“It has been found in London, miss,” he replied quietly. “The fiendish brutes who committed the crime thought out this monstrous way of diverting attention from themselves by getting hold of my son’s coat and making the actual assassin wear it, in case he was espied in the gloom.” There was silence in the little study for awhile. I was amazed, aghast at the suggestion put forward by that rough north-countryman, that sorely stricken father who spoke with curious intensity of language and of feeling. Lady Molly was the first to break the solemn silence. “What makes you think, Mr. Shuttleworth, that the assassination of Mr. Carrthwaite was the work of a gang of murderers?” she asked. “I know Sicily,” he replied simply. “My boy’s mother was a native of Messina. The place is riddled with secret societies, murdering, anarchical clubs: organisations against which Mr. Carrthwaite waged deadly warfare. It is one of these--the Mafia, probably--that decreed that Mr. Carrthwaite should be done away with. They could not do with such a powerful and hard-headed enemy.” “You may be right, Mr. Shuttleworth, but tell me more about the coat.” “Well, that’ll be damning proof against the blackguards, anyway. I am on the eve of a second marriage, miss--ma’am,” continued the man with seeming irrelevance. “The lady is a widow. Mrs. Tadworth is her name--but her father was an Italian named Badeni, a connection of my first wife’s, and that’s how I came to know him and his daughter. You know Leather Lane, don’t you? It might be in Italy, for Italian’s the only language one hears about there. Badeni owned a house in Bread Street, Leather Lane, and let lodgings to his fellow-countrymen there; this business my future wife still carries on. About a week ago two men arrived at the house, father and son, so they said, who wanted a cheap bedroom; all their meals, including breakfast, they would take outside, and would be out, moreover, most of the day. “It seems that they had often lodged at Badeni’s before--the old reprobate no doubt was one of their gang--and when they understood that Mrs. Tadworth was their former friend’s daughter they were quite satisfied. “They gave their name as Piatti, and told Mrs. Tadworth that they came from Turin. But I happened to hear them talking on the stairs, and I knew that they were Sicilians, both of them.