The Mammoth Book of Best British Crime 10

THE INVISIBLE GUNMAN by Keith McCarthy

IT WAS 7.50 on a warm May evening in 1976 and Max and I were running late. Dad had invited us for a meal at 7.30 and he did not normally like to be kept waiting. The reasons we were late were many and varied; firstly, I had been kept at the surgery by the mother of a small boy who had stuck a wodge of masticated chewing gum up his nose that would not come back down (when I inserted a pair of forceps so far up there, I fully expected to see his eyes being pulled back into his sockets), and Max – a vet by trade – had been overrun by an outbreak of diarrhoea and vomiting in a local kennels; then the car had refused to start for ten minutes because I managed to flood the engine.

Dad had told us to come round the back because he was planning a barbecue. I had feigned enthusiasm for this idea but had suggested that he should avoid doing pork or chicken. I thought I’d done this tactfully but clearly not for he had asked at once and rather sharply, “Why not?”

I groped for the correct form of words. “Because chicken and pork don’t barbecue particularly well.” Actually, on Dad’s barbecue, no meats did particularly well, but at least you were relatively safe with lamb or beef that had fourth-degree burns on the surface yet still, miraculously, a beating heart within. Similar cooking conditions when applied to chicken or pork were apt to lead to terminal food poisoning.

“I’ve never found that,” he pointed out.

“How about sticking to beefburgers?”

“Horrible, pre-digested pap. Wouldn’t feed them to my dog.”

I tried the last gambit in my arsenal. “I know that Max likes lamb…”

A pause. “Does she?”

“Loves it.”

“Oh, well…I’ll see what I can do, then.” In the eyes of Lance Elliot Senior, retired general practitioner, Max Christy could do no wrong. Accordingly, I was hoping for an evening meal that, if not destined for gastronomic legend, would not at least see Max and me spending the next forty-eight hours threatening to overwhelm the sewers of Thornton Heath.

I hurriedly opened the wooden door by the side of the garage that led down a narrow pathway to the back garden. I would judge that I had the door open about six inches when it happened. There was a heavy thud, and simultaneously the door was pushed violently back into a closed position while I found my right eye about two inches from the metal-tipped point of an arrow that protruded through a small explosion of splinters from the door. I jumped back, colliding with Max who squealed then fell over.

I said, “Bloody hell!” while Max said, “Ow!”

As I turned around to help her back up, the garden door opened and the heavily beard-encrusted face of my father looked out. “What’s all the fuss?”

It took a moment to straighten Max out, who also had a few questions to ask me – like why I had decided to assault her – so it was not immediately that I turned to my aged parent. In this interlude he had pulled the arrow out of the door and was examining it. “What in the name of all that’s good and holy are you doing?” I demanded.

I knew his expression well. It was a perfect blend of innocence and reproach, and it asked me where I had learned to speak to my elder and better in such a way, because it certainly hadn’t been from him. “Practising.”

“Practising? Practising what? Trying to kill me?”

“No, of course not. Practising archery.”

There would once have been a time when this reply would have left me not only short of things to say but also short of breath to say them with. But no longer; I knew him too well. My father collected new hobbies like small boys collect pictures of first-division footballers, only he tired of them considerably more quickly. Over the last year he had taken up campanology, astronomy, carpentry, metalwork, juggling and karate; admittedly, the last he had been forced to give up after two days when he broke his fifth metacarpal trying to chop firewood with his bare hands, but all the rest had arrived with a rush of enthusiasm, stayed for a few weeks, then dwindled to indifference in the space of perhaps five days.

“You were aiming at the door to your garden,” I pointed out.

“Of course I was,” he said, his voice betraying doubt that I was using my brain about the matter. “That’s where I pinned the target.” He gestured behind us and we turned to see a large paper archery target peppered with holes – none in the bull – on the inside of the garden gate. “The pathway down the side of the garage makes a nice shooting gallery.”

“But you knew we were coming in that way.”

He frowned. “So? Oh, don’t worry,” he said airily. “I wouldn’t have fired the arrow if the door had been any more open than it was.”

I didn’t believe that for one moment but knew better than to argue the point, so tried another one. “As it was, the bloody thing went through the wood and nearly got me in the eye.”

“I know,” he said with real enthusiasm. “Very impressive, you’ll have to agree. And all with a home-made bow. Come over here and look at it.”

He toddled off and all Max and I could do was proffer each other a despairing smile and follow him. I have never been able to decide whether my father is a madman pretending sanity, or a sane man pretending madness. He was standing just in front of his homemade, oil-drum barbecue from which the distinct odour of burning meat was rising. He was cradling his bow with the kind of love that is normally only seen in mothers with their first-born. “Isn’t she beautiful?”

It was, I have to admit, a fairly impressive item; about five foot long and an inch in diameter at the middle, it was highly polished and had a handle made of a crepe bandage wound tightly round. Just below this there was some sort of thin bolt protruding forwards, on the end of which was welded a five-pound kitchen weight. Just above the handle was a slight notch on the left-hand edge.

