The Second Shot (19 page)

‘Yes,’ I considered. ‘Yes, I think I can agree to that.’

‘Well, it’s your neck, Tapers,’ observed Sheringham, with misplaced joviality. ‘Very well, now we all know where we are. Hillyard, you’d better take up the tale again and fill in all those gaps.’

‘We must tell him everything now,’ I remarked to John. ‘Even what you told me in confidence about that mutual alibi.’

John nodded.

‘Good heavens, yes,’ Sheringham said, crushing out the butt of his cigar and pulling a pipe from his pocket. ‘I should think so. You’ve got to tell me every tiniest detail now. First Hillyard, and then you, Tapers, and then we’ll discuss it till past midnight. That’ll be enough for today, and tomorrow we’ll go forth and seek what we may find – and incidentally try to put a temporary stop on any idea the superintendent may have of clapping old Tapers into jail. Now, then.’

It was crudely expressed, but the sentiment was admirable. I found myself warming again towards Sheringham. At any rate his complete confidence was exceedingly heartening.

So much so that I found courage to put into words a secret terror which I had hitherto kept to myself.

The inquest on Scott-Davies had been fixed for the next morning at eleven o’clock. My apprehension was that the police would put forward such a strong case against me (and how strong their case might be I had no idea) as to cause the jury to return a verdict of wilful murder against me, in which case I should be immediately arrested. My desperate anxiety was to avoid arrest until the tide had turned definitely in my favour, and I said as much to Sheringham now.

To my concern he took a grave view of the possibility. ‘If they’re confident,’ he said, ‘it’s quite on the cards. If they’re not, they’ll probably arrange for the inquest to be adjourned, to give them time to look for more evidence. But you must be prepared for it, Tapers, I’m afraid.’

I must confess I pressed him strongly to do his utmost to unearth something in my favour before the inquest opened, short though the time was. As I pointed out, it would add considerably to my tribulation to be compelled to await events from the inside of a prison cell rather than outside it. I can assure the reader, who may consider my urgency a trifle undignified, that should he ever be faced with the likelihood of incarceration in a prison cell, and can almost see the door as it were opening to receive him, there are few stones, and even boulders, that he will leave unturned to delay the event.

‘I’ll have a talk with the superintendent, of course,’ sheringham said dubiously, ‘though I doubt if I shall get very much out of him. Anyhow, that’s on the knees of the gods, and if they do jail you for a bit, Tapers, I promise you I’ll have you out again in double-quick time, if it’s humanly possible.’

I smiled wryly.

We went on to discuss the whole thing in detail.

It was well past midnight when we separated to our bedrooms, and by that time Sheringham knew quite as much about the case as John did, and very nearly as much as I did myself. For I, of course, knew more about it than John.
I
knew, for instance, that I had not fired that second shot.

The next morning I was early astir, in the hope that Sheringham would be the same. Indeed I had already completed my toilet before half-past seven, and was wondering what to do next, when my door opened and Sheringham walked into the room in his dressing gown.

‘Hullo, Tapers. Up already, are you? I was going to pull you out of bed, to show me the lie of the land.’

‘I was thinking of something like that myself,’ I agreed. ‘We have at least an hour before breakfast.’

‘Right. Well, I won’t keep you ten minutes. And I may say,’ Sheringham added with a grin as he passed out of the room, ‘that it’s the biggest compliment you’ve ever had in your life, getting me up at this unearthly hour. I haven’t done such a dismal thing for ten years.’

I nodded and smiled, though privately I did not consider Sheringham’s insistence on the favours he was doing me, real though they might be, in altogether good taste.

He disappeared into the bathroom, leaving my door open behind him, so that I had to shut it myself. I detest an open door in any room which I happen to be occupying.

It was not much over the stipulated time when Sheringham, again without any attempt to knock though he knew this time that I was not in bed, strolled into my room once more. I rose from my chair and we went down together.

‘Let’s go and have a look at the scene of your crime first,’ he said.

We went out of the house and down the hillside. When we were halfway down I glanced back and noticed a man strolling after us. A sudden panic shook me that he might somehow be about to forbid our investigations, though I knew perfectly well that such a thing was almost impossible. The incident serves to show the deplorable state to which my nervous system had been reduced.

