Murder by Matchlight by Edith Caroline Rivett

Macdonald had timed his identification parade for 5.45, that hour being reasonably convenient for all parties concerned. “Quite a circus you’ve got here, Jock,” murmured one of his fellow inspectors and Macdonald felt that the comment was cogent. All the tenants of 5 Belfort Grove had been summoned to attend; Miss Rosie Willing, smiling and interested, looking quite remarkably young, stood beside Miss Odette Grey—the latter a platinum blonde of tonsorial perfection with an expression of calm disdain on her most efficiently painted face. Miss Grey wore a fur swagger coat over her brief petunia coloured house frock and she had an expensive posy of orchids pinned to her shoulder. Close to these two ladies stood Mr. and Mrs. Rameses, he with an expression of stolid indifference on his dark melancholy face, while his “Lady-bird” was suitably all of a twitter. Just behind them was Mr. Carringford, looking very much out of place among his theatrical fellow tenants. In addition were a few odd “supers” who had been collected to mingle with the principals in the identity parade. In another room Bruce Mallaig and Stanley Claydon looked furtively at one another, both wondering who were the other men with them in the room.

Both groups of people were given similar instructions in their different rooms: the Belfort Grove collection was asked to study the men who would file past them in order that they could say if any of them had ever been seen in or near Number 5a. The group in which Mallaig and Claydon found themselves were told to study the people they would see in the other room and to say if they had ever seen them before. The doors were then opened and the Mallaig-Claydon group walked into the other room and filed very slowly past the Belfort Grove tenants.