“I made it myself.” My father said this in the tone of voice that dared you not to be impressed. Max complied with, “Wonderful craftsmanship, Dr Elliot. You’re clearly very talented.” I merely said, “Mmm…”

“I got this book on archery out of the library and I suddenly thought what a brilliant idea to make my own longbow.”

“Have you killed anyone yet?”

He took offence. “What do you mean by that?”

“You came close with me. If that arrow had hit a knothole in the wood, at this present moment I’d be doing a fairly lifelike imitation of King Harold on the field at Hastings.”

He turned to Max. “He does go on so, doesn’t he?”

At which point, with a faint “whoosh”, the whole barbecue went up in flames and, what with trying to save the food and stop the overhanging sycamore tree from burning down, the subject wasn’t raised again that evening. As we ate meat that varied from cremated to raw in the space of two mouthfuls, I remember vaguely wondering whether I should try to argue him out of his current obsession but, what with nearly being killed and then having to play at fire brigades all in one evening, I didn’t feel strong enough to ask.

At 7 o’clock on Thursday, 3 June, on a hot and sticky day, I parked my car in Fairlands Avenue, which stretched and curved away behind me, rather upmarket terraced houses staring at each other across the road. The reason I was there was not because of the day job as a general practitioner, but because I had newly become a Police Surgeon. I had not wanted the post but had been badgered into it by Brian, my practice colleague, who had been doing it for ten years and was now about to retire; he had been assisted in this coercion by my father – himself a Police Surgeon in his day – who painted a rosy-hued picture of the life, one that, inevitably, was as true to reality as my father’s recollections of his war exploits. It was not a pleasurable thing to do – although it did supplement my income quite nicely – and it had the amazing knack of doing maximum damage to my social life. I was becoming seriously afraid that Max would soon forget how beautiful I was.

I walked up to the top of the road where Fairlands Avenue met Thornton Road, which was where a lot of coppers were thronging. I had been doing the job long enough to be let in to what I discovered to be a clockmaker’s shop – proprietor Harvey Carlton, Esquire – without hindrance, where I found Inspector Masson. I wish I could say that he and I were buddies of the bosom kind, that we spent many a long night chatting cosily about our mutual hobbies, how we both quite liked ABBA (although all their songs tend to sound the same) and how we were delighted that Southampton had trounced Manchester United in the FA Cup final. In truth, though, I was slightly scared of him, and he was completely contemptuous of me; this was not the basis for a deep, lasting relationship.

There was an even greater concentration of constabulary blue behind him as he turned to face me. “Doctor,” he said, as he usually did, his tone suggesting that he had hoped for better.

“Inspector.”

“We normally wouldn’t have bothered you, but the pathologist’s been taken with diarrhoea and vomiting.”

Maybe he meant this well, but I had the impression he found my presence only slightly more welcome than an attack of either. “What’s happened?”

He turned and gestured me forward. I followed him through the uniforms that parted as we moved amongst them to reveal the body of a man dressed in brown overalls. He was on his back and his left eye was gone, replaced by a bloodied pulp. In falling, he had knocked over a whole shelf full of clocks, watches, barometers and weather stations, many of which appeared to have shattered, so that he was surrounded by an astonishingly intricate array of cogs, wheels, wood splinters, coils and spherules of mercury.

“Ouch.”

“Did that kill him?” asked Masson.

I rather hoped that it had, but I couldn’t say for sure immediately. “Can I move him?”

“SOCO have got all the photos they need for now,” he assured me, so I gently took the head in my hands and lifted it, feeling the scalp with the tips of my fingers. There was a soft boggy patch that would do for an exit wound. Then, having laid it back down, I quickly looked over the rest of the body, enlisting a constable to turn it so that I could look at the back; I tested the limbs for rigor mortis and gross bony injuries, checked for bruising around the neck and ligature marks around the wrists and ankles. Then, telling myself that a corpse has no dignity to lose, I undid his belt, pulled down his trousers and pants, and inserted a thermometer where not only the sun didn’t shine but there was no starlight either. I left it there for five minutes, pulled it out and examined it, noting the temperature before wiping it with a tissue and putting back in its holder. Without completely stripping the body, it was as good an examination as I could make.

“Well?” Masson’s tone suggested that he was fed up with watching me footle around pretending to know what I was doing.

“The body’s only lost two degrees and it’s still limp, so I’d estimate he’s been dead about three to four hours…”

If I thought I was doing well, Masson soon put me right. “I know when he died, Doctor. As he fell he broke at least eight clocks and all of them stopped at the same time – three-fifty-two.”

It appeared that I was not even to get credit for being accurate in my estimate, so I swallowed some bitterness and went on, “I can see no other evidence of serious trauma apart from the injury to the eye for which there is an exit wound. I would say that there’s no doubt it was that injury that resulted in his death.”

“What made it?”

“My first impression is that it’s a relatively small-calibre bullet, but until a full post-mortem can be done, that can only be a guess.”

