"Someone had. Our trouble is that we don't know the first thing about any of them - barring that girl. All we've got is a bunch of classy people, all moving in the best circles, all to be handled carefully, and only one of them known to the police." He scratched his chin meditatively. "You can just see a chap like Mr. Godfrey Poulton putting up a beef to the Assistant Commissioner about the rude way he's been handled, can't you? And they've all of them got such nice manners they won't talk about each other! To think I should ever be glad to run up against Terrible Timothy in a case! It all goes to show, doesn't it?"
"That would be Mr. Harte?"
"It would."
"I do not think he would strangle a man."
"I'm dead sure he wouldn't - at least, I would have been before the War, but now I come to think of it he's just the sort of young devil to have got himself into a Commando, and the parlour-tricks they taught those lads were enough to make your hair stand on end! All the same, Terrible Timothy isn't even an Also Ran in my humble opinion. Which is why, Sandy, I am going to call on him in these chambers of his, and get him to give me the low-down on these people! He was very keen on helping me when he was fourteen: well, now he can help me!" He rose, and added: "And what his father and mother would say, if they knew of the highly undesirable bit of goods he's got his eye on, is nobody's business!" He shut his notebook, and restored it to his pocket. "We'll go and see what the backroom boys have discovered in the way of finger-prints. It won't help us, but we may as well go by the book. After that, we'll give Mr. Seaton-Carew's flat the once-over, and see what we can get out of that. No use my hauling some housemaid out of bed to get the story of the wrong towel out of her: that'll keep."
"What, Chief Inspector, did you make of Mrs. Haddington?"
"I'm no judge of snakes, but she seemed to me a good specimen! I didn't like her, I didn't like her story, and I don't like her any the better for the latest disclosure. Come on!"
The finger-print experts had only one thing to show the Chief Inspector that interested him. As he had supposed, no prints could be obtained from the wire twisted round Seaton-Carew's neck; the prints on various objects in the room included only those which would naturally be found there. The telephone-receiver showed several rather blurred prints, a clear impression of Miss Birtley's fingers, and not a trace of the murdered man's.
"Which is a very significant circumstance," said Hemingway. "It's no use asking me why it's important, because so far I don't know. I know it is, because I've got flair. That's French, and it's what made me a Chief Inspector, whatever anyone may tell you."
"It means," said Inspector Grant, "that the murdered man never touched the receiver."