This was our first sight of Major James Mordaunt. In silhouette at the oars he was burly, quite strong enough to push the craft out from under a muddy bank into the shallows and pull himself aboard. He paused suddenly in mid-stroke, as if he might have heard something. Not an owl hooted, not a badger stirred the undergrowth. Our presence had put such sensitive night-dwellers to flight. Mordaunt might yet pass among us without knowing it!
How long would the silence last? There was a startled sound above me, the heavy wings of a restless wood pigeon displaced by our movements. That alone could betray our presence if the sound carried. Worse still, I caught the crackle of bracken in the uncleared copse, not trodden underfoot but pressed aside by one of Swain’s men. Surely Mordaunt would not miss it?
But he was pulling out from the rhododendron bushes and tree trunks, forty feet at least beyond us. Hauling on the sculls with his back to us, he was turning out into the Middle Deep, heading for the island.
I felt Holmes’s cold, hard grip upon my wrist.
“The Temple of Proserpine! No one else has the means of getting there so long as the oars are under lock and key.”
I said nothing. Instead I recalled Mrs Grose’s story of Harry the Poacher trying to swim the Middle Deep and dying in the treacherous embrace of the water weed. There was no danger of that. Without a boat we could do nothing. If Holmes was right—and if it took Swain an hour or even less to summon a boat on a cart from Abbots Langley—we had seen the last of such evidence as Mordaunt intended to destroy. What would be left—except Miss Jessel’s word against his?
Tobias Gregson was, as they say, munching his teeth with frustration just behind us. I caught his muttered curse upon the wooden-tops, as Scotland Yard was apt to call its country cousins. Holmes ignored this. But Gregson was soon beside us. Indeed he was edging forward too far, where the tree trunks grew almost in the water and the mud of the bank ran into silt. It seemed as if he was trying to get level with Mordaunt and almost into the man’s view.
If Mordaunt did not notice these movements, it was perhaps because something seemed amiss with him or his boat. The light of the short summer night was still poor, but the man’s outline remained clear enough to show that this figure at the sculls was making heavy weather of it. He was labouring as though his strength was failing him. Almost a hundred feet out among the lily pads, the boat was moving slowly and, worse, responding sluggishly. It was going nowhere. I could see no reason at first. Water weeds may drag down a human body but they would hardly snare a boat as tenaciously as this. Perhaps it had run into impenetrable pads of water lilies. Surely he would know his own waters well enough?
To my astonishment, it seemed he was trying to stand up. The boat did not rock under his movements, as one might expect. Its bulk was lying too low in the water. He had an oar in one hand and was trying, vainly, to find the muddy bottom of the lake. Was his aim to move the little craft like a punt into the shallows? Perhaps it was by standing up that he caught a sound or glimpsed a movement on the bank. The mid-summer night had begun to lighten further towards dawn. I made out a plantation of horse chestnuts whose candles now stood white in the mist.
Holmes was immobile as a graven image, his tall, spare figure with his back to the broad trunk of a beech, the edge of the lake at his toes. In the darkness, he would have been just out of line with our fugitive. But the distance between the two men was no longer quite dark. I could make out enough of Mordaunt’s wraith-like figure to see that he was gripping or waving something in his free hand, an object which he had taken from his pocket. His manner of holding it convinced me that it must be the gun with which he had shot his dog. We later learnt that it was a Webley Mark 4 service revolver.
No one had been prepared for this. It would be an hour or more before we could have armed officers in place, let alone launch a boat on the lake. Mordaunt on his island with this revolver and a pocketful of .455 cartridges could keep us where we were for the next day and night.
Then, in one startled moment, I understood the feeling of those who claim to have jumped out of their skin. From several feet behind me came the crack of a voice carrying the certainty of command.
“Major Mordaunt, sir! Your attention if you please!”
The authority of that voice was such that the outline of the man upright in the boat seemed to stiffen to attention as if obeying a command. But he was bringing his right hand up. A roar from the Webley echoed like a ricochet across the misty surface of the water. I heard its bullet chip the bark of the beech trunk about eight inches from my friend’s left shoulder. Mordaunt had heard Swain but seen Holmes, the grey cloak against the darker tree trunk. Holmes remained perfectly still, as if resigned to martyrdom. Every policeman near us was now lying flat with the exception of Inspector Alfred Swain, whom I had supposed to be more at home with the Agamemnon or the Idylls of the King than with armed conflict.
“Put—your—gun—down, sir!”
The same crack of authority rang out but Mordaunt’s arm was coming up again. Holmes did not move and there was not even time for me to jump forward and knock him flat. Yet Quint’s murderer was a marksman who would not miss him a second time. With a terrible sickness I heard a hoarse explosion and saw the human figure spin round and catapult into the water.
Then the tall, quiet man whose face had suggested mild equine intelligence, whose private hours were spent among dead fossils and what his superiors derided as “School-Miss Poetry,” lowered his arm. He gently wrapped the grey barrel and the black stock of the Smith & Wesson .32 handgun, an ejector target revolver, in a piece of lint and handed it to Inspector Tobias Gregson.
“Have the goodness to take care of this, Mr Gregson,” said Alfred Swain quietly. “There must be an inquiry. The weapon is signed for but it is best that it should be in your custody now.”
During some thirty seconds, in the gloom before dawn, this ghastly drama of life and death was played before us. Mordaunt had put himself a hundred feet beyond any aid that we could give him, even if he were still alive. To save Sherlock Holmes, Swain had shot with the care of a man who knows he must hit his target with a single bullet and the confidence of one who is certain he can do it. Could he be sure of killing Mordaunt instantly? Had he done so? The major’s body went under at full length. There was a pause and then his head reappeared, hair streaming wet from his scalp. His arms threshed and he snatched at a frail wooden scull that had floated free.
Sergeant Acott waded in a dozen feet from the slippery bank until the water was almost at his chest.
“Get back, Mr Acott!” called Swain, “The mud is like treacle out there. You won’t come out of it.”
I thought again of Harry the Poacher in the Middle Deep. The weed clung tighter each time the poor fellow jumped breast-high from the water like a fish, gulping air, Mrs Grose had told us. The weighted mass that was festooning him pulled him back each time until he could jump no more. At the moment Mordaunt seemed upright, as if standing. But he could not be standing, where the floor of the lake was twenty feet down. Then he was on his back with arms spread out, snatching at air. Gregson and those about him talked busily of what to do. Holmes and Swain knew that there was nothing. The fugitive sank, motionless and expressionless. Perhaps he was dead already. The water settled and lay still. The drowning man appeared no more. Whatever the damage from Swain’s bullet, it had cut short his struggles.