This immediately caught Vicky's ever-lively imagination. "Yes, or a Roman slave."
"Or a Roman slave," agreed Hugh, giving the end of the handkerchief into her hold.
From the opposite side of the pool, Inspector Hemingway watched Miss Fanshawe's departure with undisguised relief. When, however, he saw that Mr. Hugh Dering, instead of accompanying her, was walking on towards a point where the stream could be jumped, his satisfaction waned swiftly. He called: "Now, look here, sir, I'm busy, and I can't have you messing about here now!"
Hugh cleared the stream, and walked towards him. "Can't you?" he said. "Well, of course, if you won't have me on this side of the stream, I'll go back and watch you from the other side. I dare say Miss Fanshawe and her mother would like to come and watch, too, though of course I can't promise that they won't bring the dogs with them."
Sergeant Wake bent a shocked stare upon him. Hemingway said: "Oh! Nice state of affairs, I must say, if the police are to be blackmailed by gentlemen of your profession, sir! Now, you know very well you've no right to come meddling here!"
"Don't worry, I won't meddle. But all this earnest search leads me to suppose that new and startling evidence has cropped up. Moreover, you are holding in your hand, Inspector, something that bears all the appearance of a vice. From which I deduce that, contrary to expectations, the rifle found here was not fired by hand. Correct me if I'm wrong, my dear Watson."
Hemingway shook his head. "Yes, you're wasted at the Chancery Bar: I can see that," he said. "All the same '
"Hold!" said Hugh. "These things being as they are, I am further led to suppose that you are about to lay bare evidence which will clear the fair name of the lady to whom I am shortly to be joined in holy matrimony. I contend that this gives me a right to be here."
"Oh, so that's been fixed up, has it?" said Hemingway. "Well, I'm sure I hope you'll be very happy, sir. I've been expecting to hear of it ever since I came down to these parts."
"When you first came here I hadn't the slightest intention of getting married," said Hugh. "However, don't let me spoil your good story."
"I won't," said the Inspector. "What you don't grasp, sir, is that if there is one thing I've got, it's intuition. Besides, it's been standing out a mile. But as for your having any right to be here, that's another matter. Still, I can see that Inspector Cook wants me to let you stay, so I suppose you'll have to."
"I never!" Cook exclaimed, taken by surprise. "Why, I never said a word!"
"Well, if you don't want me to let him stay rather than have a couple of women and two dogs getting in the way, I've been mistaken in you," said Hemingway. "What's more, he knows too much already."
"Hair-trigger," said Hugh. "You might almost call me your good angel. Hallo, one of your henchmen has caught a fish!"
The Inspector turned, as Jupp came to the edge of the pool, holding an odd-looking object in his hand.
"Would this be what you're after, sir?"
The Inspector took it. "Yes," he said. "Yes, it might be. At any rate, it didn't grow in the pool. Know anything about these things, sir?"
"About as much as the next man," Hugh replied. "I know it's an electro-magnet. I don't immediately see the connection between it and the rifle, though. Do you?"
Hemingway shook his head. I'm bound to say I haven't figured it out. You know a bit about electrical gadgets, Wake: could you fire a rifle with this?"
"No," replied the Sergeant. "I don't see any sense to it. Even when you pass current through it, it wouldn't have any effect on the rifle-trigger, Couldn't have."
"Well, go on searching," said Hemingway, waving Jupp back to the pool. "Maybe you'll find something more. Though I've got a hunch this thing did the trick."
He stood for a few moments, silently, and rather abstractedly, watching the two constables, while his Sergeant frowned upon the electro-magnet.
"No," said Wake at last. "Look at it which way you will, you can't fit an electro-magnet into it. It wouldn't work, and that's all there is to it."
Hemingway lifted his head quickly. "Magnet!" he said.
"It sounds like "Eureka!"' remarked Hugh.
"It is Eureka," said the Inspector. "Now, don't you start asking me a whole lot of questions I can't possibly answer, sir! If I'm right, you'll know all in good time. All I want you to do now is to keep a still tongue in your head, which I'm sure you will do. All right, you two! That'll do!"
