Free Puzzle of the Silver Persian by Stuart Palmer Page A

throw her overboard when both exits from that stretch of the deck were covered—one by the drowsing school teacher and the other by the roommate who was coming in search of Rosemary?”
    The chief inspector considered this an intelligent question and stopped at the rail to ponder it.
    “Suppose she was leaning over the boat-deck rail, and Noel was up in the rigging somewhere? If he’d thrown something and hit her, she’d have gone right over, headfirst…”
    Cannon stopped and shook his head. “Too easy,” he said. “He wouldn’t have chanced a miss.”
    He looked up. “She must have been standing at the rail right over our heads,” he observed. “It was somewhere amidships, anyway. This lower deck, we’ve found out, was deserted. Suppose Noel had been standing here and had reached up with a boat hook or something, and pulled her down?”
    Sergeant Secker ventured to suggest that he had never seen a boat hook used on an ocean liner—not even on a half-pint vessel like the American Diplomat.
    Cannon was forced to admit the justice of that. “Or even a walking stick,” he went on. The rail of the boat deck was only a few feet above their heads.
    “It would be easy if she’d worn a long scarf…” began the sergeant. He stopped short and nearly fell overboard as an acidulous voice cut in from a point seemingly just behind his ear.
    “Rosemary Fraser did wear a long scarf!”
    Both men whirled to see the New England face of a lean New England spinster, which had materialized miraculously almost between them. Miss Hildegarde Withers, her hair neatly braided, was leaning from her porthole.
    “Don’t look so indignant,” she said. “If you’re going to shout at each other outside my window all morning, you can’t blame me for butting in.”
    “My dear madame—” barked the chief inspector.
    But Sergeant Secker clung to one idea. “You say that Rosemary Fraser wore a scarf?”
    “It was as characteristic of her as the coat she affected,” said Hildegarde Withers. “All through the voyage she wore a gray squirrel coat and a long, dangling scarf, dark blue. When I saw her at the rail, she had no coat, but she was wearing the scarf.”
    “There you are,” said Sergeant Secker to his chief.
    Cannon was not sure just where he was. The young man plunged merrily on. “Noel had seen the scarf, hadn’t he? He was carrying a dose of poison which he had stolen from the doctor earlier in the evening, wasn’t he? Well, as he stood at the rail down here, wondering how he was going to get a chance to administer the cyanide, he saw the blue scarf dangling. On an impulse, he yanked at it—and Rosemary Fraser plunged past him—down into the water.”
    The chief inspector chewed this for a while, and Miss Withers very nearly clapped her hands in applause. Yet she realized immediately that some tiny detail, half remembered from the night when Rosemary Fraser disappeared, stubbornly refused to be fitted into the sergeant’s ingenious explanation. It was temporarily lost in the bottom of her mind, and there was nothing she could do about it until she could remember just what it was. Something to do with the deck and the wind and the night—and the wind—
    Chief Inspector Cannon, to do him credit, was not hesitant in his recognition of good work. He smote his assistant so heavily upon the shoulder that the young man winced a little. “Now tha’s talking, lad!” He stopped suddenly and snapped his thick fingers. “It’s my turn now.” Forgetting that Miss Withers still formed an uninvited member of the party, Cannon went loudly on: “All along one thing has been bothering me—the splash!”
    “What splash?” interrupted Hildegarde Withers from her porthole. “There wasn’t any.”
    “Right you are! That’s what bothered me. But I should have remembered a case that came up three or four years ago. Murders aboard the Countess of Teal —which was a dirty little tramp steamer anchored off Gravesend. Look