Three Blind Mice Read Free Page A

forbidding-looking woman with a resonant voice and a masterful manner. Her natural aggressiveness had been heightened by a war career of persistent and militant usefulness.
    “If I had not believed this was a running concern, I should never have come,” she said. “I naturally thought it was a well-established guesthouse, properly run on scientific lines.”
    “There is no obligation for you to remain if you are not satisfied, Mrs. Boyle,” said Giles.
    “No, indeed, and I shall not think of doing so.”
    “Perhaps, Mrs. Boyle,” said Giles, “you would like to ring up for a taxi. The roads are not yet blocked. If there has been any misapprehension it would, perhaps, be better if you went elsewhere.” He added, “We have had so many applications for rooms that we shall be able to fill your place quite easily—indeed, in future we are charging a higher rate for our rooms.”
    Mrs. Boyle threw him a sharp glance. “I am certainly not going to leave before I have tried what the place is like. Perhaps you would let me have a rather large bath towel, Mrs. Davis. I am not accustomed to drying myself on a pocket handkerchief.”
    Giles grinned at Molly behind Mrs. Boyle’s retreating back.
    “Darling, you were wonderful,” said Molly. “The way you stood up to her.”
    “Bullies soon climb down when they get their own medicine,” said Giles.
    “Oh, dear,” said Molly. “I wonder how she’ll get on with Christopher Wren.”
    “She won’t,” said Giles.
    And, indeed, that very afternoon, Mrs. Boyle remarked to Molly, “That’s a very peculiar young man,” with distinct disfavor in her voice.
    The baker arrived looking like an Arctic explorer and delivered the bread with the warning that his next call, due in two days’ time, might not materialize.
    “Holdups everywhere,” he announced. “Got plenty of stores in, I hope?”
    “Oh, yes,” said Molly. “We’ve got lots of tins. I’d better take extra flour, though.”
    She thought vaguely that there was something the Irish made called soda bread. If the worst came to the worst she could probably make that.
    The baker had also brought the papers, and she spread them out on the hall table. Foreign affairs had receded in importance. The weather and the murder of Mrs. Lyon occupied the front page.
    She was staring at the blurred reproduction of the dead woman’s features when Christopher Wren’s voice behind her said, “Rather a sordid murder, don’t you think? Such a drab -looking woman and such a drab street. One can’t feel, can one, that there is any story behind it?”
    “I’ve no doubt,” said Mrs. Boyle with a snort, “that the creature got no more than she deserved.”
    “Oh.” Mr. Wren turned to her with engaging eagerness. “So you think it’s definitely a sex crime, do you?”
    “I suggested nothing of the kind, Mr. Wren.”
    “But she was strangled, wasn’t she? I wonder—” he held out his long white hands—“what it would feel like to strangle anyone.”
    “Really, Mr. Wren!”
    Christopher moved nearer to her, lowering his voice. “Have you considered, Mrs. Boyle, just what it would feel like to be strangled?”
    Mrs. Boyle said again, even more indignantly, “Really, Mr. Wren!”
    Molly read hurriedly out, “ ‘The man the police are anxious to interview was wearing a dark overcoat and a light Homburg hat, was of medium height, and wore a woolen scarf.’ ”
    “In fact,” said Christopher Wren, “he looked just like everybody else.” He laughed.
    “Yes,” said Molly. “Just like everybody else.”
    In his room at Scotland Yard, Inspector Parminter said to Detective Sergeant Kane, “I’ll see those two workmen now.”
    “Yes, sir.”
    “What are they like?”
    “Decent class workingmen. Rather slow reactions. Dependable.”
    “Right.” Inspector Parminter nodded.
    Presently two embarrassed-looking men in their best clothes were shown into his room. Parminter summed them up with a quick eye. He was an