Cousin Once Removed

by Gerald Hammond

  Keith took up one pistol, pointing it carefully at the ceiling. ‘Beautifully balanced,’ he said. With a loading-rod he compared the internal length of the bore with the length from muzzle to nipple. ‘Empty, presumably fired,’ he said. He did the same with the other pistol. ‘Interesting! This one’s still loaded.’

  Sir Henry looked at him with the eyes of a dead fish. ‘I fail to see why you should find that in the least interesting,’ he said. ‘Even if, which is far from certain, those pistols were last used in a duel – any duel – it would hardly be surprising if the first shot proved lethal and the second pistol were never fired. And another thing. In order to replace skill with chance, it was not unknown for a coin to be tossed in order to decide which participant would fire first.’ Sir Henry managed to sound bored. Keith, a practised haggler, could recognize boredom faked to conceal rapt interest.

  ‘Then I’ll move on,’ Keith said, ‘and we’ll see whether we find anything more gripping. The hammer’s down but there’s a cap on the nipple. This is where we find out whether my oil did any good.’ Still keeping the muzzle carefully high, Keith put pressure on the hammer. It resisted and then came slowly. He pulled the trigger forward, to ensure that the mechanism was engaged. Then, with a small tool from the case, he detached the percussion cap from the nipple. ‘Safe now,’ he said.

  Molly picked up the cap. ‘This cap’s been fired,’ she said. ‘Why didn’t the pistol go off? Do you think Little Brother bunged up the vent in the nipple?’

  ‘Let’s think about it,’ Keith said. He took a nipple-key and a pricker out of the pistol case and started probing with the pricker. ‘On the one hand, plugging up the vent might not be certain. And on the other he’d be at risk if Big Brother wanted to see the vent pricked for himself. If he put a spent cap on the nipple, that could also be spotted. The nipple does seem to be bunged up, but you’d expect that after a century and a half in the damp. Well, if it breaks it breaks.’

  He fitted the key on to the nipple and applied pressure. The threads resisted, squeaked plaintively and then turned. He took the nipple right out and turned the pistol over. When he probed with the pricker a trickle of powder ran out through the enlarged hole, first grey and then yellow.

  ‘There you are,’ Keith said. ‘The little beggar loaded his brother’s pistol with sand instead of gunpowder. Using a flask with an integral measure, who’d notice?’ The case held a single small, copper flask. Keith inverted it over the blotter and pressed the lever of the Sykes Patent Action. A trickle of dark powder spilled on to the white paper. ‘Gunpowder,’ Keith said. ‘He must have palmed a second flask.’

  Molly gave an involuntary shiver. ‘God save us from relatives,’ she said. ‘Especially those who’re waiting for the cash. But didn’t the principals have choice of weapons, rather than the seconds? How would Little Brother know who was going to get which pistol?’

  Keith scratched the back of his neck, leaving a dark smear of mixed gun oil and powder smoke. ‘Good point,’ he said. ‘Let’s think about it. If Cousin was in the plot he could know which pistol to take – if there’s any way to tell them apart. But all the accounts have it that, as things worked out, Cousin was the challenger. Big Brother would have had the choice of weapons. Why would he choose one rather than the other, unless he thought that his baby brother was helping him to steal an advantage? . . . Molly, help me look for some visible difference. A bit of engraving, an extra line on the chequering, something like that. Something you can see from the butt end.’

  Molly did not even bother to look. ‘I already know,’ she said.

  ‘You do?’

  ‘I noticed something in France. I took a good look at the engraving, wondering whether it was good enough to photograph for your book. It isn’t, by the way. Each of the hammers has a tiny shield engraved on the back of the spur, with a diagonal line across. The lines go different ways.’

