There was no twenty miles an hour about Desmond Okewood’s driving that morning. The rain had stopped, the wind had dried the sandy Surrey roads, and well within the hour they had reached Onslow Square, where the private house of Air-Marshal Sir Alexander Bannington was situated. He received them in a small book-lined room on the ground floor, a florid, well-fed dapper man, whose shining, good-natured face was ill-suited to the look of care it now wore. “Ah, Okewood!” he cried. “Thank God, you’re here. This your brother? How de do, how de do?” Then he clasped his red hands together in a gesture of anguish, which at another time would have been grotesque. “The most shockin’ affair! Miss Bardale, my confidential typist, was found dead—murdered—in her flat this morning. It’s a ghastly business, ghastly, and, what is more, unless you can do something it means ruin for me!” “Perhaps you wouldn’t mind telling us the whole story from the beginning, sir,” said Desmond. “It would help,” he added, “if you would omit nothing!” Francis cocked a shrewdly admiring eye at his brother. The large man sighed heavily. “I see you have already grasped that it is a confidential matter,” he remarked. “A State secret of the utmost importance is, in fact, at stake. As Chief of the Air Staff it has recently been my duty to draw up for submission to the Cabinet a comprehensive scheme for the aerial defence of the Empire. For this purpose I have attended many meetings with the First Sea Lord and the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, as well as more than one sitting of the Cabinet. Upon the notes I made on these discussions I based my report. I finished it in the rough yesterday afternoon . . .” “And gave it to your typist to make a fair copy? Is that it?” Desmond interposed. “Exactly.” “At the office?” “I gave it to her at the Ministry at six o’clock yesterday evening. She was to take it home, type it out after dinner, and let me have it back this morning. You will say, gentlemen, that I was criminally careless in thus letting a vitally important document out of the office. But I thought . . . I never imagined . . .” “It might be better, sir,” Desmond remarked soothingly, “if we got at the facts first . . .” “Quite so, quite so,” agreed Bannington. “Well, first thing this morning the resident clerk at the Ministry rang me up to say he had heard from the police that Miss Bardale had been murdered and her flat ransacked . . .” “And your report?” “Gone!” Desmond nodded. Then he asked: “How was the murder discovered?”