Mike Ashley - The Mammoth Book of Perfect Crimes and Impossible Mysteries

“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.

“Remembering that, I asked for records to be searched. The answer is, that ball was cast to be shot out of only two particular types of weapons. It’s of a size that’s quite obsolete to-day. Either it could have been shot from a long gun, registered in London by Adolph Levoisier, of Strasbourg, in 1826, or out of a duelling pistol fashioned by Gregory Gannion, a gunsmith who had an establishment in Pall Mall between the years 1702 and 1754.

“The exact date of Gannion’s application for a licence to put on the market a weapon of a new type and calibre which he called ‘an excellently powerful small-arm, for the practise of the duel, or in other uses, for delicacy and swiftness of discharge in defence or offence’… was February the ninth, 1709. And, according to all accounts, the bloodthirsty young bucks of that day went daffy about it. Y’see, it was the first ‘hair-trigger’ pistol on the market: ugly, but useful.

“I’m working up from that. I’ve a shrewd idea that good English lead wouldn’t come out of a continental long-gun. No , a Gannion duelling pistol seems indicated.”

I am getting ever more used to Barnabas Hildreth’s tortuous tricks. The queerly precise ordination of those words, “good English lead”, made me curious.

“How does one determine the nationality of-er-lead?” I suavely asked.

“All as easily as one differentiates between a Chinaman and a Zulu,” he sourly grinned. “All as simply as one distinguishes Cleveland iron-ore from Castillian heematite; Poldruinn copper from Norwegian; Aberdeen granite from that of Messina – by looking at it first of all, ass, and studying it afterwards.

“According to the assay-notes, furnished me this morning, the lead from which that ball was cast came from one particular area of Derbyshire, and nowhere else! What’s more, it’s almost pure native stuff” – his face shone with some inner ecstatic light – “and, as it chances, so absolutely unique… that it’s worth its weight, and more, in gold. In fact, if the fervours and excitements of the metallurgical chemists are anything to go by – and they’re simply frazzling over it – it’s the clue to a pretty fat fortune for someone!”

He got up then, and growling something about my hospitality and his thirst, calmly stalked across to my tantalus and mixed whisky and sodas. Then he challenged me across the brim of his glass.

“Well, old man, all the best! And here’s to the speedy solution of one of the neatest mysteries I’ve struck for months.”

So far as I recollect, it was two days later that Hildreth descended on me. He wanted me to go to Thornton Heath with him, and I went. We visited the premises occupied by Westmacott’s brother Ralph – Westmacott and Company, Ltd.: “Antique Furniture Restored, Renovated, Repaired and Reproduced” – reproduced mainly, if my layman’s eye had any common sense behind it.

Admittedly, Ralph Westmacott had certain specimen pieces in his workshops. These were the magnificent possessions of connoisseurs, to whom the factor of financial worth hardly counted. They were all undergoing tiny but incredibly painstaking forms of restoration, and guarded jealously for the treasures they were.

However, as Hildreth said, these were not our meat. Westmacott took us to the larger, general workshop. Here we saw really valuable, but ordinary, examples of olden furniture in the processes of repair and “faking”.

“We pride ourselves,” Westmacott told us, “on our ability to replace a faulty participle with a sound one, so meticulously reproduced and fitted – grafted on, one might say – that no one outside first-flight experts can detect the addition.”

“That, of course, necessitates,” smoothly came Hildreth’s question, “your carrying an amazing stock of old cabinet-making woods, I presume?”

Westmacott looked curiously at my friend.

“ Aye , amazing is the word,” he laughed. “Come and have a look in here!”

He preceded us to a vast loft that was filled by racks and shelving – and all of them packed with broken parts of old-fashioned furniture.

“Here you are,” he exulted, “from Tudor to Early Victorian; from linenfold panelling to pollard-oak sideboard doors… gathered together from the auction rooms of half the globe. We couldn’t carry on a day without ’em. Unless similar old stuff is used on replacement jobs-”

“Stuff like this, for instance,” Hildreth interrupted to point at a great stack of dirty wood, looking to me like huge half-cylinders of amber-flecked bog oak: split tree trunks. “This lot seems to be pretty ancient.”

Ralph Westmacott moved delicately to Hildreth’s side.

“ Aye ,” he concurred, “it’s old enough! That wood’s been buried in the earth for a century and more.”

Brightly, blandly, almost with the alert cockiness of a schoolboy, Barnabas Hildreth replied:

“I don’t doubt that for a moment, Mr Westmacott! They’re elm-wood water conduits, aren’t they? And, judging from their boggish appearance, they’ve come out of moorland or country where there’s plenty of peat about.”