Fever Dream - Douglas Preston [14]
“Thank you, Maurice.”
A nod and the manservant was gone.
Pendergast reached inside the case and—slowly, slowly—grasped the cold metal of the double barrel. His fingers tingled at the mere touch of her weapon. For some reason his heart was accelerating—the lingering effects of the nightmare, no doubt. He brought it out and placed it on the refectory table in the middle of the room. From a drawer below the cabinet he removed the gun-cleaning paraphernalia, arranging it beside the rifle. He wiped his hands, picked up the gun, and broke open the action, peering down both barrels.
He was faintly surprised: the right barrel was badly fouled; the left one clean. He laid the gun down, thinking. Again he walked to the top of the stairs.
“Maurice?”
The servant appeared once more. “Yes, sir?”
“Do you know if anyone has fired the Krieghoff since… my wife’s death?”
“It was your explicit request, sir, that no one be allowed to handle it. I’ve kept the key myself. No one has even been near the case.”
“Thank you, Maurice.”
“You’re quite welcome, sir.”
Pendergast went back into the parlor, this time shutting the doors. From a writing desk he extracted an old sheet of stationery, which he flipped over and laid on the table. Then he inserted a brush into the right barrel, pushed out some of the fouling onto the paper, and examined it: bits and flakes of some burned, papery substance. Reaching into his suit pocket, he pulled out the loupe he always carried, fixed it to his eye, and examined the bits more intently. There was no doubt: they were the scorched, carbonized fragments of wadding.
But the .500/.416 NE cartridge had no wadding: just the bullet, the casing, and the propellant. Such a cartridge, even a defective one, would never leave this kind of fouling behind.
He examined the left barrel, finding it clean and well oiled. With the cleaning brush he pushed a rag through. There was no fouling at all.
Pendergast straightened up, his mind suddenly in furious thought. The last time the gun had been fired had been on that terrible day. He forced himself to think back. This was something he had avoided—while awake—at all costs. But once he began to remember, it wasn’t hard to recall the details: every moment of that hunt was seared forever into his memory.
She had fired the gun only once. The Krieghoff had two triggers, one behind the other. The front trigger fired the right barrel, and that was the trigger normally pulled first. It was the one she pulled. And that shot had fouled the right barrel.
With that single shot, she missed the Red Lion. He’d always chalked it up to bush deflection, or perhaps extreme agitation.
But Helen wasn’t one to display agitation, even under the most extreme of circumstances. She rarely missed. And she hadn’t missed that last time, either… or wouldn’t have missed, if the right barrel had been loaded with a bullet.
Except that it wasn’t loaded with a bullet: it was loaded with a blank.
For a blank to generate a similar sound and recoil, it would have to have a large, tightly wadded plug, which would foul the barrel exactly as he’d observed.
Had Pendergast been a man of lesser control, the hinges of his sanity might have weakened under the emotional intensity of his thoughts. She had loaded the gun with .500/.416 NE soft-points at the camp that morning, just before heading into the bush after the lion. He knew that for a fact: he had watched her. And he knew they were live rounds, not blanks—nobody, especially not Helen, would mistake a wadded blank for a two-ounce round. He himself clearly recalled the blunt heads of the soft-points as she dunked them into the barrels.
Between the time she loaded the Krieghoff with soft-points and the time she fired, someone had removed her unfired cartridges and replaced them with blanks. And then, after the hunt, someone had removed the two blanks—one fired, one not—to cover up what they had done. Only they made a small mistake: they did not clean the fired barrel, leaving the incriminating