the crime, and I think you are going
to have a difficulty in persuading a jury that he didn't. You see
Merrill's story is that he came and saw his uncle, that they had a few
minutes' chat together, that his uncle suddenly had an attack of
faintness, and that he went out of the room into the dining room to get
a glass of water. While Merrill was in the dining room he heard the
shots, and came running back, still with the glass in his hand, and saw
his uncle lying on the ground. I saw the glass, which was half filled.

"I was also there in time to examine the dining room and see that Mr.
Merrill had spilled some of the water when he was taking it from the
carafe. All that part of the story is circumstantially sound. What we
cannot understand, and what a jury will never understand, is how, in the
very short space of time, the murderer could have got into the room and
made his escape again."

"The French windows were open," said Mr. Mann. "All the evidence that we
have is to this effect, including the evidence of P. C. Wiseman."

"In those circumstances, how comes it that the constable, who, when he
heard the shot, made straight for the room, did not meet the murderer
escaping? He saw nobody in the grounds--"

"Except Sergeant Smith, or Crawley," interspersed Saul Arthur Mann
readily. "I have reason to believe, and, indeed, reason to know, that
Sergeant Smith, or Crawley, had a motive for being in the house. I
supplied Mr. Minute, who was a client of mine, with certain documents,
and those documents were in a safe in his bedroom. What is more likely
than that this Crawley, to whom it was vitally necessary that the
documents in question should be recovered, should have entered the house
in search of those documents? I don't mind telling you that they
related to a fraud of which he was the author, and they were in
themselves all the proof which the police would require to obtain a
conviction against him. He was obviously the man who struck down Mr.
Cole, and whose light the constable saw flashing in the upper window."

"In that case he cannot have been the murderer," said the detective
quickly, "because the shots were fired while he was still in the room.
They were almost simultaneous with the appearance of the flash at the
upper window."

"H'm!" said Saul Arthur Mann, for the moment nonplussed.

"The more you go into this matter, the more complicated does it become,"
said the police officer, with a shake of his head,