The Second Shot (32 page)

‘Yes,’ said Sheringham. ‘I agree.’

We sat for a few moments in silence. In the woods below us where Scott-Davies had met his well deserved death, an owl was hooting mournfully. A glimmer in the far distance showed where the moonlight struck on the sea.

‘Poor Elsa!’ Armorel whispered.

epilogue

I have finished my manuscript at last.

It is now nearly three years since I began to write it, working so feverishly on it that hot afternoon in my bedroom at Minton Deeps. The reasons that have caused me to bring it to an end are very different from that which prompted its inauguration. I can say now that this latter, too, was not by any means the one with which I so carefully prefaced my story.

Briefly, I began the writing of this narrative for the sole benefit of the police.

When I realized, three years ago, that the police suspicion in connection with the death of Eric Scott-Davies was becoming more and more dangerously crystallized on myself, I tried not to give way to panic or lose my head; I knew that something must be done, and I set about doing it. It was obvious that Superintendent Hancock’s feeling about me was due to two suppositions, both erroneous: firstly, that I had had the best opportunity of shooting Scott-Davies as I was the only person known to have been down by the stream when the second shot was fired, and secondly, that I had the only motive. With the first of these I could deal only by reiterating the plain truth, that it could not possibly have been the second shot which had killed him; for the second I had to adopt more subtle methods.

When the police inquiry first began I was anxious that nothing reflecting upon anyone else should reach their ears. I soon realized that this attitude was unnecessarily quixotic. It could not after all be unfair to the others that the police should realize the plain fact that so far from my being the only one with a motive, every single person in our little party (except, so far as I knew then, Elsa Verity) had a motive, and in all cases a far stronger one than mine. If it had been a matter of one other person only, my decision might have been different. But if ever there was safety in numbers, it was in this case. With everyone shown as having an interest in Eric’s death, how could one person be singled out more than another? Where one alone was not safe, all together were. The trail would become confused, complicated, impossible to decipher, incapable of proof.

The police, then, I decided, must be informed of the exact circumstances leading up to Scott-Davies’ death, with all the hidden intrigue and byplay that would reveal these different motives. But how?

It was useless for me to tell them verbally. Any statement I might make would be sniffed at immediately as tainted, a mere subterfuge to remove suspicion from myself; it could carry no real conviction. The only way was to introduce the knowledge to them in such a way as to lead them to believe that they were discovering it for themselves, almost against the will of the narrator. But once more, how?

And so I conceived the idea of writing it all up in detail in the form of fiction, reconstructing the conversations, setting down every incident as it actually happened. I knew that every action of mine would be watched. If I made a great show of concealing the manuscript, it would certainly be removed and read. It amused me to write down plainly in my story that I was at some pains, when I hid the box containing it among the roots of that gorse bush, to ascertain whether I had been followed or not. I did make sure of exactly that thing, and I had been followed. It was simple to arrange the lid of the box in such a way that I should know instantly whether it had been opened. It had been, of course.

That, then, was the urgent reason which brought perhaps the first hundred pages of this story into being; and when the necessity was past, and Armorel and I had left Minton Deeps for our delayed honeymoon, I put the thing aside, as I thought, for good. But it is a characteristic of mine never to leave any task to which I have put my hand half-finished. Coming across the manuscript some months afterwards, I added a few chapters just for my own amusement and as a form of mental exercise; and so it has gone on. I am still, however, in doubt whether to send it to a publisher or not, although I have altered all the names so that (now Eric Scott-Davies and his unexpected death have been almost forgotten) the persons and incidents would hardly be recognized.

