Somewhere in the House by Elizabeth Daly

police until we find out what killed her?”
    â€œBecause we’re told to,” said Seward, with a short laugh. His face looked bluish. Elena had come up to him and was trying to persuade him away from the locked door and down the hall. He hung back. “Harriet brought a witness in,” he said. “Somebody to tell us what to do.”
    â€œIf you think for one moment—” began Mr. Allsop severely, but broke off. “No, of course you don’t, Seward. You’re all of you badly upset. There is only one thing for us to do, and we must do it now. Mr. Gamadge will go down and telephone for the police. And in order to relieve us of responsibility, I’ll ask him to take this key with him.”
    Elena said: “Come along, darling, you’re not able to stand. Come and lie down. I’ll stay with you.” Seward shook his head.
    Garth persisted in repeating questions which no one seemed able to answer: “But how could it have happened? Did she drop dead? Was she sealed up alive in there by accident?”
    Gavan shot him a furious look. “Don’t be a fool. Sealed up? The window wasn’t bricked for days afterwards.”
    â€œShe got in there somehow after you locked the door, and you never took a look again?”
    â€œWhy should we?”
    Gamadge took the key from Mr. Allsop and went along the hall to the stairs. His client, standing white-lipped and motionless, addressed him soundlessly: “I’ve been stupid.”
    â€œNo.”
    â€œDid you expect this?”
    â€œI did think of it as a vague possibility, when you told me that Miss Fitch had disappeared.”
    â€œAnd that,” said Leeder from the studio doorway, “is why you decided to come back to-day, isn’t it?”
    â€œThat’s why. Mrs. Leeder, where’s the telephone?”
    â€œThere’s only one, in a back passage off the first-floor lobby.”
    Gamadge went down, found the telephone, and called the precinct. He asked for Detective Lieutenant Nordhall.

CHAPTER EIGHT
Sir Arthur Wilson Cribb
    S OME TWO HOURS later, at approximately six o’clock, Lieutenant Nordhall sat at a broad oak writing table beside the south window of the Clayborn library. He was looking up at Gamadge, who had perched himself upon the opposite end of the table and was smoking a cigarette.
    The library, which ran the whole east length of the house, represented more outlay in time, money and labour than all the rest of the rooms put together. It was ceiled and walled in black oak, which had been imported in slabs from a manor in England. Most of the furniture had been imported with it, and the low glassed bookcases that lined the west side of the room had been built and carved to match.
    Its north and south windows could not light it even at midday, and Nordhall had a green-shaded student lamp to work by. Papers lay in front of him, and near them a cardboard box that had held writing paper.
    He and Gamadge had been very thick for several years, since they had worked together on another case; but he had always rather hoped to catch his friend at a loss. Now, grinning up at him, he spoke merrily:
    â€œThey got a long start on you this time. Twenty years’ start. Motive lost in the pawnshops of twenty years ago, and the corpse is a mummy. We don’t want the Medical Examiner, we want to send down the Avenue to the Museum. They have professors there that can tell whether prehistoric remains had their skulls beaten in, or whether they were just trephined by the local medicine man.”
    â€œSkull beaten in? You said she was strangled.”
    â€œSo she was.” Nordhall cast an affectionate look at the cardboard box. “And we didn’t find any buttons.”
    â€œThen there are none there. They must have been in some sort of tray or case lying on the piano wires.”
    â€œYes, but were there ever any buttons? I’d like to know why this Aggie Fitch was