No Wind of Blame

He stood for a few moments, silently, and rather abstractedly, watching the two constables, while his Sergeant frowned upon the electro-magnet.

‘No,’ said Wake at last. ‘Look at it which way you will, you can’t fit an electro-magnet into it. It wouldn’t work, and that’s all there is to it.’

Hemingway lifted his head quickly. ‘Magnet!’ he said.

‘It sounds like “Eureka!”’ remarked Hugh.

‘It is Eureka,’ said the Inspector. ‘Now, don’t you start asking me a whole lot of questions I can’t possibly answer, sir! If I’m right, you’ll know all in good time. All I want you to do now is to keep a still tongue in your head, which I’m sure you will do. All right, you two! That’ll do!’

Twenty minutes later, in Fritton again, the Inspector produced from a drawer in his desk the magnet he had found in the shrubbery at the Dower House, and bade Sergeant Wake tell him what effect on it an electro-magnet would have.

‘It would attract it, of course,’ Wake replied. ‘Soon as you switched the current on. You mean, somehow or other it was fixed so that when it jumped to the electro-magnet, it caught the trigger?’

‘Good Lord!’ said Cook blankly. ‘Could that have been done? I never heard of such a thing!’

‘What we want to go in for now, is a bit of experiment,’ said Hemingway. ‘We’ll rig that rifle up in the vice, and see how it c

ould be made to work.’

By the time the rifle had been produced, and the vice clamped to the leg of a stout table, Hemingway had discovered an additional reason for the position of the grazes on the sapling. ‘I get it!’ he said. ‘It had to be close to the ground, to get the trigger on the same level as the electro-magnet. Now, if the two arms of the horseshoe magnet had to point towards the electromagnet, that must have been just behind the trigger, about like that. Come on, Wake! How would you manage to get the horseshoe magnet so that there’s nothing to prevent its moving, and so that it’s bound to pull that trigger as soon as it does move?’

‘Well, it’s got to rest on something. Couple of blocks of wood, perhaps.’

‘That’s it,’ said Hemingway. ‘Easily kicked away when finished with. Books will be good enough for us. Hand me down a few!’

Kneeling on the floor he carefully built up his two little platforms, one on each side of the trigger-guard of the rifle, and close enough together to allow of the horseshoe magnet’s arms resting one on each platform. The magnet he placed so that the round end was within the trigger-guard, and in front of the trigger itself, and the magnetised ends pointing towards the electro-magnet placed under the stock of the rifle. While Sergeant Wake busied himself with a length of flex and a wall-plug, Hemingway tried to cock the rifle. After several abortive attempts, he sat back on his heels and eyed the rifle with dislike. ‘It’s no use: the damned thing won’t cock!’ he said. ‘It goes off the moment you close the bolt. Now, how did he work that trick?’

‘The bent’s been filed down so fine that the searnose won’t catch,’ said Cook. ‘I’ve got a brother in the gun-trade, and I’ve seen these things stripped. The bent was filed down to give it that light pull. He’d have had to load it with the trigger pulled back. Let me try, will you, Inspector? I’ve got an idea how to cock it.’

Hemingway said: ‘Go right ahead! If you can close the bolt without the blooming thing’s going off, you’re softer-handed than I am.’

‘You don’t need to touch the bolt to cock the rifle,’ said Cook. ‘I’ll lay my life White didn’t. You want to get hold of the cocking-piece, behind the bolt – this thing – and pull it gently back like this, until the nose of the sear – that’s the piece which the top end of the trigger acts on – the bit that holds the firing-block back – catches in the bent. It won’t do more than just catch, and you don’t want to jog the gun, because it only needs a touch to set it off.’

Hemingway, who had been watching Cook suit his actions to his words, drew back as Cook cautiously released the cocking-pin. ‘Jog it! I’m taking precious good care not to breathe on it. Why haven’t I got a brother in the gun-trade? The silly fellow travels in some kind of patent baby-food. A lot of use that’s ever been to me, or likely to be! You got that fixed up yet, Wake?’

Wake, who had been attaching one end of the flex to the electro-magnet, rose to his feet. ‘All set, sir. Shall I switch on?’

‘The sooner the better: the suspense is killing me,’ said Hemingway.

Wake moved across to the wall-plug, and turned the switch on it. The horseshoe magnet shot forward, towards the electromagnet, the closed end hitting the trigger, and so releasing the mainspring.

‘And that,’ said Hemingway, as the rifle clicked, ‘is that, gentlemen! I said it was a pleasure to deal with Mr Harold White!’

‘I’ll have to say it’s been a pleasure to see you deal with him, sir,’ said Wake, making amends for past scepticism. ‘I don’t mind admitting I thought you were on to a wild-goose chase this time.’

Inspector Cook got up from the floor. ‘Yes, but there’s something that’s bothering me,’ he said. ‘They’re not wired for electricity at the Dower House.’

Hemingway looked at him in pardonable annoyance. ‘I never met such a set of kill-joys! Are you sure of that?’

‘Yes, I’m quite sure. They make their own electricity at Palings, but Mrs Carter never had the Dower House wired. They use oil-lamps.’

‘Well, that has torn it!’ said Wake. ‘Surely to goodness they couldn’t have run a flex to the electro-magnet all the way from Palings!’

‘Talk sense!’ snapped Hemingway. ‘Run a flex from Palings! Yes, over the lawn, and down through the shrubbery, and across the stream, and up the other bank! I wonder if they laid it under ground, or had it fixed up on poles?’

‘Well, I said surely they couldn’t have!’ protested the Sergeant.

‘They couldn’t have, and what’s more there wasn’t any point to it, even if it had been possible. What’s the whole aim and object of firing a gun by means of a contraption like that?’