II
I arrived the next morning promptly¹ at the agreed hour and found my friend literally² fuming³ withrage.
When he had dismissed an unhappy subordinate, I inquired delicately what had happened.
For a moment Hardcastle seemed unable to speak. Then he spluttered out: “Those damnedclocks!”
“The clocks again? What’s happened now?”
“One of them is missing.”
“Missing? Which one?”
“The leather travelling clock. The one with ‘Rosemary’ across the corner.”
I whistled.
“That seems very extraordinary. How did it come about?”
“The damned fools—I’m one of them really, I suppose—” (Dick was a very honest man) “—One’s got to remember to cross every t and dot every i or things go wrong. Well, the clocks werethere all right yesterday in the sitting room. I got Miss Pebmarsh to feel them all to see if they feltfamiliar. She couldn’t help. Then they came to remove the body.”
“Yes?”
“I went out to the gate to supervise, then I came back to the house, spoke⁴ to Miss Pebmarsh whowas in the kitchen, and said I must take the clocks away and would give her a receipt for them.”
“I remember. I heard you.”
“Then I told the girl I’d send her home in one of our cars, and I asked you to see her into it.”
“Yes.”
“I gave Miss Pebmarsh the receipt though she said it wasn’t necessary since the clocks weren’thers. Then I joined you. I told Edwards I wanted the clocks in the sitting room packed up carefullyand brought here. All of them except the cuckoo clock and, of course, the grandfather. And that’swhere I went wrong. I should have said, quite definitely, four clocks. Edwards says he went in atonce and did as I told him. He insists there were only three clocks other than the two fixtures⁵.”
“That doesn’t give much time,” I said. “It means—”
“The Pebmarsh woman could have done it. She could have picked up the clock after I left theroom and gone straight to the kitchen with it.”

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