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By Root 397 0

at the bottom of her handbag? There were none in the pockets of her coat, but two were underneath the compact and lipstick, and even underneath the paper with the name and address of the club. It’s possible she had her handbag open and rummaged around for something—that might explain why the heavier items were on top—but she would never have put her only handkerchiefs away at the bottom. It was a very bad cold, and on a miserable wet night like that, she would have been blowing her nose almost continuously. Plus, there’s the address, right on top. She didn’t need it after she got to the club at eleven-thirty, but when she was killed, it was found on top of everything else. Unlikely if she’d put it in, but just where it would be if her murderer had emptied her bag of anything incriminating, shovelled the stuff back in, and then slipped in a note for the police to find, a note which would either explain her death in a satisfactory way or incriminate Tommy Buchanan, or both.”

I watched his face covertly as I talked, seeing that although the significance of the handkerchiefs had escaped him, that of the note’s placement had not. My estimation of the official investigators rose slightly. I continued.

“Obviously, if the note had been deliberately put there, it becomes extremely unlikely that Tommy Buchanan had anything to do with it, or his thugs. However, it would have to be someone who knew about Buchanan and also knew…” I fell silent for a moment, then resumed slowly. “Someone who also knew about the style of murders linked with him. I assume that various people know about that, newspaper people, for example, even if they were stopped from printing the details?”

“Undoubtedly.”

“Does the Clarion have any women reporters?”

“Two, I believe.” He was looking cross again, building up to another, no doubt final explosion, which I hastened to defuse.

“May I tell you a story, Inspector? It is not a long story, nor a pleasant one, and the amount of guesswork that has gone into it would horrify Holmes, but elements of it, I know to be the truth.” He eased back into his chair with an “at last!” expression on his face.

“It begins with the war and the perfectly appalling numbers of young men who were killed and crippled during those four years. At the beginning of the War, there were around six million men in this country of a marrying age, between twenty and forty. By the end of 1918, nearly a million of them lay dead. Another two million were wounded, half of them so badly damaged, mentally or physically, that they may never recover. Where does this leave some two to three million healthy young women who would ordinarily have married healthy young men and spent the rest of their lives caring for babies and husbands? The papers refer to them—us!—as ‘surplus women,’ as if our poor planning left us here while the men were removed. The women who ran this country, and ran it well, from 1915 to 1919, have now been pushed from their jobs to make way for the returning soldiers. Strong, capable women are now made to feel redundant in both the workplace and the home, and no, Inspector, this is not just suffragette ranting; this is the basis of our case…

“Have you met Margery Childe?”

“I have. A woman who was staying in her church went home to visit her husband, and got herself murdered.”

“What was your impression of her?”

“A nice woman, but strange.”

“Strange how?”

“It was… She didn’t seem to be listening to us. She answered our questions. She was polite, friendly even, but it was as if what we were asking weren’t important. As if we had interrupted something and she had her mind still on it while she was talking with us—but, you know, I didn’t get the idea that she was in any hurry to get back to anything specific. She was just… well, distracted, I suppose.”

“Yes. And yet when one of her women comes to her with a problem, she listens with her entire being concentrated on that woman, because that is where her interest lies, because, quite simply, she has little time for the concerns of men.

“What happens, then, when this extravagantly