Now at last Graham snapped.
“It’s a lie!” he screamed, wrenching at his arms to free them. “You’re a liar! I didn’t kill Harrison! I—I was shot myself by the same hand!”
“You bet you were!” retorted Bernard. “You shot yourself, too! It was the cleverest and yet the most foolish thing you did, Graham! But the trail was getting warm. Just before we went into town yesterday I let you see that I was going after Cuddy. You were smart enough to appreciate the risk there. So you shot yourself to mystify us and bolster up your own alibi! It was to be mystery piled on mystery, with you one of the innocent victims! Only—nobody except yourself had any real motive for shooting you, Graham!”
Graham tried to pull himself together.
“I suppose I stood in the library and shot myself from Miss Mount’s window here at the same time!” he gasped. “Don’t try to pin Harrison’s murder on an innocent man just because you’ve failed to find the real murderer!”
“When you shot Harrison,” replied Bernard smoothly, “you saw Miss Mount closing the reception-room window and you realized that she did the same thing every night at the same time. She had a motive already. Why not pin the business definitely on her and thereby close the door forever upon your wife’s unhappy past?”
Graham stared pleadingly at the faces of his other captors but found no response. Landis and the policemen were held spellbound, as much by Bernard’s tremendous personality as by his reasoned, relentless exposure of the motive and the method of the crime.
“You were left alone all day yesterday,” Bernard continued. “You spent your time collecting the rope and thread and preparing the Japanese bow as before. When Miss Mount went downstairs last night you went across to her room and got the cross-bow from Joel’s den as before. You got the gloves as before. But this time you lashed the cross-bow on the desk with your rope, hitched the thread to the trigger, ran it over the doorknob and dropped the spool out the window as we did just now. You went out and locked Miss Mount’s door!
“Mrs. Graham was tired so you got her to lie down. You went down and outdoors, got the spool, tossed it through the library window, made a nail-hole in the reception-room window and went round into the library, ostensibly to resume your work. You picked up the spool in there. When the gong rang you walked to the door as Harrison had done, jerked your thread and at the same time swerved aside. You didn’t swerve quite far enough. Or maybe you were willing to risk a wound to make the business more realistic and thereby save your neck from the noose. Was that it?”
Graham shook his head and tried to speak but in vain.