The Lost Casebooks of Sherlock Holmes (29 page)

‘Yet he may have had such a purpose, gun or no gun, since two girls were followed by him on the same day.'

‘Were they?' asked Holmes laconically. ‘They did not make statements to the police about it until some months later. One of them picked out Light on an identity parade but only after first seeing his description. Moreover, they were not asked by the police on which day the incident happened but whether it happened on the fifth of July! A leading question, if ever there was! I fancy Sir Edward will make short work of all that in court.'

And, on that last point, Holmes was to be proved right.

‘It leaves us with the gun, then,' I said.

‘And the bird, Watson. We must not forget the bird.'

It seemed that the bird was to prove more important in this case than anyone had imagined.

III

For several days we rode from Leicester round the five or ten miles of country lanes with their undulating fields showing the first green shoots of spring. We passed through villages that were hardly more than clusters of cottages and handsome churches. Flat hunting land stretched as far as the eye could see from every crest of the road.

Seldom had the time and place of a murder been so precisely defined. Bella Wright was alive at quarter to nine in the evening when she rode from Gaulby in company with Ronald Light. It would have taken her some fifteen minutes to cycle to the spot where her body was found by Farmer Cowell. She had died at that spot between nine o'clock and quarter past, to take the period at its longest. Though she cannot long have been dead, Farmer Cowell heard no shot, except perhaps the pop of a rook rifle, and saw no one. Perhaps, then, Miss Wright was shot at nine or a few minutes afterwards—not with a rook rifle.

Holmes and I stood at the scene. The hedgerows of the narrow road were already high and would grow to almost eight feet by midsummer, the season of Bella Wright's death. They would screen the narrow road and the fields from one another. To one side was the white-painted field gate on which the crow had sat and beyond it was the field in which the bird's body had been found. There was the stretch of road rising towards a junction and the spot where Farmer Cowell had found her. Seventeen feet beyond that the spent bullet had been discovered next day by Constable Hall. The bullet had been greatly deformed, as it was thought, by being trodden under a horse's hoof.

‘Watson,' said my companion presently, standing astride the saddle of his bicycle. ‘Be good enough to imagine that you have a gun in your hand. You are to shoot me from at least five feet. We are told the old wives' tale that the distance was not less, since the victim showed no burned powder on her skin. Let that stand for a moment. The bullet is to enter below my left eye and exit from the crown of my head. I am standing here and we are arguing.'

I flatter myself that I handle a service revolver pretty well and know a good deal about the wounds inflicted by one. I tried to imagine the line that Holmes described and could do so only by going down on one knee immediately in front of him. It was not a position from which Sir Edward's client would have been likely to threaten or murder Bella Wright.

‘Now,' said Holmes, ‘try again, as if I were riding along with my head a little down as I pedal harder and approach the crest of the rise.'

I did my best and then gave up.

‘It is quite impossible, Holmes,' I said at last. ‘I should almost have to lie under the wheels of the bicycle.'

‘Interesting, is it not?'

He took some measurements and presently I said, ‘You would never hold your head back far enough while you were cycling for that wound to be made. Suppose, however, that she did not fall from the bicycle as a result of being shot, but was shot when she was already lying on her back in the road. That would perfectly explain the angle of the wound.'

‘My dear Watson, I do not understand why he would shoot her when she was lying in the road, if he had not done so when she was upright. You are quite correct, however. It is a possible line. Unfortunately, there was no sign of injury before death to suggest such a fall. An accident, however, would be a quite different matter. Imagine a young fool playing about with a gun—perhaps to threaten her. The barrel is pointing down but the gun goes off. The bullet hits the road and comes up at a ricochet. Bella Wright falls dead and Ronald Light flees in panic. Let us look further.'

He propped his bicycle against the white-painted gate and entered the field. After about thirty feet, we came to a stone sheep-trough.

‘Hmmm,' he said to himself, ‘it is rather as I supposed. Convenient, if mundane.'

Without further explanation, he took his magnifying glass and examined the stonework of the trough along its upper edges, touching the masonry here and there where it seemed a little brighter from some abrasion or other.

