The Mammoth Book of Perfect Crimes and Impossible Mysteries

Duel of Shadows by Vincent Cornier

One of the great treasures of the world of baffling mysteries is the work of Vincent Cornier (1898-1976). A journalist, war reporter, and a much-travelled man, Cornier created some of the most bizarre and unusual crime and mystery stories to appear in the magazines from the late 1920s through to the 1960s. In all that time he never once sought to have them collected in book form and, although a few have been anthologized, most are now extremely rare and difficult to find. Cornier created a couple of continuing characters, of which the most popular proved to be Barnabas Hildreth, whose stories ran in Pearson’s Magazine in the mid-1930s. Cornier would announce in advance to the editor what the next story would be about and in each case the editor could not believe the author could pull it off. The following is generally regarded as the most ingenious of them all – the bullet that took over 200 years to find its target.

In the calculation an allowance has to be made for the Gregorian Correction of the calendar in 1752. Then it becomes apparent that the time elapsed between the firing of that bullet and its plunge into Westmacott’s body was exactly two hundred and twenty-two years, two months, one week, five days, twelve hours and forty-seven minutes…

The duelling pistol from which it was shot was fired by Ensign the Honourable Nigel Koffard. He was a young officer in one of Marlborough’s crack squadrons and had but recently homed to England after the decisive bloodiness of Malplaquet. The man whom his shot wounded two hundred odd years after was Mr Henry Leonard Westmacott, a branch-cashier of the London and Southern Counties Bank, Limited.

Nigel Koffard pressed the trigger of that pistol, in the park of Ravenshaw Hall, Derbyshire, at precisely eight o’clock on the radiant morning of August the second, 1710.

Henry Westmacott was sitting by his own hearthside in the drawing-room of The Nook, Bettington Avenue, Thornton Heath, Surrey, when Koffard’s bullet struck him and shattered his right shoulder. He had just settled down – on the dismal and rainy night of October the twenty-third, last year-intending to listen to a concert broadcast from the Queen’s Hall. The ball hit him as the B.B.C. announcer was concluding an apology for the programme being late by saying: “It is now eight forty-seven, and we are taking you straight over-”

Thus was the second time most accurately determined.

All the day long, young Mrs Westmacott had been anxious about their little boy, Brian. He was running a slight temperature.

Hence she no sooner had dinner ended when she needs must go up to the nursery. In the swift way of tummy-troubled baby boys, Brian had contrived to lose his pains. He was sleeping serenely. Except for a slight flush and a dampness in his hair, he was normal.

Pamela Westmacott smiled ruefully as she smoothed his rucked sleeping suit and re-arranged his cot clothes…

The shot, the groan and the stumbling fall among the fireirons all sounded on that instant. With mechanical acumen Mrs Westmacott also noted that some china crashed to ruin in the kitchen, and that the opening chords of the Symphony Orchestra’s performance were lost to a thud and a sudden silence.

She rushed down the stairs to collide with her maid-servant, who had burst with almost equal speed from her domain.

“Oh, ma’am! Wh-what in the name o’ glory’s happened?”

“Hush, Biddy, and stay there! I-I’ll go in myself and see what’s the matter.”

Westmacott had raised himself to his knees and was delicately pawing at his right shoulder.

“Henry! Henry-darling!” Pamela Westmacott was down beside him. “What’s gone wrong?” Then she saw the sodden red horror of his shoulder. “Oh, my poor old boy!… Biddy-phone Doctor Smithers and the police. Tell them to hurry. Say it’s serious: Mr Westmacott has been shot!”

When doctor and police arrived Westmacott had been got to bed. He was fully conscious and calm, despite his excruciating pain. His wife had managed him in a way that won Doctor Smithers’ admiration. Her first-aid had stanched most of the bleeding.

Smithers turned to her with a smile as he unscrewed the nozzle of the syringe with which he had administered an opiate.

“Sensible woman, Mrs Westmacott! You made everything very easy… What’s that?… Dangerous? Oh no, not at all! Direct compound fracture of the scapula socket and a flake chipped off the head of the humerus. Abominably painful, but that’s about all.”

