The Mammoth Book of Perfect Crimes & Impossible Mysteries (15 page)

I
n the calculation an allowance has to be made for the
Gregorian
Correction
of the calendar in 1752. Then it becomes apparent that the time elapsed between the firing of that bullet and its plunge into Westmacott’s body was exactly two hundred and twenty-two years, two months, one week, five days, twelve hours and forty-seven minutes . . .

The duelling pistol from which it was shot was fired by Ensign the Honourable Nigel Koffard. He was a young officer in one of Marlborough’s crack squadrons and had but recently homed to England after the decisive bloodiness of Malplaquet. The man whom his shot wounded two hundred odd years after was Mr Henry Leonard Westmacott, a branch-cashier of the London and Southern Counties Bank, Limited.

Nigel Koffard pressed the trigger of that pistol, in the park of Ravenshaw Hall, Derbyshire, at precisely eight o’clock on the radiant morning of August the second, 1710.

Henry Westmacott was sitting by his own hearthside in the drawing-room of The Nook, Bettington Avenue, Thornton Heath, Surrey, when Koffard’s bullet struck him and shattered his right shoulder. He had just settled down – on the dismal and rainy night of October the twenty-third, last year-intending to listen to a concert broadcast from the Queen’s Hall. The ball hit him as the B.B.C. announcer was concluding an apology for the programme being late by saying: “It is now eight forty-seven, and we are taking you straight over—”

Thus was the second time most accurately determined.

All the day long, young Mrs Westmacott had been anxious about their little boy, Brian. He was running a slight temperature.

Hence she no sooner had dinner ended when she needs must go up to the nursery. In the swift way of tummy-troubled baby boys, Brian had contrived to lose his pains. He was sleeping serenely. Except for a slight flush and a dampness in his hair, he was normal.

Pamela Westmacott smiled ruefully as she smoothed his rucked sleeping suit and re-arranged his cot clothes . . .

The shot, the groan and the stumbling fall among the fireirons all sounded on that instant. With mechanical acumen Mrs Westmacott also noted that some china crashed to ruin in the kitchen, and that the opening chords of the Symphony Orchestra’s performance were lost to a thud and a sudden silence.

She rushed down the stairs to collide with her maid-servant, who had burst with almost equal speed from her domain.

“Oh, ma’am! Wh-what in the name o’ glory’s happened?”

“Hush, Biddy, and stay there! I—I’ll go in myself and see what’s the matter.”

Westmacott had raised himself to his knees and was delicately pawing at his right shoulder.

“Henry! Henry-darling!” Pamela Westmacott was down beside him. “What’s gone wrong?” Then she saw the sodden red horror of his shoulder. “Oh, my poor old boy! . . .
Biddy-
phone Doctor Smithers and the police. Tell them to hurry. Say it’s serious: Mr Westmacott has been shot!”

When doctor and police arrived Westmacott had been got to bed. He was fully conscious and calm, despite his excruciating pain. His wife had managed him in a way that won Doctor Smithers’ admiration. Her first-aid had stanched most of the bleeding.

Smithers turned to her with a smile as he unscrewed the nozzle of the syringe with which he had administered an opiate.

“Sensible woman, Mrs Westmacott! You made everything very easy . . . What’s that? . . .
Dangerous?
Oh no, not at all! Direct compound fracture of the
scapula
socket and a flake chipped off the head of the
humerus.
Abominably painful, but that’s about all.”

Old Smithers patted her hands and definitely pressed her to the door. “Now run along and leave hubby to me. Go down and satisfy the curiosity of those exceedingly impatient policemen. Above all, don’t-you-worry.”

Pamela Westmacott went in to see Brian before returning to the drawing-room. He had slept through all the hubbub.

The police were certainly impatient. Their cross-examination had foundered poor Biddy. After their dismissal of her she had gone back to the kitchen to blubber among the neglected crockery.

In Mrs Westmacott was discovered harder and less hysterical material. She told them all she knew. Essentially because it tallied so exactly with Biddy’s account, the officers became more and more confounded . . .

