A Shot at Nothing

by Roger Ormerod

  I could appreciate that at that stage she wouldn’t know exactly what she was doing, but the idea had been sound. I would probably have done that myself.

  ‘But the windows open outwards, Oliver. What did she expect?’

  He shrugged. ‘I don’t know. What she did get was a jammed lock. It was jammed when our lot got here. And she’d blasted a hole a foot across in both thicknesses of glass to the left of it.’

  ‘A shotgun would do that?’ I asked.

  ‘It did do it, in any event. But she’d thought she could put an arm through and unlock the windows. It would have been hopeless. And she told us there were chunks of glass still dropping round her feet. So she’d gained nothing.’

  ‘And Harris?’ I had to clear my throat. ‘Where was he?’

  ‘She couldn’t see him at first. That whole window was starred and impossible to see through. The other window was cracked, too, but not so bad. She couldn’t make out anything, then she peered through the hole—not getting too close—and there he was, sitting slumped against the opposite wall, just a few feet to one side of the door you’re standing by, Phil. She couldn’t see much because he wasn’t opposite the window, and part of the table got in the way. You can see that yourself. Nothing’s changed. But she could see enough to realise he was covered in blood and wasn’t moving.’

  ‘She’d shot him through the glass,’ I said, drawing my breath in sharply.

  ‘But no. If she had, that would’ve been all right.’

  ‘All right?’

  ‘It would have been accepted as a tragic accident. But it wasn’t like that. The pathologist and the forensic team had a grand time with it, and they came up with the fact that the blood she’d seen, at that time, had been from flying glass. They picked about eighty bits of glass out of him.’

  I took a deep breath. ‘He’d been too close,’ I said quietly.

  ‘Not necessarily. There was glass everywhere, bits stuck in the wall, that door, the ceiling.’

  ‘But…eighty pieces! He must have been too close.’

  ‘Wherever he was…’ Oliver sounded a little weary of my emphasis on detail, though he’d asked me to help. A woman’s eyes to consider it; a woman’s point of view. What would I have done, in those circumstances?

  He seemed to realise this, cleared his throat, and started again. ‘Wherever he was at the time of the shot, Phil, he must have staggered back against the rear wall, and slumped down until he was sitting with his back against it.’

  ‘And what did Clare do then?’ I asked, as he’d paused, and didn’t seem inclined to continue.

  ‘She dropped the gun on the terrace and ran round to the front. Then through the house to the sitting-room opposite, then she picked up the phone, dialled 999, and reported that she’d killed her husband. That was what she thought at the time, you see.’

  ‘And where were you at that time, Oliver?’

  He walked round a little, apparently to stimulate his memory. ‘I worked it out later. She must have got back inside just a minute or two before I arrived. Don’t forget—I’d come on a burglar alarm call. So I didn’t go straight in, but had a quick scout round. I spotted the shattered window, and that seemed to fit the general idea of a burglary, so I knew I had to move carefully. I walked all around the house, saw nothing else unusual, so I walked in at the front door and quietly along to where I guessed Clare might be—that sitting-room.’

  ‘And?’ I had to prompt him. He seemed locked in the memory.

  ‘She was there—sort of in shock. I had to shout at her to find out what had happened, and she started babbling about the gunroom, and Harris being dead against the wall. Five minutes later a squad car got here from the station, also in response to the burglar alarm warning, and only ten minutes after that, a CID team, in response to her phone call. It was chaos, with a lot of misunderstandings —until we sorted it out. But Harris was dead, sure enough, and from gunshot wounds, as would have been inflicted by a shotgun.’

  ‘So she did kill him by accident, when she shot the hole in the window.’

  ‘It was no accident, the way he died. Harris Steadman was found leaning back against the wall, as she’d described it. But there were shotgun pellets in that wall, in a pattern all round him…but not behind him. And his body was peppered with them.’

  I gripped his good arm firmly, in order to stop him. He was going too fast for me, or my mind was too slow.

