Читать книгу Two Bottles of Relish: The Little Tales of Smethers and Other Stories - Lord Dunsany, Lord Dunsany - Страница 7

I ONCE told a story about a murderer called Steeger. It got into Time and Tide, and rather shocked some people: quite right too. Smethers is my name. And my friend Mr Linley found out how Steeger did it. But they couldn’t hang him: that was another matter. So of course the police watched him, and waited. And one day Inspector Ulton called at our flat and shook hands with Mr Linley, and said: ‘Steeger’s done it again.’

Linley nodded his head and said, ‘What is it now?’

And Inspector Ulton said: ‘He has killed Constable Slugger.’

‘What?’ said Linley. ‘The man that helped you so much over the other murder?’

‘Yes,’ said Ulton. ‘He had retired. But Steeger never forgave him. And now he’s killed him.’

‘What a pity,’ said Linley.

‘It’s a damned shame,’ I said.

And then the inspector saw me. I’m a small man, myself, and he hadn’t noticed me.

‘I speak quite suppositiously,’ he said. ‘You understand that it’s purely a suppositious case.’

‘Oh, quite,’ I answered.

‘Because it wouldn’t do to go saying outside this room,’ he went on, ‘that anyone said as Steeger had murdered anyone. Wouldn’t do at all. Render yourself liable. Besides, I never told you anything of the sort.’

‘Quite,’ I repeated.

‘He quite understands,’ said Linley. ‘How did Steeger kill poor Slugger?’

The inspector paused a moment and looked at me, then at Linley, and then he went on. ‘That’s what we can’t make out,’ he said. ‘He lived in the house opposite Slugger’s, in the village of Otherthorpe, only four or five miles away from the scene of his other crime. And we’d have said he shot Slugger across the street as he sat at an open window. And he had a big shot-gun that could have done it, an eight-bore, and there was a ghastly great wound in Slugger’s neck, going downwards into the lung.’

‘Did they find the gun?’ asked Linley.

‘Oh, yes,’ said the inspector. ‘Of course it was all clean and packed away in its case by the time the village constable got in, and he had heard a shot; it was that that made him go, and he went at once; he went to Slugger’s house first. Yes, he found the gun all right; but our difficulty is that whether the doctor got the bullet out and was careless enough to lose it, though he says he didn’t, or whatever happened, there’s no sign of any bullet; no exit wound and no bullet in the body, just the one enormous wound, the sort of thing you might make with a crowbar, and no weapon of that sort discovered, so we can’t prove anything and we’ve come to you again. We must get Steeger this time.’

‘What did he want an eight-bore for?’ Linley asked.

‘Well, to shoot Slugger really,’ said the inspector. ‘But unfortunately he’s got a perfectly good excuse for it; he does actually shoot ducks with it on Olnie Flats, and sells them. We can’t go into Court and say what he really bought it for, after that.’

‘No,’ said Linley. ‘Did the constable find Steeger when he called?’

‘Yes,’ said the inspector, ‘at the back of the house: he was digging in the garden.’

‘Digging?’ said Linley. ‘When did this happen?’

‘Last Wednesday,’ said the inspector.

‘But it was freezing hard last Wednesday, wasn’t it?’ replied Linley.

‘Well, pretending to dig,’ said the inspector. ‘But we can’t hang him on that. No one would dig while it was freezing that hard; but we can’t prove it; and we couldn’t hang him on it if we could.’

‘No, it just shows you and me that he’s up to his old tricks again.’

‘That’s all,’ said the inspector.

It was snowing even as they spoke, and had been freezing all the week. I sat quite still and just listened, and I think they forgot me.

‘He had a good heap of earth to show for his digging,’ Inspector Ulton said, ‘but that didn’t say that he’d only just done it. Lots of people heard a shot, though nobody saw it. We’ve had the whole body photographed by X-rays and there’s no sign of a bullet.’

‘Could he have hit Slugger with a pick-axe through the window?’

‘No, first floor,’ said the inspector. ‘The room upstairs. And Steeger shot him from his upstairs room too, only there’s no bullet. The wound goes a little downwards, and Steeger’s upper storey was the higher one of the two. If you could only find that bullet for us.’

‘A deep wound, I suppose.’

‘Oh, very,’ said Ulton.

‘He must have extracted it.’

‘Oh, no one crossed the street after the shot. Mears; that’s the constable there; lives in the very street, twenty-eight doors away and he was out of his house in ten seconds; the whole street was empty.’

‘He didn’t have the bullet tied to a thin wire,’ said Linley; ‘you’d have thought of a thing like that.’

‘Yes, we thought of that,’ said the inspector. ‘But a big bullet like that would have left blood-marks somewhere, either on Slugger’s sill, or the street, or the wall of Steeger’s house; and there weren’t any.’

‘What cheek,’ said Linley, ‘going and living right opposite Slugger’s house.’

