The Ha-Ha Case Page 16

  The inspector made one of those affirmative noises which committed him to nothing definite. It seemed to satisfy Dr. Barreman, for he led the way to Mr. Dunne’s sitting-room. As they entered Mr. Dunne was standing at the window with his back to them, apparently gazing up at the sky; but at the sound of their steps he swung round, and the inspector saw that he held in his hand a large white stone. He laid it down on a table as he advanced to meet his visitors.

  “This is Inspector Hinton,” the doctor explained. “He would like to hear anything you can tell him about the accident this morning, Mr. Dunne.”

  Mr. Dunne acknowledged the inspector’s greeting politely. He seemed in no way perturbed by this unexpected intrusion.

  “I shall be delighted to help you if I can,” he said frankly. “Only, I’m afraid I can’t tell you much that will be of service. The fact is . . .” His eye wandered to the doctor for a moment. “The fact is, my memory is rather treacherous at times.”

  “Quite so,” the inspector said sympathetically.

  “I really remember nothing between the time I went to bed last night and the moment when I came upon some gentlemen in a little glade in a wood, this morning,” Mr. Dunne pursued, as if such a phenomenon was one of the commonest. “From that moment onwards, I think I can tell you what happened, clearly enough.”

  “If you’d be so good,” Hinton said, filling in the pause.

  “I remember stepping out from behind some bushes,” Mr. Dunne pursued, knitting his brows slightly as though in an effort to forget nothing. “In front of me two gentlemen were standing. A third was kneeling on the ground. And in the centre of the group was the body of a young man, face downward, with his feet towards me. One of the men standing up had a gun under his arm; the other was empty-handed. I recognised none of them, I may say. They were total strangers to me. The empty-handed man was grey-haired; the one standing near him, with a gun under his arm, was a big red-faced fellow; the third, the kneeling one, was a good deal younger than the other two. He had a gun beside him, as if he’d laid it down when he knelt. There was another gun on the grass . . . let me see . . .” He passed his hand over his brow as if to concentrate his thoughts. “Yes . . . I think I can recall it. It was a little farther away from me than the young man’s body.”

  The inspector suddenly pricked up his ears.

  “Can you remember it distinctly?” he asked in a carefully neutral tone. “I mean, which way the muzzle pointed, and so forth.”

  Mr. Dunne reflected for some moments as though striving to clarify his mental picture.

  “My impression is that it lay rather beyond the body, from my own position I mean, past the head. And I think . . . I can’t be absolutely sure . . . but I think the muzzle pointed away from me. Yes, I think so.”

  “And then?” prompted Hinton.

  “I think I stepped forward and asked what it all meant. The red-faced man—a rather vulgar fellow, he appeared to me—explained that there had been a shooting accident. Then I suddenly realised that I was carrying a gun myself, though how I came by it I can’t imagine. Quite mechanically, without thinking what I was doing, I opened the breech and found two spent cartridges in the barrels. Just then the young man who was kneeling beside the body seemed to find something which he wrapped in his handkerchief and laid back again on the grass. I have no idea what it was. Then they all began talking about the accident and about removing the body. The grey-haired man finally went off for assistance. The red-faced man went off into the wood, saying he was sick. There was nothing I could do, and to fill in the time I began to search about on the grass. I suppose it was seeing the young man find something that suggested that to me. I got down the ha-ha on to the patch of grass between it and the river. And . . .” Mr. Dunne’s voice changed its note. “I suddenly discovered something I’ve been hunting for, the very thing I needed. Wonderful piece of luck, wasn’t it?”

  “Wonderful!” echoes Hinton. “What was it, sir?”

  Mr. Dunne turned to the table and lifted from it the white stone which had been in his hand when the inspector came in.

  “This is the White Stone of Coinneach Odhar Fiosaiche,” he said solemnly.

  “Oh, it is, is it?” said the inspector blankly, for the words conveyed nothing to him.

