“All of which is out of your jurisdiction, young man,” and Marsh looked at him severely. “The police will be here soon, and I’ve no doubt they will learn the truth, whatever it may be. What instrument do you deduce, Doctor Greenfield?”
“That’s hard to say,” replied Greenfield, slowly. “You see the aperture it made is a perfectly round hole. Now, most daggers or poniards are flat-bladed. I’m not sure a real weapon is ever round. The hole is much too large to have been made by a hatpin—it is as big as a—a—”
“Slate pencil,” suggested the Examiner.
“Yes, or a trifle larger—but not so large as a lead-pencil.”
“A lead-pencil could hardly accomplish the deed,” Marsh mused. “A slate-pencil might have—but that is a most unusual weapon.”
“How about a bill-file?” asked Doctor Greenfield. “I knew of a man killed with one.”
“Yes, but where is the bill-file?” asked Marsh. “There’s one on the desk, to be sure, but it is full of papers, and shows no sign of having been used for a criminal purpose. If, as Mr. Lockwood insists, this is a suicide case, the victim positively could not have cleaned that file and restored the papers after stabbing himself!”
“He most certainly could not have done that!” declared Doctor Greenfield.
Marsh examined the file carefully. It was an ordinary affair consisting of a steel spike on a bronze standard. It would without doubt make an efficacious implement of murder, but it was difficult to believe it had been used in that way. For the bills and memoranda it contained were, to all appearance, just as they had been thrust on the sharp point—and surely, had they been removed and replaced, they would have shown traces of such moving.
“Anyway,” Doctor Greenfield said, after another examination, “the hole in the side of Waring’s neck seems to me to have been made with an instrument slightly larger than that file. Surely, there are round stilettos, are there not?”