  ‘Now hold on. Wait a minute. You said earlier, Oliver—though I thought it was a slip of the tongue—you said she thought she’d killed him, because he was covered with blood. It doesn’t hang together. Are you saying she shot at him—a second shot—through that hole in the glass? Surely that would’ve been nearly impossible.’

  He smiled. He’d slipped it in as a kind of trap, to see whether I was on the ball and my mind reasonably active.

  ‘That was not only damn near impossible, it simply wasn’t done. Shotguns have a certain spread, you know, according to the machining of the barrel, and they had the actual fired gun to work with. Those forensic people know their stuff, and they could calculate reasonably accurately the actual distance from which the second shot was fired. They simply collected her gun from outside the French windows and took it along to their lab. The result was that they were certain Harris had been killed by a blast of shotgun pellets from a distance of no more than four feet. It damn near took his head off. And only Clare could’ve done that.’

  ‘Now hold on a minute. She’d left the gun on the terrace?’

  ‘So she said.’

  ‘And you’ve been saying Harris was killed by a second shot. Clare fired one at the glass. She said that…surely she said that. And she dropped the gun outside on the terrace. Now you’re talking of the second shot being fired inside the room—inside here.’

  He shrugged, turned away, turned back. ‘When the gun was found, outside on the terrace and just beneath the hole in the glass, both barrels had been fired.’

  ‘Not both from there…’

  ‘No, love, not both from there. The forensic evidence was that the second one must have been from inside, and close to him.’

  ‘With the door locked and the French windows jammed?’ I asked with scorn.

  He seemed to ignore that. ‘She kept saying she’d killed him, with her shot through the glass.’

  ‘So she ran round to the front and through the house to the room opposite here, and grabbed for the phone?’

  ‘You’ve got it exactly.’

  ‘But you…didn’t you even come to take a look in here?’

  ‘I told you. I’d come about a burglar alarm warning. I’d had a quick scout around the back, and I’d seen the shattered window. It didn’t look good—the situation. Then I went back round the house, and through the front, and managed to get some sort of sense from Clare. So naturally I looked in here.’

  ‘But she said the door was locked.’

  ‘That’s true. She said that.’

  ‘You told me she’d smashed a table against it, trying to get in.’

  He was smiling gently, no doubt at my persistence—or more likely at the fact that he’d clearly captured my interest.

  ‘Well…’ he said. ‘It certainly wasn’t locked when I tried it, so I looked in.’

  ‘You’re sliding over it,’ I accused him. ‘And it’s important. She said he’d locked the door, and she’d smashed a table against it, trying to get in. So how could it—all of a sudden—be unlocked?’

  He shrugged. It was clearly a point on which he’d been worried, and now he was having to face it again. ‘Perhaps Clare was lying about that.’

  ‘What! When she desperately wanted to get in and stop him before he started playing games with her guns? Talk sense, Oliver, please.’

  ‘That door was unlocked when I tried it,’ he said quietly.

  ‘So tell me how that could have come about?’

  ‘The super decided that Harris must’ve unlocked it. How else?’

  �
�When did he do this unlocking, then?’

  ‘When Clare started bashing a table at it,’ he suggested.

  ‘And she didn’t realise he’d unlocked it? Nonsense. It was what she was trying for. So she’d try the door handle. That’d be natural.’

  ‘Or perhaps he unlocked it after all the throwing.’ Why did he have to say that with a little smile on his face? ‘When he was hurt. Realising that he would need help.’

  ‘Rubbish.’

  I watched him nodding to himself, staring beyond me at the wall. He was trying desperately to remain neutral. Or to give that impression.

  ‘Whose side are you on, Oliver, for heaven’s sake?’ I demanded.

  ‘Hers, yours, ours. Put it how you like. I’m just letting you see the snags when it came to her defence in court.’

  ‘You mean they claimed she’d lied about the door being locked?’

  ‘Exactly. Because there’s no other answer.’

  ‘Oliver, Oliver! If you want to help her, you’ve got to believe she told the truth.’

