Well, you can see that for yourself. In obscurity lay our hope that the thing might remain what on the face of it it appeared to be. Switch the arc-lamps of the great papers on to it, with the whole power-house of dynamic government behind them, and all was over. Not an aspect of the Case would go unprobed to the very bottom, and the hungry newspapers would find themselves, not with a mere aeroplane crash that could be dismissed in a couple of lines, but with a really fine fat, first-class Murder Case that would keep them merrily going for weeks. And I can assure you that we all wanted very badly indeed just such a Case. We wanted it for more reasons than one. We wanted it, as we always do, in the ordinary way of our business, but much more we wanted it to take people's minds off other matters. We wanted it for the same reason that made us resolutely print those pictures of girls bathing during the blackest days of the War. We wanted it because the Man in the Public-house was restless and showed a disposition to pry into affairs in which his interference is only wanted when a General Election draws near. Bathing girls were very well in their way; a really high-class line in Divorce Cases would have outstripped them easily, if I may be permitted the unintentional expression; but the man who could have given us on the _Circus_ the first Assassination in the Air could have named his own price for it. III The flat in which I live with the old housekeeper who looks after me is not in Chelsea at all, but a quarter of an hour's walk away, just round the corner from Queen's Gate. It is exceedingly comfortable (as indeed it should be considering the rent I am made to pay for it), I have my own furniture, and on the whole I don't ask for a much better place to work in. For, quite apart from my paper, I do work, and I don't want to give you the impression that the whole of my leisure time is given over to the investigation of what happens to my Chelsea friends. I was, as a matter of fact, particularly busy just about that time. Day after day I was getting up at half-past six in the morning, breakfasting at my table as I worked, and continuing without interruption till it was time for luncheon and the office. Since you are probably not in the white-elephant line of business, I won't tell you which of my novels I was at work on. I will only say that I at any rate was interested in it, and, severe as was the strain of writing from seven o'clock in the morning till midday, I sometimes hated to break off. Mrs. Jardine had orders not to admit anybody whomsoever between those hours, and obeyed them to the letter. You may judge then of my surprise when there walked into my study at nine o'clock in the morning, and not over Mrs. Jardine's dead body, Billy Mackwith.