The Ha-Ha Case Read online

  “Well, see there’s no mistake about the envelope,” Miss Tugby warned him, quite unabashed. “It’d be a nice little surprise for me if I found a quid in it, wouldn’t it? You think that over.”

  “It’d surprise me more than you, even,” said the inspector as he let in his clutch. “By-by, Beauty. People might get talking if I gave you a lift.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  Hinton’s Ballistics

  INSPECTOR HINTON was, as he himself put it, “no great hand with a gun.” The modest phraseology did him no injustice. Not having served in the War, he had only the vaguest ideas about the mechanism of a rifle; and as he was no sportsman, his acquaintance with shot-guns was of the very sketchiest kind.

  That, however, need have been no handicap to him; for in that country-side there were plenty of people who could have lent him expert assistance willingly enough. To go no farther afield, Wendover of the Grange would have been only too pleased to help, had he been asked. But Hinton preferred to work entirely on his own. His implicit belief in his own cleverness, coupled with his selfish desire for the whole credit of the affair, deterred him from taking any advice which would have to be acknowledged in his reports. ‘Alone I did it!’ was to be his watchword in the ‘big case.’

  “It only needs a bit of common sense,” he assured himself confidently, as he began an examination of the four guns from Edgehill.

  He had taken the precaution to get each weapon identified, and a tiny label indicated who had used it on the morning of the tragedy in the Long Plantation.

  Johnnie’s 12-bore was the first to which the inspector turned. He had already seen it at the inquest, but had made no close examination of it then. Now, as he held it in his hand, he was rather in doubt as to how he should begin. He put the tip of his little finger into the muzzle, twisted it about, and then, withdrawing it, examined the black smudge on the skin.

  In his inexperience, it did not occur to him that he was fortunate in finding the gun just as it had been left after the disaster. In the disturbance at Edgehill consequent upon Johnnie’s death all the guns had been overlooked, and no one had remembered to clean them after the firing, except Jim Brandon, who had taken his own one to pieces and stowed it away in its case. Johnnie’s gun had been returned to Edgehill when the two Brandon brothers were away, and it had simply been put back in the rack by Una exactly as it was.

  Hinton stared at his blackened finger-tip, which suggested nothing to him beyond the fact that the gun had been fired. He made a jotting in his notebook, stating the mere fact, and then opened the breech. The left barrel contained a live cartridge which the inspector gingerly withdrew and placed in an envelope on which he wrote: “Unused cartridge from left barrel of John Brandon’s gun.” The right barrel also contained a cartridge-case; but the indentation made on the cap by the striker showed that it had been fired. The inspector extracted it in its turn and placed it also in an envelope with a written description of the contents. Then, turning the muzzle toward the window, he peered into the barrels without even discovering that he had a choke-bore in his hands.

  What should he do next? The idea of finger-prints crossed his mind; but a remembrance of the narratives of the doings on that fatal morning convinced him that very little could be got from evidence of that sort. The guns had changed hands too often to make anything important out of that. And so far as this gun went, it had been handled by all and sundry at the inquest.

  The inspector could think of nothing further, so he put down Johnnie’s gun and picked up the one with the label “Hay” on it. This also gave a positive result with the finger-tip test, and the inspector solemnly noted down his result. Both barrels were empty; but this suggested nothing to Hinton, not even the possibility that Hay had unloaded his gun on entering the house. A glance down the barrels yielded nothing, not even that this, like Johnnie’s gun, was a choke-bore.

  Laxford’s weapon gave the black smudge like the others. In the breech were two empty cases which the inspector meticulously placed in labelled envelopes. His perfunctory glance into the barrels failed to inform him that this also was a choke-bore gun.

  Finally he unstrapped the leg-of-mutton case and extracted Jim’s old smooth-bore. After a little inexpert fumbling, he managed to get it assembled; but since it had been cleaned and contained no cartridges, live or otherwise, Hinton found himself hard put to it to concoct any note about it for his report.

  He had to admit to himself that so far he had not secured any data throwing light on his problem. The state of the guns tallied with the oral evidence, so far as he could see. He glanced at the weapons in turn, but they suggested nothing fresh to his mind. He had got everything from them that mattered; and he could now proceed to what he described to himself as “the real business.”

  Inspector Hinton had no intention of carrying out the next stage of his investigation under the public eye. He pretended to himself that secrecy was essential; but his real reason was a distaste for displaying his marksmanship under the eyes of his subordinates. One never knew what sort of fist one might make of a thing like that; and he recoiled from the idea of conducting his tests in the little garden behind the police station. He knew a quiet spinney not far off which would serve his turn.

  He took down a broad roll of white paper from a cupboard, and then, laden in addition with cartridges, the guns, and a long surveyor’s tape-measure, he went out to his car. A drive of some twenty minutes brought him to the spinney; and in a very short time he had selected a suitable spot and made his preparations. An almost perpendicular bank of earth served him as a convenient butt on which to fasten his paper sheets. With the help of his surveyor’s tape he measured off distances of ten, fifteen, and twenty yards from his target and marked the spots by means of sticks thrust into the ground. Then, beginning at the closest range, he set to work.