He nodded but forgot to thank me as he turned back to his troops and barked, “I want the bullet found.”

I appeared to have been dismissed, but I thought I ought to issue some Health and Safety advice. “Be careful of the mercury from the barometers. It’s poisonous.”

Masson turned to look at me. “Is it?” He sounded suspicious that I might be having him on.

“Everyone should wear gloves.”

He snorted, looked at me for a moment, then said to the room in general, “You heard the man. Get some disposable gloves.”

I asked conversationally, “Is that Harvey Carlton?”

He shrugged. “Who knows?”

I hung around for a bit but no one had anything more to say to me, so eventually I slunk away. No one even seemed to notice. On my way out I noticed the shop on the opposite corner. It was some sort of bespoke furniture shop. The name above the window said that the proprietor was Peter Carlton, Esquire.

Inspector Masson always evinced nothing but impatience and exasperation in his dealings with me, but I like to think that he had a soft spot for me nevertheless because he seemed to gravitate towards me when things were not going well in his capacity as a sleuth. Max and I had followed the case in the Croydon Advertiser, although we were well aware that this fine organ did occasionally get its facts quite startlingly wrong.

Peter and Harvey Carlton were brothers, and they hated each other. Harvey became a master watchmaker, Peter a highly skilled joiner and carpenter making furniture that was snapped up as soon as he finished it. Apparently they had fallen out over twenty years before because of a woman, Mary. They both fell in love with her and only one could win; they matched each other in terms of looks, skills and prospects, but she chose Harvey. Peter tried to commit suicide, failed, and became an eternally angry man. He had a reputation as an unforgiving, hard and unscrupulous businessman. The paper didn’t say so, but it was clear that Peter was the number one suspect, though there were problems.

“Of course he’s guilty,” Max said with complete conviction.

“Is he?”

She nodded. When I enquired how she knew, she said, “He was a nasty man.”

I saw no point in debate.

It appeared that although a bullet had been found, there were no reports of a shot being fired, despite extensive house-to-house enquiries. Peter had been interviewed for several hours, had been cooperative and open, portraying shock but no remorse at the death of his brother. He assured the police that he had not left his shop all day and no witnesses could be found to contradict this. Harvey Carlton’s financial affairs were reported as being sound, and all enquiries regarding his private life returned nothing but the utmost propriety. The paper, inevitably, reported – perhaps more appropriately, crowed – that the police were “stumped”.

The case slipped from public – and our – consciousness.

When the doorbell rang on the evening of Sunday, 27 June, Max and I were sitting in the garden partaking of some Pimm’s. I cannot say that the appearance of Masson’s sunny visage as I opened the front door produced anything close to a whoop of delight from my vocal chords. “Doctor Elliot,” he said. “Mind if I come in?”

I showed him through to the garden. He was graciousness itself as he nodded at Max and said, “Miss Christy. Are you well?”

She smiled at him because that was Max; she would probably smile politely at the Grim Reaper when he came to call. “I’m very well indeed, thank you.”

He sat down and, in not asking for a drink, made it plain that he would quite like one. “Pimm’s?” I asked.

A shake of the head. “Can’t stand the stuff. Poncey in the extreme.” Only Masson could have refused the offer so graciously; only Masson could have then said, “I’ll have a bitter, though.”

After I had accommodated him and we were all sitting around the table looking at the midges and mosquitoes dancing over the garden pond, I was afraid the conversation might prove a tad desultory, but I had reckoned without Masson’s forthright character. “I expect you’re wondering why I’m here.”

“Not a social call, then?”

He looked at me and I found myself wondering if he disliked everyone as much as he appeared to dislike me. “I don’t seem to get the time for social calls.” With which, somehow, he seemed to imply a puritanical disapproval of anyone sitting in the garden on a summer’s evening.

Max, bless her, asked, “Would it be to do with the death of Harvey Carlton?”

To which he said curtly, “After we’d got the pathologist out of his bed, he confirmed what you had told us – that Carlton died of a single small-calibre bullet wound that entered through his right eye and exited through the back of his skull.” He didn’t seem inclined to applaud my diagnostic skills so I said nothing. ”We eventually found it embedded in the corner of a wooden cabinet. It’s a small-calibre revolver round.”

“That’s good,” I said.

He didn’t snarl because he didn’t make a sound, but it was the look that big hairy men were always giving Charlie Chaplin in the golden age of silent movies. “You think so?”

“Isn’t it?”

Masson said nothing; I looked covertly at Max and she did likewise at me. I think that we were both unsure of what to say, or whether to say anything at all, since it would almost certainly be taken amiss by our guest. Silence therefore ensued between us and there was the faint sound of a cuckoo in the distance. Masson drank more beer and we did similar damage to the Pimm’s.

He said at last, “It has to be Peter Carlton. It just has to be.” He snorted. “We’ve found out that a few weeks before Harvey’s death the two brothers met unexpectedly at Mary’s grave. There was some sort of fracas. It was witnessed by one of the gardeners at the crematorium; he didn’t hear everything that was said, but he swears that he heard Peter threaten to kill his brother.”

