The Ha-Ha Case

by J. J. Connington

  “Don’t remember doing it,” Hay answered. “One of us must’ve picked it up.”

  “Which way was he lying down there?” the inspector demanded.

  “His head was to the north, up-stream,” Laxford replied at once. “We didn’t turn him, in lifting him; and his head was to the north when we laid him down—here—on the grass. You can see the blood where it oozed from the wound, if you look.”

  The inspector apparently took no interest in the matter. He merely emitted one of his battered conversational counters: “Quite so,” and waited for further information.

  “Mr. James Brandon arrived here almost immediately after that,” Laxford went on. “Then, while he was examining the body, somebody stepped out from behind the bushes—here—with my gun in his hand. I understand his name was Dunne. He seemed taken aback, which wasn’t surprising. In fact, he seemed to me to behave rather strangely altogether. He said he didn’t know how he got there.”

  “I know about Mr. Dunne,” the inspector admitted, with a touch of impatience in his tone.

  “That’s really all I can tell you about the affair,” Laxford concluded. “I went off to get assistance, and we took the body to the house.”

  The inspector nodded as though satisfied, but turned to Hay.

  “You were here while Mr. Laxford was away?”

  Hay seemed to have the strongest disinclination to telling anything.

  “Right,” he agreed, and stopped short at the monosyllable.

  “Did you notice anything that seems important?” Hinton demanded bluntly.

  “Me? Nothing much. I saw a bit of the bone of his head lying on the grass there. Made me feel sickish, somehow. I catted over yonder among the trees, if you want to know. Blood takes me like that, somehow. This Dunne person didn’t seem to mind. He was prowling all over the place, down the slope, there. I don’t think that cove’s quite right in the head, if you ask me. He talked a lot of stuff about somebody or something he called Cunning Oar Physic or some such stuff—rot! And he picked up a bit of a pill-box and made enough fuss over it for it to have been the Cullinan Diamond complete. Bats in the belfry’s his trouble, you take my word.”

  Inspector Hinton nodded rather absent-mindedly in acknowledgment.

  “The coroner will want the evidence of you gentlemen at the inquest,” he explained. “You’ll get a subpœna later on. And that reminds me to ask your full names.”

  He produced his note-book ostentatiously and stood with pencil in readiness.

  “Thomas Laxford . . . L-A-X-F-O-R-D,” Laxford volunteered. “Some people are apt to spell it L-A-C-K-S,” he added in explanation.

  The inspector turned to Hay.

  “Joseph’s the first one; and you spell the other one the same way as you spell a donkey’s breakfast, so you can’t go wrong there,” Hay sneered.

  “And the address?” demanded Hinton, taking no notice of the rudeness.

  Hay seemed confused by this question. He glanced at Laxford before answering.

  “I’ll be here for a day or two.”

  “Edgehill,” the inspector noted. Then, turning to Laxford, he asked casually, “By the way, sir, you’ve no doubts about how this happened, I suppose?”

  “None whatever,” Laxford declared immediately. “He was coming along the top of the sunk fence, because it makes easier walking than the up-slope, most of the way. He must have tripped or stumbled over something and dropped his gun out of his right hand, so that it fell down the ha-ha. It went off with the jar it got when it hit the ground, with the safety-catch at danger; and his head happened to be in the way of the discharge. That fits everything, doesn’t it?”

  “It was the first idea that crossed my mind,” Hinton said in a faintly superior tone. “I just wondered if you knew anything that didn’t fit in with it.”

  “No, nothing I can think of,” Laxford assured him immediately.

  “Ah, well, in that case I needn’t trouble you gentlemen any further,” the inspector concluded with a certain finality in his tone. “The coroner likes to have a little plan made, so I’ve got to take one or two measurements here. You’d only be in my way, so I’ll say good morning, gentlemen.”

  His air of dismissal, though polite, was too plain to ignore. Laxford wished him good morning. Hay contented himself with a surly nod.

  “You wait here and give me a hand, Stoke,” Hinton ordered as the other two moved off towards the house.

