The Mammoth Book of Perfect Crimes & Impossible Mysteries (17 page)

“Well, Sowerby,” Hildreth briskly questioned when introductions were completed, “had any luck? Tried my little experiment –
eh
?”

Sowerby smiled unctuously and beckoned us back to the hut. In there, he pointed to a fire-clay retort that glowed above a fierce petrol-air lamp. Around the squat nozzle of the retort a big plume of intensely blue and brilliant flame was glowing. It made the popping sound of the burst of gorse-pods to August sun: an infinitesimal tattoo of whispering explosions.

“Yes, Mr Hildreth, your surmise was right enough. It’s
methyl hydride
, without a doubt.” He pointed to the halcyon fire. “Almost pure, to burn like that.”

“Most ’strordinary – most ’strordinary thing,” this was the crisp clacking of Koffard, “tha’ one can live a lifetime, ’mong things like these, an’ never know – never know. ’Course, this land’s been full o’ will-o’-th’-wisp lights for years, but one never stops to give ’em much thought – what?”

Barnabas abstractedly nodded and walked out. We followed him to the side of the trench. For a long while he studied the enormous hollow trunks that the navvies had dug out of the black and oozy earth.

“Magnificent trees,” he muttered. “Veritable giants! Took some labour, I should say, to gouge their innards out!”

Then he turned to Koffard and asked him something about a map.

“Aye, I’ve got it here.” The rattlevoiced old officer produced a tin cylinder and drew out of it a scroll inscribed by rusted lines of ink. “The avenue stood across there. Nigel Koffard fought his duel” – he pointed to a level sward forty yards away – “just on that patch. At the beginning of the avenue, exactly.”

When we went to this place we could plainly see a series of little hummocks stretching, in parallel, for almost half a mile. It was explained to me that here had been a hundred and more elms making a great avenue that was felled in 1803 – under each knoll was a mighty stump. The trunks, hollowed out, had gone into the formation of that pipe-line (for conveying drinking water from a hillside spring) the navvies were excavating.

Hildreth stopped exactly on the spot on which one Nigel Koffard had taken his stance to fight a duel on the morning of August the second, 1710.

“Now Sir Arthur,” Hildreth murmured, “let’s work things out. Your ancestor challenged his cousin to a duel, primarily over the intentions of that cousin toward your ancestor’s sister. When the affair came to its head, Nigel Koffard was fully determined to put a ball through his cousin. But that doughty lad, conscious of honour and innocence, did not so much as lift his own pistol. Refused, point-blank, to defend himself.”

“Tha’s right; quite right!” Koffard applauded. “He must ha’ had guts, y’know – simply stood there. Completely broke Nigel’s nerve.”

“And the said Nigel,” Hildreth grinned, “thereupon did a bit of quick thinking. It dawned on him that he had misjudged his man. So, to show his regret and to extend an olive branch, he turned and fired his bullet straight into the nearest elm. Whereupon the youngsters shook hands. The cousin got permission to marry Nigel’s fair sister, and the Gannion duelling pistols – one discharged and the other loaded – were put back in their case and guarded thereafter, for the sake of the episode, as family heirlooms. And everyone lived happily ever afterwards.”

“Precisely, sir!” said General Koffard. “Admirably put, sir! B’gad quite neat, I say –
neat!”

“Then, if that’s so” – Hildreth was already on the move – “we’ll trouble that invaluable plan of yours once again. Now we want to see this place called Skelter’s Pot, where lead was mined in those days.”

. . . We tramped a full mile up a mountainous slope and were eventually rewarded by the view of a bite into a pinkish face of spar, which the old map told us was “Skelter’s Pot.”

“Out of here,” Sir Arthur Koffard told us, “came all the lead used hereabouts. The hall is roofed by it. That pistol-ball was certainly cast from it. But it doesn’t pay to work it now.”

Hildreth took a geologist’s hammer from his pocket and knocked away at a piece of semi-translucent quartz in which dull grey patches showed and on which strangely green filaments were netted.

“I would like,” he softly returned as he put this specimen away, “to own your roof! At a modest estimate, it’ll be worth more than the hall and this estate put together.”

“Now, you see, old chap” – Hildreth tapped the rough pencil sketch he had made – “this was the way of it.” I leaned across the table, and under the steady oil-lamp light of the old Black Bull, I looked at the drawing. “Here we’ve all we need.”

I smoked my pipe and wondered.

“When Nigel Koffard shot that ball, at closest range, into the living elm-tree it made a deep cavity, a tunnel, in which it stopped. In a few more years a ‘rind-gall’ was formed. The elm closed over the wound in its structure by a growth of annular rings. The cylindrical little tunnel remained and the ball remained, precisely as they were.

“Then our elm showed signs of what is called ‘doatiness’ – incipient decay. It, together with all the others in the avenue, was felled, hollowed out, and used for an aqueduct. Y’see, old man, elm is the
one
wood which never changes if kept constantly wet. They’ve actually dug Roman elm-wood conduits out of the middle of Piccadilly, as sound as the day on which they were laid. . . .

“This is a queer countryside, Ingram. And the elm is a queer tree. Get those facts in mind.

“That chamber which held the bullet also held the gases of the elm’s former disruption, and to these were added those similar gases which lurk in peaty land. ‘Similar,’ did I say?
Identical
would be a better word. . . . You heard old Koffard talk about marsh-gas; natural gas, that is. . . . Well, that’s what we’re considering. You saw that chemist fellow, Sowerby, with a retort full of elm-wood burning such gas at the mouth of the apparatus.