Old Smithers patted her hands and definitely pressed her to the door. “Now run along and leave hubby to me. Go down and satisfy the curiosity of those exceedingly impatient policemen. Above all, don’t-you-worry.”

Pamela Westmacott went in to see Brian before returning to the drawing-room. He had slept through all the hubbub.

The police were certainly impatient. Their cross-examination had foundered poor Biddy. After their dismissal of her she had gone back to the kitchen to blubber among the neglected crockery.

In Mrs Westmacott was discovered harder and less hysterical material. She told them all she knew. Essentially because it tallied so exactly with Biddy’s account, the officers became more and more confounded…

“But are you absolutely sure, Mrs Westmacott, no one came out of this room as you rushed down the stairs? Or slipped out by the front door without your seeing ’em?”

“Oh dear, how many more times must I tell you? No!” Wearily she smoothed her forehead. “Who could have done so?”

“Whoever fired that shot,” grunted Inspector Ormesby, “there’s no weapon to be found. The windows are all properly secured. There isn’t any glass broken. Your husband wasn’t potted at by someone lurking in the garden, that’s self-evident. And he couldn’t possibly have shot himself.” The Inspector nodded toward the wireless cabinet which the bullet had struck. “The position of his wound and the subsequent flight of the missile settles that... Somebody shot him! Then who was it?”

A plain-clothes officer turned from his inspection of the damaged cabinet. He had been pencilling notes referring to the tarnished ball of lead which showed itself, half embedded, in the seven-ply veneered woodwork. It had struck a spot directly in front of a valve, and the impact had been sufficient to shatter filaments, so stopping reception.

This man’s talking was far less truculent than that of Inspector Ormesby. But it was deadlier.

“You’ve told us that the front door was locked for the night. Have I got that right-hey?”

“Yes; you have.”

“I noticed that a little brass bolt is on the inner side of the door. Then there’s the main lock and a Yale latch. All of ’em secured?”

“No. The key of the big lock wasn’t turned, but the bolt was pushed home. Naturally the latch held as well.”

“Had you to open those to let us in?”

“I had.”

“Wasn’t it natural for your maid to open that door? Why yourself?”

“Why not? Especially in-in such a crisis! As a matter of fact, Biddy was hopeless – helpless.”

The plain-clothes man watched her through half-closed eyes.

“Now, you remember, you also told us that you came helterskeltering down the stairs at such a rate that you bumped into this Bridget O’Hara woman at the bottom. And she’d just flown out of the kitchen – hey?”

“Perfectly correct. When the shot was fired, Biddy dropped a plate or something. Then she rushed here. We – we converged on the room like two mad things.”

“No one went out of the door.” It seemed that the plain-clothes man was musing aloud. “No one, so you say, went up the stairs past you. No one could have doubled out by way of the kitchen, and no one could have doubled out of here back into the dining-room or into the cupboard under the stairs, without you or your servant seeing ’em… Um-m-m!” He paused, and ignored Mrs Westmacott completely, to smile past her at Inspector Ormesby. “And no weapon found,” he slowly murmured. “You carry on here, Inspector. Strikes me I’ll have to have another heart-to-heart talk with our faithful Bridget – our exceptionally clever and faithful Bridget. Perfect treasure of a maid, I’ll bet!”

Pamela Westmacott flinched as though a viper had reared itself before her eyes as she watched the inimical C.I.D. man saunter from the room. Mad as it seemed; horrible, fantastic and unreal as it was, nevertheless she realised she was the suspect here.

Now let interpolation be made of the somewhat astounding experience of an official police photographer, called Coghill.

A genial little fellow, Egbert Coghill; a craftsman of infinite patience and capability. He was the man who went to The Nook the next day and, acting on police instructions, set about securing photographs of the drawing-room and, more especially, the bullet-splintered radio-set.

Mr Coghill was highly gratified by all he saw. Plenty of light, artificial and otherwise; plenty of space, and most admirable contrasts of dark furnishings against pale matt walls.

Cheerily, with an incessant whispering whistle, he moved about and made himself quite at home. He dumped his big camera on a table. The black leather case, which contained his plates in their mahogany slides, he placed in front of the wireless cabinet. Still softly whistling, he pottered around, making his notes and selecting his objects and angles.

