“In the doorway,” said Graham. “He was coming into this room from the library when he suddenly plunged forward.”
“On his face?”
“I hadn’t thought of that! Perhaps he rolled over.”
“Then his legs wouldn’t point through the doorway as they do! Never mind. The shot came from the library. We’ll have a look at the library, I think.”
He glanced at Bernard who nodded in silence.
Leaving the local policeman on guard over it, they stepped past the body and entered the room from which the arrow had come. It was some fifty feet long, walled high with books, aglare with ceiling lights as well as standard and table lamps. The long inner wall to their left was broken by the double doorway into the hall and then by a fireplace of vast dimensions in which a log fire burned pallidly beneath the blaze of lights. Fireplace and chimney above it jutted into the room. Solid ranks of books lay beyond.
The far end wall was broken in the middle by a door, built to open outward and to the left. This was not quite closed. Against the end wall, square platforms about three feet high flanked a low passage to the door. They were hidden by handsome silk rugs, and from each rose a suit of armor; that to the left, chivalric; the other, Japanese.
The wall to the right held three windows at balanced intervals. Wide and high to light the big apartment in the daytime, the nearest two framed the contrasting darkness of the night outside, while the third showed a glimpse of the lighted wing, for the shades had not been lowered. The bottom sashes were closed. The top ones were down a foot or so, though the October air had grown chilly at twilight.
Opposite the fireplace stood an enormous teakwood desk, its carved dragons supporting a surface of polished black marble. Landis regarded it with awe as the ugliest and clumsiest piece of furniture he had ever seen. A bronze desk-lamp, lighted, disclosed gilded files, papers clipped together, a small hand telephone on its rest and the paraphernalia of a working desk. Much of the other furniture was almost equally heavy and pretentious, if not quite so ugly.
In front of the fire sat a middle-aged man with a short beard and large ears, drumming on the arms of his chair. He stood up as they drew nearer and Graham introduced him as Doctor Stanford from the town a half-mile distant.