“Methyl-hydride; methane; carburetted-hydrogen
– call it what you will, and still you’re right – is marsh-gas. Also it’s the dreaded and terribly explosive thing which miners call
fire-damp . .
. when mixed with air.

“You see it burning away in every fireside in the land. It’s the illuminating property of coal. And it
always
results when bodies of a peaty, woody or coaly constituent are subjected to great heat.”

I began to have an inkling of what Hildreth was getting at.

“However, to the mechanics of the situation.” He laughed and drank some beer. “Ralph Westmacott, the furniture man, buys some old weathered elm-wood from Derbyshire in order to fake his manufactures. What he has to spare – useless – he gives, as usual, to his brother, Henry Leonard. Our good Henry Leonard diligently saws it up into chunks and fills the family woodshed.

“Now comes a rainy and dismal October night. Henry puts a log on the open-hearth fire, extends his slippered feet and prepares to enjoy the evening.

“But the wild mystery of the ever-burgeoning earth comes into the simple household of The Nook and claims him. . . . He hears a violent hiss. That was air rushing into the vascular tissue of that hot elm-log, combining with the incredible chemistry of Nature with the terrible potential of that hydro-carbon,
methane, in the hollow where the bullet lay concealed.

“Nigel Koffard’s powder had not half the fulminating property, in the steel barrel of his pistol, that
fire-damp
had in the smooth wound of the elm-log . . . Pressure increased, since the hollow was filling every second with more and more gas, and air was in combination with it. At last, the hungry fire, eating away the inner face of the log, reached the terribly explosive mixture. Then
bang
, up and outwards shot the ball into Henry’s shoulder.

“So we’re back at our beginning – the very first point I made: that the ball was fired from somewhere about Westmacott’s feet. I recalled flying fragments of coal and co-related things . . . allowing, always, for the unusual.

“But, instead of coal and cinders, the well of the grate was filled with half-burned fragments of wood – like fragments of furniture, surmounted by a big tricorne hunk of charred elm-wood. I wondered, vastly, about those fragments. Then, when I saw the little boy, Brian, playing with his home-made building blocks, I was definitely set on the second line which led me to solution.”

He picked up his tankard and smiled.

“That green network you saw on the surface of that spar
was
pitch-blende! I’m told it’s more than usually rich in radium and uranium salts.

“The land on which Skelter’s Pot is situated belongs to the Commissioners. It’s an open common land. Anyone procuring the necessary faculty, and entering into serious negotiations, can mine it . . . So, with the joyous approval of Mr Henry Leonard Westmacott, I have entered my innocent ally Master Brian’s name on our list—”

“‘Our list’?” I was puzzled by his most deliberate pause. “What list?”

“Oh, the little company I’m forming: myself, yourself, Koffard, Westmacott and young Brian, to exploit the pitch-blende deposits of our property in Skelter’s Pot, Derbyshire.” He laughed and stretched his long arms. “It ought to provide for us in our old age, if nothing else!”

. . . Judging by my latest returns from that adroitly-contrived concern, I am inclined, stoutly, to agree.

T
o say that hotels in Luddersedge were thin on the ground was an understatement of gargantuan proportions. Although there were countless guest houses, particularly along Honeydew Lane beside the notorious Bentley’s Tannery – whose ever-present noxious fumes seemed to be unnoticed by the guests – the Regal was the only full-blown hotel, and the only building other than the old town hall to stretch above the slate roofs of Luddersedge and scratch a sky oblivious to, and entirely disinterested in, its existence.

The corridors of the Regal were lined with threadbare carpets, hemmed in by walls bearing a testimonial trinity of mildew, graffiti and spilled alcohol, and topped by ceilings whose anaglypta was peeling at the corners and whose streaky paint-covering had been dimmed long ago by cigarette smoke. The rooms themselves boasted little in the way of the creature comforts offered by the Regal’s big-town contemporaries in Halifax and Burnley.

For most of the year, the Regal’s register – if such a thing were ever filled in, which it rarely was – boasted only couples by the name of Smith or Jones, and the catering staff had little to prepare other than the fabled Full English Breakfast – truly the most obscenely mountainous start-of-the-day plate of food outside of Dublin. Indeed, questions were frequently asked in bread-shop or bus-stop queues and around the beer-slopped pub tables at the Working Men’s Club, as to exactly how the Regal kept going.

But there were far too many other things to occupy the attention and interest of Luddersedge’s townsfolk and, anyway, most of them recognized the important social part played by the Regal in the lives of their not-so-distant cousins living in the towns a few miles down the road in either direction. Not that awkward questions were not asked about other situations in which the Regal played a key role, one of which came to pass on a Saturday night in early December on the occasion of the Conservative Club’s Christmas Party, and which involved the one hotel feature that was truly magnificent – the Gentlemen’s toilet situated in the basement beneath the ballroom.

To call such a sprawling display of elegance and creative indulgence a loo or a bog – or even a john or a head, to use the slang vernacular popular with the occasional Americans who visited the Calder Valley in the 1950s, the heyday of Luddersedge’s long-forgotten twinning with the mid-west town of Forest Plains – was tantamount to heresy.

A row of shoulder-height marble urinals – complete with side panels that effectively rendered invisible anyone of modest height who happened to be availing themselves of their facility – was completed by a series of carefully angled glass panel splashguards set in aluminium side grips and a standing area inlaid with a mosaic of tiny slate and Yorkshire stone squares and rectangles of a multitude of colours. It was an area worn smooth by generations of men temporarily intent on emptying bladders filled with an excess of John Smith’s, Old Peculiar and Black Sheep bitter ales served in the bars above.