"Well, I don't know so much about that. The Divisional Surgeon, he holds to the opinion that Sir Arthur wouldn't have had time to write anything after the blow was struck. On the other hand, Dr Raymond thinks that he could. That's what it is with doctors. What with one saying one thing, and another arguing it could have happened different, you never know where you are. And it doesn't seem to me to lead anywhere, that bit of paper. Well, I mean, look at it!"
The Inspector was looking at it. Scrawled in pencil across a half-sheet of engraved note-paper was the word "There'. There was no more; the faint pencil mark tailed off, as though the pencil had dropped suddenly from nerveless fingers.
"To my mind it doesn't lead anywhere," grumbled the Superintendent. "There what? The way I look at it is this, Supposing Sir Arthur was starting out to write something when suddenly he gets stabbed from behind? There is nothing to show he wrote it after he'd been stabbed."
"Except that the word is scrawled crookedly across the paper," suggested the Inspector. "I should like to keep this, if I may, Superintendent."
"Oh, you can have it," said the Superintendent generously. "It's about all there is to have, what's more. Not but what something may turn up, because the Chief Constable was very set on having nothing disturbed in the room where the murder took place, so there hasn't been what I call a proper search."
"I see. And about the position of the study: I under stand it is in the front of the house, facing on to the drive?"
"That's right. On the right of the front door as you go in, it is, there being what they call the morning-room behind it, then the stairs, and beyond them the drawing-room, which is a big room along the back of the house next to the billiard-room."
"The terrace, I take it, is also at the back of the house.? Then the study is at a considerable distance from it? No chance of any noise in the study reaching the ears of anyone on the terrace?"
"Oh dear me, no," said the Superintendent, with a tolerant smile for one as yet unacquainted with the dimensions of the Grange. "It's a very big house. What you might call a mansion. Very well off, Sir Arthur was. and did himself proud."
"And these windows," pursued the Inspector, consulting one of the photographs. "Were they open, or shut?"