If I do, however, this epilogue will not go with it. That is written for my own amusement solely. I shall destroy it as soon as it is finished, for such things are dangerous; but just the mere act of setting down on paper what I intend is strangely exciting. If things had not turned out as they did…

These three years have been very happy ones. Working together at and for Stukeleigh and its tenantry, Armorel and I have developed into a deep affection that first impulse, based no doubt upon a combination of fear and gratitude, which brought us together. I cannot in honesty say that all my schemes for Armorel’s regeneration have worked out exactly as I planned them. Indeed, some of those who knew us both before and since our marriage affirm that I have altered more than she. That may be, for certainly Armorel seems to have altered very little, while I – well, it may sound paradoxical but it is perfectly true that the older I get the younger I feel. I can only hope that with Armorel’s stimulating companionship the process will continue indefinitely.

It seems strange to remember now that once I stood on the very threshold of the gallows.

Is it only thanks to Sheringham that I never stood actually upon them? One cannot say. Personally, I do not think now that on the meagre case the police had against me, things would ever have come to the point of arrest; nor, if they had, is it conceivable that on such very indefinite evidence I could ever have been convicted. Still, I am thankful that it never came to the test.

Stranger still is it to reflect that, but for that ill-timed shot of John Hillyard’s, no suspicion would ever have fallen on me at all. No doubt it is just some such unfortunate coincidence which wrecks the most carefully thought-out crimes. Certainly when I laid my plans for killing Scott-Davies I omitted to take any such thing into account; the possibility never even occurred to me.

I see now that it was officious of me to shoot Eric. But in those days I must have been officious. I really did fancy that I had some sort of an appointment to set the world to rights. Secure in the conviction of my own infallibility, it did not merely distress me when people refused to share my opinions; I felt it a duty incumbent on my own rectitude to correct their mistaken notions. I can realize now that this was priggishness, but priggishness may often involve a highly conscientious sense of duty; that it did in my case I set forth not only in extenuation but as an interesting phenomenon. I knew that Eric Scott-Davies had in his short life brought nothing but distress upon those with whom he came in contact; it did not need John to tell me that his life was not only of no manner of use to the community but a positive menace to it; I knew that his continued existence meant to a great number of people far more than distress, it meant disaster. Obviously for the greater good of the greater number, Eric should be eliminated. And as certainly no one else would undertake the task, I conceived it nothing less than my own duty to do so.

I did not shoot Eric on Armorel’s behalf, on Elsa Verity’s behalf, on Ethel’s behalf, on Paul de Ravel’s behalf, or on anyone’s behalf; certainly not on my own; I shot him out of a sincere, if as I say officious, conviction that as the only one with the moral courage to recognize that nothing short of a bullet would meet Eric’s case, I should be betraying my own superior responsibility by not following up this recognition with action. A curious form of conceit indeed, as I see it now; but even now I cannot think that my conclusion was wrong, by whatever strange method I arrived at it. How many people have not slept more peacefully since Eric Scott-Davies died?

I remember writing at the beginning of this book that I intended to set down everything that had happened with one sole exception, the revelation of which might bring pain to another. I think I have kept my promise. That it was my finger which pulled the fatal trigger will hardly come as a surprise, for I have scarcely troubled to disguise that fact; indeed, I actually prefaced my story with the plain statement that it was to be told from the ‘criminal’s’ point of view. Only over the method I employed have I thrown a cloak, for to have shown that would have been to show also Armorel as an accessory after the fact, a revelation which would naturally have caused her distress. It satisfies my orderly mind to write that method down here so that my book shall at any rate have been tidily rounded off, even if it must go out into the world shorn of this neat appendage.

The fact then on which I based my whole plan was the notoriously defective power of observation of the normal person.

The average man sees only what he expects to see. If you tell him that he is looking at a rabbit, it is a rabbit that he sees; and the piece of dead bracken at which you are pointing becomes invested by his imagination with ears and a shred of white tail. So, I made no doubt, if half a dozen pairs of eyes expected to see a live Eric it would be a live Eric that they would see, for all that they were looking at a dead one.

And so it turned out. They saw Eric (and were ready in all good faith to swear to the fact afterwards), laughing, gesticulating, and for all I know moving his very ears; one or two even heard him speak, and were prepared to testify to his actual words, when all the time he had been dead for minutes – had died, indeed, under those completely unsuspecting eyes of theirs. For I shot Eric in our little scene together with a ball cartridge which I substituted before all those onlookers for the blank one with which John had loaded the rifle.

