“You have no business to make such suggestions,” I interrupted angrily, as soon as I could conquer my first astonishment.
“Oh, please don’t be cross, you know what a way I have of blurting out whatever comes into my head. And, after all, it must be one of us, we must each of us be guessing and thinking these awful things about the rest. It was all very well, and natural too, perhaps, of the doctor to warn us against it, but it really isn’t human nature not to. However, it doesn’t matter now for just look here what I’ve stumbled across.”
She put her hand down inside the top of her jumper and pulled out a sheet of newspaper, handing it over for my inspection. Like the one that had been found in my chest of drawers, odd words and letters had been cut out here and there, and I gazed at it astonished.
“And look at this,” she added, passing me a smaller piece of paper.
I recognized it for what it was at once. It was a sheet torn from the memo tablet that stood on the doctor’s desk. On it there were some almost illegible pencil notes, about a prescription, I gathered, in The Tundish’s characteristic writing. And right across the middle of it, and pasted partly over the penciled words, had been stuck letters cut from a newspaper forming the first portion of the identical message that I had found on the card above the landing switch.
“dark Deeds ARE done in D”
“Where on earth did you find this?” I asked her.
“In the box-room up among the attics. I went up just now to look for a cardboard box to send some things away in. Annie told me there were a lot stored away up there and the first one I came to had a lot of rubbish and odd bits of paper in it and when I emptied them out, this”—she pointed to the memo slip—“fell face upward on the floor. Then I found the sheet of newspaper when I searched among the rest.”
“I can’t make it out, can you? Who could have put it there?”
“It looks fishy to me,” she said. “Kenneth’s bit of fish,” she added pensively after a pause.