Thin Air

by Gerald Hammond

  Wallace looked thoughtful. ‘Or at least for a competent mechanic who’s a bit of a mathematician. And the common airgun wouldn’t stand up for long to the extra loading.’

  ‘Do you know,’ Ian asked bluntly, ‘whether Keith has ever done such an alteration?’

  Wallace’s eyebrows went up. ‘Ever’s a long time. You’d have to ask him. As far as I know, he’s never done such a thing since I’ve known him, and that’s been a matter of twenty years or more. It wouldn’t always have been illegal,’ Wal pointed out.

  Ian thought that over and then looked at me. ‘You saw and heard Young Murdo using his air rifle. Did it sound normal?’

  ‘It sounded exactly like any other air rifle,’ I said. ‘It just went Phut!. Of course, I was comparing it with the much louder banging of twelve-bore shotguns. But you surely can’t suspect Young Murdo. He’s a gentle soul.’

  Ian looked at me without comment.

  ‘Even a gentle soul has a limit,’ Ronnie said. ‘You saw how his dad treated him. And then to forbid him seeing his lady-love. I thought at the time that he was maybe pushing the boy too far. A’ the same, unless your pathologist mannie finds a thin skull, it’s just not possible. For a big enough bet, I’d stand sideways and let you ping me on the heid wi’ a slug out of that gun at twenty yards.’ He waited expectantly but in vain for offers.

  ‘I’ll have to get my hands on that air rifle,’ Ian said. ‘Young Murdo’s still at the hospital with his mother but I had somebody ask him the question. He says that he just dropped it and ran when he saw that something was wrong at the farmhouse. We haven’t found it yet.’

  ‘If you want a keek at it,’ Ronnie said, ‘I’ve got it in the back of the jeep. When we went wi’ Ken McKee, I spotted it lying beside the track where he’d dropped it, along with his bag of bits. There was rain coming and you don’t leave a good gun, or even a cheap air rifle, lying in the wet grass. And his Cymag shouldn’t get wet at all. It was in a tin, but tins can leak and it’s the damp in the ground that releases the cyanide gas when you spoon the powder down a hole. I’ll show you the gun later.’

  ‘Fetch it now,’ Ian said. He remembered his manners. ‘I’m sorry, Alice. I shouldn’t be bossing people around in your house.’

  ‘Carry on,’ Alice said. ‘You’re an object lesson. I’m still hoping to get the knack of it.’ She winked at me.

  Ian was still too tense to laugh but at least he smiled for a moment. ‘I can’t imagine there being any useful fingerprints on it,’ he said, ‘but whenever I take a short cut it turns out to have been a wrong turning. Alice, do you have a large, clean polythene bag?’

  Alice nodded. ‘A pair of Simon’s trousers just came back from the cleaners. They’re still in the bag. Where are they, Simon?’

  ‘I hung them behind the study door,’ I said, ‘just to have them out of the way.’

  ‘Use that,’ Ian told Ronnie. ‘I won’t even come out with you. Your fingerprints will be all over it anyway. We’ll take your prints for comparison purposes when you come over in the morning.’

  Ronnie had cleared his plate but he grumbled as he got up from the table. He returned with the airgun in the thin polythene.

  ‘This is it?’ Ian asked me.

  ‘It looks much like it,’ I said.

  Ian took it from Ronnie and gave it to Wal. ‘What do you think? Try to handle it by the extremities.’

  It was a conventional barrel-lever action. Wal put it over his knee and broke it open, checked that there was no slug in the barrel and felt the strength of the spring. Working awkwardly through the polythene bag, his movements were slightly clumsy. Some tasks were made more difficult by the absence of three fingers from his right hand.

  ‘It feels absolutely normal,’ he said. ‘I can test it in the morning if you want.’

  ‘I’ll have it printed and sent over to you. And there was another air rifle in the house. I’ll have it fetched to you for testing.’ Ian carried the gun out into the hall and I heard him deposit it in the umbrella stand. When he resumed his seat he looked at Wallace again. ‘We’ll stay with you for the moment,’ he said. ‘You know what happened. Old Murdo fell down dead with a . . . a projectile in his brain which shouldn’t have been able to penetrate his skull. What explanations can you envisage?’

  Wal looked thoughtful. ‘Apart from a souped-up but otherwise ordinary airgun? There are two other ways.’

