The Lost Casebooks of Sherlock Holmes (54 page)

We followed Mr Stewart into this unkempt woodland, among beeches, limes, and rowan, where high birch trees along the paths formed a vaulting that almost obscured the sky. The white house of Ardlamont with its tall sash windows and terrace was now completely hidden. There had been a contested legacy and a protracted sale of the estate, I believe, during which the copses and spinneys had been left to run riot. All the same, these shadowy bridle-paths and alleys, with their carpeting of dark leaf mould which silenced one's footsteps, were a paradise to the hunter with dog or gun. The way was dry underfoot. Though it had rained before the day of the tragedy, it had not done so since and the ground was firm enough now.

The path was so overgrown in some places that it was scarcely any path at all. Tall bracken brushed the legs of our trousers at either side. At length we came out into what might be called a clearing. Across a further expanse of bracken the trees dwindled to a thinner screen of branches. To one side was a ‘sunken fence', where the land fell to a lower wood on our left. This fence took the form of a stone retaining-wall at the level of our feet, holding back the earth from the lower woodland, so that we seemed to walk through the bracken upon a terrace. A hundred feet or so beyond this, the trees opened out on our right and there was a view of the house again. Such was the scene of the ‘Ardlamont Tragedy', as the newspapers had called it.

Stewart approached the further screen of trees. I noticed that a beech, a rowan, and a lime tree bore circular yellow dye-marks on their trunks, some no more than three feet from the ground and others as high as eight feet. Our guide turned to us.

‘Lieutenant Hamborough's body was found just here. Edward Scott told Monson and the doctor that he had seen the young man lying at the foot of the sunken wall and had lifted him up to the higher ground. It may be so, or it may not. There is no independent witness. When the body was seen by others, it was lying at the higher level on its back, the head six feet from the rowan tree and thirteen feet from the beech. The yellow dye-marks painted by our officers on the beech and rowan trunks show clearly the spread of shot as it hit the trees. There had been no shooting in this plantation for two or three weeks before Lieutenant Hamborough was killed. Therefore, where an earlier shot had hit the trees, the pellet-wounds had already healed over. The pellet holes you see marked were new, from the shot that killed Mr Hamborough.'

‘And what is the spread?' Holmes asked casually.

‘The spread of the shot is about five feet, as you may see from the trunk of the beech. Its trajectory can be traced back. It is a matter of geometrical calculation. By that calculation, the gun was most probably fired some thirty feet behind him and about five feet above the ground. A man who fires five feet above the ground is not shooting at rabbits, Mr Holmes! Nor does one sportsman fire a shotgun thirty feet immediately behind another without knowing that death or grievous injury is likely to result. A defence of accident at thirty feet can scarcely be sustained. Major Monson would surely have heard Lieutenant Hamborough's movements, even if he could not see him. And yet he fired, as the witnesses heard. In Scottish law as in English, Mr Holmes, a man is presumed to intend the natural and probable consequences of his acts.'

‘I understand that the major maintains that he did not fire in any such a direction or at such a height,' Holmes said firmly.

Mr Stewart looked at him and shrugged.

‘Unfortunately for Major Monson, Scott was seen on the far side of the wood by the third witness, too close to Hamborough to have fired a shot which spread as far as this. He was also on the wrong side of the deceased to have inflicted a wound to the right of the head.'

Holmes seemed not to be listening to him. The keen grey eyes were scanning the trunk of the beech tree, at a higher level.

‘Allow me one moment, Mr Stewart.'

He took off his jacket and handed it to me. Then he gave a short jump upwards. His bony hands gripped a lower bough of the beech like a steel clamp. He swung his feet up and caught the branch between them. A moment more and he was astride it, examining the pale grey trunk at a height of ten or twelve feet above the ground. Out came his trusty pocket-knife from his trousers pocket and he attacked a tiny scab on the bark. Presently he called down.

‘I fear, Mr Stewart, that your men overlooked a most interesting piece of evidence. I daresay when they found pellets as high as eight feet above the ground, they felt that they had done enough to show that only Monson could have fired the shot. That was remiss of them. I notice that there are three holes at quite twelve feet, not yet healed over, and that a shotgun pellet is still embedded in one of them. You shall see it for yourself in a moment.'

