“Wait!” echoed Rollison hollowly. “My dear Aunt, you certainly must be prepared to wait. And wait a very long time. Surely you don’t believe you’ll ever see a penny of that money again?”

“I certainly do believe it,” said Lady Hurst sharply. “Everything else Madam Melinska said has come true. She told me you’d take an unsolicited interest in the case, and you have.”

Rollison sighed.

“But, Aunt, she could easily have known I’ve a reputation for poking my nose into other people’s business. And once she knew you had a nephew with my kind of reputation—”

He paused, hearing his aunt breathe heavily into the receiver, and steeled himself against whatever blast she was preparing. With great deliberation and in her deepest voice, she responded:

“Richard, you are both a cynic and a sceptic. I shall now prove that you are quite wrong about her, and that she does have some strange gift of seeing facts of which she can have no personal knowledge. Go to your Trophy Wall, and count the number of trophies on it.”

Rollison said faintly: “Yes, but—but why?”

“Go and count them!” his aunt thundered.

“I counted the trophies last night,” Rollison told her defensively. “Jolly and I were in a nostalgic mood.”

“Then you found, according to Madam Melinska, that there were forty-nine, and that today you are to begin your fiftieth investigation.” After a pause the old woman went on with a touch of anxiety in her voice: “Isn’t that true, Richard? This will be your fiftieth case?”

“Glory be,” said Richard Rollison sonorously, “that is exactly right. Fifty it is.”

“But how could she know?” whispered Jolly, from the door.

CHAPTER TWO

Madam Melinska

“Jolly,” said Rollison. “Sir?” said Jolly.

“When did this woman come here and count the trophies?”