Death on a Pale Horse

by Donald Thomas

  “Most, most interesting,” said Sherlock Holmes quietly.

  “And how was all that to be accounted for, Mr. Holmes? The logical conclusion, as it seems to me, must be that the gun was not fired in this room at all. How could it have been? No smell of powder, no skin burn, spread of wound too wide.”

  “How indeed?” Holmes asked admiringly. I guessed from his tone that he was preparing the unfortunate inspector for a coup de grace. For the life of me, I could not yet see what it was going to be.

  Lestrade raised his forefinger like a man with a secret. “One has to box a little bit clever in a case like this, Mr. Holmes.” He tapped the side of his nose confidentially. “Could our man here have been shot from across the street? That was the first thing I asked myself. Not shot by a bullet passing through the window glass, of course. No window was broken and no hole made in the glass. But as you can see, there is a gap where the nearer sash window-frame has been drawn down an inch or two at the top. That would be for ventilation, I daresay.”

  “Remarkable,” said Sherlock Holmes coolly. “Next you will be telling us that a marksman in the opposite building had the victim in his sights, while the poor fellow sat at his desk just here. Your sniper was skilful enough to fire a bullet across the street, through the two-inch gap above the frame of this window sash, and into the victim’s temple.”

  Lestrade appeared a little put out, for it plainly was his solution to the assassination. Now it seemed that Holmes had stolen it from under his nose. Yet the tone of my friend’s words also suggested that the inspector’s hypothesis was about to be reduced to ashes.

  I ignored these two antagonists and gave my attention to the matted blood on the right-hand temple of the corpse. If Lestrade was right, to have hit the mark so exactly from the opposite building through such a narrow gap must indeed have been the work of a marksman.

  “You have detained the occupant of the opposite room, I take it?” Holmes asked pleasantly.

  Our Scotland Yard friend did not like this at all.

  “Not yet, Mr. Holmes,” he said huffily. “No sign of him. We have his details, of course, and we have a fellow on guard over there. We shall have the man we want the moment he appears.”

  “Of course you will,” said my friend reassuringly—“if he appears, that is.”

  The inspector ignored this final comment. “A foreign gentleman, apparently. Mr. Ramon by name. Not present this morning, so far as we know. The commissionaire on duty in the opposite building is our source of information for all this. Naturally, he is also under our observation. After all, sir, who is to say that he might not have done it himself?”

  Holmes sighed.

  “Who indeed? Confronted by your accustomed cunning and audacity, Lestrade, the true criminal will not long evade you. And what have you concluded about the dead man?”

  “Not known to us, sir, except for his presence in these rooms leased to this so-called overseas medical mission.”

  “Indeed. How did the murdered man get into this room, by the way?”

  Lestrade was now visibly irritated. “He must have had a key.”

  “Ah, yes,” said Holmes, “that would be it. Did you find a key?”

  “The dead man’s pockets were empty of everything, Mr. Holmes. Someone must have been through them.”

  “Of course, that must be it. His pockets were emptied by his assassin, no doubt, for who else could it have been? It would be a sharpshooter who came down from Landor Mansions opposite and up to the fourth floor of these premises especially to go through his pockets. How did he get in, I wonder? It seems he also had a key to this room. They must both have had keys. It could not be done otherwise. I do believe, Lestrade, that what you may have here is a most unusual case of one evangelical missionary assassinating another.”

  This was too much for the inspector. “Who knows how the dead man got here?” he said abruptly. “What does it matter? I daresay there must be another key hidden in these mansion rooms somewhere.”

  “Capital!” said Holmes encouragingly. “Of course there must be.”

  “At any rate, gentlemen, we shall make our full search and inventory on Sir Melville Macnaghten’s arrival. Carpets up and curtains unstitched if necessary. Furniture dismantled. I can show you round in the meantime, if you choose.”

  Holmes shook his head. “Just tell me a little more about the fatal shot that was not heard in this building. Was it heard across the way in Landor Mansions?”

