“He may have begun it, but he’d never have let you trip him up as to its not being a man if he had done. He made a mistake there, and Mr. Tempest doesn’t particularly care about doing that.”
“No, I agree with you on that point—he doesn’t. Still, the next move is to find Mrs. Garnett, and I’ll tell you one certain fact, Yardley, about her. The thing was premeditated, so you may be quite certain Garnett is an assumed name, and probably a name assumed for the purpose of the murder and consequently one that carried no clue in itself.”
A few days later, Tempest and Parkyns dropped across each other at the Old Bailey, and the inspector told the barrister what he had ascertained.
“Yes, I thought it would turn out that way. Now, you’ve got to try to put your hands on Mrs. Garnett, and the only way I see of your doing that is to find out some woman who will answer and whose life somehow touched that of Miss Stableford. It’s a pretty little problem, inspector. Here I must be off,” said the barrister, as his clerk brought him word that the judge was summing up in a case that preceded one in which he was himself briefed.
CHAPTER V
For some time Yardley and Parkyns devoted themselves diligently to the search for Mrs. Garnett, but the effort proved like seeking a needle in a bundle of hay. They had nothing to go upon—no detail from which they could make a start. The hotel porters had not the smallest recollection of the lady’s departure, and could give no hint how she had left the hotel nor what might have been her destination.
At length, Yardley, confessing himself conquered, applied to Tempest.
“I know it isn’t fair to come bothering you,” he had said to the barrister; “but the thing’s beaten me. If it were ordinary professional work of mine, I should just report a failure and drop it. I really don’t think it’s any good worrying over it any more, and Parkyns says he’s had enough of it too. But you sent for me to go to the inquest, and you say you are interested, so I decided I would see you again before actually reporting to Lady Stableford.”
“I’m not sure I can help you much. I’m certainly not going to drop it myself, but I don’t at present see how I can put you much further along the road at present. Still, there’s one point. You remember what I suggested as the reason Miss Stableford’s body was stripped?”
“You said it was an attempt to hide her identity; and that if we could find any person upon whom suspicion attached, merely because the body was that of Miss Stableford, that we should then have a clue. That was what you said, wasn’t it?”