The Mammoth Book of Perfect Crimes and Impossible Mysteries Part 10

"That's right! I thought I recognised the stuff again. I saw some in his wood-shed." Hildreth smiled. "Thanks!"

With that we went away and back to London.

From the "Black Bull," at Battersby Brow in Derbys.h.i.+re, a letter came to me on the twenty-ninth of October: My dear Ingram, If you can leave your mouldy rag to look after itself for the weekend, come over here and be interested. Of all the intricate bits of work I've ever struck, this is the trickiest! Don't let me down, old chap. I promise you a really n.o.ble denouement for the mystery of the Westmacott bullet: an ending that, I suppose, you'll stick on one of your scandalous chronicles of my cases and complacently claim as your own.

Sincerely, B.H.

So I set out for Battersby Brow and the "Black Bull" as soon as I put my paper to bed in the early hours of Friday, the thirty-first. At nine o'clock the next morning I was in a beautiful and brilliant country of whistling airs and mighty hills.

Over breakfast, Barnabas crowed mightily.

"Done a lot of work since I saw you, old man! Only one tiny coping-stone to be put on, and the job's complete.

"It was a Gannion duelling pistol that fired that ball. I've seen it. There's a pair of 'em, and they've been laid away in a case since seventeen hundred and ten . . . One was discharged. The other was loaded, but I got permission to draw the charge. I drew it right enough!" He chuckled. "D'you know, it was a curious experience. There I had in hand another ball, similar to the one that wounded Westmacott. And there were tiny tattered fragments of a newspaper that had been used for a wad between bullet and powder an issue of the Northern Intelligencer for August the first, seventeen-ten.

"The Koffards of Ravensham Hall have been awfully decent about everything. At first they were inclined to be stand-offish, but when I told old General Koffard the story you know, he tucked into things like a good 'un."

"Sorry to b.u.t.t in, Barnabas but, tell me, what story do I know? It occurs to me that I've only a few strikingly dissimilar and baffling incidents in mind, all hazily mixed up with lead that's 'worth its weight in gold' and old elm logs which you proved had come from this district."

Hildreth finished eating and lit a cigarette.

"Listen, old man, and follow me carefully . . . Go back in thought to the night of the twenty-third. You have Westmacott sitting in his chair. A bullet, apparently fired out of the void, strikes his shoulder and is deflected into the wireless set. Point the first to be made: direction of bullet's flight proved it was shot from somewhere in the region of Westmacott's feet. Got that?" I surveyed the scene in mind . . . I had to agree. "Now for point the second. Had a ball of that size possessed a high velocity, it'd have made the d.i.c.kens of a mess of the humerus. It'd have caused a comminuted fracture, and, without much doubt, it would have glanced across and gone through his throat.

"But no, it was a missile of low velocity only a direct compound fracture of the scapula socket and a lazy glide off, to smack the front of the wireless set.

"No one can say where the ball came from. The ineffable Egbert Coghill goes to photograph it . . . He puts his platecarrier dead in front of the set, incidentally in front of the bullet. For fully a quarter of an hour he footles about, then, when he comes to take his photographs, he carries on each plate he afterwards exposes a portrait of the ball, transmitted by its own power through the leather case, through the whole clutter of his mahogany slides and, in fact, through everything within eighteen inches of the radio cabinet!"

I jumped at that.

"D'you mean those Saturn-like globes were-"

"Photographs of that ball! Precisely! It emitted a short, hard ray of far more intensity than the usual X-ray apparatus employs!"

"But how on earth could that come about?"

"Pitch-blende," said Barnabas Hildreth, "that's why! Apart from certain areas in Cornwall, only the Peak district of Derbys.h.i.+re and some isolated caverns round about Ingleborough in Yorks.h.i.+re have pitch-blende deposits. Usually, it's in a.s.sociation with lead that has a high silver content . . . The a.s.say of that ball not only showed lead and silver, but definite traces of pitch-blende striations, all melted together.

"To clinch that part of the business, however" Hildreth glanced at the time "remember that the second batch of Coghill's prints did not show the eerie little 'planet'. That was because he did not bung his plate-carrier in front of the set on his second venture. The active emissions were powerless outside a small range.

