb, I should say, or a kid.”

She told Connie one day: ‘I lost twenty–three shillings to Sir Clifford last night.’

‘And did he take the money from you?’ asked Connie aghast.

‘Why of course, my Lady! Debt of honour!’

Connie expostulated roundly, and was angry with both of them. The upshot was, Sir Clifford raised Mrs Bolton’s wages a hundred a year, and she could gamble on that. Meanwhile, it seemed to Connie, Clifford was really going deader.

She told him at length she was leaving on the seventeenth.

‘Seventeenth!’ he said. ‘And when will you be back?’

‘By the twentieth of July at the latest.’

‘Yes! the twentieth of July.’

Strangely and blankly he looked at her, with the vagueness of a child, but with the queer blank cunning of an old man.

‘You won’t let me down, now, will you?’ he said.

‘How?’

‘While you’re away, I mean, you’re sure to come back?’

‘I’m as sure as I can be of anything, that I shall come back.’

‘Yes! Well! Twentieth of July!’

He looked at her so strangely.

Yet he really wanted her to go. That was so curious. He wanted her to go, positively, to have her little adventures and perhaps come home pregnant, and all that. At the same time, he was afraid of her going.

She was quivering, watching her real opportunity for leaving him altogether, waiting till the time, herself himself should be ripe.

She sat and talked to the keeper of her going abroad.

‘And then when I come back,’ she said, ‘I can tell Clifford I must leave him. And you and I can go away. They never need even know it is you. We can go to another country, shall we? To Africa or Australia. Shall we?’

She was quite thrilled by her plan.

‘You’ve never been to the Colonies, have you?’ he asked her.

‘No! Have you?’

‘I’ve been in India, and South Africa, and Egypt.’

‘Why shouldn’t we go to South Africa?’

‘We might!’ he said slowly.

‘Or don’t you want to?’ she asked.

‘I don’t care. I don’t much care what I do.’

‘Doesn’t it make you happy? Why not? We shan’t be poor. I have about six hundred a year, I wrote and asked. It’s not much, but it’s enough, isn’t it?’

‘It’s riches to me.’

‘Oh, how lovely it will be!’

‘But I ought to get divorced, and so ought you, unless we’re going to have complications.’

There was plenty to think about.

Another day she asked him about himself. They were in the hut, and there was a thunderstorm.

‘And weren’t you happy, when you were a lieutenant and an officer and a gentleman?’

‘Happy? All right. I liked my Colonel.’

‘Did you love him?’

‘Yes! I loved him.’

‘And did he love you?’