I pointed out to Sheringham the exact place where the body had been lying and its position, and he stood for some minutes contemplating the scene in silence.

‘I see,’ he said at last. ‘And your theory is that he was shot by someone concealed in this undergrowth, at
that
bend in the path. At least, that’s the only one where a straight shot could be got.’

‘Not my theory,’ I said quickly. I had of course mentioned that idea of mine in our conversation last night. ‘Only a possible explanation.’

‘Have you looked for any traces?’

‘No, I haven’t been here at all since.’

Sheringham turned back to the detective, who was watching us from the bottom of the path. Hitherto he had taken no notice of the man, and I did not know that he had even seen him.

‘I suppose your people have searched all this ground thoroughly?’ he called back, in affable tones.

‘Yes, sir; the superintendent went over it himself, and Sergeant Berry too,’ the man replied, advancing towards us. I noticed with surprise that he spoke respectfully and did not seem to resent our presence in the least. ‘I’m afraid you won’t find anything here, Mr Sheringham. According to Mr Hillyard, his bullocks have been over it a time or two.’

‘Ah, you know me, do you?’ said Sheringham, and even in my anxiety I was able to smile at the childlike satisfaction with which he had heard himself addressed by name. ‘How’s that?’

‘Well, sir, what with your telegrams yesterday, and one thing and another,’ the detective grinned. ‘And the superintendent said you could have a look round if you wanted to, and I was to stand by to tell you anything you wanted to know about the position of the body and suchlike.”

‘And to report to him if I found anything interesting, eh?’ Sheringham grinned back. ‘Well, that’s very kind of the superintendent, and I’ll tell him so when I see him. By the way, are there any places you don’t want trodden on, or anything like that?’

‘No, sir. We’ve finished down here now. You can go where you like.’

‘And what did you find?’ Sheringham asked bluntly.

The man hesitated. ‘Well, not much, sir, and that’s a fact.’

‘And if you had, you wouldn’t say, eh? Well, well. Anyhow, there doesn’t seem much here. I suppose the smaller glade you were talking about lies at the end of this path, Tapers?’ he added to me.

I must admit I winced. It was bad enough that Sheringham should have resuscitated this offensive nickname at all, without using it in the presence of… ‘Yes,’ I said shortly.

We moved forward into the smaller glade, and there again Sheringham stood stock still, just looking round him.

‘Yes, I see. And that track on the left leads to the main clearing, I suppose? What’s the theory? That Scott-Davies came from the main clearing to this one by
that
path, passed through the clearing, and was going along the path we came in by to the foot of the main track up the hill, when someone shot him from behind? Is that the idea?’

‘We don’t know yet that it wasn’t accident, sir,’ said the man cautiously. ‘We’re not prepared to say it was murder at all.’

‘Oh, assuming it was. Murder’s much more interesting,’ returned Sheringham ghoulishly. ‘Would that be the idea?’

‘Something like that, if it was murder, no doubt.’

‘In other words, the murderer was on
this
side of him – between him and this clearing. What about the other way round: that Scott-Davies was on his way into this clearing along the other path, and someone shot him from that direction?’

‘The head was pointing towards the slope, sir; the feet were in this direction.’

‘He might have spun round when he was hit.’

‘And the rifle was on this side too, behind him. There were no signs of anyone having got past him to lay it this side. I’m assuming it was murder, as you said.’

‘Yes, quite. But I thought you said cattle had been all over the place?’

‘Not down that path, they don’t seem to have been. You can see for yourself it’s not much more than a foot wide, and there’s no broken twigs and crushed brambles like there is everywhere else. Though the ground was too hard to take any prints.’

‘Yes, the other path’s bigger, certainly. But if cattle got into this place they must have got out again, and I don’t suppose they wandered in and out by the same path. I don’t know much about cattle, but that doesn’t somehow sound like them.’

‘No, they came through it all right. There’s another path on the farther side, bigger than the one where the body was found. You can’t see it from where we’re standing. It’s over there, behind that bush.’

