Not one of the three had looked at a clock at Ballyshiel.
“Do you remember anything about coming home again?”
They did not. They looked furtively at one another and presently broke into a grin.
“Ah! I see how that was,” Hewitt said good-humouredly. “That’s all now, I think. Come, it’s ten shillings each, I think.” And he handed over the money. The men touched their forelocks again, stowed away the money and prepared to depart. As they went Larry Shanahan stepped mysteriously back again and said in a whisper, “Maybe the jintlemen wud like me to kiss the book on ut? An’ as to the toime—”
“Oh, no thank you,” Hewitt laughed. “We take your word for it Mr. Shanahan.” And Mr. Shanahan pulled his forelock again and vanished.
“There’s nothing but confusion to be got from them,” Mr. Bowyer remarked testily. “It’s a mere waste of time.”
“No, no, not a waste of time,” Hewitt replied, “nor a waste of money. One thing is made pretty plain. That is that the shot was fired on Tuesday. Mrs. Hurley never noticed the report, but these three men were close by, and there is no doubt that they heard it. It’s the only single thing they agree about at all. They contradict one another over everything else, but they agree completely in that. Of course I wish we could have got the exact time; but that can’t be helped. As it is it is rather fortunate that they disagreed so entirely. Two of them are certainly wrong, and perhaps all three. In any case it wouldn’t have been safe to trust to mere computation of time by three men just beginning to get drunk, who had no particular reason for remembering. But if by any chance they had agreed on the time we might have been led into a wrong track altogether by taking the thing as fact. But a gunshot is not such a doubtful thing. When three independent witnesses hear a gunshot together there can be little doubt that a shot has been fired. Now I think you’d better sit down. Perhaps you can find something to read. I’m about to make a very minute examination of this place, and it will probably bore you if you’ve nothing else to do.”
But Mr. Bowyer would think of nothing but the business in hand. “I don’t understand that window,” he said, shaking his finger towards it as he spoke. “Not at all. Why should Main want to get in and out by a window? He wasn’t a stranger.”
Hewitt began a most careful inspection of the whole surface of floor, ceiling, walls and furniture of the sitting-room. At the fireplace he stooped and lifted with great care a few sheets of charred paper from the grate. These he put on the window-ledge. “Will you just bring over that little screen,” he asked, “to keep the draught from this burnt paper? Thank you. It looks like letter paper, and thick letter paper, since the ashes are very little broken. The weather has been fine, and there has been no fire in that grate for a long time. These papers have been carefully burned with a match or a candle.”
“Ah! perhaps the letters poor young Rewse was writing in the morning. But what can they tell us?”
“Perhaps nothing—perhaps a great deal.” Hewitt was examining the cinders keenly, holding the surface sideways to the light. “Come,” he said, “see if I can guess Rewse’s address in London. 17 Mountjoy Gardens, Hampstead. Is that it?”
“Yes. Is it there? Can you read it? Show me.” Mr. Bowyer hurried across the room, eager and excited.
“You can sometimes read words on charred paper,” Hewitt replied, “as you may have noticed. This has curled and crinkled rather too much in the burning, but it is plainly notepaper with an embossed heading, which stands out rather clearly. He has evidently brought some notepaper with him from home in his trunk. See, you can just see the ink lines crossing out the address; but there’s little else. At the beginning of the letter there is ‘My d——’ then a gap, and then the last stroke of ‘M’ and the rest of the word ‘mother.’ ‘My dear Mother,’ or ‘My dearest Mother’ evidently. Something follows too in the same line, but that is unreadable. ‘My dear Mother and Sister’ perhaps. After that there is nothing recognisable. The first letter looks rather like ‘W,’ but even that is indistinct. It seems to be a longish letter—several sheets, but they are stuck together in the charring. Perhaps more than one letter.”
“The thing is plain,” Mr. Bowyer said. “The poor lad was writing home, and perhaps to other places, and Main, after his crime, burned the letters, because they would have stultified his own with the lying tale about small-pox.”
Hewitt said nothing, but resumed his general search. He passed his hand rapidly over every inch of the surface of everything in the room. Then he entered the bedroom and began an inspection of the same sort there. There were two beds, one at each end of the room, and each inch of each piece of bed linen passed rapidly under his sharp eye. After the bedroom he betook himself to the little bath-room, and then to the scullery. Finally he went outside and examined every board of a close fence that stood a few feet from the sitting-room window, and the brick-paved path lying between.
When it was all over he returned to Mr. Bowyer. “Here is a strange thing,” he said. “The shot passed clean through Rewse’s body, striking no bones, and meeting no solid resistance. It was a good-sized bullet, as Dr. O’Reilly testifies, and therefore must have had a large charge of powder behind it in the cartridge. After emerging from Rewse’s back it must have struck something else in this confined place. Yet on nowhere—ceiling, floor, wall nor furniture—can I find the mark of a bullet nor the bullet itself.”
“The bullet itself Main might easily have got rid of.”
“Yes, but not the mark. Indeed, the bullet would scarcely be easy to get at if it had struck anything I have seen about here; it would have buried itself. Just look round now. Where could a bullet strike in this place without leaving its mark?”
Mr. Bowyer looked round. “Well, no,” he said, “nowhere. Unless the window was open and it went out that way.”
“Then it must have hit the fence or the brick paving between, and there is no sign of a bullet there,” Hewitt replied. “Push the sash as high as you please, the shot couldn’t have passed over the fence without hitting the window first. As to the bedroom windows, that’s impossible. Mr. Shanahan and his friends would not only have heard the shot, they would have seen it—which they didn’t.”
“Then what’s the meaning of it?”
“The meaning of it is simply this: either Rewse was shot somewhere else and his body brought here afterwards, or the article, whatever it was, that the bullet struck must have been taken away.”
“Yes, of course. It’s just another piece of evidence destroyed by Main, that’s all. Every step we go we see the diabolical completeness of his plans. But now every piece of evidence missing only tells the more against him. The body alone condemns him past all redemption.”
Hewitt was gazing about the room thoughtfully. “I think we’ll have Mrs. Hurley over here,” he said; “she should tell us if anything is missing. Constable, will you ask Mrs. Hurley to step over here?”
Mrs. Hurley came at once and was brought into the sitting-room. “Just look about you, Mrs. Hurley,” Hewitt said, “in this room and everywhere else, and tell me if anything is missing that you can remember was here on the morning of the day you last saw Mr. Rewse.”
She looked thoughtfully up and down the room. “Sure, sor,” she said, “‘tis all there as ord’nary.” Her eyes rested on the mantelpiece and she added at once, “Except the clock, indade.”
“Except the clock?”
“The clock ut is, sure. Ut stud on that same mantelpiece on that mornin’ as ut always did.”
“What sort of clock was it?”
“Just a plain round wan wid a metal case—an American clock they said ut was. But ut kept nigh as good time