The ‘Star’ Ushak

‘“The police seem at a loss to account for the almost entire absence of blood at the scene. Barring some residual seepage through the victim’s wounds, which must have occurred after death, there was none at all; indeed, the Turkey carpet on which the body lay bore no trace of the violence with which it had been used. The police are working on the theory that the murder was committed elsewhere, and the body then transported to the victim’s flat sometime late last night. This conjecture, however, raises new difficulties. Professor Cuthbert’s neighbour, Mrs Hermione Doughty, a widow who suffers with insomnia, affirmed that the house was completely quiet after about ten o’clock, when the professor’s dinner guests took their leave. She says that she heard him singing to himself for a while, in the peculiar incantatory style which he had lately affected, but that this soon stopped, enabling her to sleep undisturbed until this morning when she was awakened by the charwoman’s screams.’”