“But are you absolutely
sure
, Mrs Westmacott, no one came out of this room as you rushed down the stairs? Or slipped out by the front door without your seeing ’em?”

“Oh dear, how many more times must I tell you?
No!”
Wearily she smoothed her forehead. “Who could have done so?”

“Whoever fired that shot,” grunted Inspector Ormesby, “there’s no weapon to be found. The windows are all properly secured. There isn’t any glass broken. Your husband wasn’t potted at by someone lurking in the garden, that’s self-evident. And he couldn’t possibly have shot himself.” The Inspector nodded toward the wireless cabinet which the bullet had struck. “The position of his wound and the subsequent flight of the missile settles
that . .
. Somebody shot him! Then who was it?”

A plain-clothes officer turned from his inspection of the damaged cabinet. He had been pencilling notes referring to the tarnished ball of lead which showed itself, half embedded, in the seven-ply veneered woodwork. It had struck a spot directly in front of a valve, and the impact had been sufficient to shatter filaments, so stopping reception.

This man’s talking was far less truculent than that of Inspector Ormesby. But it was deadlier.

“You’ve told us that the front door was locked for the night. Have I got that right–
hey?”

“Yes; you have.”

“I noticed that a little brass bolt is on the inner side of the door. Then there’s the main lock and a Yale latch. All of ’em secured?”

“No. The key of the big lock wasn’t turned, but the bolt was pushed home. Naturally the latch held as well.”

“Had you to open those to let us in?”

“I had.”

“Wasn’t it natural for your maid to open that door? Why yourself?”

“Why not? Especially in-in such a crisis! As a matter of fact, Biddy was hopeless – helpless.”

The plain-clothes man watched her through half-closed eyes.

“Now, you remember, you also told us that you came helterskeltering down the stairs at such a rate that you bumped into this Bridget O’Hara woman at the bottom. And she’d just flown out of the kitchen –
hey?
”

“Perfectly correct. When the shot was fired, Biddy dropped a plate or something. Then she rushed here. We – we converged on the room like two mad things.”

“No one went out of the door.” It seemed that the plain-clothes man was musing aloud. “No one, so you say, went up the stairs past you. No one could have doubled out by way of the kitchen, and no one could have doubled out of here back into the dining-room or into the cupboard under the stairs, without you or your servant seeing ’em . . .
Um-m-m!”
He paused, and ignored Mrs Westmacott completely, to smile past her at Inspector Ormesby.
“And no weapon found,”
he slowly murmured. “You carry on here, Inspector. Strikes me I’ll have to have another heart-to-heart talk with our faithful Bridget – our exceptionally clever and faithful Bridget. Perfect treasure of a maid, I’ll bet!”

Pamela Westmacott flinched as though a viper had reared itself before her eyes as she watched the inimical C.I.D. man saunter from the room. Mad as it seemed; horrible, fantastic and unreal as it was, nevertheless she realised she was the suspect here.

Now let interpolation be made of the somewhat astounding experience of an official police photographer, called Coghill.

A genial little fellow, Egbert Coghill; a craftsman of infinite patience and capability. He was the man who went to The Nook the next day and, acting on police instructions, set about securing photographs of the drawing-room and, more especially, the bullet-splintered radio-set.

Mr Coghill was highly gratified by all he saw. Plenty of light, artificial and otherwise; plenty of space, and most admirable contrasts of dark furnishings against pale matt walls.

Cheerily, with an incessant whispering whistle, he moved about and made himself quite at home. He dumped his big camera on a table. The black leather case, which contained his plates in their mahogany slides, he placed in front of the wireless cabinet. Still softly whistling, he pottered around, making his notes and selecting his objects and angles.

Thereafter he erected his camera and screened its peerless lens with a precisely-chosen colour-filter, designed to obtain for him the correct qualities and the infinitude of detail that the satisfaction of his craftsmanship demanded.

