Justice Hall - Laurie R. King [90]
“I should think that man would have one boot firmly planted in the grave and still do what he deemed necessary.”
“I don’t know, Holmes. If Alistair and Iris unite to keep him here, I’d not care to wager on the winning side.”
He smiled to himself. “It is a rather interesting variation on a marriage, is it not?”
“Do you mean Marsh and Iris, or all three of them?”
But his smile only deepened.
Iris reappeared shortly thereafter, the odour of sanctity strong about her, but wearing an expression of worry.
“The doctor’s seen Marsh,” she told us. “Some of the wounds are festering, and he’s running a fever. I think perhaps we should delay our meeting.”
“But of course,” Holmes said, hiding his irritation nobly. He scowled after her departing form, and turned to me. “Let us use this opportunity to examine the ground where Marsh was shot. There may be some tiny piece of evidence not yet trampled or washed away.”
A change of clothing, a pair of walking-sticks, and we were away.
Yesterday’s mist had cleared, leaving the air frosty and dry. Setting a pace brisk enough to warm us, I led Holmes on a reenactment of the shoot, from the first stand at the upper lawns to the lakeside where I had stoned a duck in full flight. There were men at the earlier sites, quartering the ground for unclaimed birds, as well as stray discarded cartridges, which not only looked untidy but did the stomachs of grazing animals no good.
Then to the final stand.
I walked the line of guns, pointing out roughly where each shooter had stood waiting. Holmes burrowed into the thick shrubs from which the bird, and possibly the murderous shot, had come, but it appeared that others had been in there since the shooting as well. He emerged, his clothing somewhat the worse for wear, after ten minutes of grubbing about.
“I’m very sorry, Holmes, I should have kept everyone out, but there was just too great a press. Bloom must have had fifty or sixty beaters, and they were all over.”
“I doubt there’d have been much evidence to begin with. The fallen leaves are too thick to show footprints, there is nothing that would take a fingerprint, and the only threads I could see are rough white cotton. I take it the beaters wore some kind of smock?” he asked, holding up the thread in question.
“Most of them.”
“Very well. You say the boy Peter and his father were here?”
“So the boy said. The other twin, Roger, was a little closer to me.”
Holmes squatted to examine the ground, tracing boot-marks with his long gloved fingers. He shifted, lowered his head to gain a more extreme angle, and then stood up.
“And Marsh—if you would take up his position, Russell?”
I went to the holly clump where the two cousins had fallen, and faced Holmes. He settled his walking-stick into his shoulder and sighted down it to the first stand of mixed evergreen shrubs.
“The bird breaks,” he said. “One. Two. Bang.”
As my rough sketch the night before had suggested, he was now facing a point about halfway between the two evergreens. He repeated his motion, only this time faster, continuing until he was aiming at me. “One-two-three-four-five-bang,” he got out, and nearly fell over as his feet corkscrewed around themselves.
“Unfortunately, Holmes, the bird was over there. In fact,” I said in surprise, “the bird is still over there.”
We converged on the spot and looked at the twice-shot fowl.
“Why do you suppose they left this here?” I wondered.
“Overlooked in the dusk, or perhaps squeamishness. The bird was nearly the death of their duke, after all. However, I think it worth performing a cursory necropsy on the creature. Just to confirm a theory. How are you at plucking birds?”
I put my hands together behind my back. “It takes me an hour and rips my fingers to bits,” I told him.
To my surprise, he sat down on a nearby log, removed his gloves, and