by Roger Bax
Marion stared wildly at the inspector. “Yes, but it wasn’t true. I wiped the trigger. Barbara didn’t do it—I did. I swear it. I—I was so afraid.”
“Aunt Marion!” exclaimed Barbara.
If James was a little taken aback, he didn’t show it. “And what exactly were you afraid of, Miss Appleby?”
“I was afraid of what you might find. You’d talked so much about fingerprints … Oh, I oughtn’t to have done it, I know.”
“You appear to have done a lot of things you oughtn’t to have done,” said James. “On whose account were you afraid, pray?”
“I wasn’t thinking of anyone in particular. I just suddenly thought as I looked at the gun that perhaps someone’s fingerprints might be there, and almost before I knew what I was doing I’d wiped the trigger clean.”
“You make it sound almost like a slip of the hand! I find it very difficult to believe that if you did commit this grossly improper act you were not precisely aware of what you were doing, and why. You’d already made one attempt to recover the gun, no doubt for the same purpose.”
“Marion!” said Thomas in an appalled voice. “What can you have been thinking of?”
“I assume, sir, that she was thinking of Miss Rutherford,” said James dryly. “It looks as though she believed, or knew, that her niece’s prints were on the trigger, and was determined to protect her at all costs.”
“That isn’t true,” Marion cried, aghast at the turn of events. “Oh, it’s not true—you must believe me.”
“I feel under no compulsion,” said James. He glanced at his wrist watch, as though only half his mind were on the discussion. “I don’t know, Miss Appleby, what your niece may have told you, but judging by your actions I can’t help thinking that you believed her to be a murderess. It may well be that your attempt to retrieve the gun the other night was made on her behalf, with the idea of wiping the prints or hiding the weapon in a safer place. When that attempt was frustrated, Miss Rutherford may have found the suspense unbearable and recovered the gun in order to wipe the prints herself. Whether, in fact, she wiped them on her way up to the house, or whether, as you say, you yourself wiped them, I frankly don’t know. It may be that you have merely tried to shoulder the responsibility. In any event, suspicion of the murder seems to rest squarely upon Miss Rutherford.”
Marion gave a low moan. “You’re making a terrible mistake.” She looked across at William and then back at James. “Oh, God, this can’t happen …”
Suddenly, from his seat by the fireplace, the Ancient spoke up. “Can I have a private word with you, Inspector?”
“As you wish, sir,” said James impassively. “Will you others kindly step into the next room?” He dismissed the dazed family with an authoritative gesture. “Miss Rutherford, you’re on no account to leave the house.”
He waited until the door was shut, and then turned to William.
Chapter Thirty One
“Well, Mr. Appleby?”
“What’s all this nonsense about Barbara?” growled the old man, with a darting glance at James. “Never heard such poppycock in all my life. I shot the scamp myself.”
James nodded. “I rather thought that was what you were going to tell me.”
The Ancient glared at him from beneath shaggy brows. “You did? Then what the devil do you mean by practically accusing my great-granddaughter?”
“There was very little evidence against you,” James pointed out. “It seems that the prospect of a definite charge against Miss Rutherford has made you speak out.”
“So it was a trick, eh?” snarled William.
James inclined his head. The gesture could have meant anything.
From William’s sour expression it was obvious that even at his age the thought of being outmaneuvered was distasteful. “I still don’t see how you knew I had anything to do with it,” he muttered.
“In one important respect, you were an obvious choice,” James told him. “You alone, among all the candidates, might be expected to care so little about personal consequences that you would allow yourself to shoot a man in broad daylight when people were about. I attached great weight to that.”
“M’m. You’ve got more sense than I gave you credit for, young man.”
“At the same time,” James went on, “there seemed to be an insuperable obstacle—you couldn’t have snatched the gun from Hutton and pushed him into the grave.”
“Quite right,” said William, almost as though he were collaborating on the case. “We agreed on that before. And how did you get over this insuperable obstacle?”
“I didn’t,” said James frankly. “I’m very curious indeed to hear your explanation.”
“Nothing simpler, young man. Nobody pushed him into the grave. He went in of his own accord. That surprises you, doesn’t it?”
“It does, rather. Suppose you tell me all about it?” The inspector took out his notebook.
“Aren’t you supposed to give me a warning at this stage?” asked William, eyeing the book.
James rubbed his chin. “The usual formalities seem a little inappropriate in your case, sir.”
“Why? I’ve never heard of any provision for depriving a centenarian of his civic rights.”
“Well, no, of course not. All right, sir, it’s my duty to warn you that anything you say will be taken down and may be used in evidence.”
“Good. As it happens, there’s no need for you to take anything down. I’ve already written everything down myself and signed it. And had it witnessed. Here you are.” William held out a wad of papers which James took in some surprise. “At my age,” the old man explained, “I can’t afford to take risks. I could see that you suspected some of the others, and as I knew I might die at any moment I had to make sure that they wouldn’t be left in any trouble.”
“Very considerate,” said James. “You may possibly have noticed that they’ve been in some trouble already.”