  Keith looked closely. ‘By God, you’re right! So the maker identified each pistol, for somebody who knew where to look. Now, why would he do that?’ The turnscrews in the pistol case were too short. Keith probed each barrel delicately with his letter-opener. ‘I thought so,’ he said. ‘I bloody well thought so. I’ve seen a pair like this before. One pistol’s smoothbore, the one that’s still loaded. The one that was fired has fine rifling almost to the muzzle. It’d throw much straighter. This other one, the smoothbore. . . .’ Keith wrapped a strip of paper around the end of a loading-rod until it was a tight fit in the muzzle of that pistol. He drew a bead on the door-handle. ‘It’s been bored to shoot off to the right,’ he said. ‘So there you have it. One rigged to miss, the other one bored true and half-rifled.’

  Molly looked doubtful. ‘If you were having a pistol made,’ she said, ‘which somebody else might be going to shoot at you, wouldn’t you fix it to shoot to his left rather than to his right, your left, where your heart is?’

  ‘I doubt it. When somebody shoots in haste, which he’d be tempted to do in a duel, he’s more likely to snatch the trigger and pull right. You wouldn’t want the two factors cancelling each other out.’

  Sir Henry had been listening with an air of amused indulgence, but now he spoke. ‘It may be against my interests to say this,’ he said, ‘but you’ve got so far that a little further will hardly matter. Your heart isn’t on the left. It’s in the centre. You feel it beating on the left because that’s where the big arteries are.’

  ‘You see, Clever-clogs?’ Keith said.

  ‘Well,’ Molly said defiantly, ‘if I’ve understood you properly, Big Brother picked the wrong pistol. Why would he do that?’

  Keith frowned. ‘You don’t go in for easy questions, do you? I can’t know everything. I only thought to get this far because the accounts say that there were rumours of a scandal at the time, and then when I bought the pistols everybody seemed to be dashing around like chickens with a fox in the pen; but this is the first chance I’ve had to study them properly. Let’s assume that Little Brother swapped the hammers over. Now, the rigging of the pistols must have been done by the original maker – which might explain why they were ordered from Ross instead of from one of the usual makers of duellers like James Innes or John Thomson. He wouldn’t have put the identifying mark on the hammers if there was also a visible identifying mark on the pistols. But a mark would be needed, to ensure that each hammer went back on the proper pistol. Which leads me to think. . . .’ With great care and the application of a little force, Keith removed the retaining screw from one of the hammers and, levering gently, removed the hammer from its spindle. ‘There we are. The same mark on the lock-plate, hidden by the hammer.’ He looked closely. ‘And, by God, they’ve been swapped over. The hammer with the bar sinister belongs on the pistol with the rifling. How appropriate!’

  ‘There’s a lovely family for you!’ Molly said indignantly. ‘Let’s see if I’ve got this straight. Daddy orders a pair of pistols, one of them accurate and one made to miss. His eldest son gets into a duel and grabs the pistol he thinks is going to shoot straight. But his baby brother, who got him into the duel in the first place, has swapped the hammers over so that he picks the wrong one, and that one’s been loaded with sand so that it won’t go off at all. Cousin was part of the conspiracy, and he kept the coach and the pistols together because he didn’t trust Little Brother. And,’ Molly said, ‘I don’t blame him. What a family! I can only thank the Lord there are no Raths left in politics.’

  There was a brief silence tainted with embarrassment. Keith opened his mouth but again Sir Henry spoke first. He still sounded amused. ‘I hate to disillusion you,’ he said, ‘but Lord Rath – the one to whom you refer as Little Brother – was my great-great-grandfather. He renounced that title in order to stay in the Commons.’ Sir Henry turned his attention to Keith. ‘Now that you’ve plumbed this ancient mystery, at least to your own satisfaction, perhaps we could come back to the present?’

  Keith wasted a few seconds staring into space while part of his mind returned fro
m history. ‘Let’s do that,’ he said, ‘but we’ll do it by stages. I spent yesterday afternoon in Register House, filling in the gaps in what I already knew. It seems that Big Brother died unmarried and presumably childless. Little Brother went on to become your great-great-grandfather, Sir Henry. And there was a third and even younger brother who ultimately grew up and became the great-great-great-grand-father of the Duguidsons.’

  Sir Henry sighed and pretended to hide a yawn. ‘I fail to see the relevance,’ he said.

  ‘I don’t think that you do,’ Keith said. ‘I intend to pursue it anyway. Somebody tried to kill me and I want to explore the reasoning behind that act. The price I put on these pistols may well be affected.

