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By Root 354 0

to understand that nothing is truly trivial – there was surely some pattern to his close questioning which none of us could discern – but Mrs Brimicombe was, indeed, becoming agitated, and so Holmes dropped his interrogation of her and allowed Tarquin to lead us through to the drawing room, where he provided sherry. “I have to say I did not invite Mr Wells here,” he said. “At first I regarded his interest and his insistence on coming here as an intrusion into my family’s grief. But my view has changed, as I have meditated on the recent tragic events. Now that you are here I am glad, Mr Holmes. I need your help.”

“Why so?”

“Ralph’s life was not lost. Mr Holmes, it was stolen. After the coroner’s report, the police are not interested. I was not sure who to approach, and – ”

Holmes held up his hands. “Tell me exactly what you mean.”

His pale blue eyes were fixed on Holmes. “Ralph’s death was no accident.”

“Who was present in the Inertial Adjustor chamber at the time of the incident?”

“Only two of us. Myself and Bryson, my brother’s engineer.”

“Then,” I said doggedly, “you are accusing Bryson – ”

“– of murder. That is right, doctor. Jack Bryson killed Ralph.”

Holmes is always impatient to visit the scene of a crime, and Wells was clearly enjoying the whole affair hugely; and so we agreed to accompany Tarquin at once to the Inertial Adjustor chamber, the site of Ralph Brimicombe’s death.

We had a walk of a hundred yards or so across the grounds to an out-building. By now it was late afternoon. I took deep breaths of wood-scented air, trying to clear my head after the fumes of the train. I could hear the clucking of chickens, evidently from the hen coop Mrs Brimicombe had mentioned.

I was startled when an insect no less than six inches long scuttled across my path, disturbed by my passage. At first I thought it must be a cockroach, but on closer observation, to my astonishment, it proved to be an ant. It ran with a blur of legs towards an anthill – a gigantic affair, towering over the lower trees like an eroded monument.

“Good Lord, Holmes,” I said. “Did you observe that? What was it, do you think, some tropical species?”

He shook his head. “Ralph Brimicombe was no collector of bugs. Given the pattern of events here I have expected some such apparition.”

“You expected it? But how?”

“Surely that repulsive red leech of Wells’s was enough of a clue. But in any event – all in good time, my dear friend.”

We reached a laboratory, of crude but functional construction, and I ran my eyes for the first time over the gruesome details of the Inertial Adjustor itself. The main chamber was fifty feet tall; and it was dominated by the stupendous wreck of a vehicle. This latter had been a cone some fifteen feet in length and perhaps as broad, but it was without wheels, sails or runners: for its purpose, Tarquin told us in all seriousness, had been to fly, freed of gravity by Ralph’s invention, into Space! To simulate to its occupant some of the stresses and impacts to be expected during a flight, the vessel had been suspended in midair, at the heart of the Intertial Adjustor itself, by a series of cables and gimbals.

Now the cables dangled uselessly. The ship, after an evident fall, had gouged a crater a few inches deep in the floor; it looked as if a great hammer had pounded into the concrete. And it was inside this capsule, this aluminium dream of flight in Space, that Ralph Brimicombe had fallen to his death.

Around the massive wreck were arrayed the elements of the Intertial Adjustor apparatus: coils and armatures, cones of paper and iron, filamented glass tubes, the poles of immense permanent magnets, great shadowy shapes which reached up and out of my vision, the whole far beyond my comprehension. There were besides some more mundane elements: drafting tables laden with dusty blueprints, lathes and vices and tools, chains for heavy lifting suspended from the ceiling.

I observed, however, that the fall of the vehicle had done a pretty damage to the equipment in that chamber, surely rendering it inoperative.

My eye was