The Second Shot (33 page)

All I had to do then, with Mrs Fitzwilliam at my side, was surreptitiously to twitch the line and so fire the gun below. That would not only account, in my scheme, for the shot which was to be reckoned as the one that killed Eric, but would also provide a gun to show unmistakable signs of having fired a blank cartridge.

When I left Mrs Fitzwilliam, my first task was to transfer Eric’s body from where it was lying to the place where it was subsequently to be discovered, and I carried it not along that track but along the larger one directly connecting the two glades. It was not an easy job, but I had not been so dense as I pretended when John was trying to teach me the fireman’s lift that morning. In reality I had mastered it perfectly, and so was just able to stagger along under Eric’s dead weight. Then I fetched the rifle which I had fired with the fishing line, hastily wiped off my own prints and obtained others from Eric’s dead fingers, and substituted it for the other rifle which was lying in the glade. This latter already bore Eric’s prints (and, as was pointed out later, most convincing ones), for he had carried it, too, down from the house, and though I had pretended to wipe them off with my handkerchief in the play, I had done nothing of the sort. This rifle, moreover, did not bear my own prints, for I had taken the precaution, on my way down to the wood in Eric’s wake that afternoon, of coating my fingertips with a solution of ‘New Skin’, a bottle of which invariably has its place in the small first-aid case which it was then my practice to include in my luggage. To clasp Eric’s hand round the muzzle and then lay the weapon behind him did not take a moment. That, with the winding up of my pieces of fishing line, and the removal of the forked bough which had acted as my fulcrum, completed my task. It had not taken me more than five minutes altogether.

At that moment I felt perfectly secure. The only point in the whole scheme about which I had been really anxious was where Ethel came into it. I had banked on the fact that her mind would be too preoccupied for her to bother to look more than cursorily, and in passing, at Scott-Davies. So, fortunately, it turned out. Had she looked more closely, and realized that he was dead, I was going simply to take her into my confidence. I did not think that moral scruples would worry her in such a case, any more than they had me, and I was certain of being able to rely on her. But nevertheless I was thankful that it did not turn out to be necessary.

What prompted me to go down again for a final look at Eric’s body, I cannot say. Perhaps I wanted to make sure that it looked as convincing from that side as the other. In any case it was unfortunate, for my original plan had involved no such early discovery. I had intended simply to leave things as they were, till Eric’s absence became noticeable and people went out to look for him; and then somebody else was to find him, not I. And I must confess that when I stumbled into John at the end of the track I did come very near to losing my head for an instant. Fortunately, however, I was able to pull myself together almost at once, and John attributed my nervous condition to nothing more than the natural shock of such a discovery. But it caused me more than a few awkward moments, both then and later.

Once again I came near to losing my head, two days afterwards. My nerves were feeling the strain, and I must have been within an ace of giving myself completely away that morning to the superintendent. My telegram to Sheringham was the nearest I came to an act of panic.

Yet there was method in it, for all that. Sheringham, I knew, was clever. If anyone could prove the plain truth that I had not fired that second shot, I was sure he could. And I never considered him clever enough to discover the real truth. That in the end he should have solved the mystery so extremely neatly, so entirely to his own satisfaction, and so utterly wrongly, was a point which I certainly did not foresee, but which proved none the less satisfactory for that.

And now I come to Armorel’s part in the affair.

Unfortunately for her, poor girl, she could use her eyes. When I shot at Eric in the glade, with the spot of red lead for my aim, which had been my crowning inspiration, Armorel divined at once that I had fired in deadly earnest. She was convinced that it was a dead body at which she was afterwards looking.

Even now I still marvel how she kept her head. There was, however, one moral incentive to steadiness. Simultaneously with her realization of the truth came the conviction that I had done the thing, if not wholly, at any rate partly, for her own sake, in direct consequence of what she had told me that morning. And almost simultaneously came the resolution in that case to take her share of the moral responsibility (as she considered it) and stand by me at all costs. A noble resolve indeed, and one calling for high courage in a girl not yet twenty-four, as she was then. But as she told me later, there was an agonizing interval of indecision before she could make up her mind what to do for the best.

