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  ‘Because I think he did hear one.’

  ‘Well, what of it, sir? According to what you told me, what he heard couldn’t have had any bearing on the case. It was an hour too early!’

  ‘Horace, I told you only this morning I’d got a feeling the wrong end of the stick had been pushed into my hand, and that there’s something important I haven’t spotted. We’re now going to have a look for it!’

  Sixteen

  Where are we off to?’ enquired the Inspector. ‘Fox House?’

  ‘Out of the old gentleman’s sight, for a start,’ Hemingway replied. ‘I want to think.’

  They reached the gorse-clump again, and Hemingway stopped. The Inspector watched him curiously, as he stood there, his quick, bright eyes once more taking in every detail of the scene before him. Presently he gave a grunt, and sat down on the slope above the lane, and pulled his pipe and his aged tobacco-pouch out of his pocket. While his accustomed fingers teased the tobacco, and packed it into the bowl of the pipe, his abstracted gaze continued to dwell first on the spot in the garden where the seat had stood, and then upon the stile, just visible round the bole of the elm-tree. The Inspector, disposing himself on the ground beside him, preserved a patient silence, and tried painstakingly to discover, by the exercise of logic, what particular problem he was attempting to solve. Hemingway lit his pipe, and sat staring fixedly at Fox House, his eyelids a little puckered. Suddenly he said: ‘The mistake we’ve been making, Horace, is to have paid a sight too much attention to what you might call the important features of this case, and not enough to the highly irrelevant trimmings. I’m not sure I’ve not precious near been had for a sucker.’

  ‘I’ve heard you say as much before, but I never heard that it turned out to be true,’ responded the Inspector.

  ‘Well, it isn’t going to be true this time – not if I know it. This operator is beginning to annoy me,’ said Hemingway briskly.

  The Inspector was a little puzzled. ‘Myself, I hate all murderers,’ he said. ‘But I don’t see why this one should annoy you more than any other – for it is not as if the case was a complicated one. It isn’t easy, but that’s only because we have too many possible suspects, isn’t it? Taken just as a murder, I’d say it was one of the simplest I’ve ever handled.’

  ‘When you talk like that, Horace, I think I must be losing my flair. I ought to have spotted at the outset that it was much too simple.’

  ‘But you can’t go against the facts, sir,’ argued the Inspector. ‘The man was shot in his own garden, by someone lying up beside these bushes, at about 7.15 or 7.20, according to Miss Warrenby’s evidence. You can doubt that, but you can’t doubt the evidence of the cartridge-case Carsethorn’s men found under the bushes. The difficulty is that the murder happened to be committed just when half a dozen people who all of them had reasons for wanting Warrenby out of the way were scattered round the locality, in a manner of speaking, and couldn’t produce alibis.’

  Hemingway had turned his head, and was looking at him, an alert expression on his face. ‘Go on!’ he said, as the Inspector paused. ‘You’re being very helpful!’

  Harbottle almost blushed. ‘Well, I’m glad, Chief! It isn’t often you think I’m right!’

  ‘You aren’t right. You’re wrong all along the line, but you’re clarifying my mind,’ said Hemingway. ‘As soon as you said that the murder happened to be committed while a whole lot of Warrenby’s ill-wishers were sculling about at large, it came to me that there wasn’t any ‘happen’ about it. That’s the way it was planned. Go on talking! Very likely you’ll put another idea into my head.’

  The Inspector said, with some asperity: ‘All right, sir, I will! I may be wrong all along the line, but it strikes me that there’s a hole to be picked in what you’ve just said. It can’t have been planned. Not with any certainty. The murderer couldn’t have known Warrenby would be in the garden at that exact time; that was just luck. He must have been prepared to go into the house, or at any rate into the garden, where he could have got a shot through the study-window, and when you consider how near he came to being seen by Miss Warrenby, as things turned out, you’ll surely agree that there wasn’t much planning about it. If he’d been forced to enter the garden, Miss Warrenby would have seen the whole thing. As I see it, he’s got more luck than craft.’

  ‘Don’t stop! It’s getting clearer every minute!’

  ‘Well, do you agree with me so far?’ demanded Harbottle.

  ‘Never mind about that! You can take it I don’t, unless I hold up my hand.’

  ‘I see no sense in going on, if you don’t agree with anything I say, sir.’

  ‘Well, I shouldn’t see any sense in us sitting here agreeing with one another,’ returned Hemingway. ‘Where’s that going to get us?’

  ‘Look here, sir!’ said Harbottle. ‘If we’re going to assume that the murder was planned to take place when all the guests at that tennis-party were on their way home, then we’ve also got to assume that the murderer was banking on having all the luck he did have – which seems pretty inadequate planning to me! Why, it could have come unstuck in half a dozen places! To start with, he’s got to do the job quick, because it cuts both ways, having a lot of people scattered near the scene: who’s to say one of them won’t come down the lane? You can say it’s unlikely, but it might have happened. What was a dead certainty was that Miss Warrenby was bound to arrive on the scene at any moment. So he’s got to reach the house ahead of her, shoot Warrenby, and get away without losing a second of time. What would have happened if Warrenby had gone upstairs, or into the back-garden? He must have faced that possibility! He must have thought, if he planned it, that he must allow himself quite a bit of time, in case of accidents.’

  ‘Quite true, Horace. So you think that he laid his preparations – by which I mean his rifle – on the off-chance that he’d get an opportunity to shoot Warrenby?’

  There was a pause. ‘When you put it like that,’ said the Inspector slowly. ‘No, that won’t do. But my arguments still hold!’

  ‘They do,’ said Hemingway. ‘They’re perfectly sound, and they do you credit. Our operator didn’t want to be hurried over the job, and it’s safe to assume he wasn’t going to take any unnecessary risks.’

  ‘Then what’s the answer?’ said Harbottle.

  ‘Warrenby wasn’t shot at 7.15, nor anything like that time.’

  There was another pause, while the Inspector sat staring at his chief. He said at last: ‘Very well, sir. I can see several reasons for thinking you’re wrong. I’d like to know what the reasons are for thinking you’re right, because you haven’t jumped to a conclusion like that simply because you want to make out the murder was carefully planned.’

  ‘I haven’t jumped at all,’ replied Hemingway. ‘I’ve been adding up all those bits and pieces of information which didn’t seem to lead anywhere. Taking it from the start, the doctor was what you might call vague on the time of Warrenby’s death.’

  ‘Yes,’ conceded Harbottle. ‘I remember it was the first point you queried, when you were going through the case with the Chief Constable. But it didn’t seem to matter much, and goodness knows Dr Warcop isn’t the only doctor we’ve come across who’s more of a hindrance than a help to the police!’

  ‘You’re right: it didn’t seem to matter. The mistake I made was in accepting as a fact that the time of the murder was fixed. To go on, the next thing was that I was given a highly significant piece of information by Miss Warrenby. She told me, the very first time I saw her, that her uncle very rarely sat out of doors. Well, I didn’t pay any particular heed to that, because it didn’t seem to matter any more than the doctor’s evidence. There the corpse was, sitting in the garden, with a bullet through his left temple; and there the cartridge-case was, lying just where you’d expect to find it, supposing Warrenby had been shot while he was on that seat.’

  The Inspector sat up. ‘Are you going to say he wasn’t shot in the garden at all?’