Death in the Coverts

by Roderic Jeffries

  He held the gun at the ready since the big flushes would begin at any moment. A woodcock suddenly and silently appeared, twisting round the branches of a willow with a brilliant display of aerial gymnastics. He fired the right barrel and the left and the woodcock went on its twisting way, unscathed. As he reloaded, two hen pheasants came straight over him. By the time he had closed the gun and turned they were out of range.

  He heard the distant sound of beating wings that signified a big flush and a second later the faintly audible order for the beaters to hold. The birds came in sight, rising very steeply with the wind. They approached at various angles and heights, all going like hell riding an express train. He shot one and missed one, broke the gun, and both empty cartridges were ejected. As he pulled two cartridges out of his belt, Henry Decker stepped round a willow tree to come into sight in the small clearing of the stand.

  ‘Run out of cartridges?’ asked Julian, as he reloaded. He fired at a cock pheasant and the bird dropped. ‘Take some out of the bag. It’s just there by the stick.’ He broke the gun and the empty cartridge was ejected. As he went to draw a fresh cartridge from his belt, he looked down to see the barrels of Henry Decker’s gun pointing at his head. ‘Look out…’ He stopped, as he realised with a chilling sense of shock that this was no piece of careless gun handling.

  Henry Decker slid the safety catch forward with his thumb. As his forefinger curled round the front trigger, there was a loud shout. A man burst through the undergrowth into the clearing.

  Henry Decker stood quite motionless.

  Julian stared at the twin muzzles of the shotgun and found himself wondering whether the mind had time, before it was blasted out of existence, to record the agonising pain as the column of shot smashed into the flesh.

  ‘Drop that gun,’ ordered the man. As Henry Decker hesitated, he threw himself forward.

  Henry Decker pulled the trigger. There was no shattering explosion, no cone of shot tearing into Julian’s head, only the sharp click of the striker-pin as it hit the cap of the cartridge.

  The man crashed into Henry Decker, who was thrown to the ground. Henry Decker struggled to bring the gun round and received two blows in his stomach which left him doubled up in agony.

  Julian stared at the man as he came to his feet. ‘God! if that cartridge hadn’t misfired by some miracle…’ he muttered.

  The other picked up the gun, broke it, and extracted the right-hand cartridge. ‘Luckily, sir, we doctored this one. What worried me was that we hadn’t doctored the other.’

  *

  In Hurstley Place, Doherty sat in the arm-chair to the right of the fireplace in the red withdrawing-room. The blazing fire, made up of two thick sections of tree trunk and any number of smaller ones, threw out just enough heat that reached him to persuade him that he was not too cold. He drank some whisky. On his right, past generations of the Deckers looked down at him from their framed portraits. By the side of the fireplace hung a flintlock pistol: had that one ever faced a horde of starving Irish peasants?

  ‘How in the hell were you able to doctor that one cartridge?’ asked Julian. ‘You weren’t to know which one he’d use.’

  ‘The detective constable made himself useful at the first beat, sir. He got his hand on Henry Decker’s cartridge bag and passed it back to me and I changed all the cartridges. Then I weighed the ones from the bag.’

  ‘Weighed them?’

  ‘Yes, sir. I expected to find one slightly lighter than the others and after a while I did. This cartridge had a distinguishing mark on the cap, which was good confirmation.’

  ‘I’m sorry, but I don’t see the significance.’

  ‘Well, sir, you’ll remember Mr Williams, the gun expert, and the pathologist between them proved that in two cases the murdered man had been shot by the standard load of a number five shot sixteen bore cartridge – which is about two hundred and six pellets. Had the load come from a standard twelve bore cartridge, that number would have been two hundred and thirty-four pellets. You’ll know better than me that it’s the number of pellets which is important, not the pellets themselves as a number five pellet can come from any bore gun.

  ‘Mr Williams was of the very definite opinion the murderer wouldn’t know that the size of cartridge used could be determined by the weight and number of shot, but experts who believe themselves infallible aren’t always so very clear when they move from facts to theories. Anyway, according to Williams the murderer used a sixteen bore cartridge and this had obviously either to be fired from a sixteen bore gun – which only you and your brother used – or a twelve bore in which was an adaptor. Not only would this adaptor have been a most unusual one – adaptors normally scale down to a four ten – but it would have been a clumsy method as the murderer would have to carry the adaptor round with him plus a sixteen bore cartridge which, when found, would bear the unique and identifying marks of his own gun. The truth was that the murderer was fully aware of the relevance of the weight and number of pellets in the charge and he hit on the idea of taking a twelve bore cartridge and reducing the number of pellets in it to a sixteen bore load. He could thus safely use his own twelve bore gun to commit the murder and yet make it appear the murder weapon was a sixteen bore.

