No Wind of Blame Read online

  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 wild-goose 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-Schönauer 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