Bodies from the Library

by Tony Medawar

  ‘I see,’ replied the professor. ‘I wonder if you would mind showing me where they were firing from?’

  ‘Certainly, sir, it’s close handy.’ The range-warden led us to a firing-point nearby, and pointed out the spot on which the stand had been erected.

  ‘That’s the place, sir. They were firing at number 10 target over yonder. A thousand yards it is, and wonderful accurate the new gun seemed. Shot the target to pieces, they did.’

  The professor made no reply, but took out his map and drew a line upon it from the firing-point to the butts. The line, when extended, led over a tract of desolate marshes until it met the river.

  ‘There is very little danger on these ranges, it appears,’ remarked the professor, with a note of annoyance in his voice. ‘If a shot missed the butts altogether, it could only fall into the river, far away from any frequented spot.’

  ‘That’s what they were laid out for,’ replied the range-warden. ‘You see, on the other side there’s a house or two, to say nothing of the road and the railway. It wouldn’t do to have any stray rounds falling among them.’

  ‘It certainly would not,’ replied the professor absently. ‘I see by the map the Rainham station is not far beyond the end of the ranges. Is there any objection to my walking to it past the butts?’

  ‘None at all, sir, it’s the best way to get there when there’s no firing on. Thank you, sir, it’s been no trouble at all.’

  We started to walk down the ranges, a puzzled frown on the professor’s face. Every few yards he stopped and examined the country through his glasses, or pulled out the map and stared at it with an absorbed expression. We had reached the butts before he said a word, and then it was not until we had climbed to the top of them that he spoke.

  ‘Very puzzling, very!’ he muttered. ‘There must, of course, be some explanation. A mathematical deduction from facts can never be false. But I wish I could discover the explanation.’

  He was looking through his field-glasses as he spoke, and suddenly his attention became riveted upon an object in front of him. Without waiting for me he hurried down the steep sides of the butts, and almost ran towards a flagstaff standing a couple of hundred yards on the far side of them. When he arrived at the base of it, he drew a couple of lines on the map, walked half round the flagstaff and gazed intently through his glasses. By the time I had caught up with him he had put the glasses back in their case, and was smiling benevolently.

  ‘We can return to town by the next train, my boy,’ he said cheerfully. ‘l have ascertained everything I wished to know.’

  He refused to say a word until our train was running into Fenchurch-street Station. Then suddenly he turned to me.

  ‘I am going to the War Office,’ he said curtly. ‘Will you go to Scotland Yard, see Inspector Hanslet, and ask him to come to Westbourne-terrace as soon as he can?’

  I found Hanslet, after some little trouble, and gave him the professor’s message.

  ‘Something to do with the Farquharson business, I suppose?’ he replied. ‘Well, I’ll come if the professor wants to see me. But I’ve got it all fixed up without his help.

  He turned up, true to his promise, and the professor greeted him with a pleasant smile.

  ‘Good evening inspector; I’m glad you were able to come. Will you be particularly busy tomorrow morning?’

  ‘I don’t think so, professor,’ replied Hanslet in a puzzled voice. ‘Do you want me to do anything?’

  ‘Well, if you can spare the time, I should like to introduce you to the murderer of Mr Farquharson,’ said the professor, casually.

  Hanslet lay back in his chair and laughed. ‘Thanks very much, professor; but I’ve met him already,’ he replied. ‘It would be a waste of your time, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Never mind,’ said the professor, with a tolerant smile. ‘I assure you that it will be worth your while to spend the morning with me. Will you meet me by the book-stall at Charing Cross at half-past ten?’

  Hanslet reflected for a moment. The professor had never yet led him on a wild-goose chase, and it might be worth while to humour him

  ‘All right,’ he replied, reluctantly. ‘I’ll come. But, I warn you, it’s no good.’

  The professor smiled, but said nothing. Hanslet took his leave of us, and the professor appeared to put all thought of the Farquharson case out of his head.