  He sighed. ‘You haven’t met her, Phil. I wish you could. But let’s not jump the gun on this. Shall I tell you what the Crown’s case was, and you can try picking holes in that.’

  ‘Tell me, then. But not in here, please. It’s too quiet and bare, and I can’t see the thing you’re talking about. Outside. Let’s go round and look at it from outside. Maybe I’ll get a better impression.’

  ‘All right.’ He seemed pleased to be able to get out of there himself. ‘We can simply walk out on to the terrace.’

  ‘Yes, yes. Stupid of me. Of course.’

  He turned the key and pushed open the French windows. There was a bolt top and bottom for the left-hand one. They opened with a creak. Outside was the terrace, a plain spread of paving slabs, eight feet or so to their edge and running the whole width of the house. The drop to the lawn was about three feet, and there were steps down to it, though not, with this house, opposite the windows. The grass was dry at this time.

  I walked down on to the lawn. The French windows now seemed quite a long way away, and above me.

  ‘How much does a shotgun weigh, Oliver?’ I asked him.

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. Anything from about seven to ten pounds, I’d reckon.’

  ‘Say eight pounds, then. That’s equivalent to four bags of sugar. I wouldn’t reckon to throw that weight from here into the gunroom. Once, perhaps, but not on and on. And certainly not in a raging thunderstorm.’

  ‘Phil, Phil, this must certainly be amongst the thousands of things your father told you. In times of great emotional stress, people can do the most remarkable things. You’d be surprised. In any event, she did do it.’

  My respect for her grew another few notches, but I told myself that I had to remain uncommitted.

  ‘So…under this stress, you’re saying, she would be capable of walking into that room, when the hall door was supposed to be locked, and calmly shooting her husband from a distance of a few feet?’

  ‘I’m saying she wasn’t,’ he pointed out. ‘My superiors claimed she was.’

  ‘What, exactly, did they claim?’

  He took a deep breath, and let it out slowly. ‘If we must…’

  ‘Most certainly, we must.’

  ‘Very well. They said she fired only one barrel at the window, and there was no argument about that. They said that Harris, realising he was badly hurt, managed to unlock the door before he collapsed.’

  ‘I’ve already said all I’m going to about that. It’s ridiculous.’

  ‘All right, Phil. But, however it happened, they said that she did do that, walk in, that she was still carrying her gun, and that she fired her second barrel directly at him. She then put the gun out through the hole in the glass that she herself had blasted in it, and dropped it on to the terrace, with the intention of claiming she’d fired both barrels outside and shot him by accident.’

  ‘But she didn’t claim that?’

  ‘No. I think the jury felt that she’d realised she couldn’t, because of the forensic evidence of the second shot, fired at him from close range. They made a special point of that, the Crown did.’

  They, they! Oliver had previously dissociated himself from his immediate superiors, now he was challenging the Crown’s claims. They’d been quite correct in taking him off the case.

  ‘In any event,’ I said, ‘she’d admitted having fired it. She didn’t deny that.’

  ‘No. But she wouldn’t budge from claiming she’d fired only one barrel. She said she knew she’d fired only one barrel. You can’t fire both without knowing. And that she’d dropped it outside on the terrace. The gun was found there, where she’d said, but with both barrels fired—and the empty shell cases still in the breech.’

  ‘So the case against her was that she fired one shot outside, then ran round and into the gunroom—and fired the other?’

  ‘Precisely.’

  ‘And you’re convinced she couldn’t have done that—would have been incapable of it?’

  ‘That’s it.’

  ‘Even when you’ve explained so carefully that people can do literally anything, when under emotional stress.’

  ‘I still think she didn’t kill him.’

  ‘Then don’t you see that you’re claiming somebody else did? Just imagine it. They’d have had to pick up her gun from where she’d dropped it—assuming she did drop it—go round to the front and follow her into the house, enter a door that had to be locked, whatever you might say, shoot him, put the gun out through the hole in the glass…and simply walk out of the house again.’

  ‘I’m not saying that.’

  ‘Then what?’

  ‘I don’t know. If I did, why would I ask for your help on it?’

