“The rest was easy. The thing was over in a moment. She fell forward without uttering a sound. I made sure that she was dead, then I picked up the bundle of notes and thrust the torch and the revolver into my pocket. Then I felt my way out in the dark. I must have left the front door open, but I only found that out after Leslie had been arrested. At the gate I undid my coat and placed the notes in an inside pocket. It must have been then that Sybil’s ‘Red Dwarf’ pen rolled out onto the path where you found it.” Fayre drew in his breath sharply. “Good God!” he muttered. Kean’s fixed gaze shifted for a moment to Fayre’s face. “You never guessed it was Sybil’s. And yet she had used one for years. That wretched ‘Red Dwarf’ gave me more than one bad quarter of an hour. For one thing, I was terrified that you would mention it to her. She lent it to me on the morning of the 23rd, and I must have slipped it into my pocket; when I got back to Staveley on the 26th one of the first things she did was to ask me for it. I made the excuse that I had left it in London. If you had spoken to her about it after that she might possibly have put two and two together.” Fayre opened his lips to say that he had mentioned it, with ominous results, but Kean interrupted him. Afterwards he was thankful that he had not been given the chance to speak. “I suppose you must have opened the drawer of the table at my Chambers and seen the two pens or you wouldn’t have produced them as you did this morning. You probably also realized what I had been doing. I was afraid she would ask me for it again and, somehow, I could not bring myself to return her own to her, apart from the fact that I might have been called upon to produce it and did not dare let it out of my possession. So I bought another and stained it with ink, meaning to return it to her as her own. You guessed that?” Fayre nodded. “I knew, naturally, that you had been trying to fake a duplicate, but I was entirely at sea as to your object.” “I think, all along, Sybil was the person I feared most. She has more intuition than any one I have ever met and I was in terror that something in my manner or attitude towards the case would rouse her suspicions. Thank goodness she never dreamed that anything was wrong.” This time Fayre deliberately held his peace, but his heart turned sick within him, for, bit by bit, the patterns in the puzzle were beginning to slip into their places and, among them, Sybil’s letter and the enclosure.