by Marion Bryce
“From the day he joined I had misgivings, and, though his good looks, lively spirits, and recklessness with money made him popular with others of his age, I soon discovered that his moral sense was practically nonexistent, and considered him a very undesirable addition to our ranks. Still, I hoped he might improve, and for a year or two nothing occurred to force me to take serious notice of his behaviour. Unknown to me, however, he took to gambling very heavily, and must have lost a great deal more than he could afford, for he appears to have got deep in the clutches of moneylenders long before I heard anything about it. So desperate did his financial affairs become, that shortly before he left the regiment he was actually driven to forging the name of a brother officer, a rich young man, with whom he was on very friendly terms. The large amount for which the cheque was drawn drew the attention of the bankers to it, and in spite of the extreme skill with which, I am told, the signature had been counterfeited, the forgery was detected, and the matter was brought before me.
“The victim of the fraud was as anxious as myself to avoid a public scandal, and it was arranged that nothing should be done for a year, to give time to McConachan to refund the money; if, however, he failed to do so within that time, there would be nothing for it but to make the matter public. These terms were agreed on and McConachan was told to send in his papers at once.
“The year allowed is now drawing to a close, and the money has not been forthcoming, so that there is no doubt that Mark McConachan’s need of obtaining a large amount is extremely pressing. My knowledge of his character obliges me to add that I consider him one of the few men I ever knew whom I could imagine going to almost any length to provide himself with what he so urgently requires.
“Please consider this letter confidential unless you obtain actual proof of his guilt.—I am, sir, yours faithfully,
“T. G. URSFORD,
“Colonel commanding 31st Lancers.”
Gimblet put the letter away with the other items of evidence of Mark’s guilt: the telegram from the analyst in Edinburgh, the measurements of the footprints on the rose-bed, and of those other marks near the hedge by which he had at first been mystified. It was another thread in the thin cord that, like the silken line Ariadne gave to Theseus, had led him to come successfully out of the bewildering labyrinth into which the investigation of the crime had beguiled him.
CHAPTER XXII
It was after dinner that night, as he sat in the little drawing-room of the cottage with Lady Ruth and Sir Arthur, that his hostess asked him to explain to them how he had contrived to detect the way in which the murder had been committed.
“You promised to tell me all about it,” Lady Ruth reminded him, “if I would keep silent about your finding the papers in the statue.”
“Tell us the whole thing from the beginning,” Sir Arthur urged him.
“I will willingly tell you anything that may interest you,” Gimblet consented readily. “Every one enjoys talking about their work to sympathetic listeners such as yourselves. It is a bad thing to start on a case with a preconceived idea, and I can’t deny that when I first came here I was very near having an idée fixe as to the origin of the crime. I tried to deceive myself into thinking that I kept an open mind on the subject; but I don’t think I ever really doubted for a minute that the Nihilist society to which Lord Ashiel had formerly belonged was responsible for the murder. Even after my conversation with the new peer, which showed me that things looked blacker against Sir David Southern than I had expected, I was far from convinced that he was guilty, though I was obliged to admit that there was some ground for the conclusion come to by the police.
“But what was the evidence against him? Sir David was known to have quarrelled with his uncle; he had even been heard to say he had a good mind to shoot him. But that was more than twenty-four hours previous to the crime, and the words were uttered in a moment of anger, when he probably said the first thing that came into his head. Was he likely to have hugged his rage in silence for the hours that followed, and then to have walked out into the garden and shot his uncle in cold blood and without further warning? It did not appear to me probable, but then I did not know the young man.
“He was not to be found when the deed was discovered, and a hunt instituted for the murderer. Well, he had an answer to that which fitted in with my own theory. He said he saw some one hanging about the grounds, and went to look for him. But it was said that the night was so dark as to make it improbable that anyone should have been seen, even if there had been anyone to see. That cut both ways, to my mind. For it would account for the intruder making his escape undiscovered.
“Then there was the matter of the rifle, which he had told Miss Byrne he had cleaned that evening, in which case it had certainly been fired since then. He owned that he had locked it up and that the key never left his possession afterwards, but now denied that he had told the young lady that he had cleaned it. I asked young Lord Ashiel if he could put any possible interpretation on these facts except the one accepted by the police, and he replied that he could not. That, for the first time, made me wonder if he were really anxious to believe his cousin innocent. For I could put quite different interpretations on them myself.
“In the first place, though it was possible that Sir David lied in making his second statement to the effect that he had not said he had cleaned his rifle, it was equally possible that the first statement that he had cleaned it was not strictly accurate. For some reason, which he did not care to divulge, he might have told Miss Byrne he had been cleaning his gun when he had been really doing something entirely different. But had he told her he had cleaned it? His words, as repeated by her to me, were, ‘I went in there to clean my rifle,’ but not, ‘I have been cleaning my rifle,’ which would be another thing altogether, he probably had not yet begun cleaning it when he heard Miss Byrne coming and went out to speak to her; it is possible some feeling akin to shyness might make him reluctant to confess this afterwards in public. Indeed I now feel quite sure that this is the explanation of the matter. Later on, when I questioned her again, she did not appear certain which of the two forms of words he had used; but there was, at all events, a considerable doubt. There were other possibilities also. Some one might possess a duplicate key to the gun-cabinet. It seemed to me impossible that none of these considerations should have occurred to young Ashiel, if he were really reluctant to believe in Sir David’s guilt. But at the same time I remembered the almost incredible lack of reasoning powers shown by most members of the public where a deed of violence has been committed, and knowing that there is nothing so improbable that it will not find a host of ready believers, I did not attach much importance to the circumstance until later.