Thereafter he erected his camera and screened its peerless lens with a precisely-chosen colour-filter, designed to obtain for him the correct qualities and the infinitude of detail that the satisfaction of his craftsmanship demanded.

He made various long exposures. He took photographs of the door, the windows, the blood-stained rug, the untidy hearth, and the arm-chair in which Westmacott was sitting when he was wounded. After these, Coghill concentrated on his most important work. He removed his plate carrier from its place in front of the wireless set and focused on the half-embedded bullet and the starry matrix wherein it lay. He expended his remaining four plates on this.

When he came to the development of his material, Coghill was astonished and alarmed. Without exception, each dripping negative held-superimposed on its actual detail – a wee portrait of something that appeared to be an astronomical portrait view of the planet Saturn. These were ring-impounded orbs which had a quality of eerie brilliancy that had struck the plates with something amounting almost to halation. Yet they were mottled by shadows of an intensity and a delicacy Mr Egbert Coghill had never previously developed out of any sensitive emulsion.

More than this phenomena, the four exposures of the wireless cabinet were useless. These, which should have been Coghill’s acme, not only bore the eerie imprint of the tiny incandescent “planet”, but a great maelstrom of fog about the place where the bullet should have been. The cabinet was clear enough. Only that area which should have been occupied by a representation of the leaden slug was at fault.

Mr Coghill equipped himself with another camera and a new assortment of plates. Back he went to the drawing-room of The Nook. He duplicated his previous exposures and again developed them.

None of this second group of negatives showed the Saturn-like globe. Equally, none of the seven plates he had, secondarily, exposed on the cabinet front was in any better state than the former four. Except for the non-appearance of the queer orb, there were the identical coils of fogginess about the splintered woodwork – and no sign of the bullet.

Mr Egbert Coghill made a number of prints from all these negatives. Together with his notes and the plates themselves, he gave these into police keeping. This done, he fared forth and drank deeply.

Without much loss of time those photographs went, by way of Scotland Yard, to a Home Office department in Whitehall: to Barnabas Hildreth. He studied them and puzzled over them, as he afterwards told me, until he was sick to death of the very sight of them. Disgruntled and bewildered, Barnabas then went out to Thornton Heath and interviewed the Westmacotts.

The unfortunate Henry had nothing of much value to relate. He had been reading, he said, and had just put aside his evening paper to listen to the broadcast. As he leaned back in his chair, taking off his pince-nez and rubbing his closed eyes, he heard a curiously violent hissing as of air escaping from a pin-punctured tyre. Then there was a detonation and a fierily enormous blow at his shoulder. The next thing he realised was that he was wambling about the floor, suffering pain.

He scouted the idea that anyone could have been in the room with him without his knowledge. And on the subject of the police theory – that his wife had shot him and, in collusion with Bridget O’Hara, had thereafter established incontestable alibi-he was sardonically and sulphurously vehement. When he discovered Hildreth so far agreed with him under that head as to veto further official brow-beating, Westmacott became a different man. He was so relieved, so pathetically relieved, that Hildreth was touched – actually was humanised sufficiently to accept an invitation to stay for tea!

So it came about that the grim Intelligence Service officer and Master Brian Westmacott became friends. Hildreth chuckled over this.

“There was no resisting the little beggar, Ingram. He’s a sturdy kid and as sensible as the deuce. No sooner had I finished examining the drawing-room than he lugged me off to build what he called a ‘weal twue king’s palace’-from bits of wood; wood such as I’ve never seen a child playing with before. He had a big box full of sawn-up chair legs and rails; ‘pillars’ for his palace. And he’d scores of miniature arches and so forth – all shaped out of carved walnut and mahogany and oak and elm-little blocks, battens and angle-pieces that had originally been parts of furniture. One glance at ’em showed they were scores of years old and had come from the workshops of masters like Hepplewhite and Chippendale.”

I sensed something of extraordinary import here.

“Oh, and where’d he got ’em from?”

