Free In the Teeth of the Evidence by Dorothy L. Sayers

didn’t sit at my table at dinner, and we only exchanged a few words later on in the bar-parlour. The voice was muffled – it might easily have been the voice of a man who has just woken up and was speaking from half under the blankets and without his false teeth. I don’t suppose I should recognise the voice again.’
        ‘That’s very natural, Mr Egg; don’t distress yourself. Now, about this Mr Waters, who left by the early train. You say you heard him snoring all the time?’
        ‘Yes – both before and after. I know him; he’s a highly respectable man.’
        ‘Quite. Well, we shall have to get in touch with him some time, I suppose, but obviously, if he slept right through it he won’t be able to tell us anything. I think we must take it that the person you spoke to was the murderer. You say you can fix the time?’
        ‘Yes.’ Monty described again how he had heard the clock strike twelve. ‘And by the way,’ he added, ‘I can’t, of course, produce any alibi for myself, but my employers, Messrs Plummet & Rose, Wines & Spirits, Piccadilly, would speak for me as to character.’
        ‘We’ll look into that, Mr Egg. Don’t you worry,’ said Inspector Monk, imperturbably. ‘Let me see, haven’t I heard your name before? Ever meet a friend of mine called Ramage?’
        ‘Inspector Ramage of Ditchley? Why, yes. There was a little problem about a garage clock.’
        ‘That’s right. He said you were a smart chap.’
        ‘Much obliged to him, I’m sure.’
        ‘So for the moment we’ll accept your evidence and see where that gets us. Now, this clock here. Was it accurate, do you suppose?’
        ‘Well, I heard it strike again this morning, and it was right then by my watch. At least,’ said Monty, as some obscure doubt fluttered uneasily into the back of his mind and fluttered elusively away again, ‘I think it was the same clock. It had the same note – deep and quick and what you might call humming. Rather a pretty strike.’
        ‘H’m,’ said the Inspector. ‘We’d better check that up. May have been wrong last night and right again this morning. We’ll take a turn round the house and see if we can identify it. Ruggles, make Mr Bates understand that nobody must leave the place, and tell him we’ll be as quick as we can. Now, Mr Egg.’
        There were only six striking clocks in the Griffin. The grandfather on the stairs was promptly eliminated; his voice was thin and high and quavering, like the voice of the very old gentleman that he was. The garage-clock, too, had quite the wrong kind of strike, while the clock in the coffee-room and the ugly bronze monster in the drawing-room were both inaudible from Monty’s room, and the clock in the bar was a cuckoo clock. But when they came to the kitchen, just beneath Monty’s bedroom, Monty said at once:
        ‘That looks like it.’
        It was an old American eight-day wall-clock, in a rosewood veneer case, with a painted dial and the picture of a beehive on its glass door.
        ‘I know the kind,’ said Monty, ‘it strikes on a coiled spring and gives just the sort of rich, humming tone, like a church bell, but much quicker.’
        The Inspector opened the clock and peered inside.
        ‘Quite right,’ he said. ‘Now let’s check him up. Twenty-minutes to nine. Correct. Now, you go upstairs and I’ll push the hands on to nine o’clock, and you tell us if that’s what you heard.’
        In his bedroom, with the door shut, Monty listened again to that deep, quick, vibratory note. He hurried downstairs.
        ‘It’s exactly like it, as far as I can tell.’
        ‘Good. Then, if the clock hasn’t been tampered with, we’ve got our time settled.’
        It proved unexpectedly easy to show that the clock had been right at midnight. The cook had set it by the Town Hall clock, just before going up to bed at eleven. She had then locked the kitchen door and taken away