  ‘Your very remote cousin Valerie Duguidson reads a great deal of relevance into those facts. There seems to have been a family legend that Big Brother had been murdered by Little Brother – a legend which we can now confirm. Little Brother got the family fortune, title and estates. But the law doesn’t allow anybody to profit from a crime, and especially not to inherit from somebody they murdered. The inheritance should have passed to the youngest son and have come down to her brother. In her view there has been a hundred and fifty years of injustice which the courts could still put right.’

  ‘She’d be on a loser,’ Sir Henry said.

  ‘I told her so, though she seemed unconvinced. I talked to my own solicitor last night. He spoke for about half an hour, mostly in Latin, but if I understood him rightly, the guts of it, in layman’s language, is that Little Brother would have been vulnerable, because if the story had come out during his lifetime and if he’d been convicted of murder – which itself is far from certain, because he didn’t fire the shot – then the family fortune might have passed to the third brother. But once Little Brother’s innocent son had inherited, the inheritance was good.’

  Sir Henry studied his fingernails. ‘As a statement of the law,’ he said, ‘that hardly starts to begin to commence. . . . But, in essence, it is correct. In addition there is another factor . . . not exactly a secret although we prefer not to remind people, or each other. My late father was cast in a very different mould from his great-grandfather, the Lord Rath whom you’ve spent the past hour reviling but who did at least have a very strong capacity for nurturing his own fortune. My father was a gambler. Horses, casinos, the stock exchange, each of them relieved him of what most men would count a fortune. When my turn came to inherit, I found that my inheritance comprised some sadly reduced estates, no money and an encumbrance of debts which equalled or exceeded the value of the land. The money which those young people covet was gone.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Keith. Much was explained. He had already noticed that the guns at Wallengreen Castle seemed to have been bought by the yard. This had led him to observe that, while the castle was furnished in period, the pieces were not always a match, which suggested that the castle had been emptied and refurnished.

  Sir Henry was frowning, irritated at having had to bare a family wound, but Lady Batemore smiled. ‘You are thinking,’ she said in her accented and incongruously seductive voice, ‘that my husband seems wealthier than would be expected of an out-of-office politician. The answer is simple. I was never a beauty, but I had my attractions. When my husband found his position difficult, he did what members of both families have done when embarrassed. He married a wealthy cousin. My father had been more prudent than Sir Henry’s, and my first husband was a member of a great banking family.’

  ‘The salient facts,’ Sir Henry said, ‘are that, even if such a suit succeeded, the remainder of the Rath fortune is negligible. In any case, as we said, it would not succeed. I explained to my family only last week that the claim is not good in law. I was a barrister before I entered politics,’ he added.

  Keith thought furiously for a few seconds before he spoke again. Sir Henry, unwittingly, had just added a new dimension to the puzzle. ‘Let me think aloud,’ Keith said at last. ‘We have several groups or individuals with differing reasons for wanting different guns.

  ‘I accept that you, Sir Henry, were only interested in the pistols. You first approached me with an offer for your choice of any two guns. I infer that nobody had told you about Chondo’s gun?’

  ‘That’s so,’ Sir Henry confirmed. ‘And if anybody had mentioned the matter I should have been uninterested. I never speculate in commodities about which I know nothing. My sole concern was that I would prefer the full depths of my great-great-grandfather’s depravity not to be revealed – at least during my lifetime.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Keith said. ‘Lady Batemore, on the other hand, was prepared to buy three guns, was almost as anxious to buy a single one but was not interested in two. Well, French attitudes tend to set a higher value on money than on scandal. When she learned, through her son, the significance of the letter stolen from her, she realized that there was potential for a substantial profit. The pistols, with their story, would also be valuable, but they could not be resold.

  ‘Then we have the Duguidsons, brother and sister – although I think we need only consider the sister, Valerie. During the summer of last year she abstracted –’

  ‘Stole!’ said Lady Batemore.