Max asked, “Does Peter Carlton own a gun?”

Masson shook his head. “No, but that means nothing. Fifty pounds is all you need, if you know the right people.”

Max enquired, “And does he know the right people?”

He snorted. “Not as far as we can tell.”

“So maybe he didn’t do it.”

He shook his head immediately. “He did it. I know he did.”

We waited a while as Masson stared at a dragonfly as if he would quite like to give it what for with a truncheon. It was starting to turn to dusk, the light becoming golden and soft as opposed to harsh; the very first stirrings of a breeze played about the tops of the trees. Eventually, Max pointed out gently, “That doesn’t seem very logical to me. Are you sure you’re not just being a bit headstrong?”

Coming from me, he would probably have got out his rubber cosh at this and given me a good talking-to, but Max had this way with people and he merely glanced briefly up at her and then said thoughtfully, “I don’t think so.”

“Why not?”

“Peter Carlton employs a young man called Colin Bell as general assistant and runaround. Bell says that he was in the shop with Carlton almost all of the day that Harvey died, except for a thirty-minute period when Carlton asked him to make a delivery of a footstool to a house in Gonville Road. That was between three-thirty and four.”

I said softly, “Blimey.”

He smiled. “Sounds significant, doesn’t it?”

“I’d have thought so.”

“So would I,” he agreed, but then stopped. It was as though a fuse had blown and he was no longer functioning.

“And we’ve found the gun. It had been thrown into the grounds of St Jude’s Church about two hundred yards down the road.”

All of this seemed like good news and we waited patiently until he said suddenly, “One problem is that ballistic analysis of the bullet’s trajectory places the point of origin as the opposite side of Thornton Road, at ninety degrees to the position of Peter Carlton’s shop. To be precise, from a rather neat and tidy end-of-terrace house called Dunhiking. A newly married couple live there, Mr and Mrs Homan. She’s pregnant and he’s a plasterer; we’ve searched the house and investigated them thoroughly – and, in the process, scared the bejeesus out of them. And found nothing.”

“Ah…”

“As you’ve probably read in the papers, Carlton claims not to have left his shop all afternoon, and all the witnesses we’ve talked to support that; we have no positive sightings of Carlton outside his shop during the critical time. Certainly no one saw him with a gun.”

“Did anyone hear the shot? Surely someone did.”

He shook his head. “A silencer was used.”

“Well, that’s something…”

He pointed out sourly, “A silencer doesn’t make the marksman invisible.”

“Perhaps he was in a soundproofed van or something, parked in the road in front of Dunhiking.”

Masson was becoming impatient. “He didn’t leave the shop all day, remember?”

“An accomplice?” Max suggested, but it was with such timidity that she was almost cowering as the words came out. Masson didn’t even seem to hear, though. He merely repeated, “He did it. I know that, I just don’t know how.”

“Why are you so sure?”

He drained his beer, then put the glass down hard. “I’ve been staring at him across an interview table for the past nine days and he radiates smugness because he knows he did it, and I know he did it, but I can’t show how.”

Max, as usual, came to the point. “Why are you here, Inspector?”

It took him a while to answer that one, and when it came it did so with a degree of reluctance that was quite entertaining to behold. While we waited, I poured more Pimm’s for Max and myself and asked him, “Another beer?”

He shook his head. More silence. He seemed to have forgotten the pleasurable prospect of delivering a beating to the dragonfly and was contenting himself with staring at the bird table. Max and I drank some more Pimm’s.

Then, “You’re his GP, right?”

Pennies – several of them – dropped. “Yes,” I replied warily.

He glared at me. “I know all the crap about patient confidentiality, Doctor, I’ve been there before. You silly sods have no idea how difficult you make my life, but I’m not talking about that.”

“No?”

“I don’t want to know about Peter Carlton’s medical conditions – I want you to tell me if he ever mentioned anything that might be relevant to the death of his brother.”

Which was different. The doctor’s waiting room is not a priest’s confessional; I only have to remain schtum about medical things. “I can’t recall anything,” I said.

He was suspicious. “Really?”

“Yes, absolutely. He’s never mentioned his brother, or the history between them.”

He breathed heavily for a bit, possibly angry at me, possibly at the fates that he felt goaded him, then nodded. “It was worth a try.” More silence and more Pimm’s.

He began to speak again after a while. “In pursuit of this case, I seem to have uncovered a secret coven of loonies in the area. I’ve been told about midnight prowlers, UFOs, ghosts and goblins. One old woman saw a man indecently exposing himself, although she only told anyone when we came to call, and another was visited by her ex-husband, except that he was lost at sea in 1948.”

As crusty and irritable as Masson was, Max managed to find empathy within herself. “Surely you’ve been in situations like this before? Cases that seemed insoluble, I mean.”

“Oh, yes. Too many, in fact. And, in some of them, I’ve known who did it, too, but I’ve never felt so bloody taunted as I do in this one. He thinks I’ll never prove that he did it, and he’s quite happy to crow about it.”