Twenty minutes later, in Fritton again, the Inspector produced from a drawer in his desk the magnet he had found in the shrubbery at the Dower House, and bade Sergeant Wake tell him what effect on it an electromagnet would have.
"It would attract it, of course," Wake replied. "Soon as you switched the current on. You mean, somehow or other it was fixed so that when it jumped to the electromagnet, it caught the trigger?"
"Good Lord!" said Cook blankly. "Could that have been done? I never heard of such a thing!"
"What we want to go in for now, is a bit of experiment," said Hemingway. "We'll rig that rifle up in the vice, and see how it could be made to work."
By the time the rifle had been produced, and the vice clamped to the leg of a stout table, Hemingway had discovered an additional reason for the position of the grazes on the sapling. "I get it!" he said. "It had to be close to the ground, to get the trigger on the same level as the electro-magnet. Now, if the two arms of the horseshoe magnet had to point towards the electromagnet, that must have been just behind the trigger, about like that. Come on, Wake! How would you manage to get the horseshoe magnet so that there's nothing to prevent its moving, and so that it's bound to pull that trigger as soon as it does move?"
"Well, it's got to rest on something. Couple of blocks of wood, perhaps."
"That's it," said Hemingway. "Easily kicked away when finished with. Books will be good enough for us. Hand me down a few!"
Kneeling on the floor he carefully built up his two little platforms, one on each side of the trigger-guard of the rifle, and close enough together to allow of the horseshoe magnet's arms resting one on each platform. The magnet he placed so that the round end was within the trigger-guard, and in front of the trigger itself, and the magnetised ends pointing towards the electro-magnet placed under the stock of the rifle. While Sergeant Wake busied himself with a length of flex and a wall-plug, Hemingway tried to cock the rifle. After several abortive attempts, he sat back on his heels and eyed the rifle with dislike. "It's no use: the damned thing won't cock!" he said. "It goes off the moment you close the bolt. Now, how did he work that trick?"
"The bent's been filed down so fine that the searnose won't catch," said' Cook. "I've got a brother in the gun trade, and I've seen these things stripped. The bent was filed down to give it that light pull. He'd have had to load it with the trigger pulled back. Let me try, will you, Inspector? I've got an idea how to cock it."
Hemingway said: "Go right ahead! If you can close the bolt without the blooming thing's going off, you're softer handed than I am."
"You don't need to touch the bolt to cock the rifle," said Cook. "I'll lay my life White didn't. You want to get hold of the cocking-piece, behind the bolt - this thing - and pull it gently back like this, until the nose of the sear - that's the piece which the top end of the trigger acts on - the bit that holds the firing-block back - catches in the bent. It won't do more than just catch, and you don't want to jog the gun, because it only needs a touch to set it off."
Hemingway, who had been watching Cook suit his actions to his words, drew back as Cook cautiously released the cocking-pin. "Jog it! I'm taking precious good care not to breathe on it. Why haven't I got a brother in the gun-trade? The silly fellow travels in some kind of patent baby-food. A lot of use that's ever been to me, or likely to be! You got that fixed up yet, Wake?"
Wake, who had been attaching one end of the flex to the electro-magnet, rose to his feet. "All set, sir. Shall I switch on?"
"The sooner the better: the suspense is killing me," said Hemingway.
Wake moved across to the wall-plug, and turned the switch on it. The horseshoe magnet shot forward, towards the electromagnet, the closed end hitting the trigger, and so releasing the mainspring.
"And that," said Hemingway, as the rifle clicked, "is that, gentlemen! I said it was a pleasure to deal with Mr. Harold White!"
"I'll have to say it's been a pleasure to see you deal with him, sir," said Wake, making amends for past scepticism. "I don't mind admitting I thought you were on to a wildgoose chase this time."
Inspector Cook got up from the floor. "Yes, but there's something that's bothering me," he said. "They're not wired for electricity at the Dower House."
Hemingway looked at him in pardonable annoyance. "I never met such a set of kill joys! Are you sure of that?"
"Yes, I'm quite sure. They make their own electricity at Palings, but Mrs. Carter never had the Dower House wired. They use oil-lamps."
