‘In my job,’ said Detective-Inspector Humbleby, ‘a man expects to be shot at every now and again. It’s an occupational risk, like pneumoconiosis in coal-mining, and when you’re on duty you’ve obviously got to be prepared for it to crop up. But a social call on an old acquaintance is quite a different matter. Here am I on my sabbatical. I drop in to see this man I’ve known ever since the 1914 war. And what happens? Before I have a chance to as much as open my mouth and ask him how he is, he snatches a damned great revolver out of his pocket and lets it off at me. Well, I was petrified. Anyone would be. I was so astonished I literally couldn’t move.’
‘He doesn’t seem to have hit you, though.’ From the depths of the armchair in his rooms at St Christopher’s, Gervase Fen, university professor of English Language and Literature, regarded his guest with a clinical air. ‘I see no wound,’ he elaborated.
‘There is no wound. Three times he fired,’ said Humbleby dramatically, ‘and three times he missed. Which, of course, makes it all the odder.’
‘Why “of course”? I’ve always understood that revolvers—’
‘I say “of course” because Garstin-Walsh, whom I’m speaking of, is a retired Army man: a brevet-rank Colonel, to be precise … Yes, I know what you’re going to tell me. You’re going to tell me that Army men seldom actually use revolvers, even though they may carry them; and that consequently it’s naïve to expect them to be good marksmen. Agreed. But the trouble in this instance is that Garstin-Walsh has always made a hobby of shooting in general – he’s the sort of man it’s impossible to visualize outside the context of dogs and guns and an interest in dahlias – and of pistol-shooting in particular. That’s why I’m so certain he missed me on purpose: at a yard’s range even I could hardly go wrong … But perhaps I’d better begin at the beginning.’
Fen nodded gravely. ‘Perhaps you had.’
‘As you know,’ said Humbleby, ‘I was in Military Intelligence during the 1914 war; and it was while I was investigating an unimaginative piece of sabotage at an arms depot near Loos that I first met Garstin-Walsh, who at that time was a Captain in the supply Corps. It’d be an exaggeration to say that we became close friends – and looking back on it, I can’t quite see why we should have become friends at all, because our temperaments weren’t at all alike, and we had very few interests in common. Still, for some obscure reason we did in fact get on well together; and I think that much of his attraction for me must have been due to his complete humourlessness – we were all a bit hysterical in those days, whether we knew it or not, and a man who never laughed was unexpectedly restful.
‘We used to meet, then, as often as we could; and after the Armistice we kept up a sporadic correspondence and managed some sort of reunion once or twice every year. Then eighteen months ago Garstin-Walsh retired and went to live at a village called Uscombe, which is a few miles from Exeter; and since I was staying with my sister at Exmouth, and hadn’t seen him for some considerable time, I decided, the day before yesterday, to drive over and pay him a surprise visit.
‘I left Exmouth immediately after breakfast and got to Uscombe about ten-thirty. Uscombe’s not as cut off from the rest of the world as some Devon villages, because it’s only a quarter of a mile from the main London road; but in all other respects it’s fairly typical – settled to some extent by middle-class “foreigners”, I mean, with an unsuccessful preparatory boarding-school in a tumble-down manor-house, and a church tower scheduled dangerous; you know the sort of place. I hadn’t been there before, so I stopped at one of the village shops to enquire for Garstin-Walsh’s house. And the way they looked at me, as they gave me directions, was the first intimation I had that anything was wrong.
‘The house proved to be a nice, trim, up-to-date little redbrick villa beyond the church, with lots of chrysanthemums in the garden and a carefully weeded front lawn; so that was all right. But then the trouble started. The painters were in, for one thing; an Exeter C.I.D. inspector was hanging about the hall, for another; and an undeniably dead body was in process of being removed by a mortuary van. I need hardly tell you that if I’d known about all this I should have gone back to Exmouth and tried again some other day; but by the time the situation became clear I’d rung, and been let in by the housekeeper, and so couldn’t very well escape without positive incivility.
