"Of course, doctor," he pointed out, "a good deal of your story is like What the Soldier Said—it isn’t first-hand evidence. We’ll have to get it for ourselves, again, from the people who gave it to you: Dr. Markfield and this maid next door. That’s only routine; and doesn’t imply that we disbelieve it in the slightest, naturally."
Dr. Ringwood agreed with a faint smile.
"I prefer getting a patient’s symptoms at first-hand myself," he said. "Things do get distorted a bit in the re-telling. And some of what I gave you is quite possibly just gossip. I thought you ought to hear it; but most certainly I don’t guarantee its accuracy."
The Inspector beamed his approval of the doctor’s views.
"And now, sir," he said, glancing at Sir Clinton, "I think I’d better go over the ground here and see if there’s anything worth picking up."
He suited the action to the word, and began a systematic search of the room, commenting aloud from time to time for his companions’ benefit.
"There’s no pistol here, unless it’s hidden away somewhere," he reported after a while. "The murderer must have taken it away with him."
Sir Clinton’s face took on a quizzical expression.
"Just one suggestion, Inspector. Let’s keep the facts and the inferences in separate boxes, if you please. What we really do know is that you haven’t found any pistol up to the present."
Flamborough’s grin showed that the Chief Constable’s shot had gone home without wounding his feelings.
"Very good, sir. ‘Pistol or pistols, not found.’ I’ll note that down."
He went down on hands and knees to examine the carpet.
"Here’s something fresh, sir," he announced. "The carpet’s so dark that I didn’t notice it before. The pattern concealed it, too. But here it is, all right."
He drew his fore-finger over the fabric at a spot near the door, and then held it for their inspection, stained with an ominous red.
"A blood-spot, and a fair-sized one, too! There may be more of them about."
"Yes," said Sir Clinton mildly. "I noticed some on the hall-carpet as I came in. There’s a trail of them from the front door into this room. Perhaps you didn’t see them; they’re not conspicuous."
The Inspector looked a trifle crestfallen.
"I know you’ve a sharp eye, sir. I didn’t spot them myself."
"Suppose we finish up this room before going elsewhere. All the windows are fast, are they?" the Chief Constable asked.
Flamborough examined them and reported that all the catches were on. Then he gazed up and down the room inquisitively.
"Looking for bullet-holes?" Sir Clinton questioned. "Quite right. But you won’t find any."
"I like to be certain about things, sir."
"So do I, Inspector. So does Dr. Ringwood, if you remember. Well, you can be certain of one thing. If two shots had been fired in here this evening, and if all the windows had been left closed as they are now, then I’d have smelt the tang of the powder in the air when we came in. I didn’t. Ergo, no shots were fired in this room. Whence it follows that it’s no use hunting for bullet-holes. Does that chain of reasoning satisfy you, Inspector?"
Flamborough made a gesture of vexation.
"That’s true enough," he confessed. "I ought to have thought of it."
"I think we’ve got the main points, now, so far as this room itself goes," Sir Clinton observed, without paying any heed to the Inspector’s annoyance. "Would you mind examining the body, doctor, just to confirm your view that he was shot in the lung?"
Dr. Ringwood assented and, crossing over, he subjected young Hassendean’s body to a careful scrutiny. A few minutes sufficed to prove that the only wounds were those in the chest; and when the doctor had satisfied himself that his earlier diagnosis was correct, he turned to the Chief Constable.
"There’s no certainty without a P.M., of course, but from the way the bullets have gone in, it’s pretty obvious that the shots took effect on the left lung. There’s very little external bleeding, apparently; and that rather looks as if one of the intercostal arteries may be involved. He must have bled a lot internally, I suspect. Probably the P.M. will confirm that."
Sir Clinton accepted the verdict without demur.
"And what do you make out of things, Inspector?" he demanded, turning to Flamborough.
"Well, sir, with these small-calibre pistols, it’s difficult to give more than a guess. So far as I can see, it looks as if the pistol had been quite close-up when it was fired. I think I can see something that looks like scorching or discoloration on his dress shirt round about the wound, though the blood makes it hard to be sure. That’s really as far as I’d like to go until I’ve had a better chance of examining the thing."
Sir Clinton turned back to the doctor.
"I suppose a wound in the lung may produce death at almost any length of time after the shot’s actually fired. I mean that a man may live for quite a long while even with a wound like this and might be able to move about to some extent after being shot?"
Dr. Ringwood had no hesitation in agreeing with this.
"He might have lived for an hour or two—even for days. Or else, of course, he might have collapsed almost at once. You never can tell what will happen in lung wounds."
Sir Clinton seemed to give this a certain consideration. Then he moved towards the door.
"We’ll take up the blood-trail now. You’d better switch off the light and lock the door, Inspector. We don’t want anyone blundering in here and getting a fright by any mischance."
They went out into the hall, where Sir Clinton drew the attention of the Inspector to the traces of blood which he had noticed on the carpet.
"Now we’d better have a look at that car outside," he suggested.
As they descended the steps from the front door, the Inspector took a flash-lamp from his pocket and switched it on. Its rays merely served to light up the fog; and it was not until they came almost to the side of the car that they could see much. The Inspector bent across, rubbed his finger over the driving-seat, and then examined his hand in the light of the lamp.
"Some more blood there, sir," he reported.
He cleaned away the marks on his finger-tip and proceeded to explore the other seats in the same manner. The results were negative. Apart from one or two spots on the running-board at the driving-seat door, the car seemed otherwise clean. Inspector Flamborough straightened himself up and turned to Sir Clinton.
"It seems that he must have driven the car back himself, sir. If someone else had done the driving, the blood would have been on some of the other seats instead of this one."
Sir Clinton acquiesced with a gesture.
"I suppose that’s possible, doctor? A wound in the lung wouldn’t incapacitate him completely?"
Dr. Ringwood shook his head.
"It would depend entirely on the sort of wound it was. I see nothing against it, prima facie. Driving a car isn’t really much strain on the body muscles."
Sir Clinton ran his eye over the lines of the car in the light of the side-lamps.
"It’s an Austin, so he’d be able to get the engine going with the self-starter, probably, even on a night like this. He wouldn’t need to crank up the car. There would be no exertion on his part."
The Inspector had been examining the ground.
"It’s frozen fairly hard," he reported. "There’s no hope of tracing the car’s track on a night like this, even if one could have done that through all the marks of the town traffic. That’s a blank end."
"You may as well take the number, Inspector. It’s just possible that some constable may have noticed it, though the chances are about a thousand to one against that, on a night of this sort."
Flamborough went round to the rear number-plate and jotted down the figures in his pocket-book, repeating them aloud as he did so: