The inspector asked to see Alicia’s room upstairs, which meant the bedroom and her studio, and Sydney remarked that she had taken her paint box, the size of a small suitcase, but not her easel. The Inspector slid out the top drawer, which was Alicia’s, in the chest of drawers in the bedroom, perhaps looking for something no woman would have left behind, like a lipstick or a compact, but the drawer contained four lipsticks and two old compacts still, besides a stack of handkerchiefs and scarves, manicure scissors, a small sewing kit, and several belts. Inspector Brockway and the young constable walked out of the back door without saying anything, and Sydney trailed after them, puzzled, until it occurred to him that the Inspector wanted to see if the back yard and garden showed any signs of digging. Sydney was somewhat interested and he did his best to imagine himself really guilty of having killed and buried his wife under a couple of square yards of grass, which he would have carefully replaced after cutting it up into six-inch-square divots, but he really couldn’t imagine much internally, and as for externally, he supposed a guilty man would have done the same as he, looked up at the sky and the birds, and let the police be. A guilty man would of course have kept on the lookout for what the police might be finding, and Sydney had done this, casting a glance now and them from his distance of some forty feet. The Inspector had looked at the garage also, and noted that it had a wooden floor. It certainly wasn’t a thorough search, Sydney thought. A proper investigation would have meant going on hands and knees over every foot of the place, poking and even digging in spots, and tearing up the garage floorboards. But still, that was what the Inspector’s look around was for, a buried corpse, and closer inspection might come later. The two or three rains in the last month would have obliterated any signs of freshly turned earth since Alicia had been gone, and no doubt the