It was a snapshot taken at the seaside. It showed a slim girl, perhaps nineteen years old, in an extremely scanty flowered bathing suit. She was standing on a crowded beach, laughing, her arms up as though she were about to catch a beach ball. Taken in strong sun and with a steady camera, every detail was vividly limned: the gleaming dark hair, the full lips, the rounded nose.
H.M. spoke abruptly.
"I say, Masters. Doesn't she remind you of somebody?"
"Can't say she does, sir."
"Somebody we've seen recently? For the love of Esau, think!" persisted H.M. He turned to Courtney. "What about you?"
Courtney nodded. He had his own emotional reasons for seeing the likeness.
"She's a little like Ann Browning. The color of the hair is different, but the features and the expression—"
Masters looked doubtful.
"Oh, ah. I suppose she is, a bit. But what of it? Anything there, do you think?"
What Courtney was thinking, with a return of all his old apprehensions, was that what had happened to Polly Allen in July might have happened to Ann