She knew very little about her employer. Three days a week she used to come to tidy the flat. For this purpose she was entrusted with a key. She had very strict orders that, if the door did not yield when she turned the key and was obviously bolted on the inside, she was to go away. This had happened three times in the course of the past year. Mr. Schmidt, though a very healthy-looking gentleman, was an invalid. Sometimes he had very bad spells, and she had come to find the atmosphere of his bedroom sickly with the smell of drugs. He never spoke about his business, and when he spoke at all, it was with a very strong foreign accent. She had an idea he was an actor, because she had once seen a box containing wigs and moustaches and theatrical make-up, and she had seen a photograph of him in some theatrical role. Although it was a ground floor flat, it only consisted of three rooms and a kitchenette. One was entirely bare, except that in a cupboard he found three uncased pillows. Mrs. Adderly explained that occasionally Mr. Schmidt had a weakness for pillows, though the only time he ever slept there one sufficed him. The bedroom contained an iron bedstead with a mattress, comparatively new, a small dressing chest, a mirror, a little table and two chairs. The bed was not made, but the blankets were neatly folded at the foot of the bare mattress and covered with a sheet. On the wall was a lithographed portrait of a man in a foreign uniform. Mr. Reeder guessed it was Russian. Over the bed was hung a shelf which contained four or five Russian books, and here he made a discovery, for on the fly-leaf of one was a long inscription in French: “Presented to me by the Grand Duke Alexander on the occasion of my performance in ‘_Revisor_’.” Beneath this was a single letter “L.” The main interest for Mr. Reeder lay in the fact that the handwriting was not the same as that in the letter. In the small cupboard he found two medicine bottles half filled. He sniffed one and discovered the unmistakable scent of spirits of chloroform. He was hardly as much impressed by the contents as by the labels, which were those of a Bloomsbury chemist. He left Mrs. Adderly and went in search of the disgruntled hall porter. “Mr. Schmidt” had had visitors, but apparently they came after 11 o’clock at night at which hour the porter went off duty; the lift, being an automatic one, was operated by the tenants themselves. He would not have known of this, but for the fact that one of the other tenants in the building had seen people going into or coming from the flat in the middle of the night. They were invariably men. A chemist’s shop on the corner of the block was Mr. Reeder’s next objective. The chemist was a suspicious man, not inclined to answer readily to the detective’s questions. Mr. Reeder, however, carried authority in the shape of a small warrant card, for he had definite association with the Public Prosecutor’s Department.