John Carr - Till Death Do Us Part

' Hello there!' called a voice from the lane.

It was very warm now. A wasp droned from the direction of the fruit-orchard. Bill Earnshaw, his footsteps swishing in the grass, cut across the garden towards the cottage.

'I shall be late at the bank,' Earnshaw said. 'But I thought I'd better turn back here and...' His voice trailed away in a kind of inflectionary shrug. He stared at the house. 'Bad business, isn't it?'

Dick agreed that it was.

'Where,' he asked, 'did you hear about it?'

Earnshaw nodded back over his shoulder.

'I was standing' outside Lesley's house, having a word with that - that ass Hprace Price.' His forehead darkened, for this was not bank-managerial language. 'Bert Miller came past on his bike, and told us all about it, See here!'

Earnshaw hesitated. His was a well-tailored, erect figure which just escaped being dapper. His sallow face, not unhandsome, showed a man in the middle forties but looking younger. His collar was starched, and he fanned himself with an Anthony Eden hat. His black, shining hair had a knife-like white parting; his cheek gleamed from close-, shaving.

A great social enthusiast was Earnshaw. He laughed a good deal, and prided himself on his sense of humour. He was a good business-man, a keen bridge and squash player, a Territorial officer with some pretensions to excellence in pistol and rifle shooting, though his behaviour as a rule remained humorous and retiring. But you could easily guess his approach to this.

'I was just thinking, Dick,' he said. "This rifle ...'

'Damn the rifle 1' Dick burst out, with such unnecessary violence that Earnshaw looked at him in surprise. It was sheer nerves. 'I mean,' Dick corrected himself, 'that the fellow wasn't shot. He was ...'

' I know, I know. But look here.' Earnshaw's dark eyes travelled along the front of the cottage. His lips outlined a soundless whistling. 'Hasn't it occurred to you - I may be wrong, of course - that whoever did fire the rifle is the most important figure in the whole business?'

Dick blinked at him.

'No, it certainly hadn't occurred to me. How so?'

'Well, suppose there's something queer about this thing? Suppose they suspect Sir Harvey didn't commit suicide after all?'

'He did commit suicide! Look at the evidence! Don't you believe that?'

'Frankly, old man,' smiled Earnshaw, and continued to fan himself idly with his hat, 'so many peculiar things have been happening that I don't know what to believe.' (The whole voice of Six Ashes was in that.) 'By the way,' Earnshaw added, with his eyes on the ground, 'I haven't yet congratulated you on your engagement to Lesley. Good luck and long life!'

'Thanks.'

Something had got into Dick's chest, and was hurting like hell. He felt it as a physical pain, at which you tried not to cry out. Earnshaw seemed slightly embarrassed.

'But - er - about what I was telling you!'

‘Yes?'

Earnshaw nodded towards the sitting-room windows. 'Mind if I take a look in there?' 'Not at all. I'm not the police.'

Walking on tiptoe evidently with some vague idea of respect for the dead, Earnshaw approached the right-hand window and peered in. Shading his eyes with his hat, he studied the exhibit. Then he turned round with a mouth of genteel distaste but a frowning certainty of suspicions confirmed. -

'A would-be murderer,' he argued, pointing to the boundary wall across the lane,' is hiding behind that wall to take a pot-shot. Somebody turns on a light in this sitting-room. All right! Then the whole point is that the person with the rifle could see who was in this room.'

Earnshaw paused.

Dick Markham got slowly to his feet.

"This person,' continued Earnshaw, 'is a witness. On the one hand he can say, "Yes; Sir Harvey was alone. I couldn't know he was giving himself a dose of prussic acid, so I whanged away with a bullet." On the other hand this witness can say, "Sir Harvey wasn't alone; there was somebody with him." In either case, it would settle the matter. Don't you agree?'

There are certain things so obvious that'the mind does not immediately grasp them. Dick nodded, in a rage at not having seen this for himself.

Earnshaw's innate caution manifested itself.

'Mind, I don't say this is so.' He laughed awkwardly. 'And I'm not setting up in business as a detective, thanks. All I say is that's what I should do if I were this detective Miller says is coming down from London. Ask the witness to come forward ...'

'But the witness wouldn't come forward! He'd be accused of attempted murder if he did.'

'Couldn't the police promise him immunity?'

'And compound a felony?'

Earnshaw put on his Anthony Eden hat, adjusting it not rakishly but with a certain cavalier slant. He dusted his hands together.

‘I don't understand these legal terms,' he declared, and muscles worked along his lean jaws. 'You must ask,' slight hesitation,' Major Price about that. It's none of my business, anyway.' Then he looked squarely at Dick, with bright dark determined eyes. 'But I have got a special interest in that rifle, if it's the one everybody seems to think it is. Where's the rifle now?'

' In the sitting-room. Miller had a look at it.'

'May I see it?'

' Certainly. Any special reason for asking?'

'In the first place,' returned Earnshaw, 'it's my rifle. You remember, Price went round borrowing guns from everybody for his shooting-gallery?'

'Yes.'

'In the second place, having a certain standing in this community -' Earnshaw gave his amiable diplomatic laugh, not very convincingly. 'Never mind. Let's go in.'

The echo of that laugh, which - you heard so often from the manager's office of the City and Provincial Bank at Six Ashes, became even less convincing when they entered the sitting-room.

The hanging lamp over the writing-table had long ago been switched off, so that the dead man sat amid shadow and dazzle from the sun. Though Earnshaw was nerving himself to a polite indifference, he could not help a wince of some emotion when he skirted gingerly round the table and caught sight of the dead man's sardonic half-open eye. He turned round with some quickness, eager to get away from it, when Dick produced the rifle.

'Don't be afraid to handle it, Bill. I've already messed up any possible finger prints. Is it your gun?'

'Yes, it is,' answered Earnshaw. 'Now look here!'

'Wait a minute,' Dick urged wearily. 'If you're going to ask me who stole the rifle yesterday afternoon, I've already told Lord Ashe that I don't know!'

'But-'

'All I can be certain of,' Dick said with conviction, 'is that neither Price nor Middlesworth took it, because I remember watching them carry Sir Harvey away. Lesley or I certainly didn't; we were together. And there was nobody else there, until you arrived and said you'd take charge of the guns.'

Though Eamshaw kept on smiling, the expression round his eyes and mouth did not indicate amusement.

' If anybody took that rifle, it was Price himself.'

'Damn it, Bill, he didn't! You can't stick a rifle in your pocket or shove it under your coat.'

"That's exactly what I mean, old man. Nobody came near while I was in charge. I didn't do it, though Price pretends to think I did. Lift my own gun? It's absurd. I ask you! And I hope you don't suggest it was done by witchcraft?'

Dick was on the point of replying that it wouldn't surprise him. But he was sick of rifles, sick to death of everything in the anticipation of waiting for the arrival of Superintendent David Hadley. So he only muttered something conciliatory, propping the rifle back up against the wall by the fireplace.

Earnshaw laughed, to show no ill-feeling.

' I hope you're not thinking I'm making a mountain out of a molehill,' he suggested. 'But, if you'll excuse my mentioning it, I've got a certain standing to maintain. And this thing is going to have repercussions.'