“Out of the family woodshed. Or, at least, his father had.” Hildreth grinned. “I looked it over-lots of the same stuff there. Y’see, Westmacott has a brother in the antique furniture trade: does restorations and repairs and so forth. Westmacott gets all the waste from his brother’s workshops. The likely bits he cuts up to add to Brian’s collection of blocks and pillars. The remainder is burnt.

“While I was in the drawing-room, old man” – he deliberately went off at a tangent – “I poked that bullet out of the wireless set and took a pair of callipers to it. It’s a pistol ball right enough. But where in the name of glory did it come from? And, who cast it – when?”

“‘Who cast it?’” I echoed. “What, isn’t it an ordinary revolver slug?”

“Mass-produced?” Barnabas rubbed his hands together in glee. “Not on your life! It’s as big as a marble and perfectly spherical. And it has marks on it that only the closure of a beautifully accurate bullet-mould could have made. More than that. It’s of an unusual calibre-one so unusual that it opens up a tremendous field of conjecture, yet, at the same time, defines the narrowest of tracks. A track, indeed, that a fool could follow.”

Silently I watched the peculiar fellow twiddle about with his smoking cigarette. He was looking through its writhing spirals at me with a glitter of satanical humour in his dark eyes.

“Calibres of firearms,” he softly stated, “are not little matters left to individual discretion, Ingram. They’re registered and pedigreed better than bloodstock – at least, in this country. Ever since 1683 any armourer or gunsmith drilling a new size of bore has had to deposit a specimen barrel and exact measurements with the Tower authorities before he could fit it to a stock or sell or exploit it in any way.

“Remembering that, I asked for records to be searched. The answer is, that ball was cast to be shot out of only two particular types of weapons. It’s of a size that’s quite obsolete to-day. Either it could have been shot from a long gun, registered in London by Adolph Levoisier, of Strasbourg, in 1826, or out of a duelling pistol fashioned by Gregory Gannion, a gunsmith who had an establishment in Pall Mall between the years 1702 and 1754.

“The exact date of Gannion’s application for a licence to put on the market a weapon of a new type and calibre which he called ‘an excellently powerful small-arm, for the practise of the duel, or in other uses, for delicacy and swiftness of discharge in defence or offence’… was February the ninth, 1709. And, according to all accounts, the bloodthirsty young bucks of that day went daffy about it. Y’see, it was the first ‘hair-trigger’ pistol on the market: ugly, but useful.

“I’m working up from that. I’ve a shrewd idea that good English lead wouldn’t come out of a continental long-gun. No, a Gannion duelling pistol seems indicated.”

I am getting ever more used to Barnabas Hildreth’s tortuous tricks. The queerly precise ordination of those words, “good English lead”, made me curious.

“How does one determine the nationality of-er-lead?” I suavely asked.

“All as easily as one differentiates between a Chinaman and a Zulu,” he sourly grinned. “All as simply as one distinguishes Cleveland iron-ore from Castillian heematite; Poldruinn copper from Norwegian; Aberdeen granite from that of Messina – by looking at it first of all, ass, and studying it afterwards.

“According to the assay-notes, furnished me this morning, the lead from which that ball was cast came from one particular area of Derbyshire, and nowhere else! What’s more, it’s almost pure native stuff” – his face shone with some inner ecstatic light – “and, as it chances, so absolutely unique… that it’s worth its weight, and more, in gold. In fact, if the fervours and excitements of the metallurgical chemists are anything to go by – and they’re simply frazzling over it – it’s the clue to a pretty fat fortune for someone!”

He got up then, and growling something about my hospitality and his thirst, calmly stalked across to my tantalus and mixed whisky and sodas. Then he challenged me across the brim of his glass.

“Well, old man, all the best! And here’s to the speedy solution of one of the neatest mysteries I’ve struck for months.”

So far as I recollect, it was two days later that Hildreth descended on me. He wanted me to go to Thornton Heath with him, and I went. We visited the premises occupied by Westmacott’s brother Ralph – Westmacott and Company, Ltd.: “Antique Furniture Restored, Renovated, Repaired and Reproduced” – reproduced mainly, if my layman’s eye had any common sense behind it.

