Death on a Pale Horse - By Donald Thomas Page 0,55
the autopsy. Everything stays put now until Sir Melville has been to see for himself.”
He looked about him and sighed.
“Most of our murders get tidied up by lunchtime. Not this one. This isn’t a straightforward case, gentlemen. No one could say that it was.”
The sitting-room we had entered seemed all the larger and taller for its meagre furnishing and bare walls. A pair of sash-windows was overshadowed by Landor Mansions, the block on the far side of the street. What must be the bedroom and bathroom opened to one side, and what might be a kitchen on the other. Dusty dark-green paper, peeling a little by the picture rail, covered the walls. Its dado was a motif of faded summer flowers. The floor was covered by plain polished linoleum in bottle-green, with a rug before the stone fireplace and another beyond the desk. The furniture consisted of a round polished table with three dining chairs, placed between the windows. A day-bed in heavy mahogany and badly cracked black leather stood along the far wall. A sour smell of long-dead tobacco lingered in the curtains and fabrics.
“You might do better living in a dentist’s waiting-room,” said Lestrade helpfully.
Immediately before us, the knee-hole desk, with the fourth padded dining chair drawn up to it, stood clear of the walls. It was sideways to the nearer window. Petty crime abounds in such districts as this, and I had noticed that each sash window was equipped with an inset bolt. The frame could be lowered only two or three inches at the top unless this bolt was unfastened with something like a screwdriver. Two net curtains gave what privacy there was at present. They stirred a little in the draught as the door was closed behind us.
The murdered man still sat at his desk, or rather he lay forward upon it, as if he had decided to rest his head quietly upon his crooked arm and take a nap. He was looking away from us. I could see little more than the back of his head and the clothes that he wore. He was dressed in a russet-brown tweed Norfolk jacket with a belt at the waist and a pair of gaiters. It was the garb of a country gentleman who has arrived in London unprepared and has no clothes suitable for town. He patiently awaited the attention of the Scotland Yard Criminal Commissioner, Sir Melville Macnaghten.
Lestrade became helpful again.
“Shot first thing this morning by the look of it. Seven o’clock or so. Dr. Littlejohn knows a thing or two about guns. He did the case of the Fulham Laundry shooting last year. He reckons that this one hadn’t long been dead when found. The wound to the head had hardly stopped bleeding. Have a look at him, doctor, if you’d care to.”
The inspector stepped back, as if expecting me to confirm the police surgeon’s diagnosis. I touched the dead man. The muscles of the jaw had begun to stiffen and the body to cool, confirming Littlejohn’s finding of the time of death at about half-past seven that morning.
“That’s right, doctor,” said Lestrade encouragingly, “I tried the jaw. Just beginning to turn. We get to know these little tricks. You can’t always tell, of course. Last year there was a woman down in Hoxton with instantaneous rigor mortis after an alcoholic seizure. She was found standing up, stone-cold dead, leaning against a door with her arms folded. In this case it’s just his identity that’s playing us up.”
As I stooped over the dead man, shutting out the inspector’s running commentary from my mind, Lestrade continued for Holmes’s benefit.
“I can tell you how it was done, sir. We have the murderer’s method taped. No shot was heard by anyone. Curious, seeing that the rooms on either side had been occupied from the evening before until after the body was found. No weapon lying around, of course. More to the point, no cartridge case. There was no smell of gunpowder. No sign of burning nor amberite on the skin. The spread of the wound suggests it was made at a range greater than the width of this room.”
“Most, most interesting,” said Sherlock Holmes quietly.
“And how was all that to be accounted for, Mr. Holmes? The logical conclusion, as it seems to me, must be that the gun was not fired in this room at all. How could it have been? No smell of powder, no skin burn, spread of wound too wide.”