ver; 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