The Mammoth Book of Perfect Crimes and Impossible Mysteries

“Wasn’t it natural for your maid to open that door? Why yourself?”

“Why not? Especially in-in such a crisis! As a matter of fact, Biddy was hopeless – helpless.”

The plain-clothes man watched her through half-closed eyes.

“Now, you remember, you also told us that you came helterskeltering down the stairs at such a rate that you bumped into this Bridget O’Hara woman at the bottom. And she’d just flown out of the kitchen – hey? ”

“Perfectly correct. When the shot was fired, Biddy dropped a plate or something. Then she rushed here. We – we converged on the room like two mad things.”

“No one went out of the door.” It seemed that the plain-clothes man was musing aloud. “No one, so you say, went up the stairs past you. No one could have doubled out by way of the kitchen, and no one could have doubled out of here back into the dining-room or into the cupboard under the stairs, without you or your servant seeing ’em… Um-m-m!” He paused, and ignored Mrs Westmacott completely, to smile past her at Inspector Ormesby. “And no weapon found,” he slowly murmured. “You carry on here, Inspector. Strikes me I’ll have to have another heart-to-heart talk with our faithful Bridget – our exceptionally clever and faithful Bridget. Perfect treasure of a maid, I’ll bet!”

Pamela Westmacott flinched as though a viper had reared itself before her eyes as she watched the inimical C.I.D. man saunter from the room. Mad as it seemed; horrible, fantastic and unreal as it was, nevertheless she realised she was the suspect here.

Now let interpolation be made of the somewhat astounding experience of an official police photographer, called Coghill.

A genial little fellow, Egbert Coghill; a craftsman of infinite patience and capability. He was the man who went to The Nook the next day and, acting on police instructions, set about securing photographs of the drawing-room and, more especially, the bullet-splintered radio-set.

Mr Coghill was highly gratified by all he saw. Plenty of light, artificial and otherwise; plenty of space, and most admirable contrasts of dark furnishings against pale matt walls.

Cheerily, with an incessant whispering whistle, he moved about and made himself quite at home. He dumped his big camera on a table. The black leather case, which contained his plates in their mahogany slides, he placed in front of the wireless cabinet. Still softly whistling, he pottered around, making his notes and selecting his objects and angles.

Thereafter he erected his camera and screened its peerless lens with a precisely-chosen colour-filter, designed to obtain for him the correct qualities and the infinitude of detail that the satisfaction of his craftsmanship demanded.

He made various long exposures. He took photographs of the door, the windows, the blood-stained rug, the untidy hearth, and the arm-chair in which Westmacott was sitting when he was wounded. After these, Coghill concentrated on his most important work. He removed his plate carrier from its place in front of the wireless set and focused on the half-embedded bullet and the starry matrix wherein it lay. He expended his remaining four plates on this.

When he came to the development of his material, Coghill was astonished and alarmed. Without exception, each dripping negative held-superimposed on its actual detail – a wee portrait of something that appeared to be an astronomical portrait view of the planet Saturn. These were ring-impounded orbs which had a quality of eerie brilliancy that had struck the plates with something amounting almost to halation. Yet they were mottled by shadows of an intensity and a delicacy Mr Egbert Coghill had never previously developed out of any sensitive emulsion.

More than this phenomena, the four exposures of the wireless cabinet were useless. These, which should have been Coghill’s acme, not only bore the eerie imprint of the tiny incandescent “planet”, but a great maelstrom of fog about the place where the bullet should have been. The cabinet was clear enough. Only that area which should have been occupied by a representation of the leaden slug was at fault.

Mr Coghill equipped himself with another camera and a new assortment of plates. Back he went to the drawing-room of The Nook. He duplicated his previous exposures and again developed them.

None of this second group of negatives showed the Saturn-like globe. Equally, none of the seven plates he had, secondarily, exposed on the cabinet front was in any better state than the former four. Except for the non- appearance of the queer orb, there were the identical coils of fogginess about the splintered woodwork – and no sign of the bullet.