  The inspector was even less of a marksman than he had suspected, and it was well for him that he had brought several packets of ammunition with him, similar to the cartridges which he had picked up at Edgehill. Even at the ten yards range he expended a number of rounds before he obtained a pellet-pattern which satisfied him. True to his policy of “Thorough,” he repeated his experiment with all four guns in turn; then, retiring successively to the fifteen and twenty yard marks, he persisted doggedly with his firing until he had secured results sufficient for his purpose. After each trial he noted the details of range and gun on the actual sheet used in that test, to avoid any possible mistakes. Finally he put up a fresh paper, approached to within six feet, and under these conditions blew a ragged hole through the paper with the massed charge.

  Once more back in his headquarters, he set to work with a tape-measure on his various sheets, making a rough estimate of the circles covered by the shot-patterns in his several experiments. If the fatal shot had been fired from Laxford’s gun in the hands of Dunne, the range from the body’s position to the spot where Dunne could have concealed himself in the bushes was fifteen yards. The range from the point where Hay and Laxford had emerged from the undergrowth was about ten yards. As for Jim Brandon, he could never have been nearer than twenty yards from his brother, since the Carron cut him off from the glade.

  Hinton, taking these figures along with those he had obtained from his experiments, jotted down a table which he examined with no great satisfaction.

  Shooter.

  Range.

  Diameter of Circle containing Pellets.

  Laxford or Hay

  10 yards

  9 inches

  Dunne

  15 yards

  16 inches

  Brandon

  20 yards

  32 inches

  Hinton seemed to find little satisfaction in this result. From a drawer he took the records of the affair: papers in a folder and a little packet containing the fragment of the skull which he had secured as a rather gruesome relic. He turned over the sheets in the folder until he reached his shorthand notes of Dr. Brinkworth’s evidence at the
inquest, and then began to read:

  “The wound was roughly triangular, the apex being toward the rear. It was about three and a half inches long and two and a half inches broad at the base of the triangle. . . . I found only seven pellets in the brain. . . . The ear was severely lacerated, as though the shot had gone through it, carrying away the middle part of the external ear. . . . My impression is that the shot struck the bone almost en masse and after causing the wound, was deflected through the ear flap, scattering as it went. . . . I did not observe the numerous wounds which I should have expected if the shot had scattered much before impact.”

  The inspector put the papers back into the drawer and spread out the sheet at which he had fired with young Brandon’s gun at a couple of yards range. That punched-out hole certainly fitted Brinkworth’s report; and undoubtedly none of the other results agreed with the post-mortem results. He leaned back in his chair, staring at the torn paper and cudgelling his brains to find some way of harmonising his pre-conceived ideas with these hard facts.

  At last a possible solution dawned upon him. Suppose the shot had been fired by someone concealed behind the drop of the ha-ha. A man thus hidden might have been able to get within close range of young Brandon and shoot him from behind, just after he had passed.

  Hinton produced his sketch of the ground and studied the position of the mass of shattered twigs on the north side of the glade. So far as the line went, that might be fitted into his hypothesis without too much of a strain. But then his rising hopes were dashed by the remembrance that the broken twigs were hardly higher than his own eye-level. If the shot had been fired from low down, behind the ha-ha, the trajectory would have been a rising one, and the shot would have struck the trees at a level much higher: some twenty feet from the ground, probably. Either his hypothesis would have to go, or else he would have to drop the shattered twigs out of his argument. And if he did that, a sharp barrister would want to know where the charge had actually gone after striking young Brandon and glancing off.

  And a little further consideration deepened his doubts about the value of his idea. If the evidence counted for anything, young Brandon was walking up the line of the ha-ha itself and was in a position to see the ground below him on the right. There were no bushes there behind which an assailant could find concealment, as the inspector clearly remembered. No, that cock wouldn’t fight.

  But suddenly a fresh idea altered the whole business in Hinton’s mind; an idea so simple that he wondered he had not thought of it immediately. If Laxford was the assailant—or Hay, for that matter—why should he trouble to conceal himself at all? Young Brandon would suspect nothing if he had seen Laxford on the ground below the ha-ha. In fact, why assume that he had got down the ha-ha at all? If he had come up behind the youngster, young Brandon would never have suspected foul play, and he could have been shot from behind at close range and with the gun held level.

  “That’s a winner!” the inspector commented to himself with some pride. “It accounts for that yarn of Laxford’s about finding the body at the foot of the ha-ha. Of course they had to cook up some yarn to account for his gun going off and a fall off the dyke was the obvious thing to try. But they forgot the blood, like fools!”