  ‘All right. Is there any evidence for such a thing? Did Clare, for instance, hear such a shot?’

  ‘She said she did hear something like a shot. But the storm was still going at full tilt.’

  ‘And she took it for a clap of thunder?’ I asked with sarcasm.

  ‘The police aren’t exactly stupid, Phil. What about your own father? He wasn’t stupid, was he? No. My super as good as offered her that. He suggested that if there’d been another shot, while she was in the living-room, she’d certainly have heard it. As you’ve just suggested.’

  ‘Ha!’ I said. ‘If she’d been guilty she’d have claimed that, without any prompting. The fact that she had to be prompted as good as proves she wasn’t guilty. Did she say she’d heard it?’

  ‘When prompted,’ Oliver said. He was watching my reactions gravely.

  ‘She claimed it then?’

  ‘Not exactly. What she did say was what convinced my super she was just plain guilty. She overdid it, Phil. She claimed she heard two. Two, not counting her own. One close to, one further away.’

  ‘Oh!’ I groped for a way out. ‘The final one being a clap of thunder?’

  ‘The super suggested that, too. He was very careful with her. But she was quite indignant. She said she knew a thunderclap when she heard one, and a gunshot, and what she heard was two gunshots. And she stuck to that.’

  Then he turned and began to walk back round the house. ‘That’s the wrong way, Oliver,’ I called after him. ‘The French windows…’

  ‘You can shut ‘em,’ he called back. ‘I don’t want to go inside there again.’

  It was only then that I realised the dislike he felt for the house, and therefore what a strain I’d put on him. Dear Oliver, he’d carried it through very well.

  But for whom? For me—or for Clare Steadman?

  I was beginning to wonder whether Clare could be one of those annoying people who always tell the truth, either from a mental laziness that precludes the effort necessary to compound a lie, or from the false belief that the truth is always more practical and acceptable. They are not universally popular. They must also be a little stupid, or at the best naïve, as a small lie can so easily smooth the social progress through life. ‘How d’you
like my new slacks, dear?’ They’re awful.’ The truth, perhaps, but not welcome.

  I couldn’t wait to meet her.

  But if, then, Clare had told the truth about the extra shots, I had to accept that she had heard two of them. Not one, as the super had offered to her. To have admitted to hearing a single shot after her own—to have claimed it—would at least have suggested another killer in or about the house. Most people would have pounced on the offer. But no…she’d insisted on two. Yet the forensic experts could not have been mistaken about the discharge that had killed Harris Steadman. Even if they’d had to count and weigh the recovered pellets, either in or surrounding Harris (which they probably had), they would have been certain that only one discharge had ended his life, there against the wall, and helpless.

  Consequently, if Clare had fired only one barrel at the glass, and one barrel had been fired, separately, at her husband, her gun, found with both cartridges fired, exactly fitted the scenario that she had fired both.

  Yet it was beyond reasonable acceptance that another person had whipped up her gun, run round the house, and finished off Harris Steadman after having seen him sitting there against the wall and covered with blood. But the superintendent had offered Clare this possibility, suggesting she might have heard a single shot. Craftily.

  And then she had claimed she’d heard two shots. That was where the scenario splintered into fragments, like the French window.

  It was because of this, and the fact that the French windows had to be locked again from inside, that I chose to walk back through the house. I had to check the possibility of an outsider having got in. And out again.

  I locked the room door behind me and stood in the cross corridor. It ran in both directions. The door to the sitting-room was as Oliver had said, not quite opposite. I walked along to it. This door was also locked, but the key was on the outside. I opened it and looked inside. We had already seen this room, in passing, but I hadn’t paid particular attention to it. Now I did, and there was the settee where Clare had collapsed, there the small round table with the phone on it. I went across and picked it up. The line was dead, the phone disconnected.

  I then went out again and investigated the cross corridors, and the alternative routes to the front. It would, I decided, have been just possible for an outsider to have followed Clare inside, shot Harris Steadman with Clare’s gun, and retreated without being observed. But what a risk! What a reliance on chance!