'Yes, Mother.'
'I have a right to know. When something as wicked and terrible as this happens, I have a right to know why. And I'm not the only one, emily,' she warned. 'The vicar will want to speak to you as well.'
'The vicar?'
'Taking your own life is an offence against God – and you made it worse by trying to do it from a church tower. The vicar says that it would have been an act of blasphemy. Is that what you meant to do?'
'No, no,' cried Emily.
'Suicide is evil.'
'I know.'
'We couldn't have buried you on consecrated ground.'
'I didn't think about that.'
'Well, you should have,' said Winifred, bitterly. 'I don't want two members of the family denied a Christian burial in the churchyard at St Mary's. You could have ended up like your father, emily. That would have broken my heart.'
Emily began to tremble violently and her mother feared that she was about to have another fit but the girl soon recovered. The experience she had been through was too frightful for her to contemplate yet. Her mind turned to more mundane concerns.
'I'm hungry,' she announced.
'Are you?' said her mother, laughing in relief at this sign of normality. 'I'll make you some breakfast at once. You need to be up and dressed before he calls.'
'Who?'
'Inspector Colbeck. He was the person who saved your life.'
A long sleep had revived Robert Colbeck and got him up early to face the new day. The stinging sensation in his wound had been replaced by a distant ache though his left arm was still rather stiff when he moved it. Before breakfast, he was outside the Saracen's Head, standing in the position that he had occupied the previous evening and trying to work out where the bullet might have gone. Deciding that it must have ricocheted off the wall, he searched the pavement and the road over a wide area. He eventually found it against the kerb on the opposite side of the high street. Colbeck showed the bullet to Victor Leeming when the latter joined him for breakfast.
'It's from a revolver,' said the Inspector.
'How can you tell, sir? The end is bent out of shape.'
'That happened on impact with the wall. I'm going by the size of the bullet. My guess is that it came from a revolver designed by Robert Adams. I saw the weapon on display at the Great Exhibition last year.'
'Oh, yes,' said Leeming, enviously. 'Because we saved Crystal Palace from being destroyed, you were given two tickets by Prince Albert for the opening ceremony. You took Miss Andrews to the Exhibition.'
'I did, Victor, though it wasn't to see revolvers. Madeleine was much more interested in the locomotives on show, especially the Lord of the Isles. No,' he went on, 'it was on a second visit that I took the trouble to study the firearms because they were the weapons that we would be up against one day – and that day came sooner than I expected.'
'Who is this Robert Adams?'
'The only serious British rival to Samuel Colt. He did not want the American to steal all the glory so he developed his solid-frame revolver in which the butt frame and barrel were forged as a single piece of metal.'
'And this was what they fired?' said Leeming, handing the bullet back to him. 'You thought that it came from a pistol.'
'A single-cocking pistol, Victor. Adams used a different firing mechanism from the Colt. I'm sufficiently patriotic to be grateful that it was a British weapon,' said Colbeck, pocketing the bullet. 'I'd hate to have been shot dead by an American revolver last night.'
'Who would own such a thing in Ashford?'
'A good point.'
'You were right to stay on the ground when you were hit, sir. If it was a revolver, it could have been fired again and again.'
'Adams designed it so that it would fire rapidly. What probably saved me was that the self-cocking lock needed a heavy pull on the trigger and that tends to upset your aim.'
'Unless you get close enough to the target.'
'We'll have to make sure that he doesn't do that, Victor.'
Having finished his breakfast, Colbeck sat back and wiped his lips with his napkin. Leeming ate the last of his meal then sipped his tea. He pulled a slip of paper from his pocket.
'You want me to talk to these three women, then?'
'Ask them why they signed that petition.'
'One of them lives in a farm near Wye.'
'Then I suggest that you don't go there by cart. Take a train from Ashford station. Wye is only one short stop down the line.'
'What will you be doing, sir?'
'Going back to source.'
'Source?'
'I'm going to have a long-overdue talk with emily Hawkshaw,' said Colbeck. 'This whole business began when she had that encounter with Joseph Dykes. It's high time that the girl confided in me. After what happened on the top of that church tower yesterday, I feel that Emily owes me something.'
Caleb Andrews had been driving trains for so long that he knew exactly how long it took him to walk to Euston Station from Camden. He also knew how important punctuality was to a railway company. After a glance at the clock, he got up from the table and reached for his hat.
'I'm off, Maddy.'
'Goodbye,' she said, coming out of the kitchen to give him a kiss.
'What are you going to do today?'
'I hope to finish the painting.'
'One of these fine days,' he said, 'you must come down to Euston and do a painting of me on the footplate. I'd like that. We could hang it over the mantelpiece.'
'I've done dozens of drawings of you, Father.'
'I want to be in colour – like the Lord of the Isles.'
'You are the Lord of the Isles,' she said, fondly. 'At least, you think you are when you've had a few glasses of beer.'
Andrews laughed. 'You know your father too well.'
'Try not to be late this evening.'
'I will. By the way,' he said, 'you needn't bother to read the newspaper this morning. There's no mention at all of Inspector Colbeck. Without my help, he's obviously making no progress.'
'I think that he is. Robert prefers to hide certain things from the press. When he's working on a case, he hates having any reporters around him. They always expect quick results.'
'The Inspector had an extremely quick result. As soon as he got to Ashford, someone else was murdered on a train.'
'Father!'
'You can't be any quicker than that.'
'Go off to work,' she said, opening the door for him, 'and forget about Robert. He'll solve these murders very soon, I'm sure.'
'So am I, Maddy. He's got a good reason to get a move on,' said Andrews with a cackle. 'The Inspector wants to get back here and have his painting of the Lord of the Isles.'
Robert Colbeck was pleased with the way that the sleeve of his frock coat had been replaced. George Butterkiss had done such an excellent job sewing on a new sleeve that Colbeck was able to wear the coat again.
