The liver on the stove was burning.  There was a smell of scorching through the rooms and a sort of bluish haze of smoke.  I hurried back and took it off.  By the time I had cleaned the pan, Mr. Holcombe was back again, in his own boat.  He had found it at the end of the next street, where the flood ceased, but no sign of Ladley anywhere.  He had not seen the police boat.

“Perhaps that is just as well,” he said philosophically.  “We can’t go to the police with a wet slipper and a blood-stained rope and accuse a man of murder.  We have to have a body.”

“He killed her,” I said obstinately.  “She told me yesterday he was a fiend.  He killed her and threw the body in the water.”

“Very likely.  But he didn’t throw it here.”

But in spite of that, he went over all the lower hall with his boat, feeling every foot of the floor with an oar, and finally, at the back end, he looked up at me as I stood on the stairs.

“There’s something here,” he said.

I went cold all over, and had to clutch the railing.  But when Terry had come, and the two of them brought the thing to the surface, it was only the dining-room rug, which I had rolled up and forgotten to carry up-stairs!

At half past one Mr. Holcombe wrote a note, and sent it off with Terry, and borrowing my boots, which had been Mr. Pitman’s, investigated the dining-room and kitchen from a floating plank; the doors were too narrow to admit the boat.  But he found nothing more important than a rolling-pin.  He was not at all depressed by his failure.  He came back, drenched to the skin, about three, and asked permission to search the Ladleys’ bedroom.

“I have a friend coming pretty soon, Mrs. Pitman,” he said, “a young newspaper man, named Howell.  He’s a nice boy, and if there is anything to this, I’d like him to have it for his paper.  He and I have been having some arguments about circumstantial evidence, too, and I know he’d like to work on this.”

I gave him a pair of Mr. Pitman’s socks, for his own were saturated, and while he was changing them the telephone rang.  It was the theater again, asking for Jennie Brice.

“You are certain she is out of the city?” some one asked, the same voice as in the morning.

“Her husband says so.”

“Ask him to come to the phone.”

“He is not here.”

“When do you expect him back?”

“I’m not sure he is coming back.”

“Look here,” said the voice angrily, “can’t you give me any satisfaction?  Or don’t you care to?”

“I’ve told you all I know.”

“You don’t know where she is?”

“No, sir.”

“She didn’t say she was coming back to rehearse for next week’s piece?”

“Her husband said she went away for a few days’ rest.  He went away about noon and hasn’t come back.  That’s all I know, except that they owe me three weeks’ rent that I’d like to get hold of.”