“Have the goodness to take care of this, Mr Gregson,” said Alfred Swain quietly. “There must be an inquiry. The weapon is signed for but it is best that it should be in your custody now.”
During some thirty seconds, in the gloom before dawn, this ghastly drama of life and death was played before us. Mordaunt had put himself a hundred feet beyond any aid that we could give him, even if he were still alive. To save Sherlock Holmes, Swain had shot with the care of a man who knows he must hit his target with a single bullet and the confidence of one who is certain he can do it. Could he be sure of killing Mordaunt instantly? Had he done so? The major’s body went under at full length. There was a pause and then his head reappeared, hair streaming wet from his scalp. His arms threshed and he snatched at a frail wooden scull that had floated free.
Sergeant Acott waded in a dozen feet from the slippery bank until the water was almost at his chest.
“Get back, Mr Acott!” called Swain, “The mud is like treacle out there. You won’t come out of it.”
I thought again of Harry the Poacher in the Middle Deep. The weed clung tighter each time the poor fellow jumped breast-high from the water like a fish, gulping air, Mrs Grose had told us. The weighted mass that was festooning him pulled him back each time until he could jump no more. At the moment Mordaunt seemed upright, as if standing. But he could not be standing, where the floor of the lake was twenty feet down. Then he was on his back with arms spread out, snatching at air. Gregson and those about him talked busily of what to do. Holmes and Swain knew that there was nothing. The fugitive sank, motionless and expressionless. Perhaps he was dead already. The water settled and lay still. The drowning man appeared no more. Whatever the damage from Swain’s bullet, it had cut short his struggles.
“If ever a man took his own life, it was Mordaunt,” said Holmes philosophically. “Once he saw we were here, he knew he was done for. Trussed up for the assizes and the execution shed. In his place, I too should have fought it out.”
Alfred Swain showed only the calm that is often a consequence of shock. He stood in his plain, neat tailoring with the watch-chain across his waistcoat and gazed out over the misty lake as the daylight grew.
“The boat, Mr Holmes,” he said gently. “I believe we shall find that the boat will repay examination.”
13
The treachery of the Middle Deep was plain. A floor of mud sloped gradually from the bank for ten or twelve feet. Abruptly it became steeper. At the lake’s centre, the undercurrents that were created by diverting the river water had created a weed-filled ravine. Somewhere in the cold depths of this Major Mordaunt presumably lay in a clinging shroud of water weed.
A flat-bottomed wherry had been brought up from the Bly river on a trailer. It had been launched and now lay in position above the Middle Deep. The rope of a drag stretched out behind it. Inspector Swain’s commander, Superintendent Truscott, seemed to take pleasure in predicting that to trawl such contours as these would be a long and difficult job.
Contrary to my expectations, Mordaunt’s waterlogged boat had not sunk entirely. It wallowed becalmed with the rim of its hull just above the surface. The little craft was light enough to float when waterlogged, where a heavier and more businesslike ferry might have gone straight down. The two men in the wherry had attached a line to the rowing-boat’s painter and paid it out to the others on the bank. Like competitors in a tug-of-war, Alfred Swain’s constables took the strain and heaved the submerged hull gently into the shallows from which the water was receding.
“Don’t count on seeing Major Mordaunt for a day or two, Mr Holmes,” said Truscott morosely, stamping his feet and rubbing his hands as the boat was hauled in. “You can’t drag a lake bottom as steep as that one. Best let him pop up of his own accord. They all do so, sooner or later, once the gas starts to lift them. It won’t do for the coroner, though. That’s the difficulty.”
He walked off towards Sergeant Acott, presumably for the satisfaction of repeating to him what he had just said to us.
I had not seen Alfred Swain for more than an hour. He was no doubt in conference with the local coroner. A gravelly-bearded man in a dark suit, driving a horse and trap, certainly had the appearance of an officer of the court.
An inquest could come to only one conclusion. If ever there was a case of justifiable homicide I supposed it must be this. Mordaunt had proved himself an experienced shot, even in the half-light. His first aim had missed Sherlock Holmes by only a few inches. He had been given two chances to lay down his revolver and had declined both. Without Swain’s presence of mind and unexpected marksmanship, my friend would have stood no more chance against the second bullet than a duck in a shooting gallery.
It transpired that Alfred Swain was the only man to have drawn a firearm—and the last whom I expected to be carrying one. At eleven o’clock that morning he reappeared at last, riding a grey mare. Behind him a farm wagon carried a boat not much larger than Mordaunt’s but somewhat more sturdy. Such craft were generally on call to country police forces for use in rivers and reservoirs. The consequence was that each force had to take what it could get.
Two long planks were drawn down from the tail of the wagon to the mud of the bank.
“Mr Holmes!”
“Mr Swain?”
Swain walked closer.
“We can cross to the island, sir, if you would care to go. Before the county sheriff and others get here, perhaps you—and Dr Watson, if he wishes—would like to see for yourselves.”
“Major Mordaunt’s private kingdom?”
“If you were to do it, Mr Holmes, I think it had best be done without further delay.”
In plain English, once Superintendent Truscott’s guests arrived from Abbots Langley we should have as much chance of investigating the pleasure island as Adam and Eve had of returning to Paradise. What debt from the past did Alfred Swain owe to Sherlock Holmes that it should be repaid so amply now?
“There are boots on the wagon, gentlemen.”
We sat on a felled tree trunk and pulled our waders on. Our ferry boat was in the water. Supported by constables at either arm, we edged down a slippery plank and clambered over the stern of the hull. Swain took the opposite seat as oarsman in the bows.
The inspector was a quiet man by nature, son of a Dorset village schoolmaster, as Holmes later told me. It was still hard to say whether he was shocked or serene in the aftermath of Mordaunt’s death. As we were crossing the calm lake, he spoke softly—to us or to himself.
“What possessed him to stand up in the boat? Surely he knew he would swamp it!”
It seemed to me an eminently sensible comment, but that was all by way of conversation until we reached the island shore. We waded across some fifteen feet of mud before coming to a crude plank slipway. I thought that a man who brought a woman here would probably have to carry her ashore, establishing an intimacy from the first step. However, if anyone had been here for many months, there was little sign of it. A path had been trodden long before between laurel bushes and yew but the banks of brambles and nettles in flower were now badly in need of clearing.
The so-called Temple of Proserpine was no more than a few minutes’ walk from the water. With its single gable, it suggested a garden bungalow on an Indian tea plantation. Shutters were locked over the glass panels of its two double doors and there was a fixed window at either side of them. It might very well have served as a cricket pavilion, its front quite forty feet wide. Most of the original top coat of white paint had peeled away, leaving a cream undercoat with patches of bare, silvered wood.
Such was Mordaunt’s rendezvous with his female companions. Perhaps it was also a conveniently secret spot
