The Mammoth Book of Perfect Crimes and Impossible Mysteries

I’ve only a few strikingly dissimilar and baffling incidents in mind, all hazily mixed up with lead that’s ‘worth its weight in gold’ and old elm logs which you proved had come from this district.”

Hildreth finished eating and lit a cigarette.

“Listen, old man, and follow me carefully… Go back in thought to the night of the twenty-third. You have Westmacott sitting in his chair. A bullet, apparently fired out of the void, strikes his shoulder and is deflected into the wireless set. Point the first to be made: direction of bullet’s flight proved it was shot from somewhere in the region of Westmacott’s feet. Got that?” I surveyed the scene in mind… I had to agree. “Now for point the second. Had a ball of that size possessed a high velocity, it’d have made the dickens of a mess of the humerus. It’d have caused a comminuted fracture, and, without much doubt, it would have glanced across and gone through his throat.

“But no, it was a missile of low velocity – only a direct compound fracture of the scapula socket and a lazy glide off, to smack the front of the wireless set.

“No one can say where the ball came from. The ineffable Egbert Coghill goes to photograph it… He puts his platecarrier dead in front of the set, incidentally in front of the bullet. For fully a quarter of an hour he footles about, then, when he comes to take his photographs, he carries on each plate he afterwards exposes a portrait of the ball, transmitted by its own power through the leather case, through the whole clutter of his mahogany slides and, in fact, through everything within eighteen inches of the radio cabinet!”

I jumped at that.

“D’you mean those Saturn-like globes were-”

“Photographs of that ball! Precisely! It emitted a short, hard ray of far more intensity than the usual X-ray apparatus employs!”

“But how on earth could that come about?”

“Pitch-blende,” said Barnabas Hildreth, “that’s why! Apart from certain areas in Cornwall, only the Peak district of Derbyshire and some isolated caverns round about Ingleborough in Yorkshire have pitch-blende deposits. Usually, it’s in association with lead that has a high silver content… The assay of that ball not only showed lead and silver, but definite traces of pitch- blende striations, all melted together.

“To clinch that part of the business, however” – Hildreth glanced at the time – “remember that the second batch of Coghill’s prints did not show the eerie little ‘planet’. That was because he did not bung his plate-carrier in front of the set on his second venture. The active emissions were powerless outside a small range.

“But neither set of plates would betray anything except a fogginess where the bullet should have been. What could you reasonably expect?” Hildreth shrugged. “A long exposure, with powerful lens concentrating radium rays on a speedy photographic emulsion – nothing but fog could result!”

In the end I realised that Hildreth was right. Radio-active properties in that leaden slug would explain everything. Incidentally I caught the drift of what he meant when he spoke about the value of the bullet and its potentiality as the clue to a fortune.

“Do you mind” – Hildreth was on his feet and again looking at his watch – “if we hustle? We’ve a walk of a few miles if we’re to get that coping-stone set, y’know. And I want it done to-day.”

That long tramp across the sage-green acres of the Derbyshire countryside terminated in the park of Ravensham Hall. A group of navvies, excavating a snakish trench, paused in their work and watched us curiously. And, from out of a near-by hut, a podgy and bespectacled man clad in a white coat, and an old iron-haired fellow with a face of claret, came to greet us. One was a chemist called Sowerby and the elder man was Major-General Sir Arthur Koffard, the owner of the estate.

“Well, Sowerby,” Hildreth briskly questioned when introductions were completed, “had any luck? Tried my little experiment – eh?”

Sowerby smiled unctuously and beckoned us back to the hut. In there, he pointed to a fire-clay retort that glowed above a fierce petrol-air lamp. Around the squat nozzle of the retort a big plume of intensely blue and brilliant flame was glowing. It made the popping sound of the burst of gorse-pods to August sun: an infinitesimal tattoo of whispering explosions.

“Yes, Mr Hildreth, your surmise was right enough. It’s methyl hydride, without a doubt.” He pointed to the halcyon fire. “Almost pure, to burn like that.”