He unfolded the papers and saw that they were covered with a florid, shaky handwriting. The Ancient had evidently made good use of his day or two in bed.
This was what the inspector read:
On the evening of Saturday September 12th at a little after six o’clock I went for my usual stroll in the garden. I hadn’t been out very long before I heard Barbara and Neville Hutton talking angrily in the elm grove. At my age I can’t stand a lot of noise, as people ought to know by now, so I went into the churchyard, hoping it would be quieter. It was a little better but not much. I thought I would go and have a peep at George Peckitt’s grave while I was there. When I bent over the grave I noticed something lying at the bottom. I was trying to see what it was when Neville Hutton came along the path with my gun under his arm. He looked in an ugly mood, which wasn’t surprising if my Barbara had been giving him a piece of her mind, as she’d every right to do. I wouldn’t have taken any notice of him but he stopped when he saw me by the grave and he said, “It’s a cozy place, isn’t it, Grandpa? They’ll soon be fitting you up with something like this.” He had always been smarmily polite before, but now he was out in his true colors. Before I could say anything, he saw what I had seen, only having younger eyes than mine he knew what it was. He said, “Hullo, somebody’s dropped a watch in there—it would be a pity to bury that with the old bones.” I had thought for a long time that he was greedy for Barbara’s fortune, but now I could see that he was greedy for little things as well. I said, “Leave it alone, it’s nothing to do with you,” because he looked as though he’d a good mind to try and get it, and I didn’t want him interfering with poor old George’s last resting place. He said, “Shut up, you old fool, it’s a good watch. Here, hold this.” Then, before I could say another word in protest, he had pushed the gun into my hands and jumped down into the grave. I hadn’t held a gun for years, and I was shaking a good bit as I always do when anybody annoys me. The young idiot ought to have left the safety catch on, of course, but he hadn’t any feeling for guns and he’d forgotten to do so. I must ha
ve pressed the trigger, because the gun suddenly went off in my hands, and the explosion must have jerked my finger against the trigger again because the second barrel went off immediately afterward. I saw at once that Hutton had been shot in the head as he was bending down, and that he was dead. I didn’t know what to do. I thought of Barbara, and I didn’t want her to know that I had been the cause of her young man’s death, even though it was an accident. I thought the best thing for all concerned would be for me to hide the gun and say nothing about it. I put it in the old hollow tree on my way up to the house and then went straight to bed. This is the whole truth. Nobody is to blame but me, and I am not to blame because it was an accident. If my great-granddaughter should read this, I hope she will forgive me for the suffering I have unintentionally caused her.
The document ended there. The writing toward the end was so straggling that it was barely decipherable, and the signature was a scrawl. Beside it, under the words “witnessed by” was the signature “Marion Appleby” in a firm, precise hand.
James took a deep breath. “Remarkable!” he observed, turning back the pages as though he could hardly believe his eyes. “Quite remarkable! So it was an accident after all, eh?’
“Yes,” said William.
“Did Miss Appleby know the contents of this document, or did she merely witness your signature?”
“Oh, Marion knew all about it. You see, when everyone started fussing about fingerprints I began to be worried about what might be found on the gun. I thought that if you did discover that I’d held it you might not believe that the shooting had been accidental, as I’d kept the truth from you. But I couldn’t do anything about it myself, so I decided to get someone to help me, and Marion seemed to be the only person. It was on my account that she tried to get the gun that night, and it was also on my account that she wiped the trigger today. You were quite wrong about Barbara—she didn’t do it. It must have been pure coincidence that she found the gun, just as she told you.”
“I see.” James studied the old man for a while. “You say that Hutton joined you at the grave and that you shot him there. Miss Rutherford, on the other hand, told me that she saw him already beginning to cross the fields. How do you account for that discrepancy?”
“What she said was not true, I’m afraid, but you mustn’t blame her too much. No doubt she realized that you might suspect her—and said that to protect herself.”
“H’m. What about Dennis Gwynn? He must have seen all this happen, but he won’t admit anything. Has he been lying on your account?”
“He’s a fine, loyal lad,” said the Ancient. “A lad of spirit. We’ve always got on well together. I hope you won’t be hard on him.”
“You certainly have a lot to answer for,” said James. He was still thoughtfully turning over the sheaf of papers. “I seem to remember, Mr. Appleby, that one of the first maxims for sportsmen is ‘Never point a gun at anything you don’t intend to kill.’ It surprises me that a man with your long experience of guns and your strong views about the way to handle them should have made that elementary mistake.”
“It was Hutton’s mistake,” said William self-righteously. “He handed me the gun with the stock toward me and the muzzle pointing toward himself and that was how I had to take it. Everything else happened in a flash.”
“In two flashes, surely?” James corrected him.
“It was my shaking hand,” explained the old man. He held out his gnarled right hand, which was indeed shaking like a leaf.
“You managed to write out a very fair statement of what happened, shaking hand or no shaking hand. And you told me the other day that you were still capable of handling a gun. Remember?”
