Maurice Walsh - Nine Strings to your Bow (Maurice Walsh) (Literary Thoughts Edition)

“I was walking along the path at a good clip when I saw my uncle’s two wolfhounds lying down on the edge of a copse. I wasn’t surprised to see them, but I was surprised not to see my uncle about. Not that I wanted to, mind you. We’d probably only have renewed the quarrel of the day before. Then I noticed something. There was grass fringing the path, and I noticed the hounds were lying unusually high, as if they were resting on something. I walked through the grass to see what it might be. As I approached, the dogs showed their teeth and hackled and growled, fiercely. I was puzzled. Ordinarily they were friendly to me. As I drew closer they grew more savage. Then I saw they were lying on the body of a man.” Peter’s mouth drew together in a hard line.

“You didn’t recognize who it was at first?” Con asked.

“No. My first thought was that the dogs had turned man-killer and done in Charley Wells, the poacher. Then I saw the brown heather-mixture of the tweed jacket on the body, and I knew it was Uncle Mark.

“I couldn’t approach closer, with those two red-eyed angry dogs standing guard. I had to get help, and a gun with which to deal with the dogs if necessary. I was still thinking it was the dogs who had done him in. I ran to the Home Farm. My double barreled shotgun, which usually rested on hooks behind the door, was gone. I thought only at the time that some one of the farm hands had borrowed it for rabbit shooting. I phoned the police at Eglintoun. I told them where the body was and to bring a gun with which to deal with the dogs, as mine was missing. I started back for the scene of what I still thought was an accident, and was overtaken before I got there by the police, in the persons of Superintendent Mullen and Inspector Myles.

“They had to kill the dogs, finally, to get to the body. It was then they found that Uncle Mark had been shot through the spine and the back of the head, and that it had been no accident. It was murder.” Peter hesitated.

Con knew the next stages of the story well.

The police surgeon arrived. It was 8:30 Sunday morning. The body was warm. The first thing the surgeon did was to take the internal temperature of the body. It was 90°, or eight degrees less than normal. In ordinary circumstances cooling of a body after death takes place at the rate of about two degrees per hour, and that seemed to fix the time of death at about four o’clock that Sunday morning. But the circumstances were not ordinary, not by any means.

The police surgeon pointed at the carcasses of the dead dogs and asked a question: “How long were these lying on the body?” No one could tell him. The surgeon shook his head. “Then I can’t tell you when Mark Aitken died. If these dogs discovered the body shortly after death and lay on it at once, the warmth of their bodies, somewhat above the normal human temperature, would slow down cooling and rigor mortis to an extent I’m not aware of. It might be anything from four to twelve hours.”

The surgeon never did find out. No one had found out, neither the prosecution nor the defense at the trial. Superintendent Mullen had seized on this uncertainty. He had heard of the rowing between Peter and his uncle. He began hounding Peter. He demanded his alibi for the whole of the possibly critical time before Mark’s death. Peter went over the night before. He’d been playing poker at the club. And before that? He’d been fishing. Alone? Yes. Anyone see him? Peter was not aware. Caught anything? A dozen and a half first run sea trout. Where were the fish now? Peter told his story of catching them by the brook. Mullen had one-track persistence. He would stick to Peter till Peter had established his alibi. They went to look for the fish. They weren’t there. They searched every sally-bush in the radius of a hundred yards. There was no scale of a fish to be found, nor any rod or bag.

Mullen asked if there were anything in the bag but fish. Peter explained there was a telescope gaff in the netted front, a leather-bound fishing book with parchment leaves and pockets and felts. He said it contained several good casts for trout and salmon and a valuable collection of flies, many of them dressed by himself. He was an expert fly dresser. Neither rod, nor bag, nor fishing book was ever recovered. So much for Peter’s fish story. It was no alibi at all.

Finally, there was other evidence. Three men going home from a local pub a little after ten claimed they’d heard two shots fired from the direction of the path where Mark Aitken had died. At the trial Barbara Aitken claimed to have heard two shots at a much later time; at around four in the morning to be exact. Her date with Hughes Everitt for fishing was at five, but she had waked early and decided to go out to the stream ahead of time. It was about four, and she heard the shots as she first started out. A few moments later, through the woods, she saw the hurrying figure of a man in brown. At the time, she coupled the shots and the figure she saw, and added them up to Charley Wells. Later, Hughes Everitt claimed to have seen the same figure. He had been late for his date with Barbara, his alarm clock having failed him. It was nearly six when he joined her, and on the way to their meeting place he, too, saw the figure in brown.

If Barbara’s story held up, and the figure in brown had murdered Marcus Aitken at 4 a.m., then Peter had an alibi, for he’d been playing poker at the club at that hour. Some of the jury must have believed her, for they disagreed. But most people thought Barbara and Hughes were simply trying to save Peter by their story.

So, with no alibi, with his fantastic fish story unsubstantiated, with Mullen hanging onto him stubbornly as the only suspect, Peter had stood trial . . . had stood trial three times, and three times the prosecution had failed to make its case stand up. Yet there was no case nor any evidence against anyone else.

“This man in brown,” Con said to Peter, “whom Barbara and Hughes saw at different times . . . under oath they said they couldn’t identify him. But do they have ideas who he might have been?”

Peter shrugged. “They both thought at the time of Charley Wells. But you must know, if you’ve followed the case, Con Madden, that Charley Wells has an alibi.”

“I know,” Con said, “though Mullen never tried too hard to break it. There are two more points, Peter Falkner. Your missing gun was found?”

“The police found it before mid-day of that Sunday,” Peter said. “It was in the first place they searched . . . the copse where Uncle Mark’s body was found, hidden carelessly under some undergrowth. The hider had been careful enough not to leave any fingermarks. There were two empty brass-cased cartridges in the breach, and they had been fired recently, and they had been loaded with No. 6 shot, the kind which had done for Uncle Mark.”

“And the fishing tackle?” Con asked.

“They were found later at a distance from where I’d hidden them, but they weren’t intact. There wasn’t a scale of a fish in the bag. The telescope gaff was in the net all right, but the fishing book was missing.”

“It was a valuable book?”

“The contents were. A good salmon cast costs three half dollars, and a good salmon fly the same. There were at least fifty salmon flies in the leaves, many of which I’d dressed myself.”

“Then you could have identified them for certain if they’d ever been found?”

“Beyond a question of a doubt,” Peter said.

Con was silent for a long time and then he emptied his tankard. “It’s a man-sized job my partner and I are undertaking, Peter Falkner. But we’ll give it a man-sized try.”

I

THE day after Peter Falkner had talked with Con Madden in Edinburgh he stepped down off the evening train at Eglintoun, and felt as alien as on that evening six years before when he had arrived for the first time. And, yet, he wanted to feel at home. In five years he had come to recognize that this was the place he wished most to live in. He wanted to take hold of the Danesford estate and reshape its economy, to redress, as far as in him lay, the old sins of landlordism, to introduce co-operation and fellowship and security. . . . And now he felt the stranger once more, and would have to begin all over again under a burden that might not be borne.