  I had got up to help Alice clear the dishes and serve a sweet course but I was still paying attention. ‘Three,’ I said.

  ‘We’ll come back to you in a minute,’ said Ian. ‘The mystery writer’s mind might throw up something feasible for once. Go on, Wal.’

  Ever the meticulous accountant, Wallace wanted to define his parameters. ‘Do you want a purely technical answer, ignoring questions such as who, from where, with what and why?’

  ‘Those questions are for me to answer,’ Ian said. ‘Lucky me!’

  ‘Very well, then. Firstly, high-powered air rifles are made. They require a firearms certificate. They aren’t regularly imported into this country but they can be ordered specially. We’ve sold one or two from the shop and you can trace them from the records. I remember a Crossman Model 140 going through the shop but I don’t remember who bought it. There may very easily be others held illegally. If somebody decides to bring one back in his luggage from a trip to the States, the Yanks don’t give a damn. At this end, he could walk through the green lane with it and if somebody took a look in his luggage I have my doubts as to whether customs’d think twice about it.

  ‘And, secondly, you’ve got the antiques.’

  Ian’s eyebrows shot up. ‘This is the first time I’ve heard of an antique airgun.’

  ‘Well, it would be,’ Wal said. ‘You wouldn’t have come across them when you were acting as Firearms Officer, because a genuine antique isn’t subject to the Firearms Act. A collector would only have to register it if he wanted to fire it. That would turn it from a museum piece back into a firearm.’

  ‘But . . .’ said Ian. He came to a halt.

  Alice decided to finish the question for him. ‘Could an antique airgun kill somebody? I thought that airguns were modern toys.’

  ‘Neither modern nor toys,’ Wal said. ‘Most of the earlier ones were bored for a ball larger than two-two, but a barrel liner wouldn’t be much of an engineering feat to make. Later, they came in Number Two bore, which is our modern two-two. Once again, Keith’s the expert; but we had an air cane through the shop last year and Keith read me a lecture. Airguns certainly go back to the sixteenth century and possibly much earlier. Which is what you’d expect when you remember that an air weapon could be loaded today and fired next week, unlike the matchlock; and, what’s more, an air weapon could be fired in the rain. Even the best flintlock, when eventually it arrived on the scene, was unreliable in the wet. The so-called “waterproof” flashpan usually ended up full of sludge. You’re into the nineteenth century before you have a firearm you could rely on in the rain.

  ‘By the mid-eighteenth century, some very efficient pump-up repeating airguns were being made. In seventeen-eighty the Austrian army adopted the Girardoni. It was accurate up to a hundred and fifty yards, which is more than you could say for some of the contemporary muskets, and with no smoke and little sound it was a valuable weapon of surprise. It was only withdrawn in eighteen-fifteen because of servicing problems.’

  ‘You sound more like Keith every day,’ Ian said grumpily. ‘Come to the point. Nobody wants a lecture.’

  ‘I do,’ I said. ‘But I’ll get it out of Keith some other time.’

  ‘Well, all right,’ Wallace said. ‘The point is not to think of them as toys. Some of the best known London makers built them.

  ‘Then, in the nineteenth century, came the “walking stick” airgun or “air cane”. You already had walking sticks with swords and daggers hidden in them. Others were disguised shotguns. The pump-up air cane looked clumsy for a walking stick, but it was very powerful
as a weapon.’

  ‘So I could be looking for a collector?’ Ian suggested.

  ‘Perhaps, but not necessarily. They were very popular with poachers, keepers and lairds. Two for the weight of one. Some farmer could still be using his grandfather’s air cane, quite unaware that it ought to be on his Firearms Certificate.’ Wallace paused dramatically. ‘I rather think that Ken McKee may have been leaning on one when we met him yesterday.’

  A stillness settled on the table. Alice froze in the act of pouring coffee. ‘Oh please,’ she said, ‘no. Not the McKees. I like them. They’re the best neighbours anyone could have.’

  ‘True as that is,’ I said, ‘it doesn’t exonerate them. Old Murdo’s name was a dirty word in the McKee household.’

  ‘Yes it does,’ Alice said. ‘Exonerate them, I mean. They just wouldn’t.’

