dining-room chairs a hair-pin, which went to show that one of the man's companions at that last meal of which he had partaken had been a woman. In addition, Wills had failed to notice that, behind the couch in the drawing-room, there lay a crumpled piece of pale salmon coloured ribbon-velvet. It had a hook on one end and an eye on the other.
Therefore, it had been worn around the woman's hair, and had probably fallen off unnoticed.
Who was the woman?
With the assistance of a local medical man named Neale I made a post-mortem, and we at once declared it to be a case of suicide—a verdict which the coroner's jury returned unanimously next day.
But nobody knew that, for the purposes of further investigation, I had preserved in a phial a small quantity of the blood of the unidentified suicide.
Inspector Syms, the officer of the Criminal Investigation Department attached to the head-quarters of the S Division at Hampstead, told me that the owner of the house called Baronsmere was a retired stockbroker named Charlesworth. It had been let three years ago on a ten years' lease to a German importer
