The Ha-Ha Case
Page 29
“So Laxford hits on a fresh plan, just as silly as the others he has tried already. He gets Hay down and dictates an undated assignment which Hay witnesses. The calculation probably was that, when Johnnie came of age, he could easily enough be induced to write the proper date on the paper—I mean the coming of age date. It could be represented as a mere formality; and Hay would be prepared to swear anything that was wanted about when the thing was signed.
“But that was only one of Hay’s uses, as you know. To tighten his grip on the boy, Laxford had no scruples in using his wife; and it seems clear enough that the little game in the garden was staged to make Johnnie sign on the dotted line when he was asked to do so, even if the Brandons had begun to assert themselves.
“They came on the scene earlier than Laxford had expected. James Brandon turned up unexpectedly at Edgehill and nearly upset the apple-cart. However, they managed to pull off their little affair under his nose, after all; but unfortunately for everybody, James Brandon spotted the whole business.
“Now friend James’s position was this. If the entail on the Burling Thorn estate was not barred, he got nothing. If the entail was barred by arrangement, he might get some small share in the plunder. But if Johnnie died before he was able to make a will or execute any legal instrument—why, James came into his own as next heir and could look forward to rolling in money as soon as his father died, an event which wouldn’t keep him waiting long by the look of things. Friend James thinks more of money than most people, I should imagine; and that was an awkward set of alternatives to put before a man of his sort. You know what choice he finally made. It was the most natural one, considering his type of mind. Johnnie had had his chance, one must suppose; now it was friend James’s turn. And what made it safer was this ‘borough English’ affair. It’s so unusual, you see. Very few people would think of James as the next heir. If he’d shot his elder brother, people might have pricked up their ears. But a younger brother! Nothing in that to rouse the ordinary man’s suspicions.”
“Still, fratricide’s a bit over the score,” Wendover commented. “One would expect him to shrink from going that length.”
“Why?” Sir Clinton retorted. “I didn’t gather that he was fond of Johnnie to any marked extent. He showed no signs of it in any dealings I had with him. All that interested him was the money side, so far as I could see. Give him credit for not adding hypocrisy to his other misdeed, Squire. It’s always something in his favour.
“To go on. He must have had the whole thing cut and dried before the morning of the shooting-party. He’d been over the ground the day before and had seen the lie of the land. He pitched on the very place to suit his purposes. And that makes me think that he must have used that cut-cartridge game before, in ordinary shooting. His gun was a cylinder, and most likely he’d tried various dodges to reduce its scattering effect for sporting purposes. I don’t think this can have been a mere first experiment in the method.
“Everything goes as he planned. He gets the beat he wants for his purpose. He shoots once or twice himself, to secure the empty cartridge case he needed. Then he conceals himself in the undergrowth at the bend in the Carron, waits till his brother comes along the ha-ha, and shoots him with the cut cartridge. The idea is, of course, to suggest a stumble and a gun-accident.
“Then comes the nerve-racking bit. He has to get hold of two things immediately: his brother’s gun and the top part of the cartridge, if it hasn’t fallen into the stream. He rushes round to the glade and naturally he has to play the part of a grief-stricken brother. I don’t think anyone would envy his feelings as he knelt there; for he must have been in terror lest anyone picked up Johnnie’s gun and found two live cartridges in the barrels. And yet he couldn’t risk opening the breech himself amongst the crowd. Just imagine his state of mind when Dunne picked up the very thing he wanted to hide at any cost—the bit of the cartridge-case. He must have felt that the game was up, at that moment; for, of course, he’d feel sure that a single slip might give him away. And then, think of the wave of relief when Dunne pocketed that damning bit of evidence before anyone else paid any attention to it.”
“Nasty minute or two for him, certainly,” Wendover agreed unsympathetically. “And when he found that Dunne was a lunatic who wouldn’t begin to think about the real use of the thing, he must have taken it as a direct intervention of Providence.”
