Mrs. Archer was shown the pistol and recognized it as the one she had seen in Mr. Redding’s sitting-room “over against the bookcase, he kept it, lying about.” She had last seen it on the day of the murder. Yes – in answer to a further question – she was quite sure it was there at lunch time on Thursday – quarter to one when she left.
I remembered what the inspector had told me, and I was mildly surprised. However vague she might have been when he questioned her, she was quite positive about it now.
The coroner summed up in a negative manner, but with a good deal of firmness. The verdict was given almost immediately:
Murder by Person or Persons unknown.
As I left the room I was aware of a small army of young men with bright, alert faces and a kind of superficial resemblance to each other. Several of them were already known to me by sight as having haunted the Vicarage the last few days. Seeking to escape, I plunged back into the Blue Boar and was lucky enough to run straight into the archæologist, Dr. Stone. I clutched at him without ceremony.
“Journalists,” I said briefly and expressively. “If you could deliver me from their clutches?”
“Why, certainly, Mr. Clement. Come upstairs with me.”
He led the way up the narrow staircase and into his sitting-room, where Miss Cram was sitting rattling the keys of a typewriter with a practiced touch. She greeted me with a broad smile of welcome and seized the opportunity to stop work.
“Awful, isn’t it?” she said. “Not knowing who did it, I mean. Not but that I’m disappointed in an inquest. Tame, that’s what I call it. Nothing what you might call spicy from beginning to end.”
“You were there, then, Miss Cram?”
“I was there all right. Fancy your not seeing me. Didn’t you see me? I feel a bit hurt about that. Yes, I do. A gentleman, even if he is a clergyman, ought to have eyes in his head.”
“Were you present also?” I asked Dr. Stone, in an effort to escape from this playful badinage. Young women like Miss Cram always make me feel awkward.
“No, I’m afraid I feel very little interest in such things. I am a man very wrapped up in his own hobby.”
“It must be a very interesting hobby,” I said.
“You know something of it, perhaps?”
I was obliged to confess that I knew next to nothing.
Dr. Stone was not the kind of man whom a confession of ignorance daunts. The result was exactly the same as though I had said that the excavation of barrows was my only relaxation. He surged and eddied into speech. Long barrows, round barrows, stone age, bronze age, paleolithic, neolithic kistvæns and cromlechs it burst forth in a torrent. I had little to do save nod my head and look intelligent – and that last is perhaps over optimistic. Dr. Stone boomed on. He was a little man. His head was round and bald, his face was round and rosy, and he beamed at you through very strong glasses. I have never known a man so enthusiastic on so little encouragement. He went into every argument for and against his own pet theory – which, by the way, I quite failed to grasp!
He detailed at great length his difference of opinion with Colonel Protheroe.
“An opinionated boor,” he said with heat. “Yes, yes, I know he is dead, and one should speak no ill of the dead. But death does not alter facts. An opinionated boor describes him exactly. Because he had read a few books, he set himself up as an authority – against a man who has made a lifelong study of the subject. My whole life, Mr. Clement, has been given up to this work. My whole life -”
He was spluttering with excitement. Gladys Cram brought him back to earth with a terse sentence.
“You’ll miss your train if you don’t look out,” she observed.
“Oh!” The little man stopped in mid speech and dragged a watch from his pocket. “Bless my soul. Quarter to? Impossible.”