  We met again at Charing Cross the next day. The professor had taken tickets to Woolwich and we got out of the train there and walked to the gates of the arsenal. The professor took an official letter out of his pocket, which he gave to the porter. In a few minutes we were led to an office, when a young officer rose to greet us.

  ‘Good morning, Dr Priestley,’ he said. ‘Colonel Conyngham rang me up to say that you were coming. You want to see the stand we use for testing the new automatic rifle? It happens to be in the yard below, being repaired.’

  ‘Being repaired?’ repeated the professor quickly. ‘May I ask what is the matter with it?’

  ‘Oh, nothing serious. We used it at Rainham the other day, and the clamp broke just as we were finishing a series. We had fired 99 rounds out of 100, when the muzzle of the gun slipped up. I don’t know what happened to the round. I suppose it went into the river somewhere. Beastly nuisance, we shall have to go down and start all over again.’

  ‘Ah!’ exclaimed the professor, in a satisfied tone. ‘That explains it. But I wouldn’t use No.10 target again if I were you. Can we see this stand?’

  ‘Certainly,’ replied the officer. ‘Come along.’

  He led us into the yard, where a sort of tripod with a clamp at the head of it was standing. The professor looked at it earnestly for some moments, then turned to Hanslet.

  ‘There you see the murderer of Mr Farquharson,’ he said quietly.

  Of course Hanslet, the officer and myself bombarded him with questions, which he refused to answer until we had returned to London and were seated in his study. Then, fixing his eyes upon the ceiling and putting the tips of his fingers together, he began.

  ‘It was, to any intelligent man, perfectly obvious that there are half a dozen reasons why young Halliday could not have shot his uncle. In the first place, he must have fired at very close range, from one side or other of the carriage, and a rifle bullet fired at such a range, although it very often makes a very extensive wound of entry, does not stay in a man’s brain.

  ‘It travels right through his head, with very slightly diminished velocity. Next, if Halliday fired at his uncle at all, it must have been from the left-hand side of the carriage. Had he fired from the right-hand side, the muzzle of the weapon would have been almost touching his victim and there would have been signs of burning or blackening round the wound. Do you admit this, inspector?’

  ‘Of course?’ replied Hanslet. ‘My theory always has been that he fired from the left-hand side.’

  ‘Very well,’ said the professor quickly. Now Halliday is notoriously a very bad shot, hence his journey to Purfleet. Harold, on the contrary, is a good shot. Yet, during our expedition of yesterday, I asked him to aim at my right eye with a stick while the train was in motion. I found that never for an instant could he point the stick at it. I find it impossible to believe that a bad shot, firing from the footboard and therefore compelled to use one hand at least to retain his hold, could shoot a man on the far side of the carriage exactly on the temple.’

  The professor paused, and Hanslet looked at him doubtfully.

  ‘It all sounds very plausible, professor, but until you can produce a better explanation I shall continue to believe that my own is the correct one.’

  ‘Exactly. It was to verify a theory which I had formed that I carried out my investigations. It was perfectly obvious to me, from your description of the wound, that it had been inflicted by a bullet very near the end of its flight, and therefore possessing only enough velocity to penetrate the skull without passing through it. This meant that it had been fired from a considerable distance away. Upon con
sulting the map, I discovered that there were two rifle ranges near the railway between London and Tilbury. I could not help feeling that the source of the bullet was probably one of these ranges. It was, at all events, a possibility worth investigating.

  ‘But at the outset I was faced with what seemed an insuperable objection. I deduced from the map, a deduction subsequently verified by examination of the ground, that a round fired at any of the targets on either range would take a direction away from the railway. I also discovered that the only rounds fired while the train in which Mr Farquharson’s body was found was passing the ranges were by an experimental party from the arsenal. This party employed a special device which eliminated any inaccuracy due to the human element. At this point it occurred to me that my theory was incapable of proof, although I still adhered to my view that it was correct.’

  The professor paused and Hanslet ventured to remark:

  ‘I still do not see how you can prove that the breakage of the clamp could have been responsible,’ he said. ‘The direction of the bullet remained the same, and only the elevation was affected. By your own showing, the last shot fired from the machine must have landed in the marshes or the river.’

