“The same thing—murder!” snapped Bernard.
“The fact is,” Landis cut in, “we find Mr. Joel Harrison a bit difficult, Miss Mount. One doesn’t like to be harsh with him, you see. Perhaps you’ll question him for us and find out where he was tonight when Mr. Graham was shot and whether he saw or heard anything that might prove enlightening.”
“Question him now? He’s probably asleep!”
“That will mean waking him up then. In a matter so serious for you all, we cannot afford to wait on his convenience.”
Miss Mount stared at Landis for a moment, then advanced into the hall and led the way toward Joel’s door, her lips set in a sort of patient irony. Bernard fell in behind her. Landis brought up the rear.
Both detectives waited while she knocked persistently. At length a sleepy voice bade her enter. She opened the door at that, passed in and closed it behind her in Bernard’s face. With a growl of amusement he waited. Landis turned silently and moved with a long, noiseless stride back to the wing, made a gesture enjoining silence on the gaping policeman and quietly entered Miss Mount’s room, closing the door.
The only light here came from a shaded lamp on the bedside table beyond the big four-poster. Evidently Miss Mount had been reading, for a book lay open and face downward on the bed and the rocking-chair stood close to the table. These details Landis took in at a glance. His interest lay in the left-hand window, the one farther from the main building. As silently as possible he slipped past the foot of the bed, leaned across a jutting corner of the typewriter desk and pulled the shade aside.
Looking downward and to his right he saw all three of the tall library windows clearly outlined against the lighted room beyond. The nearest showed him Harrison’s desk-chair, part of his desk and the hall doorway beyond. Through the upper half of the second window he could see the entire doorway into the reception-room, a foot or so at the bottom of it through the lowered window, the rest above the sash.
From the sill of Miss Mount’s window to the uppermost three-quarters of the reception-room door there was nothing, not even glass, to obstruct his view—nothing, for that matter, to obstruct the flight of an arrow.
He replaced the shade as he had found it, left the room, closing the door behind him, and rejoined Bernard in front of Joel’s door.