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of feathers in the corner of his mouth. And sure enough, you’d read in your paper that the country house gang – when in doubt the papers always call it a gang – had broken into the Earl of Mudshire’s residence near Sunningdale and had removed the gold plate from the dining-room, the intaglios from the Long Gallery and the Countess’ own hundred diamond matching necklace (which was of the highest sentimental value to her Ladyship) and the insurers had been informed. Only it wasn’t a gang. It was clever Mr. Feder, who was known to the county as Barry. Who had taken the trouble to teach himself – at an age when most young men are training to cut out an appendix or draw up a will – to pick a lock, dislocate a burglar alarm, silence a dog, and cut a precious stone or a throat in a neat, quiet, gentlemanly way. All his jobs were surgical operations. Long, slow, careful planning, followed by quick, ruthless execution.’
    ‘I should have thought,’ said Liz, ‘that when he got back to his roost with the loot his troubles were only just starting. How on earth did he turn it into cash?’
    ‘Well, that’s always a snag. He overcame it by patience. He concentrated on jewellery and precious metals. As I said, he could cut a diamond as well as most experts. And he made his own settings. Lovely work, some of them. But the real thing was that he was able to wait. Years, if necessary. And, of course, when he did come to dispose of anything, his position in life was a help. He wasn’t a hole-and-corner sort of person. He lived a straightforward ordinary life and had lots of rich friends. If he offered a well-known jeweller a pair of pendeloque-cut diamond earrings set in platinum filigree, the jeweller was hardly likely to approach the transaction in a suspicious frame of mind. But suppose, as a matter of precaution, he checked through his latest numbers of “Hue & Cry” and the “Pawnbrokers List.” He wasn’t going to find anything. The diamonds were probably a pair of reshaped marquise-cut stones which had been stolen three years before. And anyway, why should he be suspicious? He knew Mr. Barry well. A very nice gentleman indeed, who had bought a gold cigarette case from him only a month before.’
    ‘Clever that,’ said the General. ‘I suppose you’d say that his greatest risk was being seen actually on the job.’
    ‘A risk for him,’ said Cleeve soberly. ‘But, by the Lord, a very much greater risk for the person who happened to see him.’
    ‘A killer?’ A look of interest flickered into the General’s frosty eye. Killers, he understood. He had encountered a lot of them in his time, two-legged and four-legged.
    ‘Not by nature, perhaps,’ said Cleeve. ‘But a man like that would kill to preserve his identity. There aren’t many of them about at one time, and the police have got a short list of suspects. I don’t know just how the list is compiled, but you can take it it’s there.’
    ‘And you mean,’ said Liz, ‘that if some absolutely independent witness – a servant or a guest or the householder himself – happened to meet your man actually on the job, then he’d have to be killed.’
    ‘That’s right,’ said Cleeve. ‘Otherwise the police would be round next day to show him a bunch of photographs and – respectable Mr. Barry, businessman and churchwarden, would be marched off to the clink, and no one more surprised than the Vicar.’ He paused. ‘I didn’t tell you how Feder was caught. It was just before the war. He had broken into a house at Great Missenden – after diamonds, as usual. Only this time, for various reasons he went in whilst the family was at dinner. What he didn’t know was that the son and heir, a bright young chap aged eleven, was hiding in a cupboard in his mother’s bedroom. Why he should have been doing that, I don’t know. There’s no accounting for children. He watched Feder walk in, break open the dressing table, force the wall-safe, remove the