"Well, that has torn it!" said Wake. "Surely to goodness they couldn't have run a flex to the electro-magnet all the way from Palings!"
"Talk sense!" snapped Hemingway. "Run a flex from Palings! Yes, over the lawn, and down through the shrubbery, and across the stream, and up the other bank! I wonder if they laid it under ground, or had it fixed up on poles?"
"Well, I said surely they couldn't have!" protested the Sergeant.
"They couldn't have, and what's more there wasn't any point to it, even if it had been possible. What's the whole aim and object of firing a gun by means of a contraption like that?"
"To provide yourself with a water-tight alibi," replied Wake.
"You're right. And what kind of an alibi had any of that Palings lot provided themselves with? Or Mr. Silent Steel? Or his High and Mightiness Prince Tiddly-Push? Or young Baker? Who had the only alibi that was so good no one but me thought of trying to bust it?"
"Yes, it does look like White," said Cook. "Don't think it's any pleasure to me to have to say the Dower House isn't wired!"
"It not only looks like White; it was White," said Hemingway. "It couldn't have been anyone else."
"No, but there's another point as well, though I dare say it doesn't mean so much," said Wake. "How did he get the rifle in the first place?"
"I don't know, but if you go and ask them up at Palings, they'll tell you anyone could have taken it."
"Yes, that's what they say," persisted Wake, "but, come to think of it, it isn't quite as easy as that to walk off with a life-size rifle under your arm. Why, even supposing you had the run of the house, would you take a chance on it? Supposing someone was looking out of one of the windows? Supposing you ran into the butler, or a gardener, or someone? Of course, as soon as you started on White, I got to thinking about him returning Mr. Carter's shot-gun in a case of his own, but that's no use, because the rifle wouldn't go into a shot-gun case."
Hemingway turned his head to look at the rifle, still held in the vice. "If I was to find that the fair Ermyntrude was right all along, I don't know that I could bear it," he said slowly. "Can you break a rifle?"
"What, like you do a shot-gun?" said Cook. "No, they're made differently. You can't break any I've ever handled."
"Well, let's have a look at this one," said Hemingway. "Give it here, will you, Wake?"
The Sergeant loosened the vice, and handed over the rifle. Hemingway inspected it. "I must say it doesn't look as though you could. What are these little eyebolts for?"
Cook peered over his shoulder. "They're only to fix a sling on to, if you should want one, aren't they?"
"I can't say, but I believe in trying things out," replied Hemingway, laying the gun on his desk, and beginning to loosen the bolts.
He removed them in a moment or two, and then, with the air of a conjurer sure of his trick, quietly lifted the barrel out of the stock. "As easy as falling off a gate," he said. "Now we know why he chose the Mannlicher Schonauer instead of that classy-looking Rigby. I dare say that doesn't come apart anything like as neatly, if at all. Measure that barrel, Wake - not that I doubt it could have got into the hambone-case."
"Twenty-eight inches over all," Wake announced, closing his foot-rule. "My word, the evidence is piling up, isn't it? But we still haven't got round the main difficulty, sir - though it looks to me as though we will, the way things are shaping."
Hemingway gave him the rifle to fit together again, and sat down at his desk. "Some kind of a battery," he said. "Inside the study window, with a flex running from it to the electro-magnet."
"Could it? Without being noticed?" asked Wake.
"Yes, easy, it could," said Cook. "There's a flower-bed running along the wall of the house, and creepers on the house, too. You'd never see the wire. He could have laid it along the bed till he got to the corner of the house, and then taken it across the bit of path lying between the house and the top-end of the shrubbery. He might have sprinkled a bit of gravel over it just there, though I shouldn't think it would have been necessary myself. Then, all he had to do, once he'd got rid of the vice, and the electro-magnet, was to run back to the house, coiling up the wire as he went."
Hemingway, who had not been paying much attention to this speech, suddenly said: "Didn't you tell me White had got something to do with a coal-mine?"
"That's right," said Cook. "He's manager of the Copley group."
"I thought so. What's that thing called that they use in mines when they want to blast? Electrical thing they touch off the dynamite with?"