  “Not that we know of, Mr. Holmes, but we have better evidence than just shots being heard.”

  “Have you, indeed? Excellent! Pray describe your better evidence.”

  “The measurements between here and the opposite building were taken by our men soon after the body was reported by the maid. Measurements across the street, between the two windows.” Lestrade stood confidently again, staring up at the top of the sash. “There is a casement in Landor Mansions, the ones just opposite, slightly above this level and immediately across from us. From that window, our officers have taped a trajectory which crosses the street. It passes through the gap above the partly open sash-window on this side. It then almost infallibly enters the right-hand temple of the head of any person sitting at that desk.”

  “I see,” said Holmes encouragingly. “And I daresay there was such a constant rattle and banging of cart-wheels in the nearby Continental railway goods-yard that a murderer might choose a safe moment to fire without being heard. The clattering of iron wheels would drown the crack of his gun? That would be why the shot was not heard on either side of the street?”

  “Yes,” said Lestrade abruptly. “And what might be wrong with that?”

  “Have you retrieved the bullet?”

  “That must wait for the autopsy, which Dr. Littlejohn himself will carry out at the pathology department of St. Thomas’s Hospital this evening, sir. At present the bullet presumably remains embedded in the dead man’s brain. And seeing that it killed the man, where else is it likely to be?”

  Holmes gave him a quick humourless smile. “Where else, indeed? I mention the bullet, Lestrade, because even I can see—and as Dr. Watson will tell you—there is more dried blood than one would expect on the surface of the dead man’s wound. Will you take it from me that the injury was almost certainly inflicted by a soft-nosed lead projectile? Attend to it and you will see that the impact has left an expanded wound rather than a neat bullet hole.”

  “What of it?”

  “A soft-nosed revolver bullet may have a lethal impact even when fired without gunpowder. Air weapons have been with us for two or three hundred years. They have often been preferred to gunpowder by a sniper who wishes to remain concealed. When he fires, there is no flash, there is no explosion, there is no sign of smoke, no smell of powder. Interestingly, these are some of the very things lacking from the scene of your present crime. I smell stale tobacco in the air. I do not smell the rather more pungent odour of gun smoke.”

  Lestrade had the look of a man who feels himself hooked and wriggling and does not care for it. Holmes pacified him.

  “I wonder, inspector, whether you are familiar with the Von Herder air weapon. No? You are not? To be sure, at present it is something of a rarity in this country. Its use is mercifully confined at present to international criminals of considerable sophistication. Generally they prefer extortion or fraud to murder. Murder, when necessary, is a quiet business with them. The usual Von Herder weapon is a handgun powered by compressed carbon dioxide. It can fire these soft-nosed bullets at considerable velocity. Approaching the speed of sound but not exceeding it, for fear of setting off an atmospheric crack. Very effective.”

  “Not something I know of personally,” said Lestrade, almost chortling at such a far-fetched theory. “Talk about a rarity, Mr. Sherlock Holmes! Oh, dear! Oh, dear!”

  Of course Lestrade had never heard of Von Herder until this moment, but he resented a challenge to his solution of the case. He kept the unease from his voice but not from his
face.

  Holmes became reminiscent. “I was briefly acquainted with Von Herder in Berlin some years ago. He is a blind German mechanic of true genius but indifferent ethics. His handguns work upon compressed gas. This compression gives to a soft revolver bullet such velocity that it kills without a sound that could be heard beyond a closed door.”

  Lestrade was after him like a greyhound from a trap. “And I suppose you’ll tell me, sir, that such a weapon could have been fired just as easily from either side of the street!”

  Holmes looked troubled, as if he had been misunderstood.

  “Dear me, no. I am as sure as I can be that the shot was fired in this room. The killer and his victim were face to face. The gunman was standing up, I imagine, and his victim would have been sitting down at the desk. The wound suggests to me that the range must have been very short and the barrel of the gun, not surprisingly, would have been pointing downwards. Of course I have not, as you correctly say, made an adequate survey of the premises. I cannot be more precise for the moment.”