Of course I did what I could to help the deception.

During the morning I had made what preparations I could. Over a small log I set a forked bough to act as a fulcrum, so that, with the body on the forked end, I could depress the other, hidden from the spectators by the undergrowth, with my foot and thus give the body the appearance of humping itself up in the middle. Then I had left a length of fishing line handy, with a loop to pass over one of Eric’s shoes and with that I was able, as I stood above him, to give him the effect of waving his foot in the air; having of course made sure that the line would be invisible at the distance required. And once or twice, as I stooped over him, I uttered an uncouth braying sound, which was at once assumed to have proceeded from him. The very part I was playing enabled me to keep everyone at a safe distance from the body.

Looking back on it now I am appalled by the risks I was content to run. I considered at the time that I had guarded against nearly all contingencies; but that the result was not as it turned out to be I am modest enough now to attribute, in all thankfulness, to good luck more than to forethought.

It was as I lay awake the previous night that I realized the unique opportunity which the little play would afford to anyone who was seriously considering the elimination of Scott-Davies. The means would be simple, as I had told John all great crimes were. It was only the complication of other people’s motives, a state of affairs of which I deliberately availed myself but which had no connection with the mechanism at all, that gave it afterwards the appearance of being involved and intricate. Sheringham was wrong there, and wrong too when he argued the extreme improbability of a case of murder presenting almost equal reasons for suspicion against each of so many different persons. He put the cart before the horse. It was precisely because that would be the case, that murder was committed that afternoon at all. For though I took care to leave the appearance of accident, and hoped sincerely that accident would be accepted, I could not count that murder would never be suspected; what I did count on was that murder could never be proved, or even that any one person could be suspected more than another.

Not that I had actually determined so early to put my plan into operation at all. I merely lay awake, excited by it, considering its details, and thinking what an excellent thing it would be if Eric could thus be quietly eliminated without fuss or bother. I had not made up my mind even the next morning, when I refused Armorel’s invitation to accompany her to Bluebell Wood and went down alone to make my preparations. It was really, I think, in a spirit of make-believe that I did so. I can truly say that, at that time, I never seriously expected to use them. I knew myself and I knew that, toy as I might with the idea of taking a fellow-creature’s life, even delude myself that I was actually intending to do so, when it came to the point of action to translate the dream into reality was not in my character. Nor would Armorel’s revelations in Bluebell Wood have influenced me to that extent. Only when I learned that the engagement between Elsa and Eric, of which I had imagined all danger to be over, was an existing fact, did I realize that I had underestimated myself. I knew then that Eric must die.

I think in my own way I went quietly berserk. I remember very little of the lunch which followed. I recollect a small pulse beating in my forehead, and saying to myself over and over again: ‘I must do it, I must do it.’ I am sure that I no longer considered the possible consequences. My behaviour, actions, and words were entirely mechanical. It was not until Eric lay dead in front of me, with the smoke from the shot that had killed him curling gently out of my rifle barrel, that this curious numb trance fell away from me and my mind became alert once more. I realized fully then what I had done and, with not the slightest feeling either of compunction or panic, at once set about devoting every faculty to safeguarding myself.

That Eric himself had taken the second rifle that morning, which became subsequently a point of considerable importance, was pure chance. My plan involved the use of both rifles, and I expected to have to smuggle the second one down in the morning. When I went for it, however, it was gone. I came across it, actually, in the very glade where our scene was to be enacted, leaning against a tree. Eric must have left it there as he showed Elsa the topography of the place. What I did was to load it with a blank cartridge which I had myself prepared for the purpose, conceal it in the undergrowth several yards below the path up the hill, tie another piece of fishing line round the trigger, and hide the other end of the line beside the path in the place where I subsequently stopped, in the presence of Mrs Fitzwilliam, on the pretext of doing up my shoelace.