I lit another cigarette and sat down on one of the chairs outside the front door. In a little while Mrs Sype came out of the hous. She stood for a moment looking out across the hills, then she sat down in the other chair. Her dry eyes looked at me calmly.
'You're a detective, I suppoes,' she said
'Yes. I'm working for the company that insured the Leander pearls.'
She looker away. 'I thought would have peace here,' she said. 'That people would leave him alone.'
'He tried to keep the pearls. That was wrong.'
She turned her head quickly. She looked afraid.
I took the piece of paper out of my pocket and opened it.
There were, two hundred grand worth of murder.
'Peace?' I said. 'Nobody wanted to take away from him. But it wasn't enough for him.'
She looked slowly, hungrily at pearls. Her voice sounded dry and hard.
'Poor Wally ,' she said. 'So you did find them. You're kind of clever, you know. He killed an awful lot of fish before he learned how to do that.' She looked up into my face.
She said, 'I always hated the idea. But Wally had to do it.'
She smiled at me. I didn't smile back.
She said, 'You see, he once had the pearls, the real ones, and he felt they were his. But when he came out of prison, he couldn't find the place where he had hidden them.'
I felt an icy finger moving up and down my back.
Something-was it my voice?-said,'Huh?'