Admittedly, Ralph Westmacott had certain specimen pieces in his workshops. These were the magnificent possessions of connoisseurs, to whom the factor of financial worth hardly counted. They were all undergoing tiny but incredibly painstaking forms of restoration, and guarded jealously for the treasures they were.

However, as Hildreth said, these were not our meat. Westmacott took us to the larger, general workshop. Here we saw really valuable, but ordinary, examples of olden furniture in the processes of repair and “faking”.

“We pride ourselves,” Westmacott told us, “on our ability to replace a faulty participle with a sound one, so meticulously reproduced and fitted – grafted on, one might say – that no one outside first-flight experts can detect the addition.”

“That, of course, necessitates,” smoothly came Hildreth’s question, “your carrying an amazing stock of old cabinet-making woods, I presume?”

Westmacott looked curiously at my friend.

“Aye, amazing is the word,” he laughed. “Come and have a look in here!”

He preceded us to a vast loft that was filled by racks and shelving – and all of them packed with broken parts of old-fashioned furniture.

“Here you are,” he exulted, “from Tudor to Early Victorian; from linenfold panelling to pollard-oak sideboard doors… gathered together from the auction rooms of half the globe. We couldn’t carry on a day without ’em. Unless similar old stuff is used on replacement jobs-”

“Stuff like this, for instance,” Hildreth interrupted to point at a great stack of dirty wood, looking to me like huge half-cylinders of amber-flecked bog oak: split tree trunks. “This lot seems to be pretty ancient.”

Ralph Westmacott moved delicately to Hildreth’s side.

“Aye,” he concurred, “it’s old enough! That wood’s been buried in the earth for a century and more.”

Brightly, blandly, almost with the alert cockiness of a schoolboy, Barnabas Hildreth replied:

“I don’t doubt that for a moment, Mr Westmacott! They’re elm-wood water conduits, aren’t they? And, judging from their boggish appearance, they’ve come out of moorland or country where there’s plenty of peat about.”

Ralph Westmacott scratched his grizzled hair.

“Yes, they are conduits, and they certainly came out of peaty loam – from Derbyshire, as a matter of fact. We’ve men on the job up there now. They came from Ravensham Park, near a place called Battersby Brow… we bought the whole line of wooden water-pipes that used to serve the hall and the village. Finest tackle in the world for reproduction purposes.”

Grimly enough Hildreth chuckled.

“What a game it is!” he drily stated. “Now, ‘Battersby Brow,’ in Derbyshire” – he was jotting down these particulars in a notebook – “and ‘Ravensham Park,’ you say?”

“Yes, that’s all correct.” Westmacott seemed puzzled.

“And this hall you mentioned? What d’you call it?”

“Ravensham Hall, the residence of General Sir Arthur Koffard, you know.”

Hildreth put away his book and began to fumble among the blackened elm-wood. He pointed to one or two big fragments which lay about.

“Might I have a chunk to take away with me?” he inquired. “I want it for certain experiments that have to be made.” Westmacott nodded. “And will you ratify this? Certain lumps of this wood that you knew would be useless for your work you gave to your brother Henry, didn’t you?”

“I – I did! What’s the-”

“That’s right! I thought I recognised the stuff again. I saw some in his wood-shed.” Hildreth smiled. “Thanks!”

With that we went away and back to London.

From the “Black Bull,” at Battersby Brow in Derbyshire, a letter came to me on the twenty-ninth of October:

My dear Ingram,

If you can leave your mouldy rag to look after itself for the weekend, come over here and be interested. Of all the intricate bits of work I’ve ever struck, this is the trickiest! Don’t let me down, old chap. I promise you a really noble denouement for the mystery of the Westmacott bullet: an ending that, I suppose, you’ll stick on one of your scandalous chronicles of my cases and complacently claim as your own.

Sincerely,

B.H.

So I set out for Battersby Brow and the “Black Bull” as soon as I put my paper to bed in the early hours of Friday, the thirty-first. At nine o’clock the next morning I was in a beautiful and brilliant country of whistling airs and mighty hills.

Over breakfast, Barnabas crowed mightily.

“Done a lot of work since I saw you, old man! Only one tiny coping-stone to be put on, and the job’s complete.

