“Oh!” she stammered helplessly. “I thought—I thought——”
“Your cousin did not abstract the revolver when he was here on Thursday, Miss Whitmarsh. He did not at his leisure fire a bullet into his own watch to make it appear, later in the day, as if he had been attacked. He did not reload the cartridge with a blank charge. He did not deliberately shoot your father and then fire off the blank cartridge. He was attacked and the newspaper version is substantially correct. The whole fabric so delicately suggested by inference and innuendo falls to pieces.”
“Then you desert me, Mr Carrados?” she said, in a low, bitter voice.
“I have seen the watch—the watch that saved Whitmarsh’s life,” he continued, unmoved. “It would save it again if necessary. It indicates ten minutes past nine—the time to a minute at which it is agreed the shot was fired. By what prescience was he to know at what exact minute his opportunity would occur?”
“When I saw the watch on Thursday night the fingers were not there.”
“They are not, but the shaft remains. It is of an old-fashioned pattern and it will only take the fingers in one position. That position indicates ten minutes past nine.”
“Surely it would have been an easy matter to have altered that afterwards?”
“In this case fate has been curiously systematic, Miss Whitmarsh. The bullet that shattered the works has so locked the action that it will not move a fraction this way or that.”
“There is something more than this—something that I do not understand,” she persisted. “I think I have a right to know.”
“Since you insist, there is. There is the wad of the blank cartridge that you fired in the outbuilding.”