"Merciful God!" I said in a hollow voice. "It was from _this
window_ that the shot was fired which killed him!"
CHAPTER XXXIV
THE CREEPING SICKNESS
From the ensuing consultation in the library we did not rise until
close upon midnight. To the turbid intelligence of Inspector Aylesbury
the fact by this time had penetrated that Colin Camber was innocent,
that he was the victim of a frame-up, and that Colonel Juan Menendez
had been shot from a window of his own house.
By a process of lucid reasoning which must have convinced a junior
schoolboy, Paul Harley, there in the big library, with its garish
bookcases and its Moorish ornaments, had eliminated every member of the
household from the list of suspects. His concluding words, I remember,
were as follows:
"Of the known occupants of Cray's Folly on the night of the tragedy we
now find ourselves reduced to four, any one of whom, from the point of
view of an impartial critic uninfluenced by personal character,
question, or motive, or any consideration other than that of physical
possibility, might have shot Colonel Menendez. They are, firstly:
Myself.
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