The phone began to ring in the house, which was something of a relief. I went to pick it up and heard Dad’s dulcet tones. “Lance? I just wanted to tell you that it’s back.”

“What is?”

“The book.”

The way he said it, the word might have had a capital letter; he might have been talking about a holy writ or a long-lost first edition. “What book?”

“From the library.”

Which did not answer my question nor, indeed, did it answer any question at all. “Dad, could you be more explicit?”

He tutted; I was used to my father’s tutting and he was undoubtedly good at it, but this was better than most. He followed it up with, “The next stage.” When I said nothing, he went on, “Of my project.”

I was slightly exasperated by the way that the evening had gone and so was slightly acerbic as I asked, “What on earth are you talking about now?”

“The next step on from the longbow.”

“What does that mean?” As I asked this, I felt something furtling around in my bowels.

“Although the longbow undoubtedly revolutionized the art of war…” A shiver of cold horror blossomed within me. I could see that this meant trouble; knowing my father, I now appreciated that “the next stage of the project” probably meant building his own nuclear weapon and then testing it in the greenhouse while he took shelter in the kitchen with a large saucepan on his head. He droned on, “I am of the opinon that for sheer elegance, it is inferior to its predecessor, the crossbow. The crossbow was more powerful and easier to use, see. A great sniper’s weapon.”

“But you can’t,” I protested.

“Why not?”

“Because you really might kill someone with one of those. Where will it end? A do-it-yourself cannon?”

To my horror, there was brief silence and I just knew that he was storing this for future reference before he said, “You really are so melodramatic, Lance. Anyone would think you were talking to an irresponsible child.”

“Dad, is this wise?”

“Wise? Why shouldn’t it be?”

I had taken in a deep breath with all the arguments poised and ready to spew forth, but then thirty years of experience told me to keep quiet. Nothing I would say – nothing anyone would ever say – was going to stop my father doing what my father did. I let it all out in a long sigh. “It doesn’t matter.”

“Lance, are you all right?” he asked with genuine concern. “You seem a bit out of sorts.”

It took me a moment to find my voice. “I’m fine, Dad. Just fine.”

When I went back out to the garden, Max was looking severely strained and Masson was looking as he always did, which was morose. He stood at once. “I must be going,” he announced as if anyone was going to argue.

As I showed him out, I tried to cheer him up. “I’m sure you’ll break the case soon.”

He didn’t even reply.

For two months nothing happened and everyone forgot about the death of Harvey Carlton, even the Croydon Advertiser. Dad went quiet, too; I asked him how his crossbow was coming on, but all he did was mumble something about “technical problems”. I remember nodding sympathetically whilst giving thanks to God. Then, quite abruptly, Peter Carlton was found one morning unconscious on the floor of his shop by a woman who was interested in purchasing a set of dining chairs. An ambulance was called and he was taken to Mayday Hospital where a severe, left-sided stroke was diagnosed; he regained consciousness within a day but he remained severely compromised – paralyzed down the right-hand side, unable to speak, dribbling constantly. I visited him after two days and saw in him what I had seen in so many stroke victims – severe depression. Who could blame him? In the space of a second, his entire life had been taken from him; he had not just been placed in a cage but gagged and restrained by a straitjacket as well. There would be some improvement if he could find the will to work at it, but it would not be much, unlikely ever to bring him to an independent existence, definitely never enough to allow him to work again. I could see within his eyes that he knew it, too, and that was agony to behold.

On a walk in Norbury Park, I told Max that evening. She was uncharacteristically unsympathetic. “Perhaps it’s a punishment,” she said. There was a kestrel hovering in the air above us and to our right; it was about fifty yards up and the only movements that it made were at the ends of its wings. Something was about to die.

“What for?”

“For killing his brother.”

“We don’t know he did.”

“Inspector Masson seemed to think he’s guilty. Anyway, nobody liked him.”

I sighed. “I have to say, I’m not sure that we can automatically assume any form of infallibility on the good Inspector’s part.” Still the kestrel hovered. It was a symbol of patience. “And unpopularity is not normally considered a firm foundation on which to bring a conviction.”

“No,” she conceded. “But he mistreated Mrs Kerry’s Georgie, and that’s a sure sign of an evil man.” I knew Max well enough to decipher this cryptogram at least partially. Georgie was a dog and Max would never forgive someone who mistreated an animal.

“It’s a long way from kicking a dog to murdering a man.”

“No, it’s not,” she replied at once, and I knew better than to argue. She said thoughtfully, “He’ll be stuck in hospital now…”

I didn’t like the sound of that. “What’s going through your head, Max?”

She frowned for a moment, then smiled; it was a sweet smile, and all the more worrying because of it. “Nothing,” she said. A movement in the sky caught my eye, but I was too slow to see the kestrel dive and I never found out if it was successful.

Despite my constant questioning, Max would say nothing more.