  ‘– the letter. The Duguidsons are not well heeled. She was trying to raise the wind to buy Chondo’s gun when the news broke about the pistols being found in the barn. Well, the rumours that the duel had been rigged have been recorded often enough; as a member of the family she’d certainly know of them. She consulted Mr Threadgold, her neighbour who is also a solicitor. His advice was that she wouldn’t stand an earthly chance in court. But she’s not a girl to give up easily. She wanted to know. It may have been in her mind that, if she could prove the old story, the Batemore family might make a settlement for the sake of her silence.

  ‘At about the same time she heard that her other big chance of money, Chondo’s gun, had also fallen into my hands.

  ‘They left for France immediately with a friend, and they made a clever attempt to rob our car of both guns. They failed. So they tried to set me up for blackmail. No attempt on my life was intended – their reactions at the time were enough to tell me that.

  ‘Next into the picture comes another man. I don’t know his real name, but he’s known, very descriptively, as Creepy Jesus. He’s one of the weirdoes who’ve been infesting the Duguidson house. I know that he was the purchaser of the crossbow. Later, he burgled my house and I caught him. He first denied and then, under some pressure, admitted shooting me. So, who was he working for and what was he after?’

  ‘He could have been working on his own account,’ Sir Henry said uninterestedly.

  ‘He could have burgled my house on his own account, but he had no motive for trying to kill me. He claimed that he was after the pistols – which would suggest you as his employer, Sir Henry, if I believed him.’

  ‘But you don’t, of course.’

  ‘As it happens, I don’t. He tried to lie about everything else, so why should he tell the truth about that? More to the point, I have several pairs of duelling pistols and the best pair hangs in a glass case in my hall – you probably noticed them on your way in. Just before I . . . captured him, he walked past them with only a passing flick of his torch. If he’d been after the Rath pistols he’d surely have stopped and looked.

  ‘His motives were mercenary, pure and simple.

  ‘The Duguidsons don’t have any money, except in negligible amounts. They might have offered him a share of what they could get for Chondo’s miquelet, but without trade connections it would take them a hell of a time to market a stolen but historic gun. You, on the other hand, have money, but your interest in the pistols is not so great as to induce a rush of spending in one whose reputed vices do not include extravagance.’

  Sir Henry nodded slowly. It was almost a bow. His eyes were wary. ‘You seem to be eliminating all your runners,’ he suggested.

  ‘Not quite. There remain Lady Batemore and her son.’

  The temperature,
never more than luke-warm, plummeted. Sir Henry paused in the act of lighting a cigar with Keith’s table-lighter and rode over his wife’s gentler protest. ‘If that’s an allegation you’d better have something to back it up, or I’ll make you sorry.’

  ‘The allegations are still to come,’ Keith said. He paused. ‘It’s funny how errors get perpetuated,’ he said at last. ‘I do a lot of reading of history, my own specialized area of it. The same tales come up again and again. And when a mistake creeps in, be it a spelling error, a technicality, a date or whatever, it can recur. You can tell who got his facts from whoever else’s book. I’m told that it’s the same with early copies of the Bible. Now, when Lady Batemore came to my shop she referred to the pistols by C.J. Ross. And that was wrong. The Scotsman article only refers to Ross of Edinburgh, which agrees with the name on the pistols. There was a C. J. Ross, but he was dead before the pistols were made . . . by his son, Robert Oliver. Nobody else has made that mistake, except Creepy Jesus. Also, you had seen a copy of that article.’

  ‘I have never met the man you refer to by that blasphemous name,’ Lady Batemore said. She could have been spitting icicles.

  ‘I never said that you’d met him. I never even thought it. Yet there’s a link. Your son Brian mingles freely with the household of his very remote cousins the Duguidsons. He passed on to you all that they thought or did, with only occasional reservations. His Morgan was damaged, so he left it at Bonnyrigg and borrowed one of the family cars for his trip to France. Your car followed ours on to the ferry at Dieppe and an attempt was made to rob our car on the way over. I don’t know whether either of you knew what he was up to, and, frankly, I’m not particularly interested. I’ll only comment that he must have spun a good yarn before you lent him a valuable car and gave him the money for the trip.’