‘Garstin-Walsh was still upstairs dressing. But the Exeter man, Jourdain he was called, had heard me give my name to the housekeeper, and lost no time in introducing himself. “You’ll be curious,” he said dogmatically, “about that body they’ve just taken away.” I denied this, but it was no good, he insisted on telling me about the affair just the same. And stripped of inessentials, the story I heard, while we waited in the hall for Garstin-Walsh to come down, was as follows:
‘A year previously, the ramshackle cottage near Garstin-Walsh’s house had been rented by one Saul Brebner, he whose remains were at present en route for the Exeter City Mortuary. A powerful, malignant, drunken, slovenly man of about fifty was Brebner, and the people of Uscombe had gone in fear of him almost from the day of his arrival. He was without family, lived alone in squalor, had money in spite of working not at all, and divided his time fairly evenly between poaching and The Three Crowns. The police kept an eye on him, of course, but he succeeded in steering clear of them. And the only person in the village who ever had a good word to say for him was, surprisingly enough, Garstin-Walsh.
‘That there was a reason for this the village soon discovered: Brebner had been Garstin-Walsh’s batman in the 1914 war, and it was realized that Garstin-Walsh’s toleration of the creature derived from this. However, the toleration wasn’t by any means mutual: Brebner made no secret of his loathing for Garstin-Walsh, and from time to time, when in liquor, was heard to hint that there were phases of the Colonel’s career which would not bear investigation. The village, which quite liked Garstin-Walsh, discounted these innuendoes as the vapourings of malice, and even when Brebner became more specific, referring to misappropriation of supplies in France, refused to take him seriously. Indeed, on the night of the incident which wrote finis to Brebner’s unlovely existence, he was so vituperative about Garstin-Walsh in the public bar of The Three Crowns that there was very nearly a riot, and when he left the pub at closing time – half past ten – he was dangerously enraged as well as, what was normal, dangerously drunk.
‘Garstin-Walsh reached home that evening at about a quarter to eleven (I’m referring, you understand, to what to me, visiting him, was the previous evening). He’d spent the day acting as starter at the village sports, had dined at the Vicarage, and afterwards had worked with the Vicar at the parish accounts; and he got back to his house just in time to meet his solicitor on the doorstep, the said solicitor having driven there, on urgent business, from Exeter. Well, they went into the study, a large room on the ground floor, and got on with whatever it was they had to discuss. And according to the solicitor, a respectable old party named Weems, it was exactly five to eleven when the french windows burst open and Brebner, carrying a double-barrelled shotgun, lurched into the room.
‘It was all over in a moment. Brebner levelled the gun at Garstin-Walsh and fired off one barrel. But he was pretty far gone, and the pellets spattered the room without touching their target. The second barrel remained. Steadying himself, Brebner aimed again. And Garstin-Walsh, grabbing up the pistol which he’d been using all day to start races, and which he’d reloaded immediately on his return, fired just in time to save his own life. It was good shooting, partly because the end of the room where Brebner stood was in semi-darkness, and partly because Garstin-Walsh, according to Weems’ deposition, was fairly thoroughly unnerved. Brebner staggered, dropped the shotgun, and collapsed on the carpet with a bullet in his head.
‘Well, the village constable was summoned; and since Brebner, though unconscious, was still just alive, a doctor was summoned too. The doctor refused to have Brebner moved, and Garstin-Walsh was forced to allow him to stay in the study, with a nurse to look after him, until next morning at nine o’clock he died there without recovering consciousness.’
Humbleby sucked complacently at his cheroot. ‘That, then, was the story Jourdain told me while we waited for Garstin-Walsh to appear. A clear case of self-defence, and a very good riddance, and the only reason Jourdain was there was to have a look at the study where the thing had happened, for the purpose of making the usual routine report.
