"That's what I asked you, sir, and you ticked me off properly for wasting your time."
"Elizabeth. That was the name," Hemingway said, quite unheeding. "She had a son who went and committed suicide at some hunting-lodge, with a girl he wanted to marry, and couldn't. I know that, because Mrs. Herriard told me that bit."
"Do you mean that that might have given the murderer some idea how to kill Nathaniel?" asked the Sergeant.
"That, or something else in the book. Something the old lady hadn't got to, is my guess. Wait a bit! Didn't some foreign royalty get murdered in Switzerland, or some place, once?"
"When would that be?" said the Sergeant. ""They're always getting themselves bumped off, these foreign royalties," he added disparagingly.
"It was some time in the last century, I think. What I want is an encyclopedia."
"Well, there's sure to be one in the library here, isn't there?" suggested the Sergeant.
"That's what I'm hoping," Hemingway said. "And I've only got to find the volume I want missing to be dead sure I'm on to something!"
There was no one in the library when they entered it a few minutes later, and the Inspector was gratified to discover a handsomely bound encyclopedia on one of the bookshelves which lined the walls of the room. The required volume was not missing, and after flicking over a great many pages devoted to the lives of all the Elizabeths in whom he had no interest, and whose claims to fame he was strongly inclined to resent, the Inspector at length came upon Elizabeth, Empress of Austria and Queen of Hungary, born at Munich, December 24th, 1837; assassinated September 10th, 1898, at Geneva.
"Assassinated!" ejaculated the Sergeant, reading the entry over his superior's shoulder.