It appeared that I was not even to get credit for being accurate in my estimate, so I swallowed some bitterness and went on, “I can see no other evidence of serious trauma apart from the injury to the eye for which there is an exit wound. I would say that there’s no doubt it was that injury that resulted in his death.”
“What made it?”
“My first impression is that it’s a relatively small-calibre bullet, but until a full post-mortem can be done, that can only be a guess.”
He nodded but forgot to thank me as he turned back to his troops and barked, “I want the bullet found.”
I appeared to have been dismissed, but I thought I ought to issue some Health and Safety advice. “Be careful of the mercury from the barometers. It’s poisonous.”
Masson turned to look at me. “Is it?” He sounded suspicious that I might be having him on.
“Everyone should wear gloves.”
He snorted, looked at me for a moment, then said to the room in general, “You heard the man. Get some disposable gloves.”
I asked conversationally, “Is that Harvey Carlton?”
He shrugged. “Who knows?”
I hung around for a bit but no one had anything more to say to me, so eventually I slunk away. No one even seemed to notice. On my way out I noticed the shop on the opposite corner. It was some sort of bespoke furniture shop. The name above the window said that the proprietor was Peter Carlton, Esquire.
Inspector Masson always evinced nothing but impatience and exasperation in his dealings with me, but I like to think that he had a soft spot for me nevertheless because he seemed to gravitate towards me when things were not going well in his capacity as a sleuth. Max and I had followed the case in the Croydon Advertiser, although we were well aware that this fine organ did occasionally get its facts quite startlingly wrong.
Peter and Harvey Carlton were brothers, and they hated each other. Harvey became a master watchmaker, Peter a highly skilled joiner and carpenter making furniture that was snapped up as soon as he finished it. Apparently they had fallen out over twenty years before because of a woman, Mary. They both fell in love with her and only one could win; they matched each other in terms of looks, skills and prospects, but she chose Harvey. Peter tried to commit suicide, failed, and became an eternally angry man. He had a reputation as an unforgiving, hard and unscrupulous businessman. The paper didn’t say so, but it was clear that Peter was the number one suspect, though there were problems.
“Of course he’s guilty,” Max said with complete conviction.
“Is he?”
She nodded. When I enquired how she knew, she said, “He was a nasty man.”
I saw no point in debate.
It appeared that although a bullet had been found, there were no reports of a shot being fired, despite extensive house-to-house enquiries. Peter had been interviewed for several hours, had been cooperative and open, portraying shock but no remorse at the death of his brother. He assured the police that he had not left his shop all day and no witnesses could be found to contradict this. Harvey Carlton’s financial affairs were reported as being sound, and all enquiries regarding his private life returned nothing but the utmost propriety. The paper, inevitably, reported – perhaps more appropriately, crowed – that the police were “stumped”.
The case slipped from public – and our – consciousness.
When the doorbell rang on the evening of Sunday, 27 June, Max and I were sitting in the garden partaking of some Pimm’s. I cannot say that the appearance of Masson’s sunny visage as I opened the front door produced anything close to a whoop of delight from my vocal chords. “Doctor Elliot,” he said. “Mind if I come in?”
I showed him through to the garden. He was graciousness itself as he nodded at Max and said, “Miss Christy. Are you well?”
She smiled at him because that was Max; she would probably smile politely at the Grim Reaper when he came to call. “I’m very well indeed, thank you.”
He sat down and, in not asking for a drink, made it plain that he would quite like one. “Pimm’s?” I asked.
A shake of the head. “Can’t stand the stuff. Poncey in the extreme.” Only Masson could have refused the offer so graciously; only Masson could have then said, “I’ll have a bitter, though.”
After I had accommodated him and we were all sitting around the table looking at the midges and mosquitoes dancing over the garden pond, I was afraid the conversation might prove a tad desultory, but I had reckoned without Masson’s forthright character. “I expect you’re wondering why I’m here.”
“Not a social call, then?”
He looked at me and I found myself wondering if he disliked everyone as much as he appeared to dislike me. “I don’t seem to get the time for social calls.” With which, somehow, he seemed to imply a puritanical disapproval of anyone sitting in the garden on a summer’s evening.
Max, bless her, asked, “Would it be to do with the death of Harvey Carlton?”
To which he said curtly, “After we’d got the pathologist out of his bed, he confirmed what you had told us – that Carlton died of a single small-calibre bullet wound that entered through his right eye and exited through the back of his skull.” He didn’t seem inclined to applaud my diagnostic skills so I said nothing. ”We eventually found it embedded in the corner of a wooden cabinet. It’s a small-calibre revolver round.”
“That’s good,” I said.
He didn’t snarl because he didn’t make a sound, but it was the look that big hairy men were always giving Charlie Chaplin in the golden age of silent movies. “You think so?”
“Isn’t it?”
Masson said nothing; I looked covertly at Max and she did likewise at me. I think that we were both unsure of what to say, or whether to say anything at all, since it would almost certainly be taken amiss by our guest. Silence therefore ensued between us and there was the faint sound of a cuckoo in the distance. Masson drank more beer and we did similar damage to the Pimm’s.
He said at last, “It has to be Peter Carlton. It just has to be.” He snorted. “We’ve found out that a few weeks before Harvey’s death the two brothers met unexpectedly at Mary’s grave. There was some sort of fracas. It was witnessed by one of the gardeners at the crematorium; he didn’t hear everything that was said, but he swears that he heard Peter threaten to kill his brother.”
Max asked, “Does Peter Carlton own a gun?”
Masson shook his head. “No, but that means nothing. Fifty pounds is all you need, if you know the right people.”
Max enquired, “And does he know the right people?”
He snorted. “Not as far as we can tell.”
“So maybe he didn’t do it.”
He shook his head immediately. “He did it. I know he did.”
We waited a while as Masson stared at a dragonfly as if he would quite like to give it what for with a truncheon. It was starting to turn to dusk, the light becoming golden and soft as opposed to harsh; the very first stirrings of a breeze played about the tops of the trees. Eventually, Max pointed out gently, “That doesn’t seem very logical to me. Are you sure you’re not just being a bit headstrong?”
Coming from me, he would probably have got out his rubber cosh at this and given me a good talking-to, but Max had this way with people and he merely glanced briefly up at her and then said thoughtfully, “I don’t think so.”
“Why not?”
“Peter Carlton employs a young man called Colin Bell as general assistant and runaround. Bell says that he was in the shop with Carlton almost all of the day that Harvey died, except for a thirty-minute period when Carlton asked him to make a delivery of a footstool to a house in Gonville Road. That was between three-thirty and four.”
I said softly, “Blimey.”
He smiled. “Sounds significant, doesn’t it?”
“I’d have thought so.”