Our maid, Mary, was the next witness, and proved a somewhat truculent one. She hadn’t heard anything, and didn’t want to hear anything. It wasn’t as though gentlemen who came to see the vicar usually got shot. They didn’t. She’d got her own jobs to look after. Colonel Protheroe had arrived at a quarter past six exactly. No, she didn’t look at the clock. She heard the church chime after she had shown him into the study. She didn’t hear any shot. If there had been a shot she’d have heard it. Well, of course, she knew there must have been a shot, since the gentleman was found shot—but there it was. She hadn’t heard it.
The coroner did not press the point. I realized that he and Colonel Melchett were working in agreement.
Mrs. Lestrange had been subpoenaed to give evidence, but a medical certificate, signed by Dr. Haydock, was produced saying she was too ill to attend.
There was only one other witness, a somewhat doddering old woman. The one who, in Slack’s phrase, “did for” Lawrence Redding.
Mrs. Archer was shown the pistol and recognized it as the one she had seen in Mr. Redding’s sitting-room “over against the bookcase, he kept it, lying about.” She had last seen it on the day of the murder. Yes—in answer to a further question—she was quite sure it was there at lunch time on Thursday—quarter to one when she left.
I remembered what the inspector had told me, and I was mildly surprised. However vague she might have been when he questioned her, she was quite positive about it now.
The coroner summed up in a negative manner, but with a good deal of firmness. The verdict was given almost immediately:
Murder by Person or Persons unknown.