In the end she went up to her place in the Moorland Field and left her book there, so as to establish in case of need that she had actually been there; then she crept down again, unseen, to ascertain what I was doing and, if necessary, come to my aid. She watched me move the body and complete my other tasks, but did not come out from her concealment in case her presence might cause me to lose my head – as indeed it might have done. Instead, she is good enough to say that she was astounded by the coolness with which I went about it all, and realized then and there that she had been entirely mistaken in her estimate of my character, just as I had made the same discovery about her.

Armorel has always admired what she calls ‘nerve’, and she tells me that she watched a finer display of that attribute during those four minutes than ever before or since in her life. She had, of course, the added interest of her belief that it was being done for herself; but however that may be, she says that she fell in love with me then.

It was not until actually after our marriage that Armorel divulged this knowledge of hers to me. She says now, with a smile, that she was afraid that if she had informed me earlier I might have got the idea that her promise to marry me was made merely to safeguard me, so that she could never be forced to give evidence of what she knew, and in that case I might have refused to accept it. Another instance of the dear girl’s remarkable consideration – though she may try to explain it jokingly away by saying that she was determined (as she puts it) to get her hooks into me and was not going to frighten the fish off before she had secured it.

Similarly I did not know till then what definite steps she had taken in my aid, though of course I suspected them, just as I wondered uneasily at times how much she really did know. I remember writing, quite unwittingly, at the beginning of this narrative, of the interest with which one might trace, among other things, the desperate attempts of a criminal to manufacture new and misleading evidence to turn aside the growing pursuit. In my case this evidence was actually manufactured by an accomplice of whose existence I was unaware.

Sheringham was caught napping there. He knew, cleverly enough, that Armorel was listening on the second evening to our conversation in John’s study; he never realized that she had been listening on the first evening too. She heard me then expressing my very real fears lest an adverse verdict should be returned against me at the inquest on the following day, and imploring Sheringham to unearth in the short interval some evidence in my favour to prevent it. Whereupon she got up the next morning as soon as it was light and herself made those footprints at the twist in the path, acting on a suggestion which I had myself put to Sheringham more with the idea of opening his mind to the possibilities of the case than anything else. It may be imagined with what astonishment I heard that such footprints had actually been found.

During the night, too, the dear girl had made up her mind to the terrible decision, should things be going badly with me, to come to my rescue at the inquest with the story which she did, in fact, produce and which she calculated should put me out of danger for good and all. To support it she invented the incident of the wild rose and, when she went down to make the footprints, retrieved a wild rose which she remembered having plucked and thrown away a day or two earlier, and threw it on the ground near one of the bushes in the glade, treading it into the grass. That her story might transfer the suspicions of the police from me to herself she was fully aware, but in her own honest way considered it only fair that she should take that risk. Not even here, for the benefit of no eyes but my own, can I write down my opinion of such magnificent altruism. Such things cannot be expressed in words.

I think there is no more to explain.

If the reader of the foregoing manuscript knew the real truth he might be tempted to blame me (and in my own opinion justly) for allowing Sheringham to carry away the conviction that it was Elsa Verity who fired the shot that killed her lover. And indeed this did go seriously against my own conscience.

I kept silence at the time, in view of Armorel’s silent warnings; but alone in our room later I argued with her at length upon the gross unfairness to Miss Verity herself of such a proceeding. Armorel, however, was quite unconvinced. She pointed out that Sheringham would certainly keep his view to himself, that so long as he did so, Elsa could not be in the least injured by it, and that to try to disabuse him of it would be dangerous, and insanely and unnecessarily dangerous. I knew these arguments were nothing but sophistry, but in the end I consented. I had only been married a bare twenty-four hours, but already I had discovered that there are occasions on which a husband is wise to subordinate his convictions to his wife’s sophistries.

Women have the advantage of one so. They refuse to argue; they persuade. And they seem particularly designed by nature for successful persuasion.

Yet who would remain a bachelor? Not I, for one. But there again one must not blame blindly. Others’ cases are different from one’s own. For instance, nobody else could hope to marry such a wife as the lady whom in this narrative I have called Armorel.