"
"Then how could any murderer have got away? It is out of the
question! Mr. Douglas must have shot himself."
"That was our first idea. But see!" Barker drew aside the
curtain, and showed that the long, diamond-paned window was open
to its full extent. "And look at this!" He held the lamp down
and illuminated a smudge of blood like the mark of a boot-sole
upon the wooden sill. "Someone has stood there in getting out."
"You mean that someone waded across the moat?"
"Exactly!"
"Then if you were in the room within half a minute of the crime,
he must have been in the water at that very moment."
"I have not a doubt of it. I wish to heaven that I had rushed to
the window! But the curtain screened it, as you can see, and so
it never occurred to me. Then I heard the step of Mrs. Douglas,
and I could not let her enter the room. It would have been too
horrible."
"Horrible enough!" said the doctor, looking at the shattered head
and the terrible marks which surrounded it. "I've never seen
such injuries since the Birlstone railway smash."
"But, I say," remarked the police sergeant, whose slow, bucolic
common sense was still pondering the open window.
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