He made various long exposures. He took photographs of the door, the windows, the blood-stained rug, the untidy hearth, and the arm-chair in which Westmacott was sitting when he was wounded. After these, Coghill concentrated on his most important work. He removed his plate carrier from its place in front of the wireless set and focused on the half-embedded bullet and the starry matrix wherein it lay. He expended his remaining four plates on this.

When he came to the development of his material, Coghill was astonished and alarmed. Without exception, each dripping negative held-superimposed on its actual detail – a wee portrait of something that appeared to be an astronomical portrait view of the planet Saturn. These were ring-impounded orbs which had a quality of eerie brilliancy that had struck the plates with something amounting almost to halation. Yet they were mottled by shadows of an intensity and a delicacy Mr Egbert Coghill had never previously developed out of any sensitive emulsion.

More than this phenomena, the four exposures of the wireless cabinet were useless. These, which should have been Coghill’s acme, not only bore the eerie imprint of the tiny incandescent “planet”, but a great maelstrom of fog about the place where the bullet should have been. The cabinet was clear enough. Only that area which should have been occupied by a representation of the leaden slug was at fault.

Mr Coghill equipped himself with another camera and a new assortment of plates. Back he went to the drawing-room of The Nook. He duplicated his previous exposures and again developed them.

None of this second group of negatives showed the Saturn-like globe. Equally, none of the seven plates he had, secondarily, exposed on the cabinet front was in any better state than the former four. Except for the non-appearance of the queer orb, there were the identical coils of fogginess about the splintered woodwork –
and no sign of the bullet.

Mr Egbert Coghill made a number of prints from all these negatives. Together with his notes and the plates themselves, he gave these into police keeping. This done, he fared forth and drank deeply.

Without much loss of time those photographs went, by way of Scotland Yard, to a Home Office department in Whitehall: to Barnabas Hildreth. He studied them and puzzled over them, as he afterwards told me, until he was sick to death of the very sight of them. Disgruntled and bewildered, Barnabas then went out to Thornton Heath and interviewed the Westmacotts.

The unfortunate Henry had nothing of much value to relate. He had been reading, he said, and had just put aside his evening paper to listen to the broadcast. As he leaned back in his chair, taking off his
pince-nez
and rubbing his closed eyes, he heard a curiously violent hissing as of air escaping from a pin-punctured tyre. Then there was a detonation and a fierily enormous blow at his shoulder. The next thing he realised was that he was wambling about the floor, suffering pain.

He scouted the idea that anyone could have been in the room with him without his knowledge. And on the subject of the police theory – that his wife had shot him and, in collusion with Bridget O’Hara, had thereafter established incontestable
alibi-
he was sardonically and sulphurously vehement. When he discovered Hildreth so far agreed with him under that head as to veto further official brow-beating, Westmacott became a different man. He was so relieved, so pathetically relieved, that Hildreth was touched – actually was humanised sufficiently to accept an invitation to stay for tea!

So it came about that the grim Intelligence Service officer and Master Brian Westmacott became friends. Hildreth chuckled over this.

“There was no resisting the little beggar, Ingram. He’s a sturdy kid and as sensible as the deuce. No sooner had I finished examining the drawing-room than he lugged me off to build what he called a ‘weal twue king’s palace’–from bits of wood; wood such as I’ve never seen a child playing with before. He had a big box full of sawn-up chair legs and rails; ‘pillars’ for his palace. And he’d scores of miniature arches and so forth – all shaped out of carved walnut and mahogany and oak and elm-little blocks, battens and angle-pieces that had originally been parts of furniture. One glance at ’em showed they were scores of years old and had come from the workshops of masters like Hepplewhite and Chippendale.”

I sensed something of extraordinary import here.

“Oh
, and where’d he got ’em from?”

“Out of the family woodshed. Or, at least, his father had.” Hildreth grinned. “I looked it over-lots of the same stuff there. Y’see, Westmacott has a brother in the antique furniture trade: does restorations and repairs and so forth. Westmacott gets all the waste from his brother’s workshops. The likely bits he cuts up to add to Brian’s collection of blocks and pillars. The remainder is burnt.