shouldn’t think Hoode was asleep, sir.’
‘Exactly. It is known that Hoode was a hard worker. Further, if I’m not mistaken, he’s been more than usually busy just recently—over the new Angora Agreement. I think we can take it for granted he wasn’t asleep when the murderer came in through that window. That leads us to something of real importance, namely, that Hoode was not surprised by the entry of the murderer.’
Boyd scratched his head. ‘’Fraid I don’t quite get you, as the Yanks say, sir.’
Anthony looked at him with benevolence. ‘To make myself clearer, I’ll put it like this: he either (i) expected the murderer—though not, of course, as such—and expected him to enter that way; or (ii) did not expect him to enter that way, but on looking up in surprise saw someone who, though he had entered in that unfamiliar way, was yet so familiar in himself as not to cause Hoode to remain long, if at all, out of his seat. Personally, I think he didn’t leave his chair at all. Is not all this well spoken, Boyd?’
‘True enough, sir. I think you’re quite right again. I’ve been a fool.’ Boyd was dejected. ‘Of the two views you propounded, so to speak, I think the first’s the right one. The murderer was an outsider, but one the deceased was expecting—and by that entrance.’
‘And I,’ said Anthony, ‘incline strongly toward my second theory of the unconventional entry of the familiar.’
Boyd shook his head. ‘You’d hardly credit it, sir,’ he said solemnly, ‘but some of these big men get up to very funny games. I’ve had over twenty years in the C.I.D., and I know.’
‘The mistake you’re making in this case, Boyd,’ Anthony said, ‘is thinking of it as like all your others. From what little I’ve seen so far of this affair it’s much more like a novel than real life, which is mostly dull and hardly ever true. As I asked you before, d’you ever read detective stories? Gaboriau, for instance?’
‘Lord, no, sir!’ smiled the real detective.
‘You should.’
‘Pardon me, sir, but you’re a knock-out at this game yourself and it makes me wonder, so to speak, how you can hold with all that ’tec-tale truck.’
‘A knock-out? Me?’ Anthony laughed. ‘And I feel as futile as if I were Sherlock Holmes trying to solve a case of Lecoq’s.’ He put a hand to his head. ‘There’s something about this room that’s haunting me! What is the damned thing? Boyd, there’s something wrong about the blasted place, I tell you!’
Boyd looked bewildered. ‘I don’t know what you mean, sir.’ Then, to humour this eccentric, he added: ‘Ah! if only this furniture could tell us what it saw last night.’
‘I said that to the clock,’ said Anthony morosely. Then suddenly: ‘The clock, the clock! Grandpa did tell me something! I knew I’d seen or heard something that was utterly wrong, insane. The clock! Good God Almighty! What a fool not to think of it before!’
Boyd became alarmed. His tone was soothing. ‘What about the clock, sir?’
‘It struck. D’you remember it beginning when you were taking the body away?’
‘Yes.’ Boyd was all mystification.
‘What time was that?’
‘Why, eleven, of course, sir.’
‘Yes, it was, my canny Scot. But grandfather said twelve. I was thinking about something else, I must have counted the strokes unconsciously.’
‘But—but—are you sure it struck twelve when’—Boyd glanced up at the old clock—‘when it said eleven?’
Anthony crossed the room, opened the glass casing of the old clock-face, and moved the hands on fifteen minutes. They stood then at twelve.
‘Bong!’ went the clock.
They waited. It did not strike again.
Anthony was triumphant. ‘There you are, Boyd! Grandpa looks twelve and says one. There’s another strand of that rope you’re making for the murderer. Miss Hoode came in here at eleven-ten, to find the murder done and the murderer gone. Your time’s almost fixed for you. He wasn’t here at eleven-ten, but he was here after eleven, because, to put the striking of that clock out as it is, the murderer must have put back the hands after the hour—eleven, that is—had struck. If he’d done it before the striking had begun, grand-dad wouldn’t be telling lies the way he is.’
Boyd’s expression was a mixture of elation and doubt. ‘I suppose that’s right, sir,’ he said. ‘About the striking, I mean. Yes, of course it is; just for the moment I was a bit confused, so to speak. Couldn’t work out which way the mistake would come.’
‘It seems to me,’ said Anthony, ‘that the whole reason he faked this elaborate struggle scene was in order that the clock could be stopped under what would seem natural circumstances. But why, having stopped the clock, did he alter it? Two reasons occur to me. One is that he merely wished to make it seem that the murder was done at any other time except that when it really was. That’s rather weak, and I prefer my second idea. That is, that the time to which he moved the hands has a significance and wasn’t merely a chance shot. In other words, he set the thing at ten-forty-five because he had a nice clean alibi for that time. Judging by the rest of his work he’s a man of brains; and that would’ve been a pretty little safeguard—if only he hadn’t made that mistake about the striking.’
‘They all make bloomers—one time or another, sir. That’s how we catch ’em in the main.’
‘I know.’ Anthony’s tone was less sure than a moment before. ‘All the same it’s a damn silly mistake. Doesn’t seem to fit in somehow. I’d expected better things from him.’
‘Oh, I don’t know, sir. He’d probably got the wind up, as they say, by the time he’d got so near finishing.’
Anthony shrugged. ‘Yes, I suppose you’re right. By the way, Boyd, tell me this. How did Miss Hoode come to be downstairs at ten past eleven? I thought she was supposed to have gone to bye-bye after that game of cards.’
‘As far as I know—I haven’t been able to see her yet, sir—she came down to use the telephone—not this one but the one in the hall—about some minor affair she’d forgotten during the day. After she’d finished phoning she must’ve wanted to speak to her brother. Probably about the same matter. That’s all, sir.’
‘It’s so weak,’ said Anthony, ‘that it might possibly be true.’ Then, after a pause: ‘I think I’ve had about enough of this tomb. What you going to do next, Boyd? I’m for the garden.’ He walked to the door. ‘You took the weaker end of my reasoning if you still believe in the mysterious outsider.’
Boyd followed across the hall, through the verandah and down the steps which led from the flagged walk behind the house to the lawns below.
Anthony sat himself down upon a wooden seat set in the shade of a great tree. He showed little inclination for argument.
But Boyd was stubborn. ‘You know, sir,’ he said, ‘you’re wrong in what you say about the “insider”. You’d agree with me if you’d been here long enough to sift what evidence there is and been able the way I have to see and talk to all the people instead of hearing about them sketchy and second-hand, as it were.’
Anthony looked at him. ‘There’s certainly something in that, Boyd. But it’ll take a lot to shift me. Mind you, my predilection for the “insider” isn’t a conviction. But it’s my fancy—and strong.’
Boyd fumbled in his breast-pocket. ‘Then you just take a good look at this, sir.’ He held out some folded sheets of foolscap. ‘I made that out before you got here this morning. It’ll tell you better what I mean than I can talking. And I only sketched the thing to you before.’
Anthony unfolded the sheet, and read: