"Not yet. Here is a sketch plan of the moat-house interior and the grounds which you may find useful."
"Thanks. You had better prepare a list of the guests before they leave. They are sure to get away as fast as possible, and we may want to interview some of them later on. Now we had better have a look at the body."
They went upstairs to the bedroom. There they found a young man, with a freckled face and a snub nose, packing up a photographic apparatus. He was the photographer, and he had been taking photographs of the dead body.
"Finished?" inquired Merrington. "That's right. Then you and Freeling had better return to London by the next train—you'll be wanted in that Putney case."
The photographer and the finger-print expert left the room together, and Merrington walked across to the bed. He drew away the sheet which covered the dead girl, and bent over the body, examining it closely, but without touching it.
"The corpse has not been moved, I suppose?" he remarked to Caldew, who was standing beside him.
"Not since I arrived. But she may not have been shot in that position. She lived some minutes afterwards, and may have moved slightly—not much, I should say, for there are no marks of bloodstains on any other part of the bed."
Merrington nodded. He was looking at the bullet wound, which was plainly visible through a burnt orifice in the rest-gown which the dead girl was wearing. The wound was a circular punctured hole in the left breast, less than the size of a sixpenny piece.
"The wound has been washed," he observed. "Was that done by the police surgeon?"
"The police surgeon has not been here. The corpse was examined by the village medical man, Dr. Holmes."
"I should like to see him. Where is he to be found?"
"He will be here in the course of the morning. He is attending young Heredith, who is suffering from the shock. The doctor fears brain fever."
"When he comes I want to see him. It is idle speculating about the cause of death in the absence of a doctor. Death in this case appears to have been due to hæmorrhage. Apparently the murderer aimed at the heart and missed it, and the shot went through the lungs. The shot was fired at very close range too—look how the wrapper is burnt! Any sign of the bullet, Caldew?"
"I found none."
"Well, we shall have to wait for the doctor to clear up these points."
His trained eyes swept round the bedroom, taking stock of every article in it. He next carefully examined the door, and the lock on it.
"The door was open when the others came upstairs, you said, Caldew?"
"Yes—about half open."
"That accounts for the scream and the shot being heard so plainly downstairs. It also suggests that the murderer fled very hurriedly, leaving the door open behind him."
"It seems to me more likely that he escaped by the window, even if he did not enter that way. Miss Heredith, who was the last inmate of the household to see Mrs. Heredith alive, thinks that the window was closed when she was in the room before dinner."
Merrington walked over to the window and examined it, testing the lock and looking at the sill.
"Does Miss Heredith say that the window was locked, or merely closed, when she was in the room?" he asked.
"She cannot say definitely. She thinks it was closed because the air was heavy, and she knew that Mrs. Heredith disliked having her bedroom window open."
Merrington shrugged his shoulders contemptuously.
"A woman's fancies are not much to build a theory upon," he said. "Have you any other reason for thinking that the murderer may have escaped by this window?"
"Yes. After the shot was fired the guests rushed upstairs immediately, and the murderer would have run into them if he had attempted to escape downstairs."
"Is there no other means of escape from the wing except by the staircase?"
"There is the back staircase I told you of, at the end of the corridor. That staircase is never used. The door is kept locked, and the key hangs in a room downstairs. It was the door at the bottom of this staircase which was found unlocked by the butler yesterday evening."
"I'll have a look at it, and then we'll go downstairs. I want to see this bedroom window from outside."
They left the bedroom and proceeded to the end of the corridor, where Caldew pointed out the door at the top of the staircase. Merrington opened it, and went down the stairs. He reappeared after the lapse of a few minutes with dusty hands and cobwebs on his clothes.
"The murderer didn't get in that way," he said. "On the face of it, it seems a plausible theory to suggest that he entered by the locked door and hid himself somewhere in this wing, and escaped after committing the murder by jumping through the bedroom window. But it is impossible to get over your point that if he had entered by the door he would have tried to escape by the same means, not knowing that the door had been locked in the meantime. To do that he must have traversed the corridor twice and gone down and up these back stairs while the guests were coming up the other stairs. He couldn't have done it in the time. He would have been caught—cut off before he could get back. Look at this steep flight of stairs and the length of the corridor! That disposes of the incident of the door. Whoever unlocked it was not the murderer."
Merrington retraced his steps along the corridor. As he walked, his eyes roved restlessly over the tapestry hangings and velvet curtains, and took in the dark nooks and corners which abound in old English country-houses.
"Plenty of places here where a man might hide," he muttered, in a dissatisfied voice.
At the head of the front staircase he paused, and looked over the balusters, as though calculating the distance to the hall beneath. Then he descended the stairs.
It still wanted half an hour to breakfast time. There was no sign of anybody stirring downstairs except a fresh-faced maidservant, who was dusting the furniture in the great hall. She glanced nervously at the groups of police officials, and then resumed her dusting. Merrington strode across to her.
"What is your name, my dear?" he asked, in his great voice.
"Milly Saker, sir."
"Very well, Milly. I'll come and have a talk with you presently—just our two selves."
The girl, far from looking delighted at this prospect, backed away with a frightened face. Merrington strode on through the open front door, and turned towards the left wing.
It was a crisp autumn morning. The early sunshine fell on the hectic flush of decay in the foliage of the woods, but a thin wisp of vapour still lingered across the moat-house garden and the quiet fields beyond. Merrington kept on until he reached the large windows of the dining-room, which opened on to the terraced garden.
"That's Mrs. Heredith's window," he said, pointing up to it. "Her bedroom is directly over the dining-room. If the murderer escaped by the window he must have dropped on to this gravel path."
"It is a pretty stiff drop," said Captain Stanhill, measuring the distance with his eye.
"Oh, I don't know," replied Merrington. "He'd let himself down eight feet with extended arms, and that would leave a drop of only ten feet or thereabouts—not much for an athletic man. But if he dropped he must have left footprints."
"There