Mr Egbert Coghill made a number of prints from all these negatives. Together with his notes and the plates themselves, he gave these into police keeping. This done, he fared forth and drank deeply.

Without much loss of time those photographs went, by way of Scotland Yard, to a Home Office department in Whitehall: to Barnabas Hildreth. He studied them and puzzled over them, as he afterwards told me, until he was sick to death of the very sight of them. Disgruntled and bewildered, Barnabas then went out to Thornton Heath and interviewed the Westmacotts.

The unfortunate Henry had nothing of much value to relate. He had been reading, he said, and had just put aside his evening paper to listen to the broadcast. As he leaned back in his chair, taking off his pince- nez and rubbing his closed eyes, he heard a curiously violent hissing as of air escaping from a pin- punctured tyre. Then there was a detonation and a fierily enormous blow at his shoulder. The next thing he realised was that he was wambling about the floor, suffering pain.

He scouted the idea that anyone could have been in the room with him without his knowledge. And on the subject of the police theory – that his wife had shot him and, in collusion with Bridget O’Hara, had thereafter established incontestable alibi-he was sardonically and sulphurously vehement. When he discovered Hildreth so far agreed with him under that head as to veto further official brow-beating, Westmacott became a different man. He was so relieved, so pathetically relieved, that Hildreth was touched – actually was humanised sufficiently to accept an invitation to stay for tea!

So it came about that the grim Intelligence Service officer and Master Brian Westmacott became friends. Hildreth chuckled over this.

“There was no resisting the little beggar, Ingram. He’s a sturdy kid and as sensible as the deuce. No sooner had I finished examining the drawing-room than he lugged me off to build what he called a ‘weal twue king’s palace’-from bits of wood; wood such as I’ve never seen a child playing with before. He had a big box full of sawn- up chair legs and rails; ‘pillars’ for his palace. And he’d scores of miniature arches and so forth – all shaped out of carved walnut and mahogany and oak and elm-little blocks, battens and angle-pieces that had originally been parts of furniture. One glance at ’em showed they were scores of years old and had come from the workshops of masters like Hepplewhite and Chippendale.”

I sensed something of extraordinary import here.

“Oh, and where’d he got ’em from?”

“Out of the family woodshed. Or, at least, his father had.” Hildreth grinned. “I looked it over-lots of the same stuff there. Y’see, Westmacott has a brother in the antique furniture trade: does restorations and repairs and so forth. Westmacott gets all the waste from his brother’s workshops. The likely bits he cuts up to add to Brian’s collection of blocks and pillars. The remainder is burnt.

“While I was in the drawing-room, old man” – he deliberately went off at a tangent – “I poked that bullet out of the wireless set and took a pair of callipers to it. It’s a pistol ball right enough. But where in the name of glory did it come from? And, who cast it – when?”

“‘Who cast it?’” I echoed. “What, isn’t it an ordinary revolver slug?”

“Mass-produced?” Barnabas rubbed his hands together in glee. “Not on your life! It’s as big as a marble and perfectly spherical. And it has marks on it that only the closure of a beautifully accurate bullet-mould could have made. More than that. It’s of an unusual calibre-one so unusual that it opens up a tremendous field of conjecture, yet, at the same time, defines the narrowest of tracks. A track, indeed, that a fool could follow.”

Silently I watched the peculiar fellow twiddle about with his smoking cigarette. He was looking through its writhing spirals at me with a glitter of satanical humour in his dark eyes.

“Calibres of firearms,” he softly stated, “are not little matters left to individual discretion, Ingram. They’re registered and pedigreed better than bloodstock – at least, in this country. Ever since 1683 any armourer or gunsmith drilling a new size of bore has had to deposit a specimen barrel and exact measurements with the Tower authorities before he could fit it to a stock or sell or exploit it in any way.