The next evening I was on call but it was a relatively quiet night and so the following day I didn’t feel too bad, especially after a short afternoon nap. I was awake by six, had a sandwich and then called Max but got no answer. She was occasionally called out at night because of a veterinary emergency, although her practice did not have a formal on-call rota, so I wasn’t too concerned. I decided that I would spend the evening watching television and try her later; as it happened, I fell asleep to be awakened at eleven o’clock when the phone rang. Before I had a chance to speak, Max said, “Lance?”

“Oh, hi, Max.” I yawned.

“Are you busy?”

“Well…no…”

“Do you think you could come and fetch me?”

“Sure. Where are you?”

She didn’t even hesitate. “In Peter Carlton’s shop.”

Life with Max had never been boring and I would not have wanted it any other way, but her propensity for breaking into premises – or, for variety, inducing me to do it – did prove a trifle wearing at times. I was not, therefore, in the best of moods when I stopped the car at the end of Fairlands Avenue and walked to Peter Carlton’s shop. It was in darkness but she must have been watching out for me because the shop door opened a fraction as soon as I walked up to it. “Come in,” she hissed urgently, although I couldn’t see her. As I squeezed through, Max shut it at once, making barely a click. I could just make out the crouched form of my girlfriend.

“Max?”

“Come with me.”

She scurried off to the back of the shop, making a fairly good imitation of a chimpanzee as she did so. As a respected member of the community and feeling it unlikely that anyone could see me anyway, I chose to walk more normally. She led me into an office at the back of the shop, closed the door behind me and then switched on a lamp on the desk. “There,” she said, straightening up at last.

“Max, what the bloody hell are you doing?”

“Investigating.”

“That’s one word for it. Others would be breaking and entering.” She looked pained. “Surely not. I haven’t broken anything.”

“How did you get in, then?”

“I got the key from Mrs Kerry who lives next door. She cleans the shop for Peter Carlton and I’ve been treating her poodle. She’s ever so grateful to me.”

“What did you tell her?”

She had no shame. “I told them you had been to see Peter Carlton and you had asked me to collect a few things for him in hospital.”

I breathed very heavily, told myself that I loved her. “Listen, Max. Peter Carlton might be in hospital and likely to be there for quite a few weeks, but that doesn’t mean you can waltz into his shop and search through whatever takes your fancy.”

She looked outraged. “Lance, he’s a murderer.”

“Max, there are rules…”

She sighed. “It doesn’t matter. I didn’t find anything.”

I said at once, “Exactly. There’s no point in charging in until you know what you’re charging into. What did you think you’d find? A confession signed in blood? A gun with one bullet missing?”

“You never know…”

“Life’s not that simple, Max.”

She nodded. “I see that now.” My mouth was open and I was about to continue my philosophizing when she said, “You’re absolutely right. There’s nothing here at all.” I was about to sound even more pompous when she said, “It’s all rather pathetic, really. Just lots of invoices for different types of wood and thngs.”

“As you’d expect.”

“Of course,” she said forlornly.

It took a few minutes but I led her after a while from the shop through the darkness and then out into the cooling air of Fairlands Avenue, Thornton Heath. Having pushed the key through Mrs Kerry’s letterbox, we hurried away, looking around us all the while, seeing no one. In the car on the way back, Max said, “He must have been very eccentric.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because he bought lots of fluffy dice – the things that you hang in the car.”

It was a relatively new craze then, but I was taken aback by this news. “You’re sure?”

“I saw the receipt. He spent eighty pounds on them in May.”

“Eighty? He must have bought a hell of lot of them.” The picture I had of Peter Carlton was one of a desperately unhappy and driven man, but not a loony. I imagined that eighty pounds’ worth of fluffy dice would occupy an entire room and I could not for the life of me imagine why a dedicated and expert furniture-maker should start a sideline selling novelty gifts. “How peculiar,” I said.

“And he was branching out into his brother’s territory.”

“In what way?”

“He bought a consignment of barometers at the same time.” Which at least to me sounded less barmy than buying several crates of fluffy dice. She continued, “Maybe that’s the reason he killed Harvey – because they argued about selling barometers.”

“I would have thought that would be more reason for Harvey to kill Peter, not the other way round.”

These were mysteries for sure, but they weren’t of great import when compared with the central conundrum of who had killed Harvey and why.

Max and I were gardening when Dad came visiting that evening. I hate gardening but Max is quite enthusiastic, which makes me feel just guilty enough to show slightly willing and pull the odd weed. The familiar sound of Dad’s bright red Hillman Avenger – if you can imagine Chitty Chitty Bang Bang crossed with a Flying Fortress trundling down the runway, then you have some idea why it is not hard to identify my father’s presence in the neighbourhood – interrupted the serenity of a warm summer’s evening. Max led him through to the garden; he was carrying a battered brown suitcase and for a moment I thought that he was planning on staying for a while.

“Hello, Dad.”

“Good evening!” Like Masson, he was noticeably happier than usual, which led me to wonder if there was something in the air. Before I could offer him refreshment, he asked, “Is this the way you treat your guests? Nothing to drink? Are you suddenly teetotal?”