‘Someone has used this often as a firing-post,' he said presently. ‘We had best go and present our findings to Sir Edward.'

‘It seems to me, Holmes, that we have found very little of use to him.'

‘Precisely,' he said cryptically. ‘In that case we had better go and tell him so. I feel, however, we may assure him on the matter of the unfortunate crow.'

‘The crow?'

‘Yes, Watson. I confess that the crow has been the biggest impediment to this investigation. There have been only two exhibits of significance in this case so far: the blood of the crow and the bullet that was found flattened on the roadway the day after the girl's death. It is most unsatisfactory.'

On the evening of our return to London, Holmes withdrew after dinner to the cellar that we had leased as part of our premises, and which extended a little under the pavement of Baker Street, where there was a coal-chute. Soon after our arrival as tenants, Holmes had filled one end of the underground tunnel with rubble and masked it with iron plating, so that it was even possible to test heavy-calibre big-game rifles without danger. For some time he had been investigating the possibility, yet to be demonstrated at that time, that he might be able to identify the individual gun from which a particular bullet had been fired, as well as the type of weapon. To retrieve the bullet, he fired into a row of fifteen twelve-bore cartridge boxes stuffed tight with cotton wool. A Webley Scott service revolver would penetrate six and a Mauser twice that number. His method was so precise that he knew without fail in which box a spent bullet might be found. Once it had been retrieved, he would go to work with his comparison microscope.

On that spring night of our return from Leicester, homeward-bound pedestrians might have been a little puzzled by a series of powerful but muffled thuds from below the paving stones. Until long after midnight, the cellar was brightly lit.

On the following afternoon, we took a cab to Temple Gardens to report the extent of our progress. It was not the happiest of occasions as we sat once again in the bay-fronted room overlooking the quiet lawns and trees. Our findings were meagre enough. There was also an air of rivalry, for Sir Edward Marshall Hall, no less than Sherlock Holmes, regarded himself as an expert in the matter of firearms and ballistics, which Sir Edward was eager to discuss. Holmes preferred the dead carrion crow.

‘I believe, Sir Edward, that we may now be certain the bird was shot either as it sat upon the top bar of the gate or, more likely, a moment after it had taken off.'

Sir Edward passed a hand over his noble jaw. ‘We are told that it died because it was gorged with the girl's blood.'

‘Such a thing would be quite impossible,' said Holmes. ‘Look at the proposition for one moment. We are invited to believe that it died of apoplexy, the result of consuming a surfeit of blood. The annals of ornithology will show that birds do not die in such circumstances, or very rarely so. If there is a surfeit, they regurgitate. In this case, the interval between her death and the finding of the body was a matter of minutes. It scarcely allows time for our bird to gorge itself. Then we have the bloody tracks between the gate and the young woman's body, the impossible number upon which the theory of surfeit relies. It is surely plain that the bird was shot, and that its blood sprayed or splashed from it in the direction of Bella Wright's body. That gives the direction of the bullet. It was shot by someone in the field, not far from the gate.'

‘Yet the body of the bird was found fifty or sixty feet away from the gate.'

‘Precisely,' said Holmes, ‘Forgive me, Sir Edward, but I have made a little study of how birds and other creatures die when they are shot. A bird that is shot while in the air, assuming that our crow had just taken off, will “tower” upwards immediately after the impact, rather than dropping straight down. It gains height for a moment and then falls dead. Yet it still does not fall in a straight line. The consequence is that it will very probably hit the ground at a little distance away. Sixty feet would be nothing.'

‘At what range do you say was it shot?'

‘Twenty-two feet,' Holmes said without hesitation.

The lawyer's eyes narrowed. ‘You can be so precise?'

‘I can, Sir Edward. There is a stone sheep-trough in the field, twenty-two feet from the gate. A man or boy hunting crows or other vermin might kneel behind it for cover, no doubt waiting for his prey to show itself. A shot fired at the gate from such cover would travel upwards at an angle of about twenty degrees. It would pass through the body of the bird, which the splashes of blood suggest, and continue upwards with its force somewhat reduced.'

