Death on a Pale Horse - By Donald Thomas Page 0,57

and the opposite building were taken by our men soon after the body was reported by the maid. Measurements across the street, between the two windows.” Lestrade stood confidently again, staring up at the top of the sash. “There is a casement in Landor Mansions, the ones just opposite, slightly above this level and immediately across from us. From that window, our officers have taped a trajectory which crosses the street. It passes through the gap above the partly open sash-window on this side. It then almost infallibly enters the right-hand temple of the head of any person sitting at that desk.”

“I see,” said Holmes encouragingly. “And I daresay there was such a constant rattle and banging of cart-wheels in the nearby Continental railway goods-yard that a murderer might choose a safe moment to fire without being heard. The clattering of iron wheels would drown the crack of his gun? That would be why the shot was not heard on either side of the street?”

“Yes,” said Lestrade abruptly. “And what might be wrong with that?”

“Have you retrieved the bullet?”

“That must wait for the autopsy, which Dr. Littlejohn himself will carry out at the pathology department of St. Thomas’s Hospital this evening, sir. At present the bullet presumably remains embedded in the dead man’s brain. And seeing that it killed the man, where else is it likely to be?”

Holmes gave him a quick humourless smile. “Where else, indeed? I mention the bullet, Lestrade, because even I can see—and as Dr. Watson will tell you—there is more dried blood than one would expect on the surface of the dead man’s wound. Will you take it from me that the injury was almost certainly inflicted by a soft-nosed lead projectile? Attend to it and you will see that the impact has left an expanded wound rather than a neat bullet hole.”

“What of it?”

“A soft-nosed revolver bullet may have a lethal impact even when fired without gunpowder. Air weapons have been with us for two or three hundred years. They have often been preferred to gunpowder by a sniper who wishes to remain concealed. When he fires, there is no flash, there is no explosion, there is no sign of smoke, no smell of powder. Interestingly, these are some of the very things lacking from the scene of your present crime. I smell stale tobacco in the air. I do not smell the rather more pungent odour of gun smoke.”

Lestrade had the look of a man who feels himself hooked and wriggling and does not care for it. Holmes pacified him.

“I wonder, inspector, whether you are familiar with the Von Herder air weapon. No? You are not? To be sure, at present it is something of a rarity in this country. Its use is mercifully confined at present to international criminals of considerable sophistication. Generally they prefer extortion or fraud to murder. Murder, when necessary, is a quiet business with them. The usual Von Herder weapon is a handgun powered by compressed carbon dioxide. It can fire these soft-nosed bullets at considerable velocity. Approaching the speed of sound but not exceeding it, for fear of setting off an atmospheric crack. Very effective.”

“Not something I know of personally,” said Lestrade, almost chortling at such a far-fetched theory. “Talk about a rarity, Mr. Sherlock Holmes! Oh, dear! Oh, dear!”

Of course Lestrade had never heard of Von Herder until this moment, but he resented a challenge to his solution of the case. He kept the unease from his voice but not from his face.

Holmes became reminiscent. “I was briefly acquainted with Von Herder in Berlin some years ago. He is a blind German mechanic of true genius but indifferent ethics. His handguns work upon compressed gas. This compression gives to a soft revolver bullet such velocity that it kills without a sound that could be heard beyond a closed door.”

Lestrade was after him like a greyhound from a trap. “And I suppose you’ll tell me, sir, that such a weapon could have been fired just as easily from either side of the street!”

Holmes looked troubled, as if he had been misunderstood.

“Dear me, no. I am as sure as I can be that the shot was fired in this room. The killer and his victim were face to face. The gunman was standing up, I imagine, and his victim would have been sitting down at the desk. The wound suggests to me that the range must have been very short and the barrel of the gun, not surprisingly,