“Yes.  We had finished dinner at about seven,” Varcek said.  “Lane had been up here for about an hour before dinner, working on his new revolver; he came back here immediately after he was through eating.  A little later, when I had finished my coffee, I came upstairs, by the main stairway.  The door of this room was open, and Lane was inside, sitting on that old shoemaker’s-bench, working on the revolver.  He had it apart, and he was cleaning a part of it.  The round part, where the loads go; the drum, is it?”

“Cylinder.  How was he cleaning it?” Rand asked.

“He was using a small brush, like a test-tube brush; he was scrubbing out the holes.  The chambers.  He was using a solvent that smelled something like banana-oil.”

Rand nodded.  He could visualize the progress Fleming had made.  If Varcek was telling the truth, and he remembered what Walters had told him, the last flicker of possibility that Lane Fleming’s death had been accidental vanished.

“I talked with him for some ten minutes or so,” Varcek continued, “about some technical problems at the plant.  All the while, he kept on working on this revolver, and finished cleaning out the cylinder, and also the barrel.  He was beginning to put the revolver together when I left him and went up to my laboratory.

“About fifteen minutes later I heard the shot.  For a moment, I debated with myself as to what I had heard, and then I decided to come down here.  But first I had to take a solution off a Bunsen burner, where I had been heating it, and take the temperature of it, and then wash my hands, because I had been working with poisonous materials.  I should say all this took me about five minutes.

“When I got down here, the door of this room was closed and locked.  That was most unusual, and I became really worried.  I pounded on the door, and called out, but I got no answer.  Then Fred Dunmore came out of the bathroom attached to his room, with nothing on but a bathrobe.  His hair was wet, and he was in his bare feet and making wet tracks on the floor.”

From there on, Varcek’s story tallied closely with what Rand had heard from Gladys and from Walters.  Everybody’s story tallied, where it could be checked up on.

“You think the murderer locked the door behind him, when he came out of here?” Varcek asked.

“I think somebody locked the door, sometime.  It might have been the murderer, or it might have been Fleming at the murderer’s suggestion.  But why couldn’t the murderer have left the gunroom by that stairway?”

Varcek looked around furtively and lowered his voice.  Now he looked like Rudolf Hess discussing what to do about Ernst Roehm.

“Colonel Rand; don’t you think that Fred Dunmore could have shot Lane Fleming, and then have gone to his room and waited until I came downstairs?” he asked.

Here we go again!  Rand thought.  Just like the Rivers case; everybody putting the finger on everybody else....