Max said, “What would you like, Dr Elliot? Beer, wine, or something soft?”

“If my son has a decent bottle of beer, I’ll have one. None of that gnat’s pee you call lager, though.”

She found him a bottle of bitter that he sniffed at somewhat – he only liked beers that stripped the stomach of its lining and then knocked out your bone marrow – but eventually deigned to try.

“What’s in the suitcase?”

“Aha! I thought you’d never ask.” He sighed with happiness. “It’s finished.” With which he pulled the suitcase on to his knees and flicked the catches. From within it he withdrew a crossbow draped in a white cloth, much as a Stradivarius is cosseted by its owner. He placed it on the garden table, exposed it fully and sat back.

Max said at once, “It’s wonderful.” Even I had to admit that he’d done a good job on it. The stock was beautifully shaped and deeply varnished; the bow was of burnished metal, the trigger mechanism finely etched with filigree. There was a sight at the front and small handle towards the back with which to wind back the bowstring. It looked lethal.

“Gosh,” I said softly.

“I’m rather pleased with it.” He picked it up, put it to his shoulder, at which Max and I ducked instinctively. He looked at us. “What’s wrong with you two?”

“Is it loaded?”

A look of irritation passed across his face. “Don’t be stupid, Lance. I wouldn’t point it at someone if it had an arrow in it, would I?” I thought about responding, saw the futility of this at once. “Anyway, I haven’t made any arrows yet. I’ve only just finished the bow.”

“Let me know when you do,” I suggested, half to myself. He didn’t hear and continued, “Mind you, I might not just stick at arrows.”

“No?” asked Max.

“It’s quite versatile. You can even fire things like marbles. They could be just as lethal.”

He had put it back down and Max was inspecting it carefully. “How easy is it to use?” she asked.

“Very. That was the beauty of it; unlike the longbow, it doesn’t require much training to be very accurate. The disadvantage is that it has a low rate of fire – at most one or two arrows per minute as opposed to a dozen with a longbow. But as a sniper’s weapon, it’s superb. Accurate and lethal over nearly two hundred yards.”

As he prattled on, I remember wondering whether to ring his neighbours and warn them that it would be in their best interests to remain indoors during daylight hours for the next few weeks. Dad was clearly in love with his new creation and I could not criticize him for it, but the memory of my close encounter with death a few weeks before was strong within me.

Suddenly, I was brought back to the present as he was talking about the troubles he had had in making it. “To think that I had to wait so long to get hold of the book from the library. Some people are just so selfish. The librarian got very angry that this chap, Carlton, held on to it for so long. The fine was quite astronomical…”

“Carlton?”

“Yes. As I was saying…”

“Peter Carlton?”

“I’m not sure.”

I was looking at Max who was returning the compliment. Dad drank his beer and carried on talking.

When I rang the next morning and asked the librarian if it had been Peter Carlton who had kept the book on making crossbows out of my father’s hands, he was at first slightly surprised to be asked, but eventually confirmed that, yes, it had indeed been Peter Carlton. He made some comment that he was glad that the book had been returned before he had had his stroke, which I thought was a bit tasteless though I said nothing.

What, though, was I going to do with the information? This question occupied me as I worked my way through morning and evening surgeries, sandwiched by the midday home visits. By the time I was finished, though, I had made up my mind and, trying to avoid feelings of hypocrisy, I knocked on Mrs Kerry’s door. She was a delightful old lady who swallowed every lie that I told her about wanting to look in Peter Carlton’s shop for his cheque book, happily handing over the key.

What was I looking for? I suppose, to be truthful, I was thinking I might just find a crossbow, but I was not optimistic. If Peter Carlton had any sense, he would have burned it immediately, and I suspected that he had had a lot of sense indeed. The theory that had percolated its way through my brain cells was that he had shot the bullet with the crossbow, but that left some important questions unanswered; firstly, why had he used an old bullet – one already fired from a gun with a silencer – and secondly how had he managed to fire the crossbow in broad daylight when there were potentially a hundred people to see him?

I spent several hours looking but without success. The only vaguely suspicious thing I found was in the back garden where there were the remains of small bonfire. By the light of a torch I looked through it and came up with several pieces of charred metal but none of them looked like they might be from a crossbow; I raked them together, though, and put them in a plastic bag. I finished by searching the office, as Max had done, which was when everything fell into place as I came across those peculiar receipts for fluffy dice and barometers.

With Max, I went to see Peter Carlton the next evening. He was sitting out by his bed, dressed in pyjamas and dressing gown, a urinary catheter snaking surreptiously out from beneath the ensemble. The right side of his face was drooping, a faint shiny line of dribble coming from the corner of his mouth. His right arm was flexed on his lap; his eyes were bright but it was with the light of tears held back. After the niceties of introduction and questions about his welfare that he could only answer with nods and winks, I said gently, “Peter, I want to talk to you about your brother’s death.” There was no reaction. “I’d like to suggest to you what might have happened that day.”

