d before the Chief Constable,
had convinced himself that the key to the murder and the murderer was to
be found in London; Caldew believed that the solution of the mystery lay
near the scene of the events, and perhaps in the house where the murder
was committed.

Caldew was aware that he could have given no satisfactory reason for
holding that belief, apart from the point that the murder had been
committed by somebody who knew the moat-house sufficiently well to get
in and out of the place without being seen. But that point was open to
the explanation that the criminal might have provided himself with a
plan of the house. Nevertheless, the impression had entered his mind so
strongly that he could not have shaken it off if he had tried. But he
did not try. He had sufficient imagination to be aware that intuition,
in crime detection, is sometimes worth more than the most elaborate
deductions.

For the rest, all his speculations about the crime were affected by the
trinket he had found in the bedroom on the night of the murder. But the
discovery and subsequent disappearance of that clue, as he believed it
to be, had not led him very far as yet. He felt himself in the position
of a palaeontologist who is called upon to reproduce the structure of an
extinct prehistoric animal from a footprint in sandstone. The vanished
trinket was a starting-point, and no more. It was a possible hypothesis
that the person who had dropped the stone and entered the death-chamber
in search of it was the murderer, but so far it was incapable of
demonstration or proof. As an isolated fact, it was useless, and brought
him no nearer the solution of the mystery. But, on the other hand, it
was an undoubted fact, and, for that reason, was dependent upon other
facts for its existence. It was his task to find out who had dropped the
trinket in the bedroom and subsequently returned for it during his own
brief absence downstairs. To establish those essential kindred facts
was, he believed, to lay hands on the murderer of Violet Heredith.

Caldew walked thoughtfully from the moat-house down to the village,
intent on commencing his own independent investigations into the crime.
If the solution of the mystery lay near the scene, as he believed, it
was possible that some clue might be picked up among the villagers, to
whom the daily doings of the folk in "the big house" were events of the
first magnitude, and who might, presumably, be supposed to know anyth