"But neither set of plates would betray anything except a fogginess where the bullet should have been. What could you reasonably expect?" Hildreth shrugged. "A long exposure, with powerful lens concentrating radium rays on a speedy photographic emulsion nothing but fog could result!"

In the end I realised that Hildreth was right. Radio-active properties in that leaden slug would explain everything. Incidentally I caught the drift of what he meant when he spoke about the value of the bullet and its potentiality as the clue to a fortune.

"Do you mind" Hildreth was on his feet and again looking at his watch "if we hustle? We've a walk of a few miles if we're to get that coping-stone set, y'know. And I want it done to-day."

That long tramp across the sage-green acres of the Derbys.h.i.+re countryside terminated in the park of Ravensham Hall. A group of navvies, excavating a snakish trench, paused in their work and watched us curiously. And, from out of a near-by hut, a podgy and bespectacled man clad in a white coat, and an old iron-haired fellow with a face of claret, came to greet us. One was a chemist called Sowerby and the elder man was Major-General Sir Arthur Koffard, the owner of the estate.

"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 const.i.tuent 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 Derbys.h.i.+re 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 rus.h.i.+ng 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, Derbys.h.i.+re." 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.

THE 45 STEPS.

Peter Crowther Here's another brand new story. It was written for the last locked-room anthology I compiled but arrived too late for me to squeeze in. I was thus delighted to find that the story was still available as it includes one of the most audacious methods of murder I have yet encountered and in the smallest locked room of them all. Peter Crowther (b. 1949) is a highly respected author, editor and publisher primarily of science fiction and fantasy, but of all things unusual. He runs PS Publis.h.i.+ng which has won many awards, and which includes books by Brian Aldiss, Ray Bradbury, Michael Swanwick and Ramsey Campbell. Amongst Peter's own books are Escardy Gap (1996) with James Lovegrove and Songs of Leaving (2004) with Edward Miller, as well as the fascinating anthology sequence that began with Narrow Houses (1992). Several of Peter's stories have common settings and amongst those is the northern town of Luddersedge, which will one day coalesce into another book. In the meantime, we can peer into part of the town's strange life in the following disquieting tale.

To 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 pa.s.s on a Sat.u.r.day 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 bas.e.m.e.nt 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 gla.s.s panel splashguards set in aluminium side grips and a standing area inlaid with a mosaic of tiny slate and Yorks.h.i.+re stone squares and rectangles of a mult.i.tude 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.

Two wide steps down from the urinals was a row of generously sized washbasins, set back and mounted on ornate embellishments of curlicued bra.s.s fas.h.i.+oned to resemble a confusion of vines interlinked with snakes. They nested beneath individual facing panels split one-half mirror and the other reinforced gla.s.s, the gla.s.s halves looking through onto an identical set of basins on the other side of the part.i.tion, behind which stood the WCs.

It was these wood-panelled floor-to-ceiling enclosed retreats with their individual light switches, oak toilet seats and covers, matching tissue dispensers, and stained gla.s.s backings behind the pipe leading from the overhead cistern that were, perhaps, the room's crowning glory. They were even more impressive than the worn leather sofas and wing-backed chairs situated on their own dais at the far end of the toilet, book-ended by towering aspidistras and serviced by standing silver ashtrays and gla.s.s-topped tables bearing the latest issues of popular men's magazines.

But while these extravagant rooms albeit small rooms, designed for but one purpose had rightly gained some considerable fame (particularly as the town was not noted for anything even approaching artistic or historical significance) they had also achieved a certain notoriety that was not always welcome.

Such notoriety came not merely from the time, in the late 1940s, when an exceptionally inebriated Jack Walker pitched forward rather unexpectedly after failing to register the aforementioned double step leading to the urinals and smashed his head into one of the gla.s.s-panelled splashguards. Nor did it come from that legendary night when Pete d.i.c.kinson was ceremoniously divested of all of his clothes on his stag night and reduced to escaping the Regal, staggering drunkenly through Luddersedge's cold spring streets, wearing only one of the toilet's continuous hand towels (those being the days before automatic hand dryers, of course), a 50-foot ribbon of linen that gave the quickly sobering d.i.c.kinson the appearance of a cross between Julius Caesar and Boris Karloff's mummy.

