The paper showed a rough circle, marked into twelve segments like the numerals on a clock face, representing the seats we had occupied last night. Each segment was marked with the name of the person in that seat. (Several of the names had queries next to them.) To the right of the chair labeled DR. P. (?) was a stick figure spread out on the floor, obviously marking where the doctor’s body had fallen. At the corner of the paper, more or less opposite that figure, was an arrow pointing away from the table, marked TO DOOR.
“I’m not certain,” I said. “I think you may have switched the positions of the doctor and his wife—but I could be wrong. I agree with all the ones you’ve marked as definite. That still leaves a few places in question, though.”
“Let Miss Martha look,” he said, and I passed the sheet to her.
She studied it a moment, then looked up and said, “It’s right as far as I can tell. As Mr. Cabot says, you may have Mr. and Mrs. Parkhurst reversed, and I’m not certain whether Sir Denis or Lady Alice sat next to your wife—but Mrs. Clemens will remember that detail.”
Mr. Clemens frowned. “Well, if both of you remember the doctor in the other chair, let’s put him in it. We can change it if everybody else remembers different. But if we’re going to go up against Lestrade, we need to know that for certain.”
“How so?” I asked.
“Because it tells us where he was most likely shot from,” said Mr. Clemens. “The force of a bullet knocks a body backward. If he was shot from over by the door, his body should have fallen to the left—his left, I mean. So if he fell to the right, that means the shot had to come from somewhere else.”
“The shooter could have walked across the room to the other corner before he fired his shot,” I pointed out.
“Sure, but why the hell would he do that?” said Mr. Clemens. “If he was right by the door, all he had to do was take his shot, duck back out, and go straight down the stairs. Walking over there, he’d have risked bumping into furniture in the dark, making it twice as hard to avoid notice—or to get away afterwards.”
“He might have done it to confuse us,” I said, realizing even as I did how improbable my explanation was.
“And he might have flown out the window over there and closed it behind him,” said my employer, scornfully waving in that direction. Then his expression changed. “Damn—I never thought of that. There’s not a balcony or a wide ledge, or anything of the sort outside that window, is there?”
“Not a balcony—I’m sure of that,” said Martha. “To tell the truth, I’ve never looked to see if there might be a ledge.”
Together the three of us traipsed over to the window in question, and raised the shade. The window overlooked a small garden, bounded by a low brick wall separating it from the neighbors’ gardens. Martha undid the window latch and raised the sash—with some little difficulty, it seemed to me.
Mr. Clemens leaned out and looked down. “Well, there’s a ledge,” he said. “Maybe six inches wide; I wouldn’t want to try to walk along it and open this window from the outside, but that doesn’t mean somebody else couldn’t have done it. So there is another way the killer could have gotten in.”
“He’d have had to know in advance that the window would be unlocked,” said Martha. “But it was locked, and as you just saw, it is not easy to open. I also think we would have noticed the draft as it was opened.”
“Maybe,” said Mr. Clemens. “But he might have had somebody inside open the lock for him. And maybe, over by the table, we wouldn’t notice the draft if it was only open for a few seconds. Remember, there wasn’t any wind to speak of last night.”
“I don’t deny that it was possible,” said Martha. “As you know, I was not paying close attention to the external world at the time in question. But isn’t it likely that one of us would have heard something, or felt the breeze, or seen light from the outside, when the killer made his entrance?”
“Well, it was pretty dark last night, so there wouldn’t necessarily have been any light from outside,” said Mr. Clemens. “As for the noise, well, we’ve already pointed out that there was enough other noise to cover it up. Don’t get me wrong, now—all I’m saying is that, if the killer had help from somebody on the inside, and if he could get into one of the other apartments on this floor to get out on the ledge, and if he was fool enough to walk around it carrying a gun—” He stopped with a sheepish look, then said, “Hell, that’s a lot of ifs, ain’t it?”
“A few too many, I think,” I said. “Nor should we forget that the ledge would have been slippery from the drizzle last night.”
“Maybe he came up a ladder from the garden down below,” said my employer. He leaned out the window again, looking toward the ground below, then stood back up with a sigh, and pulled the window down again. “We ought to go down and see if there are any marks where a ladder might have set.”
“We can do that when we leave,” I agreed. Then, after a moment’s thought, I added, “I don’t mean to reject your idea outright, but it seems to rely on too many improbabilities. It also assumes that the murderer was willing to risk being seen by a neighbor.”
“Mr. Cabot has a good point,” said Martha. “The neighbors would very likely have sent for the police if they had
