The lightning winked over Westminster, and office workers queueing for buses in Whitehall looked up apprehensively at the lowering grey of the late afternoon sky. The day had dawned hot, so that most were without their coats and many without umbrellas, and the odds were against their reaching their homes before the rain began to fall. Distantly, above the rumble of rush-hour traffic, the thunder spoke. And in a room high up in a corner of new Scotland Yard, Detective-Inspector Humbleby walked to a window, looking out and down.
‘Here they come,’ he said. ‘And whether they’re guilty or innocent the Lord alone knows.’ His eye followed the two diminutive, foreshortened figures until they disappeared with their uniformed escort into the doorway below. ‘If they’re guilty, then their nerve must be colossal. But presumably nerve is one of the things experienced big-game hunters do acquire, so …’ He completed the sentence with a shrug.
‘They’re both that?’ Gervase Fen, professor of English Language and Literature in the university of Oxford, spoke out of a cloud of cigarette smoke. ‘The wife as well as the husband?’
‘Oh yes, certainly – though I understand that the woman isn’t quite as good a shot as the man …’ Rummaging, Humbleby had unearthed an old copy of the Tatler. ‘This,’ he added as he handed it across, ‘will give you an idea of what they look like.’
They looked slightly like giraffes, Fen concluded as he studied the photograph in question; and you would have taken them for brother and sister rather than for husband and wife. The woman was older than he had expected – forty at least. Her lean and apparently sunburned countenance wore a hard unspontaneous smile showing large buck teeth, and her short hair had been permanently waved by no niggardly hand. Her long nose was almost duplicated by her husband’s, and the eyes of both of them were disagreeably small. It was he, however, who contrived to look the younger and the more human of the two; a large pipe projected manfully from his lips, and he was in the act of lighting it with a frown of preoccupation and a vesta match. The caption stated that also present (at a charity garden party) were Mr and Mrs Philip Bowyer, recently returned from a big-game expedition in Tanganyika; and ‘Mrs Bowyer’, the Tatler hastened to explain, fearful of being thought to include mere polloi in its society pages, ‘is the second daughter of Sir Egerton and the late Lady Joan Wilmot, of Wilmot Hall in Derbyshire.’
Fen was still digesting this information when a telephone rang on the desk, and Humbleby picked it up.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes, I saw them come in. Keep them downstairs for a few minutes, will you? I’ll let you know when I’m ready for them.’ He replaced the instrument with a grimace. ‘Cowardice,’ he observed. ‘Procrastination. But I thought that perhaps you wouldn’t mind hearing about it, and telling me what you think.’
Fen nodded. ‘By all means. Your story’s been rather scrappy so far, and I’m still not really clear about what happened.’
Lightning flickered again in the narrow room, and this time the thunder was close after it; the storm was coming in fast from the south-west, and at its coming the wind had risen, spattering a handful of rain-drops against the panes. Humbleby put his hand up to the sash, shut the window, returned to his desk. The heat had dishevelled his accustomed neatness, and he wiped sweat from his forehead as he slumped into the revolving chair.
‘Here’s this girl, then,’ he said. ‘Eve Crandall. Twenty-four, brunette, as pretty and graceful as you expect a mannequin to be, sharing a tiny flat in Nottingham Place with another girl. She has a rich old uncle, Maurice Crandall, who’s made her his heiress. She has a big-game-hunting cousin, Philip Bowyer, who’s at present downstairs with his wife Hilary. And she has a studious cousin, James Crandall, who teaches at an elementary school in Twelford.’
‘James Crandall?’ Fen was frowning. ‘In my undergraduate days, there was a James Crandall contemporary with me at Magdalen. A gawky, conscientious, desperately dull sort of man with thick-lensed glasses and a stammer. He was one of those unfortunate people who are obviously doomed to come to nothing however hard they try, so that an elementary school, twenty years later—’
‘Yes, he could be the same one. I can vouch for the gawkiness and the glasses, though as to the rest,’ said Humbleby a shade grimly, ‘I just wouldn’t know – not at first hand, anyway …
‘Still, that’s by the way. The real point about all this set-up of uncle and cousins is this: that if Eve predeceases Maurice, the estate will be shared on Maurice’s death by Philip Bowyer and James Crandall; and that if both Eve and James Crandall predecease Maurice, the estate will go to Philip Bowyer intact. In other words, and not to be too delicate about it, schoolmaster James has a motive for killing Eve, and big-gamehunter Bowyer (together with his wife) has a motive for killing both Eve and James. Clear so far?