"A shot-firer, do you mean?" asked Wake. "But they don't blast in coal-mines, do they?"
"By gum, you've got it!" said Cook. "They do do quite a bit of blasting here, because we're remarkably free from gas, as it happens! He could have got hold of one, too, without a bit of trouble, in his position."
"Don't they check up on those kinds of stores?" asked Wake.
"Yes, but, don't you see? The murder was committed on a Sunday. White could have brought the shot-firer away with him on Saturday, and returned it to store on the Monday morning, and no one the wiser!"
"Would it work?" Hemingway demanded.
"Yes, work a fair treat. Ever seen 'em use one? All you do is push the handle down smartly, and the next thing you know is that half the rock-face has fallen off."
The Sergeant bent, and picked up the horseshoe magnet. "Funny he left this lying about for us to find," he said. "I must say, I can't understand him not slipping it in his pocket, so careful as he was about everything else."
"Yes, but it wouldn't have been lying there like that," Cook pointed out. "You only turned the current off long after the recoil of the rifle. You've got to remember that White pushed down the handle of his shot-firer, and then released it. The jar of the rifle's going off must have hurled the magnet away, once there was no strong attraction to hold it in its position."
"It did," said Hemingway. "I found it under some leaves, several feet from the sapling. White couldn't risk hanging about to hunt for it. I dare say he didn't even think it was so very necessary, either. Even if we did start hunting around, it wouldn't convey much to us. I'm bound to say it didn't." He glanced at his watch. "Who has charge of shot-firers, and the like? A storekeeper? Know who he is, and where he lives?"
"I can find out for you in less than no time," said Cook.
"Thanks, if you'd do that, and let Wake know, he can go off and put in a bit of work interviewing the fellow," said Hemingway. "Not but what we've got enough on White, without that, to justify my applying for a warrant to arrest him. Still, we must tie up every end, if we can."
Rather more than an hour later his Sergeant returned to him, in a mood of quiet triumph. "We've tied the last end, sir," he announced. "They had one of the shot-firers repaired last week, and it came back from the repairshop last thing on Saturday morning, after the storekeeper had gone off duty. He told me Mr. White was the last off the premises, and that he'd put the shot-firer away somewhere in his office. Said he was sure of that, because White was a bit late on Monday morning, and the shot firer couldn't be fou
nd."
"And then White turned up, and said it was in his office?"
"That's right, sir. Turned up with a biggish sort of attache-case, went straight into his office, and brought the shot-firer out. I reckon that settles it. You ought to feel proud of the way you've handled this case, sir. I know I would be. Because at one time it really did seem as though there wasn't what you'd call a good reason for suspecting anybody."
The Inspector was secretly gratified by this tribute, but he replied with a mournful shake of his head: "Yes, but there's always something to take the edge off for one. When I think about that silly widow sticking to it against all reason it was White that killed her husband, and being proved right, it quite makes me lose heart. And when I think of the way she'll pat herself on the back ! Well, there! it doesn't bear thinking of, and that's all that there is to it. She's probably telling her family how her instinct shows her it must have been White, right at this moment."
But, as it happened, Wally's murder was not just then paramount in Ermyntrude's mind. Her daughter's engagement had cast every other consideration into the background. It was, she said, the most delightful surprise of her life, and made up for everything. "I couldn't have wished for better!" she told Mary. "Of course, I don't say I haven't thought of an Earl, or at any rate a Viscount for her, but you can't absolutely bank on getting a peer, can you, dearie? And the Derings are county: there's no getting away from that! What's more, he's very nice, Hugh is, and not a bit up-stage with me, like an Earl might be. Fancy, though! I'd quite made up my mind it was you he was after! Well, I must say, you could have knocked me down with a feather! It's to be hoped I don't get any more shocks today, for really the excitement of' this has made me feel quite exhausted!"
She was to have yet another. Shortly after dinner Dr Chester was announced, and came into the drawing room looking rather grim.
"Well, and what little bird can have told you the news?" exclaimed Ermyntrude. "If it isn't like you, Maurice, to be the first to come and congratulate. Well, I do think it's sweet of you!"
"Congratulate?" he repeated. "What news are you talking about?"
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