“You can give no explanation of his treasuring your photograph then?”
Cecily shook her head. “I can't indeed. I should have thought it a most unlikely thing to happen. I cannot bring myself to believe that it did. This thing”—flicking the card with her forefinger—“must have got into his room by accident.”
The inspector permitted himself a slight smile.
“I really do not think so.”
Cecily shrugged her shoulders. “Well, I give it up. Unless—unless”—an accent of fear creeping into her voice—“he wanted to implicate me, to make you think that I had been helping him to rob Mr. Bechcombe.”
“In that case he would surely have thought of some rather more sure plan than leaving your photograph about in his room,” said the inspector. “You do not think it likely that seeing you so much in the office, he has taken a fancy to you—fallen in love with you, in fact, as people say.”
“I do not, indeed!” Cecily said impatiently. “As I tell you, I know nothing of Mr. Thompson, and he did not see much of me in the office. I never went in to Mr. Bechcombe's room through the clerks' office. I never had occasion to go there at all. My business concerned Mr. Bechcombe, and Mr. Bechcombe only, and by his wish I always went to him by the private door.”
“I see.” The inspector studied the photograph in silence. “You know where this was taken?” he said at last.
Cecily looked at it again.
“It looks—I believe I am sitting in my favourite seat in the Field of Rest. I suppose I must have been snapshotted without my knowing it—by some amateur probably.”