“You left the knife in this room?”
“No,” denied Vail, after a moment’s thought. “I couldn’t have done that. I didn’t come up here again. No, if I left it anywhere it was downstairs.”
“H’m!” grunted the chief, non-committally.
Irritated afresh by the official’s manner, Thaxton turned to the doctor, who was once more leaving the bedside.
“Dr. Lawton,” he asked, “is there any chance he killed himself?”
“Not the slightest,” replied Lawton with much emphasis. “He was lying on his left side. The point entered the carotid from behind. He could not possibly have struck the blow. And in any event he could not have stunned himself with that metal water bottle afterward. No, there is every proof it was not suicide. The man was murdered.”
“And the murderer escaped through the window,” supplemented the chief. “Also, he entered by the same route. Now, we’ll leave everything as it is, and I’ll take my flashlight and examine the ground just below here.”
But before he left the room he leaned far out of the window looking downward. Vail had no need to follow the chief’s example. He knew the veranda roof was directly outside and that any active man could climb up or down the vine trellis which screened that end of the porch.
He also knew no man could have done so without making enough noise to have attracted Thaxton’s notice in the night’s stillness before the crime. Nor could any man have walked on the tin veranda roof, even barefoot, without the crackle and bulge of the tin giving loud notice of his presence. A tin roof cannot be traversed noiselessly, even by a cat, to say nothing of a grown man.
As the three trooped downstairs they found the others assembled in the hall nervously awaiting them.