‘Now, uncle Maurice has carcinoma of the lungs. He may live two months or two weeks or only two days, but in any event he’s dying, and like most of us he has no particular relish for dying among strangers in a nursing-home. So he asks Philip and Hilary Bowyer, the most well-to-do of his relatives, to take him in at their house near Henley.’
‘A rather sanguine request,’ Fen commented, ‘in view of the fact that he hadn’t willed them his money.’
‘Oh, he’d left them something; the bulk of his fortune was to go to Eve, but he’d left the Bowyers something – and he was quite capable of cancelling that arrangement if they refused to have him in their house. The Bowyers aren’t, it turns out, as well off as they look – not well enough off, in any case, to sniff at the chance of an odd thousand or two: no doubt big-game hunting is an expensive hobby. Anyway, they agreed to have him.
‘They agreed to have him, and on the day he was due to arrive, rather more than a week ago, Eve travelled to Henley to see him settled in. That was to be expected; what was not to be expected was that James Crandall should forsake his little boys and turn up too. Turn up, however, he did – in the hope, maybe, of wheedling a rather larger bequest out of Maurice than the five hundred pounds he was destined for as things stood – and by the early afternoon they were all, excepting Maurice who was presumably still en route in an ambulance from the nursing-home, on the spot.
‘The Bowyers’ house stands on high ground overlooking the town and the river, about a mile out. It’s biggish – ten-bedroom calibre – and like a lot of biggish houses these days it’s going to seed for lack of an adequate staff. But Philip and Hilary are the sort of people who prefer pretension to comfort, so there they stay – and it may be that they’re attracted by the fact that there’s quite a lot of land attached, with things to shoot on it: though rabbits, I take it, must be something of a come-down after lions. There’s just one servant, a wretched overworked little woman who makes one feel that there’s something to be said, after all, for the independent, take-it-or-leave-it type that’s cropped up since the war. And it was this Mrs Jordan who opened the door to Eve Crandall when at about three o’clock she arrived in a taxi from the station.
‘By the time she got there, Hilary had left for the town to do some shopping, James had gone for a stroll, and Philip – since the ambulance wasn’t expected until tea-time at the earliest – was on the point of walking down to meet his wife and help her with her packages. So apart from the servant, Eve spent her first hour on the premises alone, and after she’d unpacked she wandered round the garden and eventually settled down in a deck-chair under a beechtree, facing a coppice of beeches about three hundred yards away beyond the garden fence. She sat very still in the chair with her eyes closed, and anyone watching her must certainly have thought her asleep. But for some unexplained reason she was nervous, and her sideways jerk, when she heard the shot, was about as instantaneous as it’s possible for such a reflex to be. The bullet, from an express rifle, tore a track in her scalp and grazed her skull; another fraction of an inch and it would certainly have killed her. As it was, she was knocked unconscious, according to the doctors, the moment it touched her, and so failed to hear the second shot which immediately followed.
‘Both shots, however, were heard by Mrs Jordan and by the postman on his way up the drive, and these two witnesses converged in front of the house thirty seconds later to find Eve lying in a huddle beside the deck-chair and Hilary, white and shaken, emerging from the coppice opposite. Two minutes later Philip arrived. His wife had hurried home ahead of him, leaving him to collect and carry her parcels. And the situation was this, that James Crandall, shot through the head by Hilary, was lying in the coppice clutching the express rifle which had been fired at Eve.
