five minutes past twelve
The prophet of the sun leaned easily against the mantelpiece and resumed : `` In a few words I have put before you the whole case against me -- the only possible case against me . In fewer words still I will blow it to pieces , so that not a trace of it remains . As to whether I have committed this crime , the truth is in one sentence : I could not have committed this crime . Pauline Stacey fell from this floor to the ground at five minutes past twelve . A hundred people will go into the witness-box and say that I was standing out upon the balcony of my own rooms above from just before the stroke of noon to a quarter-past -- the usual period of my public prayers . My clerk -LRB- a respectable youth from Clapham , with no sort of connection with me -RRB- will swear that he sat in my outer office all the morning , and that no communication passed through . He will swear that I arrived a full ten minutes before the hour , fifteen minutes before any whisper of the accident , and that I did not leave the office or the balcony all that time .