‘He’d just finished his tale when Garstin-Walsh came downstairs. Garstin-Walsh has always been a stringy, bony sort of man, and even when I first knew him he looked old; so the years have really altered him very little, in comparison with the rest of us. At the moment he was a bit haggard and white, and I guessed he hadn’t slept much; I got the impression, too, that all the time he was talking to us he was preoccupied, inwardly, with some sort of intellectual balancing trick: I mean that he had the precarious, constricted air you notice in people who are trying to think of two things at once. But he was very civil with us, brushing aside my suggestion that I should go away and come back at some more convenient time; and he took Jourdain and myself into the study as soon as the nurse, who’d been packing and tidying, quitted it.
‘It was a pleasant room, its pleasantness a bit marred, at the moment, by surgical smells and paint smells (the painters hadn’t finished with it till supper-time the previous day); and while Jourdain explained that he’d come to look at the shot-holes and so forth – rather needlessly, since he’d already said all that to the housekeeper, and she, presumably, had conveyed it to Garstin-Walsh – I had a look round. There was more shabbiness than I should have expected: Garstin-Walsh had – has – an unusually spick-and-span sort of mind, and there are considerable private means for him to spend as well as his pension, so that the threadbare carpet and the dented brass coal-scuttle, which you wouldn’t notice these days in most people’s houses, surprised me at first. But of course, there was, in view of Brebner’s insinuations and independent income, one very plausible explanation of the shabbiness. And it’ll show you how superficial my friendship with Garstin-Walsh was when I say that the possibility of blackmail neither shocked nor astonished me particularly, and that I wasn’t conscious of there being any disloyalty involved in my having my suspicions about Garstin-Walsh’s professional past.
‘So there we all were: Garstin-Walsh fidgeting in a monkish kind of dressing-gown which he wore over his shirt and plus-fours instead of a coat, Jourdain gabbling away as only a County D.I. can gabble, and myself thinking disinterested thoughts about consignments of service dress which had gone astray, and never been recovered, during the first months of 1917. It’s no use my pretending I was comfortable. I wasn’t. On the other hand, my uneasiness had nothing whatever to do with blackmail or its pretexts, or with the problem of what, in this particular instance, I ought to do about them – since I intended, very firmly indeed, to do nothing about them whatever. No, it was more the sort of sensation you have when in crossing a road you hear a car coming at you and can’t for the moment either see it or judge, from the sound of it, what direction it’s coming from. I remember I was actually humming quietly, to keep my spirits up, as I strolled over to the french windows to have a look at the view.
‘And that was when it happened.
‘The village constable hadn’t confiscated Garstin-Walsh’s revolver – there was no reason, after all, why he should – and apparently Garstin-Walsh had taken it to bed with him. Anyway, he had it on him now, in a pocket of his dressing-gown, and I was just on the point of making some remark about the garden when he suddenly whipped the thing out, shouting incoherently, and fired it at me. I was simply flabbergasted, of course. I stood there helplessly trying to remember the details of Gross’s suicidal method of disarming people with guns, and Jourdain stood there goggling, and one shot smashed a vase on a table beside me, and another smashed a pane of the french windows, and a third went heaven knows where, and then, when I thought my last hour had certainly come, Garstin-Walsh waved me away – still shouting, still incoherent – and backed out of the french windows and fled. Almost immediately Jourdain went after him – and to cut a long story short, caught up with him at the bottom of the garden, where he’d stopped and was standing like a man in a trance, staring at the revolver in his hand as if he couldn’t imagine what it was or how he’d come by it. He surrendered it, and returned to the house with Jourdain, like a lamb; and he was more dazed and bewildered than I’ve ever seen anyone in my life. He knew what he’d done, all right, but he couldn’t account for his motives in doing it. “It – it was like last night,” he stammered. “When I saw you standing by those windows I remembered Brebner, and the gun was in my pocket and—”
‘Well, it wasn’t attempted murder, because plainly there was no malice; and there’s no such thing as attempted manslaughter. So we telephoned his doctor and got him to bed, still quite bemused – and in bed, for all I know, he is still. The doctor, of course, understood all about it: it was delayed shock, or post-traumatic automatism or some such thing, and the only surprising feature of the business was that I was still alive. I can tell you, I felt quite ashamed of myself for upsetting what otherwise would have been a perfect sample-phenomenon for the medical text-books … Well, I went away, and today, as you know, travelled up here to Oxford, and—’
‘Why?’ Fen interrupted. ‘Why did you come to Oxford? To see me?’