There was no mistaking the excitement in Sir Edward's eyes. He got up and walked to and fro across the window, illustrating by his movements what he believed to have happened to the dead girl.

‘Just so, Mr Holmes. Bella Wright is cycling on the near side of the road. Her attention is caught by the bird or the presence of the man. She turns her face in that direction, however briefly. This happens in the interval of her passing the gap in the tall hedge, where the gate stands. The unlucky shot is fired by the man, who has tightened his finger on the trigger before seeing her. The bullet passes through the bird and by the most dreadful chance continues upwards, entering Miss Wright's left cheek just under the eye. Still travelling upwards, it makes its exit wound at the crown of her head. She falls dead from the bicycle. The second impact robs the bullet of most of its force and it strikes the ground seventeen feet away, where it was found next day. There we have it, Mr Holmes.'

He sat down again.

‘Not quite,' said Holmes coolly. ‘There are two items of evidence missing in your defence, Sir Edward. There is the identity of the man who fired such a shot and there is the gun that might have been used. Moreover, as the Attorney-General will point out to you, your client is the last person to be seen with the dead girl. He concealed evidence from the police. He lied to them when arrested, and he threw his bicycle into the canal. Worst of all, he possessed cartridges identical to that found on the road and which he threw away immediately after the murder. We have only his word for it that he no longer possessed the Webley Scott service revolver for which ammunition of that calibre was designed.'

Sir Edward stood up, reached across the wide desk for a folder and opened it.

‘You would agree, Mr Holmes, that if Light shot this young woman, he must have done so at close range and that, presumably, he would have used the Webley Scott revolver?'

‘I think it probable.'

Sir Edward displayed a gruesome post-mortem photograph.

‘Mr Holmes, have you never seen someone shot in the head at close range by such a weapon? Look for yourself. The bullet not only makes an entry wound and an exit wound. It is hardly too much to say that the victim's head is almost blown apart by the velocity of the bullet. Moreover at such close range, the skin would be marked by the discharge of powder from the barrel.'

‘Indeed,' said Holmes sceptically. ‘Indeed, Sir Edward, what you say of the head being blown apart might be true if the ammunition were in good condition. Where, however, cartridges have been kept as souvenirs and are of indeterminate age, the results are quite different. A bullet will go off rather like a damp squib. It would have power enough to pass through the victim's head at close range. Yet the powder blast would be relatively slight and the force of the bullet insufficient to do more than make the wounds of entry and exit. It would not be remarkable that it should drop to earth seventeen feet further on. As to the scorching of the skin, I have myself tried experiments with portions of a cadaver. Small-calibre ammunition does not scorch the skin greatly. Even when it is of larger calibre, as in this case, the powder may be washed away by something as simple as a flow of blood.'

Sir Edward Marshall Hall sat back in his chair and met his adversary's gaze with a long stare. It was impossible not to see that he was thanking whatever gods might be that the services of Sherlock Holmes had been retained on behalf of his client and had not been put at the disposal of the Crown.

‘Then what, Mr Holmes, are we to think? The bullet that was found has been misshapen by some such impact as a horse's hoof while it lay unnoticed in the road. However, you will not deny that it has been fired by a rifled barrel and that such rifling indicates a rifle.'

‘It may indicate that,' said Holmes smoothly, ‘but it does not prove it. I must warn you, Sir Edward, that if you ask such a question in cross-examination, you will be told that a Webley Scott revolver has a rifled barrel, though it is not a rifle, and that it leaves seven narrow rifling grooves on any bullet fired from it.'

For the first time in our dealings with him, a shadow of alarm crossed the great lawyer's handsome countenance.

‘Do you say, Mr Holmes, that this bullet could not have been fired from a rifle?'

Holmes shook his head. ‘No one can say for certain that it was not fired by a rifle. However, a .455 cartridge would suggest a rifle of unusual power. An elephant rifle, perhaps.'