  ‘When he shot your brother, Henry Decker carried the deception one stage further than he had before. At the first beat he’d pick up from your stand one of the used sixteen bore cartridges which, of course, bore all the identifying marks of your gun on it and after he’d shot your brother with a lightened twelve bore cartridge in his gun, he dropped this sixteen bore case on the ride. That meant there was a cartridge case at the murder spot which could be proved absolutely to have been fired from your gun.

  ‘That all leads up to why I searched for the lightened cartridge this morning. When I found it, I gave the detective constable, a similar cartridge of the correct weight and with the identifying mark. He introduced it into Henry Decker’s cartridge bag.’

  Julian finished his drink. ‘Another?’

  ‘I’m always ready for a drop more whisky, sir, even when it’s Scotch and not Irish.’

  Julian poured out the drinks. ‘Why? Why did he kill?’ He returned to his chair after handing the other a glass and sat down.

  ‘This case, sir, has been cursed from the beginning by the wrong conclusions being drawn from the right facts. And it’s no consolation at all to know that we were meant to draw those wrong conclusions.

  ‘This estate is worth at least half a million pounds and a lot of men will do anything to get a fortune like that. Henry Decker was a Decker and yet he wasn’t. Since your mutual grandfather married twice and had a son by each marriage, you and your brother were the direct descendants of the elder son and in line to inherit the estate, Henry Decker was the son of the younger son and not in line, although the eldest of the three of you. He would never come into the estate worth half a million pounds. He always saw it as a sum of money, not as you and your brother saw it, the permanent inheritance of the family and not belonging to any single member of that family.

  ‘Greed and envy twisted his mind and every time he came here and smilingly thanked you for whatever hospitality you’d just given him, that envy dug deeper and hurt more. You two had inherited everything, he had inherited nothing but a nagging, bad tempered wife. He was a Decker, yet the name meant nothing. He was the oldest of the generation, yet the half million pound estate would never come to him.

  ‘Your father set up the trust fund and this became effective so that the estate was saved from death duties and was due to vest in your brother or yourself, depending on your brother’s decision when he reached thirty-five. One day, Henry Decker suddenly realised a truth that until then had escaped him: there were only two lives between him and the half million, since your mother had signed away any and all of her rights when the trust was formed. Of those two lives, your brother was living on borrowed time and would almost certainly elect against accepting the estate. That reduced the number to one �
�� you.

  ‘He’s admitted that he day-dreamed how to kill you if and when your brother died. Then, out of the blue, he learned that Rafferty was blackmailing you because your father had, in fact, died before the five years was up. This meant that if ever the truth came out, death duties would be levied on the estate and crush it out of existence.

  ‘Rafferty blackmailed you for two reasons. He hated you for what he took to be your snobbish superiority, and he was determined to force you to socially receive him and his wife. By blackmailing you he could hurt you and there’s nothing more satisfying than hurting someone one envies. When it came to this blackmail, Henry Decker was more of a realist than ever anyone in your family was. You were prepared to pay the asking price for Rafferty’s silence: that was, the money he’d take because it was proof he was hurting you, and the invitation to the house. But Henry Decker knew that there’s never any end to blackmail. Rafferty would have gone on blackmailing you and quite soon he would have realised how much more he could squeeze out of you than he was: although, unusually, the money didn’t initially interest him as money, he would very soon have understood that he had gained access to half a million pounds. Henry Decker knew that if the estate was to be saved, Rafferty – and Abbotts his gross shadow – had to be dealt with. But why should he worry about saving the estate when he could have no interest in its salvation?

  ‘It was at this point that he realised he would gain an interest.

  ‘He would murder Rafferty and Abbotts and make their deaths appear to be accidents. He’d take every possible precaution, but obviously something could always go wrong. Therefore, he’d shoot them with cartridges whose load had been reduced to sixteen bore loads since only you and your brother used sixteen bores.

  ‘When he killed your brother, he made certain it was obviously murder. He shot him from a distance. He dropped the game counter in a tum-up and an empty cartridge case down on the ride. The motive for this murder was going to be obvious – in just one month your brother was going to make the election which could disinherit you completely. It was Henry Decker’s luck that you happened to be on the ride at the right time for his plan, but his plan would have worked just as well had you not been there, looking for a dead fox.’

  Julian drained his glass. ‘How the hell did all this get him any nearer the estate? I was still very much alive.’

  ‘You were, and with your brother dead the estate would automatically come to you. But there’s a law, quoted at your trial, which says that no man may benefit from his crime. If you were found guilty of shooting your brother, you could not inherit the estate: the law would deny you the fruits of your murder. In that case, since the trust had become intestate, as it were, the estate would pass to the nearest relative. Although only a cousin of the half blood, Henry Decker would take under the share that would have gone to his father, had his father still been alive – which meant the whole thing.