‘Yes,’ said the inspector. ‘And Slugger knew what Steeger was waiting for too. But he wasn’t going to give up his house on that account. Steeger thinks he can do what he likes, having escaped the first time.’

‘Slugger had his window open, you say?’

‘Oh, yes.’

‘You can prove that?’ said Linley. ‘Because you’d have to prove it, considering the weather.’

‘Oh, yes,’ said Ulton, ‘Mears will swear to that. Slugger had his window open in all weathers. He was sitting beside it reading. The paper was in his hand.’

‘It certainly looks as if Steeger shot him through the window,’ said Linley.

‘It stands to reason he did,’ said Ulton. ‘But, without the bullet to show, you know what a jury would do. They’d go and let him off.’

‘Yes,’ said Linley. ‘How wide was the street?’

‘Ten yards from wall to wall,’ said the inspector. ‘Barely that. Nine yards two feet.’

‘Well, I’ll think it over,’ said Linley, ‘and let you know tomorrow how I think Steeger did it.’

‘I’d be very glad if you would,’ said the inspector, and he turned to go away. And at that he noticed me again, and told me that any suggestion from me that Steeger had ever killed anyone would be highly criminal, as though he hadn’t been slandering Steeger (if that’s the word for it) himself for the last fifteen minutes. I said I wouldn’t say a word against Steeger, and the inspector left.

‘What do you make of it?’ asked Linley.

‘Me?’ I said. ‘If he shot Slugger and the bullet didn’t go through, it must be still in the body.’

‘But they’ve found that it isn’t,’ said Linley.

‘Let me go down there and have a look,’ I said.

‘No, Smethers,’ he said. ‘You won’t find anything Scotland Yard has missed.’

‘Well, what are you going to do?’ I said.

‘Think,’ said Linley.

‘What about?’ I asked.

‘Evaporating bullets,’ said Linley.

‘Are there such things?’ I asked him.

‘No,’ said Linley.

‘Then what’s the use of thinking about them,’ I said.

‘Because it’s happened,’ said Linley. ‘When a thing’s happened you’ve got to admit it, and try and see how.’

‘What about a big arrow,’ I said. ‘And pull it back by a string.’

‘Worse than the bullet tied to a wire,’ he answered. ‘Still more blood-marks.’

‘What about a spear ten yards long,’ I said.

‘Ingenious,’ was Linley’s only comment.

I got a bit huffed when he wouldn’t say more than that, and began to argue with him. But Linley was right. They didn’t find any spear, for one thing, when they searched Steeger’s house; and, for another, there wouldn’t have been space for it in the upstairs room.

And then the telephone-bell rang. It was Inspector Ulton. Linley went to the ’phone. ‘They’ve found a wad in the street,’ he said.

‘A wad?’ said I.

‘A wad of the eight-bore,’ he answered. ‘Between the two houses.’

‘Then he shot him,’ I said.

‘We know that,’ said Linley.

‘Well, what’s the difficulty,’ said I, ‘if you know it already?’

‘To prove it,’ said Linley.

He sat thinking in front of the fire for a long time, and I could do nothing more to help him. And after a while he said, ‘Ring up Scotland Yard, Smethers, and ask if there was any sign of burning about the wound.’

I did it and they said No. The doctor had thought for a moment that he felt some small foreign particle, which made them think that he might have lost the bullet, but he said that he was mistaken, and that there was nothing there, and no sign of burning.

I told Linley, and all he said was, ‘Then it was nothing that burned away.’

And he was quite silent again.

So was I, for I could think of nothing. I knew it was Steeger, just as he did; but that was no good.

‘We must hang Steeger,’ he said after a while. And I knew that he was thinking of Nancy Elth, the girl Steeger murdered the last time. He sat silent for so long then that I thought it had beaten him. Time passed and I was even afraid that he had given it up, which I knew he ought not to do, because I was sure he could solve it.

‘How did Steeger do it?’ I asked after a while.

‘He shot Slugger,’ said Linley.

‘How?’ I asked.

‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘And I never shall.’

‘Oh, yes, you will,’ I said, ‘if you give your mind to it.’

‘Oh, well,’ said he, ‘give me a chess-problem to look at.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘If you get looking at them you’ll never leave them alone. Let’s solve this problem first.’

For I saw he was just on the verge of giving it up.

‘Oh, well,’ he said, ‘then give me some fresh air. I must have a change of some sort.’

So I opened the window and he leaned right out, breathing the frozen air of the late evening. And there the whole mystery was, the moment he put his head out of the window. What funny things are our minds. Here was one of the brightest minds I had ever known, hard at work on a problem, and yet he had to see what he was looking for by shoving his face into it, and that purely by chance. Yes, there were icicles of all sizes hanging about the window, and he almost bumped his face into them. He drew in his head and said, ‘They won’t get Steeger yet. They’ll never prove this to a jury. The bullet was made of ice.’