  He dropped to one knee and smoothed his hand across the polished floor.

  “And I cannot help thinking that this desk has very recently been moved. Quite innocently moved, perhaps, for the purpose of sweeping or polishing the linoleum. But it has surely not been moved back again.”

  Still poised on one knee, he took the edge of the rug beyond the desk and turned it back.

  “It is as I supposed. Look just here. We have uncovered two small round blemishes on the linoleum forward of the desk. I believe we shall find that they are the matching patches, made by the pressure of the two forward casters of the desk over a period of months or years. They will prove a perfect fit when we move the desk forward; you may depend upon it.”

  “Meaning what, Mr. Holmes?”

  Holmes stood up. “Suppose those casters now stood where they formerly did, on the two marks in the linoleum. The desk would have to come forward to accomplish that, would it not? A rough calculation in trigonometry, made from where I stand, tells me that as the victim then sat at the desk, his head would have been beyond the aim of a gunman on the far side of the street. The projecting corner of the window embrasure over here would have made such a shot as you describe quite impossible.”

  “Ifs and buts!” Lestrade exclaimed. “Who says that the desk was not moved for sweeping and then not put back?”

  “Who says it was not moved after our poor friend was shot by a gunman confronting him in this room? Who says, my dear Lestrade, that you are not thinking at this instant precisely what the killer wishes you to think? One moment, please.”

  Sherlock Holmes crossed to the further sash window, which appeared to be tightly closed. Then, using the white cotton handkerchief from his breast pocket and extending his considerable height, he stretched upwards to the topmost glazing bar and carefully dusted it. The level was well beyond the unaided reach of a chambermaid. Next he raised his arms and gently pulled the window frame down as far as its two security bolts would permit. Returning to the nearer window, he repeated the process.

  He walked back and offered two patches of debris on the handkerchief for the inspector’s examination.

  “I daresay it means nothing, my dear Lestrade, but you know better than anyone what a clever barrister might make of such a thing in court. Do borrow my magnifying lens, if you feel it will assist you. The further window, which is shut tight, now yields a deposit of street dust and soot, sufficient to require a constant passage of contaminated air to carry it into this room. It must certainly have been left open at the top for weeks, months, even years, but is now shut.”

  Lestrade stared morosely at the evidence on the white cotton as Holmes continued.

  “Now consider the nearer sash. It yields only the amount of dust that might come from internal domestic sources. However, it also has several specks of dried white paint. These have surely been deposited since the surface was last dusted.”

  “In other words.…”

  “In other words, my dear fellow, this nearer one is a window which was ‘painted shut,’ as slovenly tradesmen say, when the room was last decorated. It has been crudely and recently prised open. You may also see a little roughening of the white paint on the sash-frame itself. The fragments have parted from the rim of the wood. If you will step across to it, you will also notice that the further sash is painted but dusty. The nearer frame is cleaner but unpainted.”

  “And what is that supposed to tell us, Mr. Holmes?”

  Holmes stood at the window and stared across the street.

  “It has been clear to me since the moment I first entered this room that the shot must have been fired within these walls and not from across the street.”

  “Meaning what, again? They forced one window and shut the other?”

  “Meaning that it suited the assassin for the police to believe that the shot came from the other building, though the porter has seen nothing out of the ordinary this morning. Let us leave that for a moment. From what I can see, there is also a curious punctiliousness about the arrangement of objects in this room. An exactness such as a busy housemaid in premises like these rarely attains. I believe that these rooms have been meticulously searched and the objects just as meticulously replaced, probably as soon as its occupant was dead.”

  I glanced up from my examination of the body and asked, “You think he had a secret to hide?”

  Holmes frowned a little.

  “The immediate cause of his murder was very probably that he refused to disclose to an intruder the whereabouts of something concealed in this apartment. Something worth killing for. He defied his adversary, believing—as you have believed—that no man would risk rousing the other residents of a fully occupied mansion block with the explosion of a revolver shot. He was wrong. One second.”