  Inwardly he was cursing bitterly. Obviously this subject was the ‘hobby’ about which the doctor had warned him. He had let himself in for it now, he reflected ruefully. It might be risky to try to switch Mr. Dunne back to the main question until he chose to return to it voluntarily. Better let him get his wind out on his ‘hobby,’ and then bring him round to business tactfully.

  “Yes,” continued Mr. Dunne, handling the treasure reverently. “This is, I am convinced, the actual stone which belonged to Coinneach Odhar Fiosaiche—Dun Kenneth the Seer of Brahan. When he was put to death, after prophesying the Doom of the Seaforths, he threw his white stone into Loch Ussie and predicted that whoever found it would inherit his gift of foretelling the future. One day it happened that I was walking on the shore of the lake, when this white stone caught my eye. The curious hole through it attracted my attention. And then it flashed on me that this was Coinneach Odhar’s talisman. Besides, the name made it almost certain. His name was Coinneach Odhar—Dun Kenneth is the English of it. And my own name is Kenneth Dunne. That would be a very strange coincidence if it were mere chance.”

  The inspector’s gift of counterfeiting emotions served him well at this stage.

  “And you can see the future when you look through it?” he asked in a respectful tone.

  Mr. Dunne’s eyes clouded slightly at the question.

  “No,” he admitted grudgingly. “I haven’t developed the gift—as yet. I get glimpses, sometimes, but they’re nothing more. There’s something missing, evidently, something to clarify the vision. Lying in that lake so long, the hole in the stone got bigger, most likely. If I could bring it back to the proper size, I might see the picture sharper.”

  “Yes, yes,” agreed Hinton, who was on pins and needles to get back to the main question.

  “You think so?” Mr. Dunne was evidently pleased to hear this endorsement of his scheme. “I think there’s certainly something in the idea. That’s why I’ve been on the hunt for something to fit the hole and narrow it down a trifle. I picked up this bit of pasteboard in the wood this morning. You see it fits neatly in. It seems to me to make some improvement, though the pictures are still very vague, too vague to show anything definite, so far.”

  He held the white stone out for inspection so that Hinton could see how he had fitted the little pasteboard ring to form a lining to the central aperture.

  “That’s very interesting, sir,” said the inspector cautiously.

  He refrained from taking the stone into his own hand, lest that should prolong this, to him, worthless discourse. But Mr. Dunne was by no means discouraged. While the inspector writhed at the waste of time Mr. Dunne delivered a short lecture on the chief prophecies of the Brahan Seer, carefully distinguishing between those which might be attributed to natural shrewdness and those which demanded something less normal in the maker of them.

  “Wonderful!” Hinton declared at last, as though he could stand no more marvels that day.

  Mr. Dunne, having ridden a long course on his hobby, seemed to recover his natural good manners.

  “I’m afraid I have taken up your time unduly,” he said in an apologetic tone. “Is there anything further you’d like to know?”

  It was evident that he meant to clear up any doubts in Hinton’s mind about the Seer of Brahan, but the inspector chose to interpret the question otherwise.

  “Just one or two points I’d like cleared up,” he said gratefully. “You’d got to where one of the party went off for assistance. What happened after that?”

  Mr. Dunne had the air of a man interrupted in affairs of importance by the intrusion of a child; but his courtesy stood the strain.

  “Oh, after that?” he answered. “I remember. The g
rey-haired man came back with a cart and some men; and the young man’s body was taken away to the house. Then the grey-haired man came up to me and claimed the gun I was carrying. It was his, apparently, so I handed it over to him. The red-faced fellow was rather offensive because I couldn’t recall how I came to have it in my hand. I gave it up to the grey-haired man.”

  “And then?” Hinton prompted.

  “Let me think,” Mr. Dunne replied, with a gesture which begged for time to assemble his recollections. “Oh, yes. The youngest of the three handed his own gun to a labourer who had come on the scene, and picked up the dead man’s gun himself. I remember that quite well because he spoke of it as his brother’s gun, and that was how I learned the relationship between them. The two older fellows set off towards the house, and I followed them at a little distance. The young man came behind. The labouring man joined me after a moment or two, to act as guide, apparently. And shortly after we reached the house two attendants appeared and I accompanied them back here,” Mr. Dunn concluded, as though it were the most natural thing in the world.