If he wanted to hear what I had to say, he didn’t show it. I glanced across at Max who encouraged me with a smile. “I think you did something that was quite ingenious, quite outrageously clever.”

The flattery had no effect either. “I think that you made yourself a crossbow. You borrowed a book from the library to help you construct it, but you would have managed with your skills to make a very, very good one, I suspect.” For the first time there was something in his eyes that suggested a reaction – pride, perhaps. I continued, “As my father has told me, it’s a perfect sniper’s weapon. Silent and very deadly over long distances. Also, it can fire anything, not just arrows. The problem is, of course, that it’s difficult to conceal.

“Also, since the murder occurred in broad daylight – at three-fifty-two in the afternoon, to be precise – and the trajectory of the bullet suggests that the killer must have been standing in open view of scores of witnesses, it is spooky that no one saw him.”

For the first time he made a noise; it was no more than a gurgle and incapable of being comprehended. I said, “The clever thing was that it wasn’t the bullet the police found that killed your brother, was it? That was just a decoy, so that they would work with completely the wrong trajectory. You fired that the night before, didn’t you? You put a silencer on the gun, walked across Thornton Road and stood in the garden of the Homans’ house. You knew that he worked late into the night, and more or less when he would leave. What did you do? Wait for your brother to leave the shop and then fire over his shoulder? You must be a good shot, Peter. Are you?”

He didn’t answer, of course, so I went on, “It must have been tempting to kill him there and then, but you were patient. Your target was the wooden shelving behind him, and you hit it; it was small-calibre ammunition so that it wouldn’t do too much damage. You knew the police would find it and you knew that they’d jump to all the wrong conclusions.

“With that piece of misdirection, you could then proceed with the murder. You shot him using your crossbow from the safety of your own shop, through the open door. You waited until he was standing in front of the place where you had shot the bullet and then you killed him.”

He was trembling, I noticed. Was that something new?

“But what of the bullet you used? The police found only one, of course, so where is the other?”

Which, since I hadn’t told her, was when Max joined in. “Yes, Lance, where is it?”

I had brought the charred metal fragments with me and, opening a newspaper on the bed, I poured them out. “I was hoping that these might be parts of a crossbow, but I think not. I think that they’re pieces of barometers. You ordered several in May, didn’t you?”

“And fluffy dice,” pointed out Max

I shook my head. “No, Max. Not fluffy dice. Not car dice, but cardice.”

She looked none the wiser so I explained, “Cardice is solid carbon dioxide. It has a temperature of minus seventy degrees centigrade, and that is quite cold enough to freeze mercury solid; mercury that you might get out of barometers, say.”

She saw the implications of what I was saying, and gasped. I looked at Peter Carlton and for the first time I knew that he was listening to me and that I was right. She said, “He made the bullet out of solid mercury.”

“He made several, I should think, just to be on the safe side. He fired the mercury bullet with the silent crossbow through the open doors of both shops as Harvey stood in front of the shelves where he kept his barometers. It passed through his eye, through his brain and through his skull, and then melted to join the rest of the mercury on the floor around the body.”

There was silence for a moment, and it took a while before I realized that Peter Carlton was crying.

Officially Masson solved the case but he hid his gratitude well. The next time I saw him, he rather curtly confirmed that, with the aid of a speech and language therapist, Peter Carlton had been helped to make a voluntary confession that fairly accurately mirrored what I had conjectured.

“I don’t know, Doctor, but I’d be worried if my brain were devious enough to have worked all this out.”

That sounded suspiciously like sour grapes to me but I smiled sweetly and pointed out, “It’s just as well somebody’s devious enough, isn’t it?”

I walked away before his scowl could excoriate me.

My father had invited us to another barbecue but I only accepted after his reassurance that he would not get his crossbow out of his suitcase until we arrived. Nevertheless, I had a faint feeling of trepidation as I opened the back garden gate and peered carefully around. Dad was sitting reading, apparently completely weaponless, but he jumped up at once as we walked up to him and produced his beloved crossbow. “I decided on arrows,” he announced. “Much more aesthetically pleasing than solid projectiles.”

He showed us his arrows; as usual with my father, they were exquisitely well made.

“Now, what you do is turn this handle, which draws the bowstring back, then you press that switch there and, by doing that, you lock the string into place under tension. You place the arrow there, and then pulling the trigger releases the string which projects the arrow forward.”

Max said, “Go on, then.”

He began to turn the handle. At first, it was quite easy, but it quickly became harder and harder. Within a few seconds there was a frown on his face and the string was only two-thirds of the way back. He persevered, though.

“Careful,” I advised.

He looked up at me whilst continuing to wind. “Lance, don’t fuss. This is a precision instrument and I know exactly the tolerances that can be applied. There is no danger…”

The snap was loud and sudden and somehow sad. Dad looked down to see his precious crossbow in two pieces, split through the stock.

A moment of silence ensued; if any neighbours were watching, that was the moment they would have opened the champagne.

“Bugger,” said Dad.