The bed was soft, too soft. Although he was desperately tired, he tossed from side to side in a vain endeavour to sleep. It must have been two hours before he dozed, and then he woke. It was a shrill, thin cry that woke him, and he sat up in bed, listening. It came again, from somewhere downstairs. It was a cat, he thought; no human voice was capable of such an attenuation of sound. Again the cry! He got out of bed, walked to the door, opened it, and bent his head, listening. And then the hair of his head rose. It was a child’s sobs he heard, and then a voice: “I want my daddy! I want my daddy!” He heard Mrs. Inglethorne’s growling voice, as if she had been wakened from sleep. “Shut up, blast you! If I get up to you I’ll break your neck!” And then the voices ceased, and Peter went back to bed. But it was not until the sound of closing doors in the street told him that the early workers were abroad, that he fell into a troubled sleep, disturbed by dreams of a child who cried and moaned all the time: “I want my daddy! I want my daddy!” CHAPTER V. A DEAD MAN Leslie received a letter on the following afternoon, when she came back from her office. 104 Severall Street, Lambeth. Dear Miss Maughan: I have lodgings at the above address, and in spite of the neighbourhood they are very comfortable, though my landlady is certainly the most unprepossessing female. There are six children in the house, ranging from a few months to a little girl of eight years. So, whatever are her faults, Mrs. Inglethorne--who drinks gin and has the fiery face of a Betsey Prig--has served her country most prolifically! I am buying some new clothes and hope to report, in a few days, that I am riding upward on a tide of prosperity. What Mr. Coldwell called “The Dawlish Case,” but which she thought about under quite another title, was completely occupying the girl’s mind. It was her first big case in the sense that never before had the wheels of investigation moved of her own volition. There had been more spectacular events with which she had been associated. She had helped Coldwell in the Kent Tunnel murder; it was her quick mind which had first grasped the fact that the principal informant of the police knew too much about the tragedy for one who had not participated in the crime. She it was who, searching the contents of a prisoner’s pocket, had found the stain of indelible ink upon a silver coin, and had built upon that slender clue the theory which led to the arrest of the Flack Gang, and the capture of the plant with which they had been flooding Europe with forged one-thousand-franc notes. She brought to police work the keenest of woman’s wits and a queer instinct for ultimate causes that sometimes amazed and sometimes amused headquarters. And now she was building up a new fabric, but, as she realized, on the shakiest of foundations--a little book of verse found in a Cumberland cottage.