"There were two shots fired," he said, "but whether both were fired by
the murderer I don't know yet. One of them may have been fired by Sir
Horace. Just behind you in the wall is the mark of one of the bullets. I
dug it out of the plaster yesterday and here it is." He produced from a
waistcoat pocket a flattened bullet. "The other is inside him at
present." He waved his hand in the direction of the room in which the
corpse lay.

"Of course you cannot say yet whether both bullets are out of the same
revolver?" said Rolfe.

"Can't tell till after the post-mortem," said the inspector. "And then
all we can tell for certain is whether they are of the same pattern. They
might be the same size, and yet be fired out of different revolvers of
the same calibre."

"Well, it is no use theorising about what happened in this room until
after the post-mortem," said Rolfe.

"You'd better give it some thought," suggested the inspector. "In the
meantime I want you to interview the people in the neighbourhood and
ascertain whether they heard any shots. They'll all say they did whether
they heard them or not--you know how people persuade themselves into
imagining things so as to get some sort of prominence in these crimes.
But you can sift what they tell you and preserve the grain of truth. Try
and get them to be accurate as to the time, as we want to fix the time of
the crime as near as possible. Ask Flack to tell you something about the
neighbours--he's been in this district fifteen years, and ought to know
all about them. While you're away I'll go through these private papers. I
want to find out why he came back from Scotland so suddenly. If we knew