“It was a Gannion duelling pistol that fired that ball. I’ve seen it. There’s a pair of ’em, and they’ve been laid away in a case since seventeen hundred and ten… One was discharged. The other was loaded, but I got permission to draw the charge. I drew it right enough!” He chuckled. “D’you know, it was a curious experience. There I had in hand another ball, similar to the one that wounded Westmacott. And there were tiny tattered fragments of a newspaper that had been used for a wad between bullet and powder – an issue of the Northern Intelligencer for August the first, seventeen-ten.

“The Koffards of Ravensham Hall have been awfully decent about everything. At first they were inclined to be stand-offish, but when I told old General Koffard the story you know, he tucked into things like a good ‘un.”

“Sorry to butt in, Barnabas – but, tell me, what story do I know? It occurs to me that I’ve only a few strikingly dissimilar and baffling incidents in mind, all hazily mixed up with lead that’s ‘worth its weight in gold’ and old elm logs which you proved had come from this district.”

Hildreth finished eating and lit a cigarette.

“Listen, old man, and follow me carefully… Go back in thought to the night of the twenty-third. You have Westmacott sitting in his chair. A bullet, apparently fired out of the void, strikes his shoulder and is deflected into the wireless set. Point the first to be made: direction of bullet’s flight proved it was shot from somewhere in the region of Westmacott’s feet. Got that?” I surveyed the scene in mind… I had to agree. “Now for point the second. Had a ball of that size possessed a high velocity, it’d have made the dickens of a mess of the humerus. It’d have caused a comminuted fracture, and, without much doubt, it would have glanced across and gone through his throat.

“But no, it was a missile of low velocity – only a direct compound fracture of the scapula socket and a lazy glide off, to smack the front of the wireless set.

“No one can say where the ball came from. The ineffable Egbert Coghill goes to photograph it… He puts his platecarrier dead in front of the set, incidentally in front of the bullet. For fully a quarter of an hour he footles about, then, when he comes to take his photographs, he carries on each plate he afterwards exposes a portrait of the ball, transmitted by its own power through the leather case, through the whole clutter of his mahogany slides and, in fact, through everything within eighteen inches of the radio cabinet!”

I jumped at that.

“D’you mean those Saturn-like globes were-”

“Photographs of that ball! Precisely! It emitted a short, hard ray of far more intensity than the usual X-ray apparatus employs!”

“But how on earth could that come about?”

“Pitch-blende,” said Barnabas Hildreth, “that’s why! Apart from certain areas in Cornwall, only the Peak district of Derbyshire and some isolated caverns round about Ingleborough in Yorkshire have pitch-blende deposits. Usually, it’s in association with lead that has a high silver content… The assay of that ball not only showed lead and silver, but definite traces of pitch-blende striations, all melted together.

“To clinch that part of the business, however” – Hildreth glanced at the time – “remember that the second batch of Coghill’s prints did not show the eerie little ‘planet’. That was because he did not bung his plate-carrier in front of the set on his second venture. The active emissions were powerless outside a small range.

“But neither set of plates would betray anything except a fogginess where the bullet should have been. What could you reasonably expect?” Hildreth shrugged. “A long exposure, with powerful lens concentrating radium rays on a speedy photographic emulsion – nothing but fog could result!”

In the end I realised that Hildreth was right. Radio-active properties in that leaden slug would explain everything. Incidentally I caught the drift of what he meant when he spoke about the value of the bullet and its potentiality as the clue to a fortune.

“Do you mind” – Hildreth was on his feet and again looking at his watch – “if we hustle? We’ve a walk of a few miles if we’re to get that coping-stone set, y’know. And I want it done to-day.”

That long tramp across the sage-green acres of the Derbyshire countryside terminated in the park of Ravensham Hall. A group of navvies, excavating a snakish trench, paused in their work and watched us curiously. And, from out of a near-by hut, a podgy and bespectacled man clad in a white coat, and an old iron-haired fellow with a face of claret, came to greet us. One was a chemist called Sowerby and the elder man was Major-General Sir Arthur Koffard, the owner of the estate.

“Well, Sowerby,” Hildreth briskly questioned when introductions were completed, “had any luck? Tried my little experiment – eh?”