“Still on the whole, after talking to young Lord Ashiel, I felt more disposed to believe that there might be some truth in the accusation that had been made than I had previously thought likely. But on that point I reserved my opinion till I should have had an opportunity of examining the scene of the tragedy for myself. So I prevailed upon the new owner of the castle to leave me alone—which he was the more ready to do since he had urgent need to be first in examining some papers of his uncle’s which were in another room—and proceeded to make a cast round the garden from which the shot had been fired, in the hope of lighting upon some trifle which had escaped the notice of Macross.
“It was when I came upon the footprints in the rose-bed which had done so much to prove the guilt of Sir David Southern in the eyes of his accusers, that I began to be certain of his innocence; and a very little examination convinced me absolutely that whoever had shot Lord Ashiel it was not his youngest nephew. For the tracks on the flower-bed left no room for doubt.
“It is true they corresponded exactly with the shooting-boots Sir David had been wearing on the day the crime was committed. I had provided myself with a pair that I was assured was exactly like those particular boots which fitted the tracks and which the police had taken away with them, and I found that there was indeed n
o difference, except for the matter of an extra nail or two on the soles. There was no doubt that Sir David’s boots had made those impressions, but to my mind there was equally no doubt that Sir David had not been in them when they made them. For the track which was so plainly distinguishable on the soft mould of the flower-bed had certain peculiarities which I could hardly overlook.
“There was first a row of footmarks leading from the lawn to the middle of the bed; then more marks as if the wearer of the boots had moved from one position to another hard by; and finally, a track leading back again to the mossy lawn at the side. Now all this was well enough till it came to the last row of footsteps, those which led off the bed, and which had presumably been taken after the fatal shot was fired. But was it conceivable that a man who had that moment committed a cold-blooded murder should leave the scene of his crime with the same slow, deliberate footsteps with which he had approached it? Surely not.
“And yet this is what the wearer of the boots had done. The imprints, as they advanced towards the lawn, were deep and well defined from toe to heel. Not only that, but they were, if anything, closer together than those which preceded them. Now a man, running, leaves a deeper impression of his toe than he does of his heel, and his steps are much farther apart in proportion to his increase in speed. I, myself, ran from the middle of the bed, to the lawn, alongside of the footmarks of the soi-disant murderer, and though I am a short man, while Sir David’s legs are reported long, I left only two footprints to his five. To me it was as certain as if I had seen it happen that the wearer of the boots trampled his way off the rose-bed as slowly as he had trampled on. Those footprints had been made by some one who was determined they should be seen, not by some one whose only thought was to get away from the place; not, in short, by a man who had that moment fired a murderous shot through the darkness. The tracks had undoubtedly been made as a blind and with the intention of diverting suspicion to the wrong man probably after the deed itself was done.
“I was satisfied, then, that the shot had not been fired from this particular part of the rose-bed, and I proceeded to search for other footprints farther down the bed. I did not feel much hope of being successful, since, if our man had had the forethought to leave so many traces of some one else’s presence, it was unlikely he would have neglected to ensure that his own should be absent. And as I expected, I found none.
“But at the end of the garden, where it is bounded by the holly hedge, I came across something which puzzled me. There were two narrow depressions on the flower-bed, about an inch wide by less than a foot long. They were parallel to each other, and at right angles to the hedge, and separated by a distance of six or seven feet. Near one, which was almost in the middle of the bed, was another mark which I could not understand. It was only a few inches long and, in shape, a narrow oval. I could not at first imagine what any of them represented, and it was only quite suddenly, as I was giving it up and going away, that the truth flashed across my mind. I had been looking regretfully at the track I myself had left by the side of the hedge on my way to and from the middle of the bed.
“‘What I want,’ I said to myself, ‘is one of those planks raised off the ground by two little supports, one at each end, that gardeners use to avoid stepping on the beds when they are going through the process of bedding out,’ And even as I said it, I realized that the same idea had occurred to some one else, and that the marks I had been examining might have been made by just such a contrivance as the one I was thinking of. A short search showed me the plank itself, kept in a tool-house conveniently near the spot, and, with a rake taken from the same place, I seized the opportunity of raking out my own footmarks from the rose-bed.
“And now who could this be who had so carefully manufactured a false scent, and so cleverly avoided being himself suspected? My previous theory, that some envoy of the Nihilists had been lurking in the neighbourhood, seemed not to meet the new conditions. For how could a mere stranger have gained possession of the misleading boots, or how returned them to their proper place? And how, for that matter, could a stranger have obtained the use of Sir David’s rifle, if his rifle had indeed been used?