  Ian was trying to hide his sudden interest. ‘I’ll check into it as soon as I leave here,’ he said. ‘Meantime,’ he looked at me, ‘you suggested another possibility.’

  ‘Was there a two-two rimfire rifle in the house?’ I asked.

  ‘There was. And not properly secured,’ Ian said grimly. ‘In fact, it was standing loose behind the back door. Exactly the sort of carelessness the Firearms Act was designed to stop. I’d have had a word about that with Old Murdo if he’d still been around. As it is, I suppose the family will let him take the blame for any infringements of the Act.’

  ‘And were there any blanks for a dummy launcher or humane killer?’

  ‘There were blanks for a humane killer,’ Ian said. ‘But the humane killer in the barn doesn’t seem to have been used for years.’

  ‘That may not matter,’ I said. ‘The humane killer could have drifted into disuse if Old Murdo preferred to leave killing to the vet, but the blanks were still around. Somebody may have wanted to kill Old Murdo in such a way that somebody else would be blamed. If he shoved an airgun pellet into the breech of a small-bore rifle with a blank up its backside, wouldn’t that do the trick?’

  ‘Aye, likely,’ Ronnie said. ‘But I have my doubts.’ He paused, swallowed and looked around bashfully while choosing his words. ‘Here’s how I see it,’ he said. ‘You take a proper, full-bore rifle. You hit a deer with it, or a man, and the bullet arrives with a mighty wallop. It flattens, or breaks up. Shock and speed are the killers as much as the damage.

  ‘A two-two, now, that’s different. More like a thin stab-wound. To kill, it’s to be in just the right place.

  ‘But a waisted airgun slug . . . Never heed the velocity, it’s meant to be accurate over a short distance. It’d soon lose speed, let alone accuracy, over more of a range. He’d’ve had to be shot from the barn or a corner of the house, not much further than that.’

  ‘Even by a skilled marksman?’ Ian asked.

  ‘How good is good?’ Ronnie retorted. ‘What I’m saying is that I don’t believe you’d get accuracy, using a pellet in front of a blank. It might have the power, I wouldn’t know. But even then you couldn’t be sure of killing. Folk have walked and talked and lived after major head-wounds.’

  ‘Quite true,’ Ian said. ‘The pathologist was telling me of a man who took the blast of a shotgun through the back of his head. Most of the shot came out through his right eye. He shoots off the left shoulder, now, Dunnett said, but otherwise you wouldn’t know.’

  Alice had been listening in rapt silence. Now she moved and cleared her throat, turning gently pink when she had caught our attention. She was always shy when expounding an original thought to an audience of more than one or two. ‘I was thinking much the same as Ronnie,’ she said. ‘And I wondered. Does anybody have an airgun pellet?’

  Ronnie fished in his pocket. He found several airgun pellets among a few .22 cartridges (both spent and fresh), a pocket knife, a box of matches and several gaudy fishing flies embedded in a cork.

  ‘And a toothpick?’ Alice asked.

  From among his treasures, Ronnie produced a toothpick. The wood looked dark grey, almost black. ‘It’s been used,’ he said, ‘but if I gie’d it a wee whittle . . .’

  Alice’s nostrils widened. ‘I am not going to clean my teeth with a second-hand toothpick, thank you very much. And I’m trying very hard not to think about who would have had to do this if anybody did it.’

  ‘Quite right,’ Ian said. ‘That’s my job.’

  ‘All right, then. Just suppose,’ Alice said, ‘that somebody stabs him in the head with a humane killer or a nail-gun, or just something spiky like a bradawl or an icepick or even just a nail and a hammer. He walks off, dazed but still alive, and collapses in the yard. They run after him.

  ‘An airgun slug has a hole in the back going a long way into it.’

  ‘That’s so that air pressure will expand the skirt against the rifling,’ Wallace said.

  ‘Never mind why. The point is that it does.’ Alice broke the toothpick and pushed it into the pellet. ‘A thin pencil would do it, or a piece of wire. Somebody could have pushed a used airgun pellet into the hole and been out of the way before Simon came round the corner of the barn.’

  ‘You realize,’ Wallace said severely, ‘that you’re pointing a finger at the widow?’

  ‘I’m not pointing at anybody,’ Alice said. ‘As Ian already told us, that’s his job. I’m just suggesting one way it might have happened.’