Sowerby smiled unctuously and beckoned us back to the hut. In there, he pointed to a fire-clay retort that glowed above a fierce petrol-air lamp. Around the squat nozzle of the retort a big plume of intensely blue and brilliant flame was glowing. It made the popping sound of the burst of gorse-pods to August sun: an infinitesimal tattoo of whispering explosions.

“Yes, Mr Hildreth, your surmise was right enough. It’s methyl hydride, without a doubt.” He pointed to the halcyon fire. “Almost pure, to burn like that.”

“Most ’strordinary – most ’strordinary thing,” this was the crisp clacking of Koffard, “tha’ one can live a lifetime, ’mong things like these, an’ never know – never know. ’Course, this land’s been full o’ will-o’-th’-wisp lights for years, but one never stops to give ’em much thought – what?”

Barnabas abstractedly nodded and walked out. We followed him to the side of the trench. For a long while he studied the enormous hollow trunks that the navvies had dug out of the black and oozy earth.

“Magnificent trees,” he muttered. “Veritable giants! Took some labour, I should say, to gouge their innards out!”

Then he turned to Koffard and asked him something about a map.

“Aye, I’ve got it here.” The rattlevoiced old officer produced a tin cylinder and drew out of it a scroll inscribed by rusted lines of ink. “The avenue stood across there. Nigel Koffard fought his duel” – he pointed to a level sward forty yards away – “just on that patch. At the beginning of the avenue, exactly.”

When we went to this place we could plainly see a series of little hummocks stretching, in parallel, for almost half a mile. It was explained to me that here had been a hundred and more elms making a great avenue that was felled in 1803 – under each knoll was a mighty stump. The trunks, hollowed out, had gone into the formation of that pipe-line (for conveying drinking water from a hillside spring) the navvies were excavating.

Hildreth stopped exactly on the spot on which one Nigel Koffard had taken his stance to fight a duel on the morning of August the second, 1710.

“Now Sir Arthur,” Hildreth murmured, “let’s work things out. Your ancestor challenged his cousin to a duel, primarily over the intentions of that cousin toward your ancestor’s sister. When the affair came to its head, Nigel Koffard was fully determined to put a ball through his cousin. But that doughty lad, conscious of honour and innocence, did not so much as lift his own pistol. Refused, point-blank, to defend himself.”

“Tha’s right; quite right!” Koffard applauded. “He must ha’ had guts, y’know – simply stood there. Completely broke Nigel’s nerve.”

“And the said Nigel,” Hildreth grinned, “thereupon did a bit of quick thinking. It dawned on him that he had misjudged his man. So, to show his regret and to extend an olive branch, he turned and fired his bullet straight into the nearest elm. Whereupon the youngsters shook hands. The cousin got permission to marry Nigel’s fair sister, and the Gannion duelling pistols – one discharged and the other loaded – were put back in their case and guarded thereafter, for the sake of the episode, as family heirlooms. And everyone lived happily ever afterwards.”

“Precisely, sir!” said General Koffard. “Admirably put, sir! B’gad quite neat, I say – neat!”

“Then, if that’s so” – Hildreth was already on the move – “we’ll trouble that invaluable plan of yours once again. Now we want to see this place called Skelter’s Pot, where lead was mined in those days.”

… We tramped a full mile up a mountainous slope and were eventually rewarded by the view of a bite into a pinkish face of spar, which the old map told us was “Skelter’s Pot.”

“Out of here,” Sir Arthur Koffard told us, “came all the lead used hereabouts. The hall is roofed by it. That pistol-ball was certainly cast from it. But it doesn’t pay to work it now.”

Hildreth took a geologist’s hammer from his pocket and knocked away at a piece of semi-translucent quartz in which dull grey patches showed and on which strangely green filaments were netted.

“I would like,” he softly returned as he put this specimen away, “to own your roof! At a modest estimate, it’ll be worth more than the hall and this estate put together.”

“Now, you see, old chap” – Hildreth tapped the rough pencil sketch he had made – “this was the way of it.” I leaned across the table, and under the steady oil-lamp light of the old Black Bull, I looked at the drawing. “Here we’ve all we need.”

