They took Joseph to the hospital that night, and they extracted the bullet.
He was not badly hurt, but was suffering considerable pain.
“He’s strong,” Doctor Simonds told me, “and he has kept himself in good condition.
He’s not flabby like most butlers.
But he’s had a shock, more of a shock than he cares to tell about.”
“He won’t say who did it?”
“No.
He says he doesn’t know.
But as he was shot from in front at pretty close range, that’s unlikely.
Unless he was asleep.”
In spite of myself I could not get Wallie out of my mind after I had learned that.
Wallie with his revolver, and that odd statement of Joseph’s that he did not know who shot him.
Inspector Harrison was very noncommittal.
One curious thing he had found that night, ranging over that first floor while Doctor Simonds worked over Joseph in the pantry. This was that the criminal, whoever it was, had paused long enough in the library to take a glass of sherry!
A decanter had been brought in earlier in the evening with some biscuits, but none of us had touched it.
Yet sherry had been poured and apparently drunk.
A little had even been spilled on the top of my old desk, and as it lay for some time the desk bears the stains to this day.
“But it’s incredible,” I said.
“Not incredible probably if we know the answer, but it certainly argues a degree of recklessness that’s unusual, to say the least.
If Jock saw this person with the gun near the garage, and you heard the front door slam, it looks as though he simply walked in the back and out the front of the house.”
“Stopping in the library for a little wine.”
“Precisely.
Stopping in the library for a little wine.”
There was no weapon anywhere.
True, Joseph’s own revolver was in the pantry drawer where he kept it, but it had not been fired and the chambers were clean and new.
Dick had gone with the ambulance, and as Robert was not about I sent Judy home in a taxicab soon after.
It was not until she had gone that the Inspector ceased his ranging over the lower floor and coming into the library planted himself in front of me.
“I’m going to ask you a few plain questions, Miss Bell, and I want plain answers.
First, tell me again about young Carter going back into the house.”
“He ran back for a knife.
I’ve told you—”
“Yes.
Whose idea was this ‘experiment,’ as you call it?”
“I think it was his. I really don’t think it was Judy’s.
He and Judy had both been talking about it.”
“But Miss Judy left the knife in the house?
Are you sure of that?”
“He accused her of it.
Half jokingly, of course.”
“That’s different.
Now let’s go over this.
He ran in by the kitchen, through the house and into the library, and then out by the front door?”
“Yes.”
“Why the front door?”
“I daresay it was nearer.”
He paced the floor for a moment, and the toothpick between his strong white teeth had an aggressive tilt.
I began to feel uneasy, without knowing quite why.
“How well do you know young Carter?
What do you know about him?” he fired at me suddenly.
“Nothing at all, really; except that he is rather a dear boy and—Judy thinks so.”