  When they were out of sight among the trees, he produced a surveyor’s tape from his pocket and, with Stoke’s assistance, proceeded to make a rough sketch-plan of the environment of the tragedy. The farther bank of the stream gave him a little trouble; but he resorted to some rough triangulation with a prismatic compass, a procedure which evidently impressed Stoke considerably. The plotting took Hinton rather longer than he had anticipated; but at last he completed his work and had the sardonic satisfaction of witnessing Stoke’s admiration of the result.

  “And that’s a ship-shape job!” he commented aloud as he filled in the last details; for Inspector Hinton was never slow in drawing attention to his own talents. “Now I’ll have a look round.”

  He went to the edge of the ha-ha at the point indicated by Laxford and climbed gingerly down to the lower level, where he fell to examining the grass. Apparently the thing he was looking for eluded him, and he went over the ground several times with increasing care, but still with obvious ill-success.

  “That was just where he must have fell,” Stoke declared, seeing the inspector so evidently at fault in some way.

  “I can see the grass trampled down,” Hinton retorted scornfully.

  “Some o’ the trampin’ was done by that loony Dunne,” Stoke pointed out. “I seen him at it. Trampin’ all over the place, he was. Lookin’ for somethin’ or other he’d lost, so he said, an’ he fair furraged round till he got it, he did. Then he came and scrambled up here on the dike and sat swingin’ his heels, as pleased as Punch, with young Mr. Brandon’s corpse just behind him. Them loonies is queer, I tell you. And him playin’ cricket like he was a sane man. Rum, to think o’ that. Wrong in the head, an’ holds a bat as straight as I do myself!”

  The inspector’s only response was a grunt. Not one of those encouraging, interrogative noises which he had practised so often, but a plain grunt which was intentionally meaningless. Hinton had come upon something which puzzled him; and he had no desire to let Stoke guess that he was perplexed. “Never give yourself away,” was another tenet in his unwritten code.

  He had climbed down the ha-ha merely to verify, for form’s sake, Laxford’s statement that the body had been found lying at the foot of the wall. If that were true, then there should be some blood on the grass, the inspector argued quite reasonably. But his examination, casual at first and then more and more searching, had failed to reveal any bloodstain whatsoever. He admitted to himself that the grass was wet. Still, considering the size of the pool of blood on the upper level, some trace ought to be detectable on what was supposed to be the place where young Brandon had fallen. And there was none to be found.

  As to the grass at this point, nothing could be inferred from it. Mr. Dunne had evidently trampled it in the course of his search, and it retained no trace of a heavy body having fallen upon it.

  Hinton made a jotting in his note-book: “Found no trace of blood on grass at foot of ha-ha.” That was the fact. On the opposite page, which he kept for his inferences, he scribbled; “May have been washed away or . . .” And here he paused.

  “Or . . .?”

  Or else the body never was at the foot of the ha-ha at all. That was the only alternative, so far as the inspector could see. And in that case, Hay and Laxford had deliberately lied when they said they found young Brandon at the bottom of the wall and lifted him up on to the higher level.

  Suppose they had faked their evidence, the inspector reflected, why had they done so? Because the truth didn’t suit ’em, obviously. That was the only reason why anybody was tempt
ed to tell a lie. And if the body hadn’t been at the foot of the dike, then it must have been somewhere else. Where else? the inspector asked himself; and the only answer he could find was: “On the slope above the ha-ha where the pool of blood was lying.” But in that case, the gun hadn’t fallen down the ha-ha at all; and the hypothesis based on its exploding with the shock was all nonsense. The youngster must have been shot at the only place where there was blood visible: on the spot where Jim Brandon had found him lying. And Laxford’s evidence must be a pack of lies, the inspector concluded, neatly rounding off his argument in a circle.

  Viewed in this new light, Laxford’s behaviour struck Hinton as suspicious. A bit too ready with needless details: ‘I was just here, at that time; and then I went over there; and after that I . . .’ and so forth. Too much anxiety to get his evidence ‘just right.’ These glib witnesses weren’t much to Hinton’s taste. And suddenly it struck him that Hay had contributed practically nothing to the story, beyond one or two curt corroborations of Laxford’s statements.

  The inspector realised that his silence might make Stoke inquisitive, so he hastily put aside his pre-occupations and turned to the gardener.