  He raised a forefinger to silence Lestrade, if only for that second. Then he strode across to the round table with its three dining chairs. He drew them out, one by one, and examined the upholstered seats. By way of placating the inspector, he tossed him another scrap of evidence.

  “When you begin the search for your killer, Lestrade, look for a man not less than five feet and ten inches in height.”

  “Why?”

  “I am rather more than six feet tall. When I did all that was necessary to examine the two windows just now, I found that I had a reach sufficient in length by more than two inches. A man several inches shorter would have needed a step-ladder. There is no step-ladder here. To move a heavy day-bed across would mark polished linoleum. I see nothing else to stand upon in this room but these three chairs. But then I see no signs upon the plush of the seats that they have been used for anything, perhaps even sitting on, since the maid’s last visit. The tenant was presumably content with a day-bed and a chair at the desk. A man or woman standing on the other chairs would have left a tell-tale impress, such that there would scarcely have been time to brush the print out so immaculately.”

  During this conversation, I had continued my examination of the dead man. Holmes was right. The soft lead bullet had done considerable superficial damage to the victim’s temple before burying itself within the softer tissue of his brain. The velocity of the bullet suggested a short range. Indeed, in this case the wound to the temple, supposedly inflicted from across the street, was so accurate that, other things being equal, one might assume the man had shot himself. But other things proved far from equal. As I turned my examination from “profile” to “portrait” of the face, forensic diagnosis was overtaken by a shock of recognition.

  I had seen many dead men and women. Their mute faces, often open-eyed as this one was, seem to question the living. They seek to know, in the last moments of conscious life, why they have come to such an unquiet end as this and to understand what lies ahead. In their gaze, it seems, one last question pleads for an answer to the greatest mystery of all. So it was in this case. I had not wanted to interrupt Holmes’s duel with Lestrade. Now I must.

  “I kno
w this man,” I said quietly with a sense of shock as I spoke. The conversation behind me stopped. “I have solved one of your mysteries, Lestrade. I have seen him before. Only once, but for long enough to be utterly certain. Death has changed him a little, and I concede that our acquaintance was brief. But I swear that I am not mistaken.”

  They watched me as I straightened up from my examination of the body.

  “His name is Joshua Sellon. In uniform, he was a captain in the Provost Marshal’s Corps. In February 1879, we shared a saloon coach between Bombay and Lahore with two young Army lieutenants. According to them, Sellon was—or had been—a Provost Marshal captain. I had no idea he was in England at present, let alone why. When we met, he was knowledgeable about military law and crime. He talked to us about what they call a subalterns’ court-martial. So did the two lieutenants. In this connection, the two young men described a man known to Sellon but about whom Sellon himself would not speak. His name was Colonel Rawdon Moran. He was as malevolently wicked as any man can be.”

  Sherlock Holmes gazed at the dead captain and sighed. “I believe we have found our second man of whom I was so sure.”

  I made no reply but concluded my explanation.

  “By the same token, in his own military career, Joshua Sellon was as surely a criminal investigator as any of us in this room. I am certain from the evidence of my own ears that he knew of Rawdon Moran as a moral deviant and a corrupter of younger officers. I believe that his own path crossed with Moran’s. Furthermore I suggest that it was in connection with Colonel Moran that Captain Sellon may have come back from India. Perhaps it is in connection with Moran that he has now been killed.”

  I could not prove the crime, but I spoke in the certainty of being right. The kaleidoscope of events in the past two days made only one pattern in my mind. For the moment, I would say no more.

  Before Sir Melville’s arrival, we pacified Lestrade by allowing him to show us the rest of the apartment. “For what use that may be,” as Holmes softly and ungratefully remarked to me afterwards. What could we expect to find? The drawers of the desk were empty. Very likely they had never been used. Of course the dead man’s pockets had been turned out. Had it not been for my chance encounter with Joshua Sellon on the Bombay, Baroda and Central India Railway, Scotland Yard would still be puzzling over whose corpse they had on their hands.