“He won't slip.” Pointer shook hands and walked briskly away. He had arranged matters to his liking and his plans were in his own keeping. He wired to the Nice police to be ready to keep an observant eye on Mr. Crane. He would have been glad of the Canadian's immediate help, but he intended to take no risks of confusing the trail. Pointer's first act on arriving at Nice was to 'phone up the Canadian at the Negresco. Over the wire he obtained a minute account of the way he had spent his two days on the Côte d'Azur. Then he rang up his police friend, and Carter's account of himself was verified in every particular. So far so good. He next presented himself at Mrs. Erskine's. That lady was lying down with a severe headache when his card was taken in to her, but she sent him out word to please call back later, as she very much appreciated his having come to see her. Pointer found her quite full of questions—for her—as to Carter's release. She evidently feared that the police had been hoodwinked by some plausible villain. “I'm not a revengeful woman,” she explained with her plaintive Scotch accent, “but I do not want the murderer of my son to escape.” The Chief Inspector had apparently no explanation to offer beyond the fact of Carter's belated, but absolutely water-tight, alibi. “Well, of course you must know your business best,” she murmured from among her cushions, “but it would take more than a Frenchman's word to have made me set that man free!” She asked very kindly after Christine, and he did not mention the fact of that young lady's coming marriage to the object of Mrs. Erskine's suspicions. Mrs. Erskine evidently feared that it would be quite useless, but she had not the slightest objection to his going over again all the Erskine letters in her possession. “But Robert's letters are missing. You remember the packet I showed you in Paris?” Pointer did. “When we returned here—Mrs. Clark came to fetch me: she thought I was too ill to be left to Marie's care alone—the letters had gone. I am sure I placed them in the top of my trunk, or saw Marie put them there just before we started. I had them under my pillow before that. But when Marie unpacked here there was no sign of them. On the whole, I am not sure that their presence was not more of a grief than their absence. But I confess the thought of those letters, sacred to me by my loss, having been lost by some carelessness—” She paused with a worried frown. It was nearly half past eleven before Pointer made his appearance on the following morning. Mrs. Erskine had had an old trunk brought down from the attic in which, as she sent him word, she kept everything belonging to family matters of any kind.