  “How’s the museum getting on, eh?” he inquired, as if he had dismissed the accident from his mind.

  Stoke rose at once to the bait. His museum was the thing of which he was proudest.

  “Oh, so-so,” be admitted with modest satisfaction. “I’ve got a fresh thing in hand for it, just now, not finished yet. It’s a whaler in the ice. I made the boat myself and copied the rigging off an old picture, so it would be right. It’s in a tub of brine at present, to get it all coated with salt-crystals—for the snow and ice you see—and it’s coming along fine, I can tell you. After that, I’m going to bed it in some clay and sprinkle salt all over it for the ice-floe. You won’t be able to tell it from the real thing, barring the size, I’ll guarantee, when it’s all fixed up.”

  “I wonder how you can think of things like that,” the inspector mused, in well-feigned admiration.

  Stoke failed to see the double edge on the compliment.

  “It’s just a sort of gift, I suppose,” he confessed bashfully. “I keep my eyes open for anything rum that comes my way, of course, and it’s queer how many o’ them kind o’ things you meet with if you keep your eyes open for ’em. And I like makin’ curiosities, too. Gives me somethin’ to fill in my time with, in the winter evenin’s.”

  “Better get a wife,” the inspector suggested genially.

  “No, no!” Stoke protested coyly. “You and me’s of the same opinion there, Mr. Hinton, I think. No use keepin’ a cow when you can buy milk, is there? I can hire a woman for to do spring-cleanin’ or anything else I want, and a sight cheaper nor keepin’ a wife.”

  Then, rather timidly, he made a suggestion.

  “You’ve never seen my museum, have you? I’d be glad for to show it to you any time you like, Mr. Hinton, if you’d care for to look in and give it a look over. Mr. Wendover, he’s promised me to come and see it, sometime. Very interested, he was, he told me. He liked to see people with a hobby that made them keep their eyes open. That’s what he said. So perhaps you’d care to give me a look up? Night’s the best time. There’s some o’ the things looks best lit up with little candles.”

  “Yes, yes,” Hinton answered, in a non-committal tone.

  He felt a good-humoured contempt for Stoke’s hobby. Fancy a full-grown man wasting his time with peep-shows and rubbish like that! It strengthened the inspector’s feeling of personal superiority to humanity in general.

  Now that he had misled Stoke as to the trend of his thoughts, he went back to his own problems. Inspector Hinton had a suspicious mind; but he was too level-headed to ignore the plain proposition that one fact and one inference did not suffice to make a case. The fact was that he had found no blood at the foot of the ha-ha. The inference was that Laxford had told an elaborate series of lies. Suggestive, perhaps, but nothing more, Hinton decided.

  And with that, his mind switched over to the coming inquest. What line should he take? He would not be called as a witness: Hay, Laxford, Jim Brandon, and the doctor were the only people who could give first-hand evidence. That left him free to tell the coroner about the ha-ha or to keep his own counsel if he chose to do so.

  Should he give the coroner the benefit of his discovery or not? He had a prejudice against the whole business of inquests and coroner’s juries, especially when the coroner thought himself clever enough to play Sherlock Holmes and trench on detective work. They ought to leave that to experts like himself. And in this particular case he had nothing to gain by being fussy, whilst it was quite on the cards that he might make a fool of himself if he went too far. He decided to sit tight and say nothing. That left him free to keep his eyes open, in case anything fresh turned up.

  Chapter Nine

  Coinneach Odhar Fiosaiche

  “YOU can’t call him as a witness, you understand?” Dr. Barreman pointed out in a slightly irritated tone. “No Court would take his evidence.”

  The inspector glanced out of the window at the broad stretches of velvety turf from which Fairlawns took its name.

  “Not if he gave this address,” he admitted without ado. “No, doctor, that idea never entered my head. It’s just a matter of form. Nobody was there, when this young fellow Brandon met his death. We have to get at how it happened, if we can; and all we’ve got to go on is what people saw when they came up and found him dead. Mr. Dunne was on the spot. He’s no use to us as a witness; but still he might remember something that would give us the key to the business. Some trifling detail, maybe, that would throw some light on the affair.”