‘Well, yes.’
‘You’re not satisfied, then?’
‘I’m not,’ said Humbleby. ‘Everything about the affair fits, and seems quite innocent, excepting just one obstinate little fragment.’
‘And that is?’
‘He unloaded the gun, you see. After he’d shot at me, and before Jourdain grabbed him, he unloaded the gun and threw the spent cartridge-cases away somewhere. When he handed the gun to Jourdain its chambers were empty. And why the devil, I ask myself, should he have done that?’
Outside the windows of the first-floor room in which they sat, a clock struck six. Dusk was falling; the gleam had gone from the gilt titles of the books ranged along the walls, and from the college dining-hall you could hear the clink and rattle of plates being laid for dinner. In the broad, high room, with its painted panels, its luxurious chairs, its huge flat-topped desk and its weird medley of pictures, Detective-Inspector Humbleby gestured expressively and fell silent – and for the time being Fen seemed disposed to let the silence stay. His ruddy, clean-shaven face was pensive; his long, lean body sprawled gracelessly, heels on the fender; his brown hair, ineffectually plastered down with water, stood up, as usual, in mutinous spikes at the crown of his head. For perhaps two minutes he remained staring, mute and motionless, into the amber depths of his glass …
And then, suddenly, he chuckled.
‘Rather nice, yes,’ he said. ‘Tell me, were the spent cartridges ever found?’
‘No. At the time, of course, we didn’t bother about them. But Jourdain was hunting for them yesterday, and he couldn’t find them anywhere.’
Fen’s amusement grew. ‘Nor will he ever, I imagine – unless your Colonel Garstin-Walsh is a hopeless blunderer.’
‘But how are they important? I don’t see—’
‘Don’t you?’ Fen lit a cigarette and reached for an ashtray. ‘I should imagine, myself, that they’re important for the reason that one of them is a blank.’
‘A blank?’ Humbleby’s face was very much that.
And Fen roused himself, speaking more energetically. ‘You’ll agree that Garstin-Walsh obviously possessed blanks; no man in his senses starts races at the village sports with live ammunition.’
‘Yes, I agree about that.’
‘And two of the shots he fired at you smashed things, so they were real enough. But what happened to the third?’
Humbleby was anything but stupid; after a moment’s reflection he nodded abruptly. ‘If that third shot was a blank,’ he said, ‘then that would mean … No, wait. I see what you’re getting at, but I can’t quite work it out for the moment. So go on.’
‘We’re assuming, remember, that Garstin-Walsh got rid of those cartridge-cases advisedly – that he wasn’t, in fact, the maniac he seemed. Now, it’s possible to conceive quite a number of solid reasons for his acting as he did; but so far as my deductions have gone, there’s only one of them that covers all the facts. A blank cartridge is recognizably different from a live one. Let’s take it, then, that the spent shells were thrown away in order to conceal the presence of a blank among them, in case either you or Jourdain should be curious enough to investigate the gun. What follows? Quite simply, the fact that Garstin-Walsh fired two live shots and a blank at you. And if he did that, it can only have been because Jourdain was just about to examine the study, and there was a bullet-hole in the wall which had to be accounted for somehow.
‘Now, there was no bullet-hole in the wall prior to the Brebner shooting; if there had been, the painters would have found it and repaired it. So what would have happened if Garstin-Walsh hadn’t staged his shooting act with you? Jourdain, finding a bullet-hole in the wall, would have reasoned thus:
‘“This hole must be the result of the single shot Garstin-Walsh fired at Brebner last night.
