“H’m! And the baby?”

“No baby. Crib’s empty. Looks crook to me.”

“It will be crook… if the baby has been abducted. What’ll it be? The fifth?”

Yoti went into the house, followed by the doctor. Essen planted himself in the doorway, and the constable stolidly regarded Mr Thring and continued to say nothing.

At the bedroom, Yoti stepped aside to permit Nott to enter. He watched the doctor release the spring blinds, turn to regard the cot. It seemed that the baby was of prior importance even to Doctor Nott, for he came back to the cot to peer into it and at the feeding bottle on the low table, having no apparent interest in the dead woman. He gained Yoti’s approval by touching nothing… till he came to examine the body. Presently he said:

“Lower the blinds.”

Yoti nodded, waited for the blinds to reduce the starkness of Death, withdrew before the doctor and crossed the hall to the lounge. The doctor thumped his bag on the polished table, sat on the table-edge and produced cigarette-case and lighter.

“Been dead, I’d guess, about thirty-six hours,” he stated.“Takes it back to last Monday night… sometime. Hit with something blunt and heavy. Could be a hammer, or the point of a walking-stick handle.”

“Was done as she entered the bedroom, I suppose?”

“Looks like it. Merely the one blow was enough.”

“Know anything about her?”

“A little. Came to me early in December. Wanted to book in at the hospital. Managed it all right, although she’d left it very late. She told me she had come up from Melbourne after her husband had been killed in a road accident.”

“Why come to Mitford, d’you know?”

“Yes. Said she thought the dry conditions here would be better for her lungs. I agreed when I found that one was touched.”

“Where did she live in Melbourne?”

“I don’t know that, Yoti. She did say that her doctor was in practice in Glen Iris. Doctor Allan Browner.”