“Poison, obviously,” Sir Clinton concluded.
The doctor agreed, adding in confirmation:
“None of these darts came near a vital spot. Alone, they’d never have killed a man.”
“Can you guess what poison was used?”
The doctor shook his head.
“Not my line. Some of these Indian arrow-poisons, perhaps. Ardsley could tell you something about them, most likely.”
“Who’s Ardsley? Could one get hold of him quickly?”
“He lives less than a mile from here. He’s a medical; but he doesn’t practise. Curiously enough, toxicology is his line, more or less. He’s a bit of a physiologist, too. I know he has a vivisection licence. You might do worse than look him up. He might be able to give you a hint.”
Sir Clinton looked thoughtful for a moment.
“What worries me is that a man can’t be in two places at once. I’m going to take over this case myself, and there’s enough work on hand in the next hour to keep two men busy. It’s time I’m up against at present.”
The doctor, reflecting on the conflicting calls of a country Practice, was inclined to think that Sir Clinton seemed to make a fuss about very little.
V
The Evidence in the Case
When the doctor had completed his work and left the room, Sir Clinton pulled the tin box of darts from his pocket and went over to the window to examine it. The box itself suggested nothing in the way of a clue; it was of a common pattern. He turned from it to the darts themselves.
“That brown stuff on the feathering is evidently the poison, whatever it may be,” he reflected. “It doesn’t seem much of a dose to kill a man, especially if one assumes that it was a quick death. Even ordinary snake poison would hardly do the trick quick enough. And yet these fellows didn’t seem to have moved much after they were hit, to judge by the look of the ground.”
He took a Coddington lens from his pocket and scanned one of the darts carefully; then with a pin he probed a dark spot near the point of the projectile.
“So that’s it! He’s drilled a hole clean through the metal and filled up the hollow with poison. That would mean a fair quantity driven well home under the skin; and the blood would soon wash the stuff out of the cavity, since both ends are open. An ingenious devil, evidently.”
He thoughtfully replaced the dart in the box; but before putting the tin back into his pocket he counted the missiles carefully.
“Eleven of them here; and six more in the two bodies.”
He glanced at the open box again, trying to estimate its probable capacity.
“That must have been the lot.”
The doctor had extracted the six fatal darts from the bodies and left them lying on a piece of lint on the dressing-table. Sir Clinton rolled them up cautiously; took his cigarette-case from his pocket; emptied out the contents; and inserted the packet of darts instead.
“I’m not likely to get pricked now, short of a big smash.”
After putting the cigarette-case and the tin box containing the darts into his pockets, he left the room and went downstairs. The windows throughout the house had been darkened; but Sir Clinton found his way in the semi-obscurity to Roger Shandon’s study; and here he came upon Wendover, the two guests, and the secretary. Costock had been left in the hall in charge of a constable.
“Now,” Sir Clinton said, as he sat down, “I’m afraid I shall have to trouble you for information. What I want first of all are the plain facts—nothing else. We’ll come to suspicions afterwards. Which of you saw the Shandons alive last?”
“I believe I did,” the secretary volunteered. “At about ten minutes past three this afternoon, Roger Shandon sent one of the maids for me, and I came straight to this room. He gave me some directions about letters. While he was doing this, Neville Shandon looked into the room. He had some papers in his hand. Seeing us engaged, he went away again. That would be about twenty-five past three, approximately. Almost immediately after that, Roger Shandon dismissed me; and I noticed him from the window, going towards the Maze. That was the last I saw of either of them, till I found their bodies in the Maze.”
Sir Clinton went to the writing-table and made a note.
“You saw Neville Shandon last at about 3:25 p.m., and Roger at, say, 3:30 p.m.?”
“As near as I can gauge the times,” Stenness confirmed.
Sir Clinton considered for a moment.
“I judge that it would take a man walking at an ordinary pace at least ten minutes—say eleven or twelve—to reach the Maze from the house. That means that Neville Shandon could have reached the Maze at 3:37; and Roger might have got there at 3:42. But possibly they were some minutes later than that; and quite possibly, also, they may have arrived in a different order, since no one seems to have seen them actually enter the Maze, so far as we have gone with the story.”
The secretary indicated assent to this with a nod. Sir Clinton turned next to Torrance.
“I take it that you can carry our information further?”
Howard Torrance gave his version of the events up to the moment when he discovered the body of Neville Shandon in the enclosure by the Pool of Narcissus.
“Exact times are what we want,” Sir Clinton reminded him when he had completed his narrative.
“Can’t give you anything except two. I happened to look at my watch while Miss Forrest and I were sitting under the trees. It was some time after three, then—I think it was twenty past three, but I couldn’t swear to