“That brought me to consider again whether after all there was any proof that his rifle had been used by anyone. Supposing, as I saw no reason to doubt, he spoke the truth when he said that Miss Byrne had misunderstood him and that he had not cleaned the weapon since coming in from stalking, was I driven back on the theory that some one possessed a duplicate key to the case where the guns were kept? Not in the least. The shot might have been fired from a rifle that had never, at any time, been within the walls of the castle. Certainly, the bullet fitted Sir David’s Mannlicher rifle, but that, as young Lord Ashiel said himself, was equally true of his own rifle, or probably of a dozen others in the neighbouring forests, since a sporting Mannlicher is a weapon in common use in the Highlands.
“The shot, then, might well have been fired by my hypothetical Russian as far as the rifle was concerned; but he would have found it difficult to borrow Sir David’s boots, and it seemed unlikely that any stranger would not only have dared to do so, but afterwards have had the audacity to return them. No, on the whole the footmarks seemed to clear the character of the Russian nation from any reasonable suspicion of being directly concerned in the crime.
“And yet, in spite of reason, I could not help feeling that the Society of the Friends of Man must be at the bottom of the whole thing in some way I had not yet fathomed. I made every inquiry as to whether any foreigner had visited the castle or been seen in the neighbourhood, but the only strangers among the visitors had been Miss Julia Romaninov and Miss Juliet Byrne’s French maid, both of whose alibis appeared so far unimpeachable. I had it on Lady Ruth’s authority that Miss Romaninov had been in the drawing-room with the other ladies at the time of the murder, and all the servants were at supper in the servants’ hall. Otherwise I should have been inclined to look on Julia Romaninov with a suspicious eye, as being the only Russian I knew to be on the spot. The last word the dying man had been able to pronounce, too, was, according to Miss Byrne, ‘steps’ which might very well have been intended for steppes, and have some connection with the enemies he dreaded.
“With these considerations running in my mind, I made my way to the gun-room, not indeed with much expectation of its having anything to tell me, but as part of the day’s work of inspection, which must not be shirked. I took down young Ashiel’s rifle to examine. He had told me it was of the same description as his cousin’s, and I was not very familiar with the make. It was owing to my wish to see for myself with what kind of weapon the deed had been done that a very important clue fell into my hands.
“As I put the rifle down on the bare deal table which forms the principal piece of furniture in the gun-room, I saw a grain of something dark, which looked like earth, fall off the butt end on to the boards beneath. I picked up the rifle, and looked closely at the butt; it was criss-crossed with small cuts, as they sometimes are, with the idea of preventing them from slipping, and in the cuts some dust, or earth, seemed, as I expected, to be adhering. I knocked the rifle upon the table, and a little shower fell from it. Except for the first grain, it might have been nothing but the ordinary dust of disuse, but I could not help thinking it was of a darker hue than the accumulations of years generally take upon themselves, and, further, I knew that the rifle had lately been used for stalking. It was, moreover, specklessly clean in every other part. I felt certain it had been leant upon the ground at no distant date; and I remembered the mark I had not been able to account for at the foot of the rose-bush, near the place where the plank had been used and, as I was persuaded, the cowardly shot actually fired. If a gun had been leant up against the large standard rose that grew there, it would have left just such a mark upon the soft ground.
“All this, of course, was a mere surmise, and rather wild at that, but the deer forests of Scotland are not muddy, whatever else they may be, and I felt an unreasoning conviction that th
e rifle had not accumulated dust while engaged upon its legitimate business on the mountain tops. The peaty moorland soil on which the castle stood would hardly be the best thing in the world for rose-trees, I imagined, and it seemed not too much to hope that some other kind of earth might be artificially mingled with it. I carefully collected the dust in a pill-box, and promised myself to lose no time in obtaining the opinion of an expert analyst, as to whether or no some trace of patent fertilizer, or other chemical, could not be traced in it.
“It was now for the first time that suspicion of young Lord Ashiel began to oust my theory of the Nihilist society’s responsibility for the murder. He had, as I remembered, struck me as taking his cousin’s guilt for granted with somewhat unnecessary alacrity. His rifle, I already believed, perhaps in my turn with needless alacrity, had fired the fatal bullet, and it seemed perfectly possible that it was his finger that pressed upon the trigger. He was, I knew, in the billiard-room, and alone, both before and after the murder was committed. It would have been quite easy for him to fetch his rifle, place the gardener’s plank in position, fire his shot and return to the house, provided Miss Byrne did not rush immediately from the room. He knew her to be a brave girl and not likely to fly without making some attempt at offering assistance. But, if she had rushed from the spot and met the murderer outside the library door, it would be simple enough to convey the impression that he had heard the shot, and that he was either dashing to their help, or making for the garden in the attempt to catch the villain red handed. The rifle was the only thing likely to provoke an awkward question, but he could have dropped it in the dark and returned for it afterwards without much fear of detection. As it happened, he thought it safer to risk carrying it indoors, and hid it under the billiard-room sofa till he had a chance to clean it and take it to the gun-room, as we now know.