  “I see,” said the inspector with a note of finality in his tone, for he was afraid that Coinneach Odhar Fiosaiche might crop up again if he remained there for a moment more. “And now, Mr. Dunne, I must thank you for your patience. Most interesting,” he added, as a dishonest tribute to the lecture on the Brahan Seer.

  As he walked down the Fairlawns avenue he thought over the strange phenomenon presented by Mr. Dunne’s behaviour. Here was a man whose memory had been blotted out completely over a fairly extended period; and yet, when he regained his normal faculties again he had shown a power of exact recollection rather better than that possessed by the average person.

  “If this business were a case for us,” Hinton reflected, “that loony would make a better witness than a good many—and yet we couldn’t put him into the box, no matter how much we needed him.”

  From that his mind turned to other peculiarities of Mr. Dunne’s mental make-up. The evident reluctance of Dr. Barreman to discuss his patient came back to him. And suddenly the inspector pulled up short, arrested by a thought which flashed into his mind. When he moved on again, it was to take the road to Dr. Brinkworth’s house. He was fortunate enough to find the doctor at home and disengaged at the moment.

  “There’s a thing I ought to have asked you about when I saw you this morning,” he said disingenuously, after apologising for his intrusion. “It’s come up in connection with a case, and I’d like an expert opinion. This is it. Suppose there was a theft in a house one night. All the doors and windows found secure in the morning. An inside job, on the face of it. And suppose one of the family is a sleep-walker. Would you say it was possible that that sleep-walker had got up—asleep—in the middle of the night and stolen the article, concealed it, and then gone back to bed without the faintest recollection of the whole affair?”

  Dr. Brinkworth reflected for some moments before replying.

  “Er . . . it’s possible, I suppose,” he admitted grudgingly, “but I never came across any case like it.”

  “It’s a puzzling case,” the inspector went on with a well-feigned semblance of perplexity. “I hardly know what to make of it. Somebody in the house must have done it, and yet . . . well, none of ’em shows the slightest symptom of knowing anything about it. I was just wondering. These loss-of-memory cases one hears about in the newspapers might give one a hint, I thought, even if it wasn’t sleep-walking. Is there any other trouble that would fit? I’m putting it to you as a mere John Doe and Richard Roe case, you understand? I’m not fishing for information about any somnambulist you may have among your patients. I hope that’s quite clear?”

  “As a matter of fact, I haven’t anything of the sort,” the doctor answered, “so . . . er . . . you’re quite free to ask whatever you choose.”

  “Well, then, isn’t there some disease or other that works like sleep-walking—where a man does things and remembers nothing about them afterwards? Automatic something-or-other, isn’t it?”

  Dr. Brinkworth rose to the bait.

  “Er . . . perhaps you’re thinking of post-epileptic automatism,” he suggested. “That might fit your case.”

  The inspector shook his head doubtfully.

  “Don’t epileptics fall down in fits, froth at the mouth, bite their tongues, and so forth?” he demanded. “None of the people I’m dealing with do that.”

  “Not necessarily,” Dr. Brinkworth asserted, and as he came to definite technicalities his usual nervous manner faded out. “These fits you speak of are a symptom of one variety of epilepsy, a type that’s called le grand mal. But there’s another type, le petit mal, where all the visible symptoms may be pallor, a slight twitching of the muscles, a movement of the eyes. The whole thing’s hardly noticeable in some cases. In both the grand mal and the petit mal there’s a lapse of consciousness. During that lapse of consciousness, the patient may do things and have no recollection whatever of having done them, once he wakes up again. That’s the sort of thing you’re looking for, isn’t it? That’s what they call post-epileptic automatism.”

  The door-bell rang at this moment, and Dr. Brinkworth fell back into his usual semi-flurried condition.

  “I’m sorry,” he apologised. “That’s a patient come by appointment. I’m afraid I’ll have to go. But see, here’s a book that will give you something more about the thing.”

  He turned to his shelves and took down a volume on forensic medicine.

