“Yes—­I, Mr.—­er—­Headland, isn’t it?  Ah, thanks.  But the boy’s unstrung, nerve-racked.  He’s been through too much.  The whole beastly thing has made a mess of him, and he was a fool to meddle with it.  Nigel Merriton fired a shot that night when Dacre Wynne disappeared, Mr. Headland; fired it after he had gone up to his room, a little over-excited with too much champagne, a little over-wrought by the scene through which he had just passed with the man who had always exercised such a sinister influence over his life.”

“So Sir Nigel was no good friend of this man Wynne’s, then?” remarked Cleek, quietly, as if he did not already know the fact.

The doctor looked up as though he were ready to spring upon him and tear him limb from limb.

“No!” he said, furiously, “and neither would you have been, if you’d known him.  Great hulking bully that he was!  I tell you, I’ve seen the man use his influence upon this boy here, until—­fine, upstanding chap that he is (and I’ve known him and his people ever since he was a baby) he succeeded in making him as weak as a hysterical girl—­and gloated over it, too!”

Cleek drew in a quiet breath, and gave his shoulders the very slightest of twitches, to show that he was listening.

“Very interesting, Doctor, as psychological studies of the kind go,” he said, smoothly, stroking his chin and looking down at the bowed shoulders of the man in the arm chair, with something almost like sorrow in his eyes.  “But we’ve got to get down to brass tacks, you know.  This thing’s serious.  It’s got to be proved.  If it can’t be—­well, it’s going to be mighty awkward for Sir Nigel.  Now, let’s hear the thing straight out from the person most interested, please.  I don’t like to appear thoughtless in any way, but this is a serious admission you’ve just made.  Sir Nigel, I beg of you, tell us the story before the constable comes.  It might make things easier for you in the long run.”

Merriton, thus addressed, threw up his head suddenly and showed a face marked with mental anguish, dry-eyed, deathly white.  He got slowly to his feet and went over to the table, leaning his hand upon it as though for support.

“Oh, well,” he said, listlessly, “you might as well hear it first as last.  Doctor Bartholomew’s right, Mr. Headland.  I did fire a shot upon the night of Dacre Wynne’s disappearance, and I fired it from my bedroom window.  It was like this: 

“Wynne had gone, and after waiting for him to come back away past the given time, we all made up our minds to go to bed, and Tony West—­a pal of mine who was one of the guests—­and the Doctor here accompanied me to my room door.  Dr. Bartholomew had a room next to mine.  In that part of the house the walls are thin, and although my revolver (which I always carry with me, Mr. Headland, since I lived in India) is one of those almost soundless little things, still, the sound of it reached him.”