Who Pays the Piper? by Patricia Wentworth Page A

noticing.”
    â€œYou mean you don’t know whether it was there or not?”
    â€œI didn’t take any notice one way or the other—I wasn’t thinking about it.”
    Abbott wrote.
    Inspector Lamb shifted heavily in his chair. He said in his expressionless voice,
    â€œAre you sure you saw Mr. Dale, and that he was alive when you went in?”
    â€œOh, yes, sir.”
    â€œAnd when you came out?” Raby looked blank. “He was alive when you came out again? You left him alive in the study?”
    Raby looked completely horrified.
    â€œOh, yes, sir.”
    â€œDid you notice what time it was?”
    â€œIt was nineteen minutes past six.”
    â€œHow do you know?”
    â€œBy the clock on the study mantelpiece, sir. I noticed it when I had made up the fire.”
    â€œAnd what did you do after that?”
    â€œI went to my pantry until a quarter to seven, when I returned to the study and found that Mr. Dale had been shot. Mr. Dale liked a cocktail at that hour, and I was taking it to him.”
    Lamb let him go. When the door had closed behind the butler he said,
    â€œWhat d’you make of him?”
    Abbott’s pale eyebrows rose.
    â€œHe’s nervous.”
    The round brown eyes of Inspector Lamb had a faintly reproachful look.
    â€œThat’s natural,” he said. “You’d be nervous if you’d found your employer murdered and weren’t sure whether the police were thinking of putting it on you, let alone having to own up you’d been listening at doors, which isn’t the best of manners for a butler.”
    â€œOh, quite—quite.”
    â€œWell?”
    â€œWell, that leaves from nineteen minutes past six till a quarter to seven for someone to have come into the study and shot Dale with the revolver which he kept in his writing-table drawer. Everyone in the house seems to have known about it. It doesn’t take twenty minutes to shoot a man, wipe the revolver, and melt from the scene. There was plenty of time for our Mr. Vincent Bell to come back and finish his quarrel. I wonder if he did. Are you going to have him in and ask him?”
    â€œI think I’ll have the secretary first,” said Inspector Lamb.

CHAPTER XVI
    Monty Phipson gazed earnestly, first at Inspector Lamb and then at Frank Abbott. He wore an air of horrified interest blended with a desire to be helpful, yet tinged—yes, quite definitely tinged with nervousness. Abbott, staring coolly back, was reminded of a rabbit eyeing a specially delectable piece of lettuce. The nose twitched with appetite, the whiskers twitched with terror. Monty Phipson had in fact no whiskers, but the illusion persisted.
    Lamb took him through his statement. He had been upstairs in his room from six o’clock till a quarter to seven. He had seen no one, and he had heard nothing. His room was on the other side of the house. He had written some letters, and then he had played some records over on his gramophone. Just after a quarter to seven the butler came and told him that Mr. Dale had been shot. He at once rang up the police.
    â€œThis matter of your not hearing the shot, Mr. Phipson—it seems to me somebody ought to have heard it. Mrs. Raby and the maids had the wireless on. Raby’s pantry is next door to the servants’ hall. He says there was a band programme and they were getting it pretty loud. There’s a baize door and a lot of hall and passage between this and the kitchen wing. And you were playing over gramophone records. When did you start?”
    Mr. Phipson removed his glasses, polished them, and replaced them on his nose. A rabbit in pince-nez.
    â€œOh, well now, Inspector, I shall do my best to be accurate, but I wasn’t looking at the time. It was six o’clock when I went to my room—I do know that, because the grandfather clock in the hall was striking as I went upstairs. And then—let me see—I wrote two