Stewart stared up, as Holmes swung himself down and dropped to the ground.

‘Surely, Mr Holmes, all you have done is to turn suspicion against your client into certainty!'

‘I have turned it into a matter of evidence, Mr Stewart! The spread of shot is plainly greater than you had measured. It was a capital error that once your men had gone high enough to establish that Ham-borough could not have shot himself, they stopped. Given the true spread, the gun that fired the pellets would be quite sixty feet away, would it not? You may calculate it for yourself in due course but you may take it from me that the calibration is correct. Now, sir! What man, seeking to kill another, would choose a range of sixty feet with a shotgun? Would he not be far more likely to wound than to kill?'

The Deputy Fiscal was courteous but unmoved.

‘Theories will not alter facts, Mr Holmes.'

‘So my friend Lestrade is always telling me. However, I myself deal in facts and only then do I offer theories.'

Before the argument could continue, I was aware of a threshing in the undergrowth and saw the face of the Ardlamont butler, crimson with exertion.

‘Mr Stewart, sir. There is a boy at the house with an express telegram, requiring an immediate reply. I should be obliged if you would come at once.'

There was time for only the briefest apology from the Deputy Fiscal before he hurried off in the wake of the butler. Holmes watched him go with an air of satisfaction, tempered by concern.

‘A very decent young fellow, Watson. I regret that I had to deceive him.'

‘Over the spread of shot?'

He looked at me in despair.

‘Of course not! In the matter of the telegram, however, it was a simple matter to send a wire from the purser's office of the railway company's steamer. They undertook to despatch it by way of the piermaster at the next port of call. There are no such facilities at Ardlamont Bay, of course. However, I verified that it would go from Kames Pier half an hour later.'

‘You sent Stewart a telegram to be delivered here?'

He looked still more concerned at my obtuseness.

‘I sent a wire in the name of Mr Comrie Thomson, requesting an immediate comment on the information that Major Monson is to be released today for lack of evidence against him. I do not think our young friend will ignore that.'

‘One day, Holmes,' I said feebly, ‘you will go too far!'

‘I have always thought that very likely. Meantime, I imagine that poor Mr Stewart is at this moment endeavouring to communicate an incomprehensible message to Inveraray and to get an equally incomprehensible reply in answer from Mr Thomson who, unfortunately, is away from his chambers today at my request. I think we may count on having the woods of Ardlamont to ourselves for at least the next forty-five minutes.'

IV

Holmes put his pocket-knife away and pulled on his jacket.

‘Let us go back to first principles. If Hamborough had shot himself with the short-barrelled 20-bore loaded with plain gunpowder, the wound would have been blackened. It was not. If he had shot himself by dropping the 12-bore loaded with amberite, he would have blown his head off. He did not. He was therefore shot by either Monson or Scott. But we are told that Scott was too close for his gun to have spread the shot as widely as the pellet-marks upon the beech tree indicate.'

‘I cannot believe that Marshall Hall will thank you, Holmes,' I said curtly. ‘As Stewart remarked just now, all you have done is to prove that our client did indeed shoot Hamborough, though perhaps at a range of sixty feet. It is the only conclusion to which your precious facts point.'

Holmes turned to me, his eyebrows raised in surprise.

‘They do nothing of the kind!'

‘I understood you to demonstrate that the spread of shot was consistent only with a range of sixty feet.'

His aquiline features assumed a weariness born of long patience as he sighed and looked about him.

‘My dear Watson, I have demonstrated that the spread of shot so high up the tree-trunks was inconsistent with a range of thirty feet! So it is. But no one could have fired that shot from sixty feet. Consider the situation. Imagine how the pellets would fan out and lose velocity over sixty feet. The spread of shot might cover an area of ten by ten—say a hundred square feet. There might be no more than four or five individual pellets in the area of the victim's head. No murderer could be certain of accomplishing his object in such circumstances.'

‘Then Monson shot Hamborough accidentally at a distance of sixty feet.'