‘Well, the local police took over, and in due course I was called in to work with them, and we got statements from everyone concerned.’ From a salmon-pink cardboard folder Humbleby extracted a sheaf of typescript. ‘Here, for instance, is Hilary’s, what’s relevant of it:
‘“I left my husband in the village because he had things to buy and I did not want to stay with him in case I should not be home in time to meet the ambulance. I came home across the fields, which is the shortest way, and entered the house by the back door. At this time I did not see Eve, since she was in the front garden. I was on my way up to my room to take off my hat when I saw through the open door of the gun-room that a Mannlicher express rifle was missing, and my suspicions were aroused because I knew that my husband did not have the gun, and no one else should have touched it. I thought of my cousin James Crandall, who had been asking questions about the guns. I put a small automatic pistol in my pocket and went out to look for him. I took the pistol because I was afraid James might intend some harm to Eve, whose death would benefit him. I had not liked his manner and was frightened of what he might do. I went round to the front garden where Eve was asleep in the deck-chair, and I thought I saw someone moving in the coppice. As quickly as possible I returned to the back garden and from there crossed into the field where the coppice is, entering the coppice from the side away from the garden. In the coppice I saw James with the Mannlicher pointed at Eve. I pointed my pistol at him and was about to speak when he fired and Eve fell. Immediately I fired at him. It was self-defence, I consider, because he would have killed me because I had seen him shoot Eve, but I did not intend to kill him. I am a fairly good shot with a rifle, but not with an automatic, which is a different kind of shooting.”’
Humbleby pushed the papers aside. ‘So much for that. Philip Bowyer heard the two shots, but by his own account he arrived too late to see anything. And that, really, is all there is to it. James Crandall’s prints were on the Mannlicher all right, and the position of his body was perfectly consistent with his having fired at Eve. On the other hand, the Bowyers undoubtedly had a very strong motive for wishing both James and Eve dead, and it’s easy to see how the thing could have been arranged. Thus: first they shoot off the rifle and hit Eve (I say ‘they’ because of course there’s no proof whatever that Philip didn’t catch up with his wife, in spite of their having left the village separately); next, James having previously been lured to the spot on any pretext you like to think of, they kill him with the automatic before he has time to as much as open his mouth; then Hilary rushes out of the coppice, leaving Philip behind to arrange the scene and put James’s fingerprints on the rifle; and finally, two minutes later, Philip appears with the astonished air of one who’s just arrived from the village with the weekly groceries … That, I repeat, is how it could have been done. But was it done like that? Or is Hilary’s story the simple truth?’
If these questions were other than rhetorical, Fen gave no sign of recognizing the fact. ‘As a matter of interest,’ he said, ‘how will Hilary’s story stand up in court?’
‘Rather well, I should imagine. After all, James Crandall did have a very good motive for killing Eve, and as long as a jury can be induced to believe that he tried to do so, Hilary will never be censured for shooting him. Yes, she’ll get away with it all right. But I’m still not quite satisfied.’
‘And Eve,’ said Fen. ‘What became of her?’
‘She was taken to hospital and is still there; but she’s pretty well recovered by now. I got her statement about what happened up to the moment the rifle bullet knocked her out, this morning …’ Humbleby paused hopefully. ‘Well?’ he said. ‘Any ideas?’
But for once Fen could only shake his head. The rain, falling heavily now, drummed against the window, and it had grown so dark that Humbleby leaned forward and switched on the desklamp. Lightning filled the room, and Humbleby had counted aloud up to four before the thunder came.
‘The storm’s going away,’ he said absently. ‘Well, well, I suppose there’s nothing for it except—’
And then he checked himself, for Fen was staring at him with the eyes of a man half blinded by unaccustomed sunlight. ‘And what the devil,’ said Humbleby, startled, ‘are you—’
He got no further. ‘The girl’s statement,’ said Fen abruptly. ‘Is there a copy of it I could look at?’
‘Eve’s statement, you mean.’ Humbleby sought for it in the folder and passed it across the desk. ‘Yes, here it is. But why—’
‘Here’s what I wanted.’ Fen had turned at once to the final page. ‘Listen to this. I remember moving to one side as I heard the shot; then straight away everything went black.’
‘Well? What about it?’
Fen tapped the papers with a long forefinger. ‘Do you consider this girl’s story trustworthy?’
