all but knocked over in the theatre, and whom he had found bending over Nancy Barrow, clutching the dagger that now, probably, lay on the table between them. Unless the dog had swallowed it.
“Naughty Vicky,” she scolded the animal without heat. “I am so sorry, sir,” she added to Harris. “I don’t know how she came to escape me! But it has worked out excellently, for I was just telling these men I wished to speak to Mr. Dragan, and here he is!”
She bestowed such a brilliant smile on him that he was dazzled, even knowing she was acting. Even not knowing her purpose.
“This,” Harris said, heavily sardonic, “is Mr. Tizsa.”
“He looks,” the girl said firmly, “like Mr. Dragan.”
“We are the same man,” Dragan said, rising belatedly to his feet. “My surname is Tizsa. How can I help you, madam?”
Harris, scowling heavily, tried to break into an illicit conversation over which he seemed to have lost control, but the girl’s laughter drowned him out.
“How gallant you are! But of course, it is I who came to help you. It bothered me so much that they had arrested you over poor Nancy that I told my brother all about it.” She swung on Harris. “You will probably know my brother, sir? Lord Horace Niven? When I told him how Mr. Dragan—Mr. Tizsa, whatever his name is—could not possibly have done it, he said I must come immediately to Scotland Yard and give you my statement.”
Harris, whose mouth had dropped open, now closed it with a gulp. “Me?” he uttered. “He gave you my name? Is his lordship with you?”
She waved that aside as a matter of no moment, merely caressing the dog and addressing Dragan. “I have been thinking about it, you see, and though I wasn’t perfectly sure last night that you hadn’t killed Nancy, I quite see now that you couldn’t have.”
“And how is that, my lady?” Harris asked, pulling himself together while Dragan held his chair for her. “You are, I take it, Lady Grizelda?”
“How clever of you,” the girl marveled, with a smile of thanks cast to Dragan as she sat. “Let me tell you how it was. We were at the opera. My mother asked me to fetch her fan, which I had foolishly left in the pocket of my cloak, and when I retrieved it from the cloakroom, I walked straight into this gentleman. Or he walked into me. Either way, I was nearly knocked over. It isn’t important, except for the fact that I saw him at the same time as I saw Nancy leaving the theatre. Mr. Tizsa left, too. And then it occurred to me that Nancy had no business to be there, and so I ran out after her. I saw no sign of Mr. Tizsa, but I thought I saw Nancy vanish around the side of the building, so I followed until I found her in the alley.”
“Was she alone?”
The girl nodded, and a muscle twitched beside her eye. She was acting, but this, the horror of discovering the murdered body of her maid, was still with her.
“Mr. Tizsa appeared a few moment later. I’d kicked the dagger as I walked toward Nancy and picked it up without thinking what it was. Mr. Tizsa told me that she was dead and took the dagger from me. And then the policeman came. But the thing is, in the time between them leaving the theater and me following them, there just might have been time for him to kill her. But there could not have been time for him to kill her, run to the end of the alley, run around and come back into the alley from the opposite direction as he did, only seconds after I got there.”
Harris and Dragan both stared at her.
Perversely, Dragan said, “I could have run out the nearer entrance just before you got there and hidden.”
“Where?” she asked. “There was enough light to see, and I looked very carefully before venturing into the dark alley. Well, one would, wouldn’t one?”
“One would,” Dragan agreed. He began to like her, whatever she was up to.
She smiled as though satisfied and turned back to the scowling Harris. “My brother, Lord Horace, said that if I made a statement to that effect, you could not charge Mr. Tizsa but would have to go out and discover the true murderer.”
“And are you prepared to make a statement to that effect?” Harris asked faintly.