‘To provide yourself with a water-tight alibi,’ replied Wake.
‘You’re right. And what kind of an alibi had any of that Palings lot provided themselves with? Or Mr Silent Steel? Or his High and Mightiness Prince Tiddly-Push? Or young Baker? Who had the only alibi that was so good no one but me thought of trying to bust it?’
‘Yes, it does look like White,’ said Cook. ‘Don’t think it’s any pleasure to me to have to say the Dower House isn’t wired!’
‘It not only looks like White; it was White,’ said Hemingway. ‘It couldn’t have been anyone else.’
‘No, but there’s another point as well, though I dare say it doesn’t mean so much,’ said Wake. ‘How did he get the rifle in the first place?’
‘I don’t know, but if you go and ask them up at Palings, they’ll tell you anyone could have taken it.’
‘Yes, that’s what they say,’ persisted Wake, ‘but, come to think of it, it isn’t quite as easy as that to walk off with a life-size rifle under your arm. Why, even supposing you had the run of the house, would you take a chance on it? Supposing someone was looking out of one of the windows? Supposing you ran into the butler, or a gardener, or someone? Of course, as soon as you started on White, I got to thinking about him returning Mr Carter’s shot-gun in a case of his own, but that’s no use, because the rifle wouldn’t go into a shot-gun case.’
Hemingway turned his head to look at the rifle, still held in the vice. ‘If I was to find that the fair Ermyntrude was right all along, I don’t know that I could bear it,’ he said slowly. ‘Can you break a rifle?’
‘What, like you do a shot-gun?’ said Cook. ‘No, they’re made differently. You can’t break any I’ve ever handled.’
‘Well, let’s have a look at this one,’ said Hemingway. ‘Give it here, will you, Wake?’
The Sergeant loosened the vice, and handed over the rifle. Hemingway inspected it. ‘I must say it doesn’t look as though you could. What are these little eyebolts for?’
Cook peered over his shoulder. ‘They’re only to fix a sling on to, if you should want one, aren’t they?’
‘I can’t say, but I believe in trying things out,’ replied Hemingway, laying the gun on his desk, and beginning to loosen the bolts.
He removed them in a moment or two, and then, with the air of a conjurer sure of his trick, quietly lifted the barrel out of the stock. ‘As easy as falling off a gate,’ he said. ‘Now we know why he chose the Mannlicher-Schönauer instead of that classy-looking Rigby. I dare say that doesn’t come apart anything like as neatly, if at all. Measure that barrel, Wake – not that I doubt it could have got into the hambone-case.’
‘Twenty-eight inches over all,’ Wake announced, closing his foot-rule. ‘My word, the evidence is piling up, isn’t it? But we still haven’t got round the main difficulty, sir – though it looks to me as though we will, the way things are shaping.’
Hemingway gave him the rifle to fit together again, and sat down at his desk. ‘Some kind of a battery,’ he said. ‘Inside the study window, with a flex running from it to the electro-magnet.’
‘Could it? Without being noticed?’ asked Wake.
‘Yes, easy, it could,’ said Cook. ‘There’s a flower-bed running along the wall of the house, and creepers on the house, too. You’d never see the wire. He could have laid it along the bed till he got to the corner of the house, and then taken it across the bit of path lying between the house and the top-end of the shrubbery. He might have sprinkled a bit of gravel over it just there, though I shouldn’t think it would have been necessary myself. Then, all he had to do, once he’d got rid of the vice, and the electro-magnet, was to run back to the house, coiling up the wire as he went.’
Hemingway, who had not been paying much attention to this speech, suddenly said: ‘Didn’t you tell me White had got something to do with a coal-mine?’
‘That’s right,’ said Cook. ‘He’s manager of the Copley group.’
‘I thought so. What’s that thing called that they use in mines when they want to blast? Electrical thing they touch off the dynamite with?’
‘A shot-firer, do you mean?’ asked Wake. ‘But they don’t blast in coal-mines, do they?’
‘By gum, you’ve got it!’ said Cook. ‘They do do quite a bit of blasting here, because we’re remarkably free from gas, as it happens! He could have got hold of one, too, without a bit of trouble, in his position.’
‘Don’t they check up on those kinds of stores?’ asked Wake.
‘Yes, but, don’t you see? The murder was committed on a Sunday. White could have brought the shot-firer away with him on Saturday, and returned it to store on the Monday morning, and no one the wiser!’
‘Would it work?’ Hemingway demanded.
‘Yes, work a fair treat. Ever seen ’em use one? All you do is push the handle down smartly, and the next thing you know is that half the rock-face has fallen off.’
The Sergeant bent, and picked up the horseshoe magnet. ‘Funny he left this lying about for us to find,’ he said. ‘I must say, I
can’t understand him not slipping it in his pocket, so careful as he was about everything else.’
‘Yes, but it wouldn’t have been lying there like that,’ Cook pointed out. ‘You only turned the current off long after the recoil of the rifle. You’ve got to remember that White pushed down the handle of his shot-firer, and then released it. The jar of the rifle’s going off must have hurled the magnet away, once there was no strong attraction to hold it in its position.’