‘Yes, I most certainly do. Why shouldn’t it be? She didn’t kill James Crandall, if that’s what you’re getting at. Quite apart from the fact that she had no motive, it’d have been a physical impossibility.’
‘All right, all right. But the point is, she’s not likely to have imagined any of this?’
‘No. She’s not the sort.’
‘Excellent. And now, two questions – no, sorry, three. First, is it certain that there weren’t more than two shots fired?’
‘Absolutely. Philip and Hilary and the postman and Mrs Jordan are all agreed about that.’
‘Good. And, secondly, is it certain that the rifle bullet knocked Eve out the moment it touched her?’
‘Good Lord, yes. It’d be like a superhuman blow with a tiny hammer. There are cases on record—’
‘Bless you, Humbleby, how didactic you’re getting … And now here’s my final question: is it certain that Hilary’s shot killed James Crandall instantaneously?’
‘My dear chap, his brain was puloed. Of course it’s certain.’
Fen relaxed with a little sigh. ‘Then providing Eve’s a good witness,’ he murmured, ‘there’s a fair chance of getting Philip and Hilary Bowyer hanged. Their motive for wanting Eve and James dead is so overwhelming that they’ll be at a disadvantage from the start, and that one little scrap of evidence ought to tip the scales against them.’
Humbleby groaned. ‘God give me patience,’ he said meekly. ‘What little scrap of evidence? You mean that in fact they did arrange it all the way I suggested?’
‘Just that. I’ve no doubt they’d been contemplating something of the sort for some time past, but of course the scheme they eventually adopted, depending as it did on Eve’s settling in the deck-chair, must have been improvisation. One of them – I presume Hilary – must have fetched the guns from the house while the other got hold of James; and they could take James to the coppice on the pretext of showing him – well, perhaps rabbit-snares: that would account for their bringing a rifle, and James doesn’t sound to me the sort of person who’d know enough about guns to realize the incongruity of a Mannlicher express model in the context of rabbits. On the other hand—’
‘These are happy speculations,’ said Humbleby with restraint. ‘But I have the idea that a moment ago you mentioned evidence. If it wouldn’t put you to too much trouble—’
‘Evidence!’ said Fen affably. ‘Yes, I was almost forgetting that. The evidence of the storm – or to be more accurate, of the storm and yourself in combination. Like so many people, you counted out the interval between the lightning flash and the thunder. Why? Because light travels faster than sound, and by gauging the interval you can gauge how far away the storm is. But there are other things, as well as light, which travel faster than sound; and one of them, as you well know, is a bullet fired from an express rifle.
‘On a hot day, sound travels at about 1,150 feet per second; but on any sort of day, over a distance of three hundred yards, a bullet from a Mannlicher rifle travels nearly three times as fast, at an average speed of about 3,000 feet per second. Therefore the shot Eve heard was not the rifle-shot at all – she couldn’t have heard that, since the bullet grazed her, and knocked her out, before the report of the rifle could reach her ears. But she did hear a shot – and since there were admittedly only two shots fired, the report she heard must have been the report of the automatic which killed James. In other words, the report of the automatic preceded the report of the rifle; which means that James was dead before the rifle was fired; which means, in turn, that it certainly wasn’t he who fired it.’
‘Well, I’m damned,’ said Humbleby. ‘What it amounts to, then, is that the Bowyers fired their two shots in the wrong order. If Eve had been killed, as they intended, that wouldn’t have mattered. But as it is—’ He reached for the telephone.
‘Will you be able,’ Fen asked, ‘to get a verdict of Guilty on that evidence?’
‘I think so, yes. With any luck we shall hang them.’ Humbleby put the receiver to his ear. ‘Charge Room, please … But it’s a pity they should have had all that trouble for nothing.’
‘For nothing?’
‘Yes. Mrs Jordan took the telephone message, but there was no one about to pass it on to. It was from the nursing-home, of course … You see, Maurice Crandall died – leaving all his money to Eve, whose will was decidedly not in the Bowyers’ favour – while they were actually carrying him out to the ambulance: that is, a comfortable two hours before the shooting started. Poor dears – (yes, Betts, you can send them up now) – they never had a chance.’