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

Ralph Westmacott scratched his grizzled hair.

“Yes, they are conduits, and they certainly came out of peaty loam – from Derbyshire, as a matter of fact. We’ve men on the job up there now. They came from Ravensham Park, near a place called Battersby Brow… we bought the whole line of wooden water-pipes that used to serve the hall and the village. Finest tackle in the world for reproduction purposes.”

Grimly enough Hildreth chuckled.

“What a game it is!” he drily stated. “Now, ‘Battersby Brow,’ in Derbyshire” – he was jotting down these particulars in a notebook – “and ‘Ravensham Park,’ you say?”

“Yes, that’s all correct.” Westmacott seemed puzzled.

“And this hall you mentioned? What d’you call it?”

“Ravensham Hall, the residence of General Sir Arthur Koffard, you know.”

Hildreth put away his book and began to fumble among the blackened elm-wood. He pointed to one or two big fragments which lay about.

“Might I have a chunk to take away with me?” he inquired. “I want it for certain experiments that have to be made.” Westmacott nodded. “And will you ratify this? Certain lumps of this wood that you knew would be useless for your work you gave to your brother Henry, didn’t you?”

“I – I did! What’s the-”

“That’s right! I thought I recognised the stuff again. I saw some in his wood-shed.” Hildreth smiled. “Thanks!”

With that we went away and back to London.

From the “Black Bull,” at Battersby Brow in Derbyshire, a letter came to me on the twenty-ninth of October:

My dear Ingram,

If you can leave your mouldy rag to look after itself for the weekend, come over here and be interested. Of all the intricate bits of work I’ve ever struck, this is the trickiest! Don’t let me down, old chap. I promise you a really noble denouement for the mystery of the Westmacott bullet: an ending that, I suppose, you’ll stick on one of your scandalous chronicles of my cases and complacently claim as your own.

Sincerely,

B.H.

So I set out for Battersby Brow and the “Black Bull” as soon as I put my paper to bed in the early hours of Friday, the thirty-first. At nine o’clock the next morning I was in a beautiful and brilliant country of whistling airs and mighty hills.

Over breakfast, Barnabas crowed mightily.

“Done a lot of work since I saw you, old man! Only one tiny coping-stone to be put on, and the job’s complete.

“It was a Gannion duelling pistol that fired that ball. I’ve seen it. There’s a pair of ’em, and they’ve been laid away in a case since seventeen hundred and ten… One was discharged. The other was loaded, but I got permission to draw the charge. I drew it right enough!” He chuckled. “D’you know, it was a curious experience. There I had in hand another ball, similar to the one that wounded Westmacott. And there were tiny tattered fragments of a newspaper that had been used for a wad between bullet and powder – an issue of the Northern Intelligencer for August the first, seventeen-ten.

“The Koffards of Ravensham Hall have been awfully decent about everything. At first they were inclined to be stand-offish, but when I told old General Koffard the story you know, he tucked into things like a good ‘un.”

“Sorry to butt in, Barnabas – but, tell me, what story do I know? It occurs to me that 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.