  ‘I knew very well that notwithstanding the apparent impossibility, this must have been the bullet which killed Mr Farquharson,’ replied the professor equably. ‘I climbed the butts behind the target at which the arsenal party had been firing, and while there I made an interesting discovery which solved the difficulty at once. Directly in line with number 10 target and some distance behind it was a flagstaff. Further, upon examination of this flagstaff, I discovered that it was made of steel.

  ‘Now the map had told me that there was only a short stretch of line upon which a train could be struck by a bullet deflected by this flagstaff. If this had indeed been the case, I knew exactly where to look for traces, and at my first inspection I found them. High up on the staff is a scar where the paint has recently been removed. To my mind the cause of Mr Farquharson’s death is adequately explained.’

  Hanslet whistled softly. ‘By Jove, there’s something in it!’ he exclaimed. ‘Your theory, I take it, is that Farquharson was struck by a bullet deflected by the flagstaff?’

  ‘Of course,’ replied the professor. ‘He was sitting on the right-hand side of the carriage, facing the engine. He was struck on the right side of the head, which supports that theory of a bullet coming through the open window. A bullet deflected in this way usually turns over and over for the rest of its flight, which accounts for the size of the wound. Have you any objection to offer?’

  ‘Not at the moment,’ said Hanslet cautiously. ‘I shall have to verify all these facts, of course. For one thing, I must take the bullet to the arsenal and see if it is one of the same type as the experimental party were using.’

  ‘Verify everything you can, certainly,’ replied the professor. ‘But remember that facts, not conjecture, are what should guide you.’

  Hanslet nodded. ‘I’ll remember, professor,’ he said. And with that he left us.

  Two days later Mary announced Miss Farquharson and Mr Halliday. They entered the room, and Halliday walked straight up to the professor and grasped his hand.

  ‘You have rendered me the greatest service one man can render to another, sir,’ he exclaimed. ‘Inspector Hanslet tells me that all suspicion that I murdered my uncle has been cleared away, and that this is due entirely to your efforts.’

  Before the professor could reply, Miss Farquharson ran up to him and kissed him impulsively. ‘Dr Priestley, you’re a darling!’ she exclaimed.

  The professor beamed at her through his spectacles. ‘Really, my dear, you make me feel quite sorry that you are going to marry this young man,’ he said.

  JOHN RHODE

  The writer best known as ‘John Rhode’ was born Cecil John Charles Street in 1884 in the British territory of Gibraltar, where his father was Colonel-in-Chief of the second battalion of Scottish Rifles.

  At the age of 16, Street left school to attend the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich and, on the outbreak of war, he enlisted. His main contribution to the war effort concerned the promulgation of allied propaganda for which he was awarded the Order of the British Empire in the New Year Honours List for 1918 and also the prestigious Military Cross. As the war came to an end, Street moved to a new role in Dublin Castle in Ireland, where he was responsible for countering the campaigning of Irish nationalists.

  During the 1920s, Street seems to have spent most of his time at a typewriter, producing a fictionalised memoir and various political studies, biographies and a wartime romance, as well as short stories and articles on subjects as diverse as piracy and peasant art. While his early books found some success, the Golden Age of detective stories was well underway, so he decided to try his hand at the genre. He created Doctor—or rather Professor—Lancelot Priestley, a former academic whose first case was The Paddington Mystery, published in 1925 as by ‘John Rhode’. Under this pseudonym he wrote nearly eighty novels and the first full-length study of the trial of Constance Kent. But one pen name wasn’t enough for this astonishingly prolific writer. Street also became ‘Miles Burton’, as whom he wrote over sixty novels, and ‘Cecil Waye’, whose four books featured sibling investigators Christopher and Vivienne Perrin.