‘Quite impossible,' said Holmes sharply. ‘As a medical man, even as an intelligent observer, one thing must strike you above all. If Hamborough had been killed with a shotgun at sixty feet, the shot would have spread so wide that his head would have been pockmarked by individual pellets. In the report of the postmortem, there was a single central wound and no pock-marking whatever. You may therefore be quite sure that he was not shot at sixty feet …'

‘Nor at thirty?'

‘Correct. Let us waste no more time on the impetuous theorizing of the Deputy Fiscal. Come, now. There are two paths running back to the carriage-drive. Monson must have approached the scene of the tragedy along one of them. We will search both, as well as the areas immediately to their right and left. I should think fifty feet back along each path would be sufficient.'

‘Sufficient for what?'

‘To look for a message left by Major Monson at the time of the shooting. To find a few torn scraps of paper.'

Why should the suspect write a message, before or after he fired? Had I not been accustomed to his unpredictable methods, I should have thought Holmes had taken leave of his senses.

‘If Monson left a message, why would he—or someone else—then tear it up?'

Holmes ignored this.

‘The fragments may be crumpled up very small and possibly singed but, let us hope, not all of them will have been entirely destroyed.'

If my friend was to be believed, Monson had composed a message in the middle of a shooting-party, then torn it up and burnt it. There was no time to argue over this, when the Deputy Fiscal might return at any moment. For ten minutes or so we searched without success for scraps of paper. There was none of any kind. With Holmes on my right, we again followed the two western footpaths, by one of which Monson must surely have made his way through the tangled briars and bracken of the wood.

‘All the witnesses agree that it had been raining and that the major was wearing tweeds, not waterproofs,' Holmes said impatiently. ‘Monson would therefore have followed the paths rather than stood up to his waist in wet heather.'

‘In which case the ink would long ago have run on the paper and any message become indecipherable.'

‘I think not. If it is here, and I have no doubt that it is, the message will remain perfectly clear.'

We extended our search further back until we were almost in sight of the fence and the carriage-drive again. Then we turned and made our way towards the scene of the shooting once more, heads down, seeking. We had patrolled up and down a dozen times and were about forty feet from the pellet-marked rowan and beech when I saw, at the edge of his path, what might have been a small white flower head. Before I could direct his attention to it, Sherlock Holmes's long arm reached down and snatched it up. With an unaccustomed carelessness, it seemed to me, he opened the scrap out, crumpled it again, and dropped it into his pocket. I was close enough to see that it was blank on both sides, though a little stained by wet.

A moment later, he darted down again and retrieved two more fragments, neither of them larger when opened than a
carte-de-visite
. If he had found a fragment of a message, my friend certainly kept it to himself. So far as I could see, however, this paper was also unmarked.

‘Capital!' he said to himself, so quietly that I could scarcely hear him. Then he turned. ‘Now let us walk back to where Hamborough's body was lying when Major Monson first saw it.'

As we reached the place, he took a twig and planted it into the earth to mark a spot that was both six feet from the rowan tree and thirteen feet from the beech.

‘Here is where his head lay. The post-mortem gives his height as five feet eleven inches. Here, then, were his feet. The impact of such compacted shot as the post-mortem wound suggests would knock him down almost where he stood. We may allow a little distance but not much.'

‘A fatally wounded man may stagger some distance before he falls.'

He sighed.

‘A hunter will gallop several yards with a broken back before dropping dead, Watson, but not with such a discharge of shot in its equine brain! Moreover, the rain had stopped, the ground was examined at once and no blood was found except where the head lay.'

‘But surely he fell over the sunken wall when he was hit. Scott found him lying down there and lifted him up to this level, out of the bracken. It was the most natural thing to do.'

‘Cast your mind back to your military service at the battle of Maiwand,' Holmes said gently. ‘Recall how much blood would flow from a wound like this in the man's dying moments, flowing on to the clothes of the injured man and thus on to those of anyone who tried to lift him. The evidence is that Edward Scott vanished from Ardlamont that afternoon in the very tweeds that he was wearing in the morning. No drop of blood appeared on them.'