  “You’ll get what you want here,” he said, fluttering the pages until he found the passage he wanted. “Just sit down and read it for yourself. You’ll be able to find your way out when you’ve finished, won’t you? Er . . . I’m sorry . . . but . . .”

  And with that Dr. Brinkworth left the inspector to his own devices.

  Hinton opened the book at the place indicated and read over the paragraph, muttering the crucial passages aloud to reinforce his memory.

  “. . . ‘Automatism is, as a rule, more pronounced after an attack of petit mal than after a typical fit’. . . Ah! . . . ‘but this is not always so.’ . . . Mmm! . . . ‘The automatic action is either a habitual action of the patient in his normal life, or a caricature of that action.’ . . . This looks like something! . . . ‘In illustration, take the case of a man who walks into a shop, picks up something, and walks out again, and is then arrested for thieving’ . . . Well, well! . . . ‘or a person accustomed to firearms may shoot somebody’ . . . The devil he may! . . .”

  The inspector paused for a moment as this last ejaculation was drawn from him by the textbook’s meaning. Then he went on eagerly.

  “. . . ‘Epileptic equivalents (sometimes termed masked epilepsy) are mental disorders which exist in some epileptics without the occurrence of fits.’ . . . Oh, indeed! . . . ‘For instance, instead of falling into a fit, the patient may do some act such as a brutal murder’ . . . Whew! . . . ‘without motive and without the slightest recollection of having committed the act! . . .”

  “This looks like getting warm!” Hinton muttered to himself.

  He hurried on to the final phrases of the section.

  “. . . ‘These cases are characterised by the fact that the victim is usually unknown to the assailant, by a total absence of motive, and from the fact that no attempt is made to escape or to conceal the crime.’ . . . Well! That’s torn it!” exclaimed the inspector, who was at times apt to recur to old-fashioned slang.

  He copied out the relevant sentences in his note-book, took a note of the book’s title and author and then, more thoughtful than usual in his demeanour, he let himself out of the house.

  Now he thought he understood Dr. Barreman’s behaviour not so long ago. ‘Lapses of memory?’ Oh, yes. We admit them because we can’t deny ’em, after Dunne had given himself away in the Plantation. But post-epileptic automatism? Oh, no. We never mention it. And why? ’Cause it might be awkward for us if an epileptic got loose from our establishment and shot a man. Damned awkward, in f
act. So we keep our thumb on Mr. Dunne’s particular trouble, and very firmly too. Professional secrecy, of course. Quite all right. And so much for Dr. Barreman. No use expecting any further help from that quarter.

  Viewed in the light of the textbook of forensic medicine, the affair in the Plantation seemed plain enough now. A fit of post-epileptic automatism on Dunne’s part; his discovery of Laxford’s gun beside the pool; the sportsman’s habituation to the use of firearms; the tendency to repeat some normal action in distorted form; a motiveless attack on young Brandon from behind the screen of the bushes: the whole thing fitted together like a jig-saw puzzle. In the first flush of his discovery, Inspector Hinton believed that he had stumbled upon the truth of the business.

  Then came calmer reflection, with less satisfactory results. That case depended on Laxford having reloaded his gun before he left it beside the pool; and Laxford had been unable to say ‘yes’ or ‘no’ when Hinton had quizzed him on the point. If Laxford had not reloaded, then Dunne could not have fired a shot, since he had no cartridges of his own. And, as the inspector realised, the act of reloading is so automatic that a man might well be doubtful whether he had slipped fresh cartridges into his gun or not.

  Further, and still more awkward to Hinton’s logical mind, there was a second difficulty. If Dunne had shot young Brandon on the ground at the top of the sunk fence, the body must have fallen there and been found at that spot by Laxford and Hay. In that case, why had they told a deliberate lie about the corpse being at the foot of the ha-ha? There would be no point in a yarn of that sort. But, again, if Dunne had shot young Brandon at the edge of the ha-ha and the body had toppled down on to the grass below, why had Hinton failed to discover any trace of blood at the spot where it landed?