  Ian took the scrap of wood from her, with the airgun pellet clinging to the end like the head of a drumstick. ‘Well done,’ he said. ‘Up to now, I’ve been doing more gathering of information than theorizing, but I had been starting to wonder, rather vaguely, whether there wasn’t an alternative to the McKees and an antique air cane. But there are snags. Do you have a blancmange handy?’

  Alice made a pocket-patting gesture and shook her head. ‘What on earth do you want a blancmange for? There’s a jelly in the fridge if that’s any good.’

  ‘I don’t know that I do want one, particularly. But the pathologist likened the texture of the brain to a blancmange just out of the refrigerator. If you’d had one, I was considering spiking a hole in it and then inviting one of you to try to insert that slug in a way that wouldn’t leave the sort of traces that could be detected at autopsy. I’d expect to see a double track, matter pushed ahead of the slug or the slug not pushed as far as the spike had penetrated, something like that.’

  ‘The jelly’d be better than the blancmange,’ Ronnie said earnestly. ‘You could see what was happening inside. Let’s do it. We could shoot a slug in, for purposes of comp . . . comparison.’ The bottle had, by then, gone round rather often.

  ‘The jelly would probably burst all over the room,’ Alice said.

  ‘We’ll go into the garden.’

  ‘No.’ Alice sounded as though she meant it. Ronnie subsided unhappily. For some reason, he was finding the idea of shooting airgun pellets into a jelly attractive.

  ‘Anyway, it would probably behave quite differently when not confined in a skull,’ Ian said. ‘What makes it all the more difficult is that, to judge from the X-rays, the slug is more than a little flattened. It doesn’t look as if there will even be enough rifling marks left to be of any help. So I doubt if there’s much of a hole left in the back of it for pushing a stick into. And the scenario, as Alice has outlined it, suggests that somebody was very quick witted and took advantage of an unexpected opportunity to cover up their own crime – or somebody else’s, did you think of that? It would be a miracle if they just happened to have a used and flattened airgun slug handy.’

  It seemed to me that he was leaping too far ahead. ‘Unless it was all premeditated. Suppose that the culprit had planned to insert the slug when he fell down at their feet,’ I suggested. ‘The fact that he managed to walk a few yards would only demand a modification of the original plan.’

  ‘Again, quite true,’ Ian said. I had the impression that we had been covering ground over which he had already travelled in his mind but that he was glad to see his thinking given a public airing. ‘We may know more after th
e autopsy.’

  ‘Or possibly not,’ I said. ‘Unless you want to wait ten days. Your pathologist sounded pessimistic.’

  ‘The brain being like a blancmange, and so forth,’ Alice said helpfully.

  Ian helped himself to biscuits and cheese. ‘You heard what the pathologist told me, Simon,’ Ian said. ‘You explain.’

  ‘He said that the track of the bullet will have gone through layers of tissue and brain that are built up like a sandwich. If, for instance, he injected into the track some liquid that was opaque to X-rays, it would leak out between the layers with the result that the X-rays would show a large blob and no information. I thought he was going to arrange for a CT scan,’ I added.

  Ian pushed his plate away and looked at his watch. ‘He was going to try. With a little luck, they’re doing it now. He went into more detail later and he didn’t promise too much. It seems that a bullet interferes with the X-ray beams so that, unless the exposure’s carefully adjusted, the bullet appears like a starburst and the track is obscured. In a negative sort of way it’s like trying to take a photograph of something near the sun.

  ‘I said that if he could get some good pictures of the track, clear enough to show whether the slug was pushed into an already prepared hole, he could go ahead and dangle the brain in formaldehyde. That way, the very best evidence can be preserved. If he can get the slug out without damaging the track, he’ll do it. Otherwise we won’t know what evidence it can provide for some days.’

  ‘That seems to be the best you can do,’ Wallace said. ‘Simon, do you think that Duggie could have—’

  ‘At this point,’ Ian said, ‘I must draw the line. You’re intelligent enough people to figure out for yourselves who the suspects would have to be, but it would be quite wrong of me to discuss police theories with private citizens. You can go ahead and speculate endlessly with your mates about who did what and how, but you’re not going to be able to say “Ian Fellowes suspects so-and-so.” I don’t want to sound toffee-nosed, but that’s the way it is. I don’t think there can be any objection to seeking your expert opinions about methods.