  John Street was also a member of the Detection Club and edited Detection Medley (1939), the first and arguably the best anthology of stories by members of the Club. He had also contributed to the Club’s first two round-robin detective novels, The Floating Admiral (1931) and Ask a Policeman (1933), as well as one of the Club’s series of radio plays for the BBC and the excellent true-crime anthology The Anatomy of Murder (1936). Street also helped other Club members with scientific and technical aspects of their own work including Dorothy L. Sayers and also John Dickson Carr, who later made Street the inspiration for his character Colonel March, head of The Department of Queer Complaints (1940).

  Street was as ingenious as he was prolific, devising seemingly impossible crimes in locked houses, locked bathrooms and locked railway compartments, and even—in Drop to his Death, co-authored with Carr in 1939—a locked elevator. And as well as unusual settings he was adept at devising unusual means of murder, including a hedgehog [sic], a marrow and a hot water bottle; even bed-sheets, soda syphons, car batteries and pyjamas could be lethal in Street’s hands. His books are particularly noteworthy for their humour and social observations and he also defies some of the expectations of the genre, with one novel in which Dr Priestley allows a murderer to go free and another in which the guilty party is identified and put on trial.… . . but acquitted.

  John Street died in 1964.

  ‘The Elusive Bullet’ was first published in the London Evening Standard on 10 August 1936 as part of a series Detective Cavalcade edited by Dorothy L. Sayers.

  THE EUTHANASIA OF HILARY’S AUNT

  Cyril Hare

  Hilary Smyth came of what his father was fond of calling ‘a good old family’. How old the family actually was might have been open to doubt, but Mr Smyth’s standards of behaviour were certainly old-fashioned enough to satisfy any Victorian aristocrat.

  So it came about that as the result of the merest peccadillo, relating to a few dishonoured cheques, Hilary had found himself summarily exiled to Australia, a place of which Mr Smyth knew little except that it provided a convenient dumping-ground for the black sheep of good old English families

  Hilary had not liked Australia, nor had Australia liked Hilary, and he took the earliest opportunity to return to England. Owing to his congenital incapacity to earn enough money to pay for his passage home, the opportunity only occurred when the simultaneous deaths of his father and elder brother put him in possession of the good old family’s fortune.

  The fortune was disappointingly small—old fashioned standards having proved sadly unremunerative of recent years—and Hilary, in the first flush of recovered liberty, ran through it in a matter of months. He was reduced to the ug
ly alternatives of destitution or looking for employment when he fortunately recollected that he was not alone in the world. He possessed an aunt.

  Hilary knew little enough of his father’s only sister, and for this the late Mr Smyth’s outdated code was again responsible. ‘Your Aunt Mary disgraced herself,’ was all that the old gentleman would ever say when her name was mentioned.

  So far as Hilary could ascertain, however, the disgrace consisted merely in the fact that she had chosen to throw in her lot with a man who, so far from belonging to a good old family, was involved in a low activity known as ‘trade’, and, it was hinted, ‘retail trade’ at that. From the time that Mary Smyth became Mrs Prothero, she was as one dead so far as her brother was concerned, and not even the demise of Mr Prothero, waving her very comfortably off with no encumbrances, could suffice to bring her to life again.

  Hilary got in touch with his aunt through the family solicitor—to whom, fortunately, she had, despite her downfall, remained faithful—and the sun shone for him once more. The old lady appeared to take to him. Hilary, when on his best behaviour, could be excellent company, and, from being a frequent visitor, it was not long before he became an inmate of the comfortable Hampstead house that the profits of retail trade had provided.

  Hilary unpacked his battered suitcase in his new home with the relief of a sailor who makes harbour just before the onset of a gale. He had brought it off, but only just in time, for he was down almost to his last sixpence.

  Before very long he realised that in another sense he had been only just in time effecting his reunion with his aunt. The old lady, although she put a brave face on things, was gravely ill.

  A confidential chat with her doctor alarmed Hilary very much. Stripped of technical phrases, his report amounted to this: Mrs Prothero’s illness was incurable and inoperable. She might live for some considerable time to come, but the end was certain. ‘Her condition may begin to deteriorate at any moment,’ the doctor concluded. ‘When it gets beyond a certain stage—well, it’s not really a kindness to want her to live very long.’