“What time was that?”
“Why, eleven, of course, sir.”
“Yes, it was, my uncanny Scot. But grandfather said twelve. I was thinking about something else. I must have counted the strokes unconsciously.”
“But—but—are you sure it struck twelve when”—Boyd glanced up at the old clock—“when it said eleven?”
Anthony crossed the room, opened the glass casing of the clock-face, and moved the hands on fifteen minutes. They stood then at twelve.
“Bong!” went the clock.
They waited. It did not strike again.
Anthony was triumphant. “There you are, Boyd! Grandpa looks twelve and says one. There’s another strand of that rope you’re making for the murderer. Miss Hoode came in here at eleven-ten, to find the murder done and the murderer gone. You’re time’s almost fixed for you. He wasn’t here at eleven-ten, but he was here after eleven, because, to put the striking of that clock out as it is, the murderer must have put back the hands after the hour—eleven, that is—had struck. If he’d done it before the striking had begun, grand-dad wouldn’t be telling lies the way he is.”
Boyd’s expression was a mixture of elation and doubt. “I suppose that’s right, sir,” he said. “About the striking, I mean. Yes, of course it is; just for the moment I was a bit confused, so to speak. Couldn’t work out which way the mistake would come.”
“It seems to me,” said Anthony, “that the whole reason he faked this elaborate struggle scene was in order that the clock could be stopped under what would seem natural circumstances. But why, having stopped the clock, did he alter it? Two reasons occur to me. One is that he merely wished to make it seem that the murder was done at any other time except when it really was. That’s rather weak, and I prefer my second idea. That is, that the time to which he moved the hands has a significance and wasn’t merely a chance shot. In other words, he set the thing at ten-forty-five because he had a nice clean alibi for that time. Judging by the rest of his work he’s a man of brains; and that would’ve been a pretty little safeguard—if only he hadn’t made that mistake about the striking.”