  Dr. Barreman shook his head sceptically.

  “He remembers nothing about it. The first thing he can recollect is coming upon a group of three people with young Brandon dead in the middle of them. You must have heard that already,” he added, with a sharp look at the inspector.

  “So I gathered,” Hinton admitted. “But what I’m concerned with is what he saw after he woke up. By the way, how did he come to be on the loose at all?”

  Here, intentionally, he put his finger on a sore spot. Dr. Barreman was proud of his organisation in Fairlawns, where everything ran like clockwork. But even clockwork may slip a cog. The most trusted keeper may fall into a doze. A wandering fit may come over a patient. The chance that the two things will synchronise is millions to one; but if it falls out so, then the cog slips, and the pride of the head organiser suffers a severe shock. And, by a still more unfortunate coincidence, Mr. Dunne had got himself mixed up in this notorious affair in the Long Plantation.

  “It won’t happen again,” Dr. Barreman said curtly, with a tightening of his lips.

  The inspector had achieved his object. Rather than discuss the escape, Dr. Barreman would discourse freely on any other subject which was presented to him.

  “What’s wrong with Mr. Dunne?” Plinton asked in a casual tone. “He’s . . . abnormal, of course; but just how?”

  A gleam of something in the doctor’s eye arrested his attention momentarily, but he refrained from showing that he had seen it.

  “I can’t discuss a patient’s troubles with you, of course,” Dr. Barreman pointed out stiffly.

  Then he seemed to reconsider his position, for he went on in a less reserved tone:

  “So far as professional secrecy goes, my hands are tied. But I don’t mind telling you what you could ferret out for yourself, since it’s public property. A few years ago Mr. Dunne was just the same as you or myself. He’s a bachelor, with big private means. He was a good all-round sportsman. I don’t mean he was first-class, or anywhere near it, of course; but he could sit on a horse, handle a yacht or a gun, play cricket without making a fool of himself—you’ve seen that for yourself, I expect—and his golf handicap was four, I believe, in those days. He has a literary turn; you know he edits our magazine. Altogether, as you see, he was rather exceptionally gifted. Unfortunately,
as it turned out, he was a keen motorist; and one day, through no fault of his own I gather, he got into a bad smash. His car was wrecked, and he got very bad concussion of the brain. There was a law case over it, and the other man was proved to be quite in the wrong. I’m telling you nothing confidential; you can read the case for yourself in the newspaper files. After that,” and here the inspector noted that Dr. Barreman picked his words carefully, “he began to have lapses of memory. That, you know already, Inspector.”

  Hinton nodded understandingly.

  “I see,” he said. “You mean he does things, and then forgets he’s done ’em?”

  Somewhat to his surprise he saw the doctor’s lips tighten again as though something had involuntarily escaped him. Then Dr. Barreman suddenly became communicative.

  “Let’s take an ordinary phenomenon,” he suggested. “Now most of us fall into a brown study at times. You do yourself, Inspector, I expect. You may be puzzling over something or other while you walk along the street, and all your attention’s concentrated on what you’re thinking about. And yet you can cross the road and take the right turnings, dodge the traffic, and so forth, can’t you? You don’t notice where you’re going; you just walk along automatically, taking no notice of anything; and if you were asked to describe a man who passed you halfway you wouldn’t remember anything about him, most likely. Your mind’s working on something else all the time, and your body works on like an automatic machine without you having to exercise a conscious control.”

  “I see,” the inspector declared, but he chose a tone which suggested that the doctor was talking much above his head. “But all I want from Mr. Dunne is what he saw when he came out of this ‘brown study’ of his. He’ll remember that, all right.”

  Dr. Barreman evidently paused to consider something.

  “Very well,” he said at length. “If you insist, you may go up and see him. But you mustn’t worry him, you understand? He’s had a nasty jar, perhaps; and I can’t have him heckled and flustered. I’m responsible for his health, and my first duty’s towards him. If you excite him, you’ll have to come away. That’s clear? And if he begins to talk about Dun Kenneth, just let him run on. Don’t contradict him, since it’s a pet subject of his. I’m stretching a point in letting you see him, and you’ll have to play the game, you know.”