“Yes,” agreed William, “but down there by the grave I was very upset.” He gave a long sigh, and his head drooped as though the effort to talk were tiring him. “I hope you don’t think that I fired the gun deliberately?”
“I would have been more ready to accept your story at its face value if you had made a clean breast of everything at the beginning.”
“I couldn’t do that, Inspector. I realize it’s been unpleasant for the family, having all this hanging over them, but it might have been even worse for them if they had been told what really happened. They might not have believed it was an accident, and then where should we all have been? I thought that once you fellows discovered that you hadn’t got any evidence, you’d drop the case. Then everything would have been all right.”
“You’re not the first person to underestimate the persistence of the police, Mr. Appleby. Cases are frequently shelved—they’re rarely dropped.” James sat in thought for a moment.
“Well, this is indeed a surprising development. An accident, eh? And what a fortunate accident! Here was a man whom you greatly disliked, a man who in your eyes was an impudent bounder and blackguard, a man who was probably going to spoil your great-granddaughter’s life—and suddenly, by a timely but uncontrollable trembling of your fingers, he’s disposed of and the danger is removed.” The inspector looked sternly at the old man. “Of course, Mr. Appleby, if you had pressed the trigger of your own volition, however sharp the impulse, that would have been murder—a wicked and detestable crime for which you would now have to answer before your family and before the law.”
The Ancient’s face was sardonic. “Inspector,” he said, “I’ve lived in this world for one hundred years, and I’ve never known a day pass when people weren’t murdering each other for bad reasons and being applauded for it. I’ve lived through so many wars that I can’t even count them—and that sort of murder’s always been reckoned a most God-fearing activity. I’ve read of people being shot down in the streets because they were hungry and wouldn’t starve quietly, and I’ve known them killed because they were patriots, or because they were Jews, or because they were Negroes, or because they had unpopular political opinions. All my life there’s been bloody murder going on, and sometimes I’ve protested—yes, and had my ricks burned because of it—but there’s never been any lack of respectable people to say that the killing was perfectly proper and legal and Christian in the particular circumstances. Are you telling me that it would have been wrong to kill one worthless blackguard like Hutton? Bah!”
“The individual can’t be allowed to take the law into his own hands,” James said quietly, “as you very well know. And in your case it would have been appallingly presumptuous. How could you tell what was going to happen between your great-granddaughter and Hutton? There was always the possibility—the very strong possibility, I should say—that Miss Rutherford might have changed her mind and decided not to marry him after all. Any attempt to divert the course of another person’s life by a method as drastic as murder strikes me as being arrogant folly. Of one thing I feel convinced, Mr. Appleby—if you had murdered Hutton, and Miss Rutherford had ever come to know of it, she would have carried a scar on her mind for the rest of her days.”
A purple vein throbbed in the Ancient’s temple. “Better to have a scar on the mind, as you put it, than to be the wife of a man like Hutton, and perhaps the mother of his child.” For a few moments he appeared lost in statuesque reflection. “Anyhow,” he said at last, “as it was an accident there’s no need to worry about that.”
“No,” said James. “As your conscience is clear, there’s nothing to worry about at all.”
“You let my conscience alone. I’ve never had any difficulty with it yet …”
Suddenly the Ancient broke off and clutched his head with both hands as though smitten with agonizing pain. As he swayed, the inspector leaped forward and caught him. Gently James gathered the big wasted frame into his arms and carried it to the settee. Then he hurried to the door. “Mr. Appleby!” he called urgently. “Mr. Appleby!”
As Thomas’s startled face appeared at the library door, James said in muted tones, “Get a doctor, quickly—the old gentleman has been taken ill,” and returned to the settee. He took the Ancient’s hand in his and as he felt for a pulse he saw the wrinkle
d eyelids flutter.
“Acc-ident,” murmured William in a blurred, feeble voice. Then he seemed to lapse into semiconsciousness.
There was a sound of flying feet in the hall and Barbara came rushing into the room, closely followed by Marion. “Oh, William!” cried Barbara, flinging herself down by the Ancient. “Oh, darling, it’s all my fault!” The old man’s eyes slowly opened again and he gave the weeping girl a look of such deep tenderness that James was moved. Barbara’s sobs became uncontrollable. It was as though a dam had burst at last under continuous, intolerable pressure.
Marion, after one swift look at her grandfather, had sped from the room in search of blankets and hot water bottles, and James now followed her out. In the hall, Thomas had just got through on the telephone and Dennis Gwynn was hovering uneasily at his elbow. The inspector made his way to the library and stood listening to the continuous soft hurrying of feet that told of a household in crisis. He felt an intruder now, yet could not leave. Presently a car drew up, and he heard the quick tread of the doctor in the hall.
It was a brief visit. Twenty minutes later the car drove off again and Thomas and Dennis Gwynn joined James in the library. A hush had fallen on the house.
“My grandfather is dead,” said Thomas, in answer to the inspector’s unspoken inquiry.
“I’m exceedingly sorry to hear that, sir,” said James with real feeling. “I’m afraid he’s been under a quite intolerable strain.”