‘“It can’t have been made subsequently, because Brebner and the nurse were in here all night.
‘“Therefore when Garstin-Walsh fired at Brebner he missed. But there is a bullet from Garstin-Walsh’s revolver lodged in Brebner’s skull.
‘“Therefore Garston-Walsh must have shot Brebner earlier on, before he returned here and met Weems.
‘“And that doesn’t look much like self-defence; it looks like murder.”
‘That Brebner was blackmailing Garstin-Walsh is obvious enough. It’s obvious, too, that Garstin-Walsh decided he must put a stop to it. So as I see it, he must have shot Brebner after Brebner left The Three Crowns, have gone to the cottage to remove whatever evidence of misappropriation of Army supplies Brebner was using, and have then returned to his house. He’d shot Brebner in the skull, and so naturally assumed that he was dead, but—’
‘Yes, that’s the difficulty,’ Humbleby interposed. ‘The idea of a man with a bullet in his brain rushing about with a shotgun intent on vengeance—’
‘Oh come, Humbleby.’ Fen was mildly shocked. ‘It’s not common, I grant you, but there are plenty of cases on record. John Wilkes Booth, who assassinated Lincoln, is one. Gross and Taylor and Sydney Smith quote others. Brain injuries don’t kill at once, and in a certain proportion of cases they don’t kill at all. They don’t necessarily involve loss of consciousness or inability to act, either: there was that fourteen-year-old boy, you remember, who tripped and fell on an iron rod he was carrying; the rod went clean through his brain; but all that happened was that he pulled it out and went on home, and he didn’t die until more than a week later, after an interlude during which he hadn’t even felt particularly ill …
‘But Garstin-Walsh must have had a nasty turn when the man he’d left for dead burst in at his french windows. No wonder he was “fairly thoroughly unnerved”. No wonder his shot went wild. But no wonder, also, that Brebner could hardly hold the shotgun with which he intended to revenge himself; no wonder he collapsed just after Garstin-Walsh fired at him …
‘Garstin-Walsh must have rejoiced. He’d murdered a man, and now, by the queerest combination of accidents, the thing had been made to seem a perfect case of self-defence. The only snag lay in that superfluous, that tell-tale bullet-hole in the study wall. In the excitement following Brebner’s collapse it wouldn’t be noticed – the more so if a piece of furniture were unobtrusively shifted so as to conceal it. But there was no chance during the night of removing the bullet and plugging the hole; and there was very little chance that Jourdain would miss it when he examined the study next morning. So Garstin-Walsh, having heard from his housekeeper of Jourdain’s presence and intentions, and seeing no opportunity, with such a crowd of people in the house, of slipping into the study and dealing with the hole before meeting Jourdain, loaded his revolver with two live cartridges and a blank; and then – you having placed yourself conveniently in position near the french windows and the bullet-hole – staged his nervous breakdown.’
There was a long silence. Then Humbleby said: ‘Yes, I’m sure you’re right. But it’s all conjecture, of course.’
‘Oh, quite,’ said Fen cheerfully. ‘If my theory’s false, there won’t be any proof of it. And if it’s true, there won’t be any proof of it, either. So you can take your choice. The only possibility of checking it would be if the—’
He was interrupted by the shrilling of the telephone. ‘That might be for me,’ Humbleby told him. ‘I took the liberty of asking Jourdain to get in touch with me here if there was any news, so …’ And in fact the call was for him. He listened long and spoke little.
And presently, ringing off, he said:
‘Yes, it was Jourdain. He’s found those cartridge-cases.’
‘In a place where he’d looked previously?’
‘No. And none of them is a blank. Which means—’
‘Which means,’ said Fen as he picked up the whisky decanter and refilled their glasses, ‘that on this side of eternity there’s at least one thing we shall never know.’