We went over to look at it. I myself had not perceived this third track when I had been in the glade before, its entrance being masked by the bush in question so that one turned an abrupt corner to reach it.

I was hoping that some important development might arise from this hitherto unsuspected path, but Sheringham did not appear to find anything significant in it. He looked at it, walked a few steps along it, and then rejoined us.

‘Well?’ I asked anxiously. ‘Does anything occur to you so far?’

‘Yes,’ he said promptly, ‘something certainly does. What the devil did Scott-Davies want to come through here at all for? He must have been making for the track up the hill, because the path he was on leads nowhere else, but it was an unnecessarily long way round from where he was. What did you people make of that?’

‘Well,’ confessed the detective, ‘I don’t know that we bothered about it much, sir. One does sometimes go a longer way round, doesn’t one? Especially when it’s a matter of only a few steps. It didn’t seem important.’

‘I don’t say it is, for a moment. It’s only a point of oddness.’

‘Well, for that matter it was a point of oddness that Mr Pinkerton should have gone along that path too,’ remarked the man, not, I felt, altogether without malice.

To my discomfiture Sheringham immediately agreed with him, with quite unnecessary emphasis. ‘Yes, it certainly was. What on earth
did
make you go along that path, Tapers?’

‘I don’t know, but I can assure you I’ve regretted it ever since,’ I replied bitterly. Though no doubt it was simple enough. I was looking for someone who was firing shots, you remember. No doubt the subconscious idea in my mind was that I had better look in this little glade as well as elsewhere, and I turned aside from the main path to do so. I cannot imagine what else it can have been.’

‘Yes, that’s feasible enough,’ Sheringham at once agreed, to my relief. ‘Well, let’s go and have a look at the other glade. You and Mrs Fitzwilliam were the last to see Scott-Davies alive, Tapers, I gather. I’d like you to show me exactly where he was. We might be able to figure something out from that.’

I led the way into the other glade and showed Sheringham where Scott-Davies had been lying during our mock drama. He examined the ground very carefully, though what he was looking for I could not imagine, but all traces had quite disappeared. It was impossible to see even where I myself had been standing. The ground here was bare, being on the fringe of a wood of large trees, and there was no bracken or even coarse grass to receive and retain impressions.

I sat down on a tree stump, watching our companion’s investigations with interest as he trotted eagerly about and even ran up the path by which we had descended a short time before, peering down among the trees at us. He even went so far as to get the detective to impersonate Scott-Davies lying there, so that he could ascertain from how high up the path he was visible.

‘I can see him from right up here, Tapers,’ he called down to me. He was standing at just about the place on the path where I had sat down to rest on the afternoon of the tragedy and watch Ethel pretending to discover the body, so that I knew that a perfectly good view could still be obtained from there of that particular portion of the glade. ‘Didn’t you notice him?’

‘I didn’t personally,’ I called up. ‘I’m quite sure I never looked back once. Whether Mrs Fitzwilliam did, I can’t say; but I don’t imagine so.’

Sheringham came down again, shaking his head reprovingly. ‘That’s a pity, that’s a great pity. You don’t know when he got up, then?’

‘No, I haven’t the faintest idea.’

‘So we don’t know which direction he took first of all. – No, don’t get up for a moment,’ he added to the detective. ‘I just want to see how visible you are from those other paths.’

He disappeared along the path into the smaller glade, where I could hear him occasionally rustling the undergrowth.

‘All right,’ he said, as he came back three or four minutes later. ‘I can see you from one or two places, but not many. I don’t think there’s much in that, anyhow. How’s the time, by the way? Good heavens, it’s half-past eight. Well, I don’t think we can do much more here, Tapers, and I’m about ready for my breakfast. What about it?’

‘Certainly,’ I acquiesced, though disappointed (however unreasonably) that nothing seemed to have eventuated from my companion’s activities.

We began to ascend the hill.

‘Oh, by the way,’ Sheringham called down to the detective, ‘what time is Superintendent Hancock likely to get here?’

‘I fancy he said he’d be here soon after nine, sir.’

‘Good! I want a word with him.’

We climbed in silence through the wood and emerged into the field above. When we were halfway across it Sheringham turned to me with a grin.