I smoked my pipe and wondered.

“When Nigel Koffard shot that ball, at closest range, into the living elm-tree it made a deep cavity, a tunnel, in which it stopped. In a few more years a ‘rind-gall’ was formed. The elm closed over the wound in its structure by a growth of annular rings. The cylindrical little tunnel remained and the ball remained, precisely as they were.

“Then our elm showed signs of what is called ‘doatiness’ – incipient decay. It, together with all the others in the avenue, was felled, hollowed out, and used for an aqueduct. Y’see, old man, elm is the one wood which never changes if kept constantly wet. They’ve actually dug Roman elm-wood conduits out of the middle of Piccadilly, as sound as the day on which they were laid…

“This is a queer countryside, Ingram. And the elm is a queer tree. Get those facts in mind.

“That chamber which held the bullet also held the gases of the elm’s former disruption, and to these were added those similar gases which lurk in peaty land. ‘Similar,’ did I say? Identical would be a better word… You heard old Koffard talk about marsh-gas; natural gas, that is… Well, that’s what we’re considering. You saw that chemist fellow, Sowerby, with a retort full of elm-wood burning such gas at the mouth of the apparatus.

“Methyl-hydride; methane; carburetted-hydrogen – call it what you will, and still you’re right – is marsh-gas. Also it’s the dreaded and terribly explosive thing which miners call fire-damp... when mixed with air.

“You see it burning away in every fireside in the land. It’s the illuminating property of coal. And it always results when bodies of a peaty, woody or coaly constituent are subjected to great heat.”

I began to have an inkling of what Hildreth was getting at.

“However, to the mechanics of the situation.” He laughed and drank some beer. “Ralph Westmacott, the furniture man, buys some old weathered elm-wood from Derbyshire in order to fake his manufactures. What he has to spare – useless – he gives, as usual, to his brother, Henry Leonard. Our good Henry Leonard diligently saws it up into chunks and fills the family woodshed.

“Now comes a rainy and dismal October night. Henry puts a log on the open-hearth fire, extends his slippered feet and prepares to enjoy the evening.

“But the wild mystery of the ever-burgeoning earth comes into the simple household of The Nook and claims him… He hears a violent hiss. That was air rushing into the vascular tissue of that hot elm-log, combining with the incredible chemistry of Nature with the terrible potential of that hydro-carbon, methane, in the hollow where the bullet lay concealed.

“Nigel Koffard’s powder had not half the fulminating property, in the steel barrel of his pistol, that fire-damp had in the smooth wound of the elm-log… Pressure increased, since the hollow was filling every second with more and more gas, and air was in combination with it. At last, the hungry fire, eating away the inner face of the log, reached the terribly explosive mixture. Then bang, up and outwards shot the ball into Henry’s shoulder.

“So we’re back at our beginning – the very first point I made: that the ball was fired from somewhere about Westmacott’s feet. I recalled flying fragments of coal and co-related things… allowing, always, for the unusual.

“But, instead of coal and cinders, the well of the grate was filled with half-burned fragments of wood – like fragments of furniture, surmounted by a big tricorne hunk of charred elm-wood. I wondered, vastly, about those fragments. Then, when I saw the little boy, Brian, playing with his home-made building blocks, I was definitely set on the second line which led me to solution.”

He picked up his tankard and smiled.

“That green network you saw on the surface of that spar was pitch-blende! I’m told it’s more than usually rich in radium and uranium salts.

“The land on which Skelter’s Pot is situated belongs to the Commissioners. It’s an open common land. Anyone procuring the necessary faculty, and entering into serious negotiations, can mine it… So, with the joyous approval of Mr Henry Leonard Westmacott, I have entered my innocent ally Master Brian’s name on our list-”

“‘Our list’?” I was puzzled by his most deliberate pause. “What list?”

“Oh, the little company I’m forming: myself, yourself, Koffard, Westmacott and young Brian, to exploit the pitch-blende deposits of our property in Skelter’s Pot, Derbyshire.” He laughed and stretched his long arms. “It ought to provide for us in our old age, if nothing else!”

… Judging by my latest returns from that adroitly-contrived concern, I am inclined, stoutly, to agree.