“Once he was out of that nasty corner,” Sir Clinton went on, “the rest was child’s play. He had only to pick up his brother’s gun, lag a bit behind the others on the way to the house, take the live round out of Johnnie’s gun and pocket it, replacing it by one of his own spent cartridges. And then he was clear. Nobody was likely to think of the trick of the cartridge-cutting. All he had to do was to give his evidence with a straight face and pretend that the whole affair was just an accident due to Johnnie’s notoriously careless handling of firearms.”
“He was on safe ground there,” Wendover declared. “I could have gone into the box myself and sworn that the boy was a public danger with his gun.”
“There’s not much to amuse one in murder,” Sir Clinton said with a slight change of tone, “but I can’t help smiling at the way friend James’s apple-cart was upset owing to Hinton picking up an entirely wrong trail. It’s really funny.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“Well, everything was going nicely for friend James, until the inspector failed to find any blood at the foot of the ha-ha. That started him in full cry after Laxford, on the ground that Laxford must have lied about the body being at the foot of the ha-ha. And so, in comes the word “MURDER” for the first time, and then a very rigorous investigation of the whole affair. And, all the time, Laxford’s evidence was perfectly correct. It was just that affair of the bone blocking the vein that gave rise to all the trouble. But for that, friend James would have been in a happier position to-night.”
He rose to his feet as he concluded his survey.
“Like the Snark, Squire, I own that I’m ‘spent with the toils of the day.’ I’m going to bed.”
Wendover rose reluctantly from his chair.
“It’s a bad business for the Brandons,” he said regretfully. “One brother murdered and another one likely to be hanged.”
“Oh, let’s look on the bright side,” Sir Clinton suggested, stifling a yawn. “Burling Thorn will fall into the hands of the only one of them who had the grit to work with a will for his living. That’s always something in the way in a silver lining.”
“The girl’s got grit, too,” Wendover mused. “It may give the family a start on a better road.”
“A bit too late in the evening to start discussing eugenics, Squire. Good night.”
THE END
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By J. J. Connington
Sir Clinton Driffield Mysteries
Murder in the Maze (1927)
Tragedy at Ravensthorpe (1927)
The Case with Nine Solutions (1928)
Mystery at Lynden Sands (1928)
Nemesis at Raynham Parva (1929)
(a.k.a. Grim Vengenace)
The Boathouse Riddle (1931)
The Sweepstake Murders (1931)
The Castleford Conundrum (1932)
The Ha-Ha Case (1934)
(a.k.a. The Brandon Case)
In Whose Dim Shadow (1935)
(a.k.a. The Tau Cross Mystery)
A Minor Operation (1937)
Murder Will Speak (1938)
Truth Comes Limping (1938)
The Twenty-One Clues (1941)
No Past is Dead (1942)
Jack-in-the-Box (1944)
Common Sense Is All You Need (1947)
Supt Ross Mysteries
<
br /> The Eye in the Museum (1929)
The Two Tickets Puzzle (1930)
Novels
Death at Swaythling Court (1926)
The Dangerfield Talisman (1926)
Tom Tiddler’s Island (1933)
(a.k.a. Gold Brick Island)
The Counsellor (1939)
The Four Defences (1940)
J. J. Connington (1880–1947)
Alfred Walter Stewart, who wrote under the pen name J. J. Connington, was born in Glasgow, the youngest of three sons of Reverend Dr Stewart. He graduated from Glasgow University and pursued an academic career as a chemistry professor, working for the Admiralty during the First World War. Known for his ingenious and carefully worked-out puzzles and in-depth character development, he was admired by a host of his better-known contemporaries, including Dorothy L. Sayers and John Dickson Carr, who both paid tribute to his influence on their work. He married Jessie Lily Courts in 1916 and they had one daughter.
An Orion ebook
Copyright © The Professor A. W. Stewart Deceased Trust 1934, 2014
Introduction copyright © Curtis Evans 2013
The right of J. J. Connington to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
This ebook first published in Great Britain in 2014
by Orion
The Orion Publishing Group Ltd
Orion House
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An Hachette UK company
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 4719 0608 4
All characters and events in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real people, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
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