Death on a Pale Horse (18 page)

Immediately before us, the knee-hole desk, with the fourth padded dining chair drawn up to it, stood clear of the walls. It was sideways to the nearer window. Petty crime abounds in such districts as this, and I had noticed that each sash window was equipped with an inset bolt. The frame could be lowered only two or three inches at the top unless this bolt was unfastened with something like a screwdriver. Two net curtains gave what privacy there was at present. They stirred a little in the draught as the door was closed behind us.

The murdered man still sat at his desk, or rather he lay forward upon it, as if he had decided to rest his head quietly upon his crooked arm and take a nap. He was looking away from us. I could see little more than the back of his head and the clothes that he wore. He was dressed in a russet-brown tweed Norfolk jacket with a belt at the waist and a pair of gaiters. It was the garb of a country gentleman who has arrived in London unprepared and has no clothes suitable for town. He patiently awaited the attention of the Scotland Yard Criminal Commissioner, Sir Melville Macnaghten.

Lestrade became helpful again.

“Shot first thing this morning by the look of it. Seven o'clock or so. Dr. Littlejohn knows a thing or two about guns. He did the case of the Fulham Laundry shooting last year. He reckons that this one hadn't long been dead when found. The wound to the head had hardly stopped bleeding. Have a look at him, doctor, if you'd care to.”

The inspector stepped back, as if expecting me to confirm the police surgeon's diagnosis. I touched the dead man. The muscles of the jaw had begun to stiffen and the body to cool, confirming Littlejohn's finding of the time of death at about half-past seven that morning.

“That's right, doctor,” said Lestrade encouragingly, “I tried the jaw. Just beginning to turn. We get to know these little tricks. You can't always tell, of course. Last year there was a woman down in Hoxton with instantaneous rigor mortis after an alcoholic seizure. She was found standing up, stone-cold dead, leaning against a door with her arms folded. In this case it's just his identity that's playing us up.”

As I stooped over the dead man, shutting out the inspector's running commentary from my mind, Lestrade continued for Holmes's benefit.

“I can tell you how it was done, sir. We have the murderer's method taped. No shot was heard by anyone. Curious, seeing that the rooms on either side had been occupied from the evening before until after the body was found. No weapon lying around, of course. More to the point, no cartridge case. There was no smell of gunpowder. No sign of burning nor amberite on the skin. The spread of the wound suggests it was made at a range greater than the width of this room.”

“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.