Rather, the toilet's somewhat dubious reputation stemmed solely from the fact that, over the years, its lavish cubicles had seen a stream of Luddersedge's finest and most virile young men venturing into their narrow enclosures with their latest female conquests for a little session of hi-jinks where, their minds (and, all too often, their prowess and s.e.xual longevity) clouded by the effects of ale, a surfeit of testosterone and the threat of being discovered, they would perform loveless couplings to the muted strains of whatever music drifted down from the floor above.

The practice was known, in the less salubrious circles of Calder Valley drinking establishments, as "The Forty Five Steps Club". The name referred, in a version of the similar "honorary" appellation afforded those who carried out the same act on an in-flight aeroplane ("The Mile High Club"), to the toilet's distance below ground three perilously steep banks of fifteen steps leading down from the ballroom's west entrance.

And so it was that, at precisely 10 o'clock on the fateful night of the Conservative Club's Christmas Party, it was to this bastion of opulence and renown that Arthur Clark retired midway through a plate of turkey, new potatoes, broccoli and carrots (having already seen off several pints of John Smith's, an entire bowl of dry roasted peanuts and the Regal's obligatory prawn c.o.c.ktail first course) to evacuate both bladder and bowel. It was a clockwork thing with Arthur and, no matter where he was or whom he was with, he would leave whatever was going on to void himself on this occasion, all the better to concentrate his full attention and gastric juices on the promised (though some might say "threatened") Christmas Pudding and rum sauce plus a couple of coffees and a few gla.s.ses of Bells whisky. Arthur's slightly weaving departure from the ballroom, its back end filled with a series of long dining tables leaving the area immediately in front of the stage free for the inevitable dancing that would follow coffee and liqueurs, was to be the last time that his fellow guests saw him alive.

"Edna. Edna!" Betty Thorndike was leaning across the table trying to get Edna Clark's attention, while one of the Merkinson twins Betty thought it was Hilda but she couldn't be sure, they both looked so alike returned to her seat and dropped her handbag onto the floor beside her. Hilda if it was Hilda had been to the toilet more than fifteen minutes ago, while everyone else was still eating, her having bolted her food down in record time, and had spent the time since her return talking to Agnes Olroyd, as though she didn't want to come back and join them: they were a funny pair, the Merkinsons.

When Edna turned around, from listening disinterestedly to John and Mary Tullen's conversation about conservatories with Barbara Ashley and her husband, she was frowning.

"What?"

"He's been a long time, hasn't he," Betty said across the table, nodding to the watch on her wrist. "Your Arthur."

"He's had a lot," Edna said with a shrug. The disc jockey on the stage put on Glen Campbell's Wichita Lineman.

"Oh, I love this, me," Mary Tullen announced to the table, droopy-eyed, and promptly began trying to join in with the words, cigarette smoke drifting out of her partially open mouth.

"You've been a long time, Hilda," said her sister Harriet, pus.h.i.+ng her plate forward. Hilda noted that the food had been shuffled around on the plate but not much had been eaten.

"Been talking to Agnes Olroyd."

"So I saw."

"She was asking me about the robbery," Hilda said.

"Robbery? I thought you said nothing had been taken."

Hilda shrugged. "Robbery, break-in-it's all the same thing."

Hilda worked at the animal testing facility out on Aldershot Road where, two days earlier, she had come into work to discover someone had broken in during the night-animal rights protesters, her boss Ian Arb.u.t.t had told the police and trashed the place.

Not wanting to talk about the break-in again it having been a source of conversation everywhere in the town the past 36 hours, particularly in the Merkinson twins' small two-up, two-down in Belmont Drive Hilda's sister said, "How's her Eric?"

Hilda made a face. "His prostate's not so good," she said.

"Oh." Harriet's attention seemed more concentrated on Edna Clark.

As Mary elbowed her husband in the stomach, prising his attention away from a young woman returning to a nearby table with b.r.e.a.s.t.s that looked like they had been inflated, Betty Thorn-dike said to Edna, "D'you think he's all right?"

Edna said, "He's fine. He always goes at this time. Regular as clockwork. Doesn't matter where he is." This last revelation was accompanied by a slight shake of her head that seemed to convey both amazement and despair.

"I know," Mary Tullen agreed. "It's common knowledge, your Arthur's regularity."

"But he's been a long time." Betty nodded to Arthur's unfinished meal. "And he hasn't even finished his dinner."

"He'll finish it when he gets back," Edna said with a.s.surance.