  Little by little, however, doubts began to creep in. How would it look to a jury? And on applying that criterion, he was forced to admit that his hypothesis had some awkward points in it. Why, with all the line of the ha-ha to choose from, would any murderer pick out that glade for his work, when at other points he could have kept under cover? The other Brandon brother was across the stream and might well have been in such a position—for all Laxford could tell—that he could overlook the whole affair. And if Laxford fired the shot, it must have been with Hay’s gun. That meant making Hay an accessory either before or after the fact. And what motive could one produce to show that Hay was implicated, either as principal—if he fired the shot himself—or as an accessory? That would be the trouble with a jury. Bring in Laxford and you drag in Hay, whether you like it or not. And when the jury asks: ‘What does Hay stand to gain by it?’ there’s no answer. And if Hay gets off, Laxford drops out of the picture too, on this basis.

  “Damn!” said the inspector fervently as he surveyed the shortcomings of his hypothesis from this angle.

  Shaking himself free from these ideas, he turned to another aspect of the case. What about Dunne? On the face of things, Dunne could not possibly have fired the fatal shot from among the bushes. At that range his gun scattered far too much to have inflicted the fatal wound in young Brandon’s head. Could he have got nearer? His case was not like that of Laxford. Dunne was a total stranger to young Brandon. In that Plantation, with a gun in his hand, he was no better than a poacher; and young Brandon would have wanted to know what he was doing there. He would have ordered him off the premises and, the inspector surmised, he would have seen him go. That precluded any likelihood of Dunne having been able to creep up behind young Brandon unsuspected.

  “No, that puts that little skunk Dunne out of the picture,” Hinton decided. “He’s beside the mark.”

  When he was puzzled, Inspector Hinton had a habit of going back to first principles—“Getting a thing down to dots,” as he expressed it. And now in his perplexity, he resorted to this method.

  “There are six ways of dying in this country, and only six,” he reflected. “Natural death, accident, manslaughter, murder, execution, and suicide: that’s the lot. This isn’t natural death and it isn’t execution. That leaves four. And if Dunne’s out of the business, it isn’t manslaughter. So it’s accident, or murder, or suicide.”

  He scribbled the three words on a piece of paper as an aid to concentration, and sat for a while staring at them in the hope of stimulating his brain. After awhile he drew his pencil through the first word.

  “No, that won’t wash. If it was an accident, how did his gun go off on a level with his head? It must have done, judging by the direction of the wound; and that fits in with the height where I found these smashed twigs. If he dropped his gun over the ha-ha and it went off when it hit the ground and shot him, the charge would have gone sky-high after glancing off his skull. And there was no blood at the foot of the ha-ha, either. No, it wasn’t an accident, I’ll bet.”

  He sat gazing absently at the two remaining words on the paper: MURDER and SUICIDE, looking from one to the other and allowing his brain to work without conscious direction. Before long, an unsought memory surged up in his mind. A year or two before, he had dealt with a case of attempted suicide. It was a common enough business: some poor devil had tried to finish himself by putting his head into an oven and turning on the gas. But he had made a muddle of it and had been rescued before he was quite dead. He’d been tried for attempted suicide, of course, and then a sordid little story had come out. A not very important moral side-slip, then blackmail, then more blackmail, then a final turn of the screw which had driven him almost out of his mind. And so to the gas-oven. Hinton recalled his own pleasure in sending the blackmailer to gaol for a lengthy term.

  As this case drifted up in his memory, it threw fresh light upon the Brandon affair. What about suicide? Why had he been so blind as to leave that glaring possibility out of his calculations? Suicide with a firearm would require a shot at close range, just such a shot as had killed young Brandon. On the face of it, young Brandon had no motive for suicide; but the inspector remembered the big financial schemes in the background, the sinister manœuvres of Laxford in the insurance field. Not an ordinary suicide, but a forced suicide due to hidden pressure—that would cover the case. And then, suddenly, the inspector realised that he had left a gap in his investigations. He knew nothing about young Brandon’s personality and very little indeed about his relations with Laxford. All the way through, he had been treating young Brandon as a lay figure—“the corpse” or “the body” or “the deceased.” He had overlooked the plain fact that what was shot was not a “body” or a “corpse” but a living man with ordinary human passi
ons and emotions.

  So illuminating was this thought to him that he dismissed the technical side of the affair from his mind for the time being, in order to concentrate all his energy on this new field of inquiry. Where could he get the information he needed? Not from Laxford, certainly; and Beauty Tugby was hardly likely to be of much help either, in a matter of this sort. The Menteith girl might have seen something, but he had already had a taste of her quality. If he began to ask questions, she’d refer him to the Brandons, just as she did before. There was no help to be got in that quarter, he felt sure. That left the Brandon brothers. The younger one came down for week-ends, the inspector knew. He could be got at the next time he came.

  Inspector Hinton picked up his desk telephone and asked to be put through to Edgehill.

  Chapter Fourteen

  The Signature

  THE inspector had fixed his appointment at Edgehill for Saturday evening, and when he arrived he was shown immediately into the familiar drawing-room. Jim Brandon was alone, and he greeted Hinton with the curtest of nods.

  “Well, what do you want?” he demanded ungraciously, without any polite preamble.

  The inspector was somewhat taken aback by this bluntness.

  “I came across in the hope that you might be able to answer one or two questions, Mr. Brandon.”