“Most ’strordinary – most ’strordinary thing,” this was the crisp clacking of Koffard, “tha’ one can live a lifetime, ’mong things like these, an’ never know – never know. ’Course, this land’s been full o’ will-o’-th’-wisp lights for years, but one never stops to give ’em much thought – what?”

Barnabas abstractedly nodded and walked out. We followed him to the side of the trench. For a long while he studied the enormous hollow trunks that the navvies had dug out of the black and oozy earth.

“Magnificent trees,” he muttered. “Veritable giants! Took some labour, I should say, to gouge their innards out!”

Then he turned to Koffard and asked him something about a map.

“Aye, I’ve got it here.” The rattlevoiced old officer produced a tin cylinder and drew out of it a scroll inscribed by rusted lines of ink. “The avenue stood across there. Nigel Koffard fought his duel” – he pointed to a level sward forty yards away – “just on that patch. At the beginning of the avenue, exactly.”

When we went to this place we could plainly see a series of little hummocks stretching, in parallel, for almost half a mile. It was explained to me that here had been a hundred and more elms making a great avenue that was felled in 1803 – under each knoll was a mighty stump. The trunks, hollowed out, had gone into the formation of that pipe-line (for conveying drinking water from a hillside spring) the navvies were excavating.

Hildreth stopped exactly on the spot on which one Nigel Koffard had taken his stance to fight a duel on the morning of August the second, 1710.

“Now Sir Arthur,” Hildreth murmured, “let’s work things out. Your ancestor challenged his cousin to a duel, primarily over the intentions of that cousin toward your ancestor’s sister. When the affair came to its head, Nigel Koffard was fully determined to put a ball through his cousin. But that doughty lad, conscious of honour and innocence, did not so much as lift his own pistol. Refused, point-blank, to defend himself.”

“Tha’s right; quite right!” Koffard applauded. “He must ha’ had guts, y’know – simply stood there. Completely broke Nigel’s nerve.”

“And the said Nigel,” Hildreth grinned, “thereupon did a bit of quick thinking. It dawned on him that he had misjudged his man. So, to show his regret and to extend an olive branch, he turned and fired his bullet straight into the nearest elm. Whereupon the youngsters shook hands. The cousin got permission to marry Nigel’s fair sister, and the Gannion duelling pistols – one discharged and the other loaded – were put back in their case and guarded thereafter, for the sake of the episode, as family heirlooms. And everyone lived happily ever afterwards.”

“Precisely, sir!” said General Koffard. “Admirably put, sir! B’gad quite neat, I say – neat!”

“Then, if that’s so” – Hildreth was already on the move – “we’ll trouble that invaluable plan of yours once again. Now we want to see this place called Skelter’s Pot, where lead was mined in those days.”

… We tramped a full mile up a mountainous slope and were eventually rewarded by the view of a bite into a pinkish face of spar, which the old map told us was “Skelter’s Pot.”

“Out of here,” Sir Arthur Koffard told us, “came all the lead used hereabouts. The hall is roofed by it. That pistol-ball was certainly cast from it. But it doesn’t pay to work it now.”

Hildreth took a geologist’s hammer from his pocket and knocked away at a piece of semi-translucent quartz in which dull grey patches showed and on which strangely green filaments were netted.

“I would like,” he softly returned as he put this specimen away, “to own your roof! At a modest estimate, it’ll be worth more than the hall and this estate put together.”

“Now, you see, old chap” – Hildreth tapped the rough pencil sketch he had made – “this was the way of it.” I leaned across the table, and under the steady oil-lamp light of the old Black Bull, I looked at the drawing. “Here we’ve all we need.”

I smoked my pipe and wondered.

“When Nigel Koffard shot that ball, at closest range, into the living elm-tree it made a deep cavity, a tunnel, in which it stopped. In a few more years a ‘rind-gall’ was formed. The elm closed over the wound in its structure by a growth of annular rings. The cylindrical little tunnel remained and the ball remained, precisely as they were.