  ‘Boiled down, it meant he’d found a way to deprive you of your inheritance by making the law work for him.’

  Julian stood up. ‘I’m still thirsty. Are you?’

  ‘I probably shouldn’t be, sir, but I am.’

  Julian poured out fresh drinks. ‘What about the counter?’

  ‘He’d pinched that out of the gun-room when he first arrived at the house. After each beat, he must casually have asked you how many birds you’d shot, then clicked up the number. At King’s Beat he couldn’t see you, but he could see the birds in the air and note how many dropped over your stand and that’s how he got the right figure on the counter when he dropped it into the tum-up of your brother’s trousers.

  ‘When we investigated Rafferty’s death we thought it probably wasn’t an accident: when we investigated Abbott’s death we were certain that that couldn’t be an accident. What’s more, the killings had to be connected. After a bit, we found what obviously was the connection. Your father had died within the five year period, Rafferty had found this out and had been blackmailing you. He and Abbotts were murdered to save the estate from having to pay the death duties it would have to pay if the true date of your father’s death became known. It seemed the murderer had to be you or your brother. Then your brother was killed within a month of his thirty-fifth birthday, when he’d have to make his election. That month was obviously of the greatest importance and we thought it could only be of importance to you. But it was also of supreme importance to Henry Decker because if your brother once elected not to take the estate and you inherited it, you could no longer be deprived of it by the rule against benefiting from your crime.’

  Julian lit a cigarette. He was silent for a while, then asked: ‘What happens to me?’

  ‘I’m not quite certain how they’ll go about your trial now, sir. Maybe after one of those things called a nolle prosequi they can just declare you completely innocent.’

  ‘Will they go for Miss Harmsworth over that judgment I claimed came from the Congo?’

  ‘My guess is they’ll be happy to forget everything. After all, there are a few red faces around, including mine! We don’t want to make them any redder.’ He smiled, finished his drink, and stood up. ‘I really must be moving, sir.’

  They walked from the red withdrawing-room through to the hall. Doherty looked round at all the heraldic shields. ‘D’you know something, sir, I reckon that what all this represents is one of the precious things this country has to offer. I suppose that makes me a hopeless square.’

  ‘If so, we’re both equally hopeless.’

  Doherty went to the front door and opened it. ‘Thanks again,’ Julian said.

  ‘Good-bye, sir. Oh, by the way, this fell out of Mr Henry Decker’s pocket. I think you would probably like to have it.’ Doherty handed Julian an envelope. Doherty smiled and then went across the porch to his car.

  Julian closed the door, turned, and looked at the hall. Around the walls was much of the history of the Deckers, a history that must now partially end. Henry Decker had failed to get the estate for himself, but in failing he had made certain it did not remain with the Deckers. The police knew the true date of the elder Fawcett’s death and already they probably had proof of that date. The state would demand its death duties: the age of unequal equality would have won one more Pyrrhic victory.

  He looked down at the envelope Doherty had given him and opened it. Inside was some sort of document, in French, which was both signed and witnessed. He read it. Doctor Roget admitted the deception that had been practised in respect of the death of the Englishman, Monsieur Fawcett Decker. The actual date of death was the 10th of June.

  Julian stared at the statement, afraid to believe that he really held it in his hands. Henry Decker had taken it from Rafferty after the first murder and Doherty had somehow, unseen, taken it from Henry Decker after the arrest. Doherty believed in history and so had given it to Julian, not the State.

  He went over to the fire, threw the paper on to it, and watched it bum. When there was only a blackened, curling mass left he smashed that into minute fragments with a long handled poker.

  Barbara walked into the hall. ‘Has he gone?’

  ‘Yes.’ He watched one of the fragments as it was wafted up the enormous open chimney by the rising hot air.

  ‘Julian, I don’t know whether I’m going to laugh or cry, or what.’ She came up and took hold of him, seeking the comfort and reassurance of physical contact. She stared at the fire. ‘What were you burning when I came in?’

  ‘Doctor Roget’s sworn statement about the date of father’s death.’

  ‘But… but how?’

  ‘The detective inspector gave it to me just before he left.’

  She began to cry. ‘I’m being very feminine,’ she murmured after a short while. ‘I’m crying because I’m so happy I don’t know what else to do. Julian – is Hurstley safe?’

  ‘They’ll never be able to prove the real date of father’s death now.’

  ‘Why did the detective do it? Why didn’t he hand it in?’


  ‘He’s a traditionalist. I think he wanted our son’s shield to join the rest.’

  ‘Then hadn’t we better hurry up and get married, Julian, or there’ll be one of those terrible things on it called a bar sinister?’

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