Dead Cold Mysteries Box Set #3: Books 9-12 (A Dead Cold Box Set), Blake Banner [reading in the dark TXT] 📗

when he got home to discover that he had gone from being the heir to a fortune to being just like the rest of us. He sought, and found, solace in Pamela May. I am pretty sure he never told her, or anybody else, the exact nature of what his father had done, or Pamela would have dropped him like a hot brick. And at that time, he was pretty sweet on Pamela. Equally, Pamela did not tell him that she had been engaged in an affair with his father.

“Charles decided to marry Pamela. He was in love with her and, after all, had nothing to lose. He had already lost everything. But then, out of resentment and anger, or perhaps because he had inherited some of his father’s craziness, he hatched a plan. We will never know for sure, but I am guessing that he had access to a copy of the will and he studied it in details. Again, correct me if I am wrong, Mr. Mackenzie, but the will said that if Old Man Gordon were to die before his marriage to Mrs. Armstrong, the estate would go to Charles until his death, when it would pass to the Armstrongs.”

“That is correct.”

“So the answer was simple. He had to kill his father and make it look like a suicide. The old man had a reputation for being eccentric, so nobody would be that surprised if he did something crazy like shoot himself. If, in addition, he staged it so that it seemed his father had had some kind of emotional crisis and seen the error of his ways, the suicide scenario would be even more credible.

“What he did next was very ingenious. It had struck me from the start that there was a curious feature to this case: Though the old man was supposed to have shot himself in the study with a Smith & Wesson .38, nobody in the house had heard the shot. A .38 revolver is not quiet! And this happened again when Charles Jr. was killed. The reason was simple.

“There is, where the tower ends and the ballroom begins, a gap between the two structures of about seven feet. I don’t know what its purpose was originally, but now it houses a broom cupboard on the inside, and on the outside a tool shed. The interesting thing is that the tool shed is sunk about four or five feet below ground level…”

Pam spoke for the first time in a voice that was weary and drained of life. She shook her head. “There is no great mystery there, Mr. Stone. Many old houses have something similar. You pick a harvest of potatoes or apples, and you store them below ground level in the dark, they will last the winter that way. There are several such nooks around the house.”

“Well, this one was unique in that the southern wall was in fact the north wall of the study, and one very particular spot gave onto the fireplace.” I smiled at Henry and saw him close his eyes and sigh. “We are least likely to see what is right before our eyes. Just about the center of the fireplace, inside the tool shed, was at a height of about five and a half feet. Charles took his time, identified the exact spot, and gradually carved away the cement from four of the bricks at just about head height. He left them attached to each other, so that he could slide them out as a single unit. The constant use of the fire meant that any irregularity in the bricks was quickly blackened and covered in soot.

“On the day of the murder, he made a point of telling everyone in the household that he planned to talk to his father about his intention to marry Pam. His father was in the habit of locking himself in the study when he worked. So, when his father was engrossed in his research on the history of his family, Charles went to the tool shed, removed the bricks and shot him in the head. With remarkable coolness, he then put back the bricks, went about the house giving everybody the good news that his father had agreed to the marriage, and went dashing off to tell Pamela.

“He then returned, with the revolver in his pocket, broke down the door, squeezed the revolver into his father’s hand and then dropped it on the floor to make it seem he had shot himself. By this time, a good hour or more since the murder, the fire and smoke had completely erased any sign of the bricks having been removed.

“When everybody arrived at the scene just moments later, it was to find a suicide. My good friend Henry spotted the inconsistencies, the lack of GSR on the old man’s hand, the trajectory of the bullet, the lack of scorching around the entry wound. But following the Holmesian dictum, eliminate the impossible…” I shrugged. “It seemed that the impossible was that it was murder, therefore, however unlikely, by some fluke the GSR had been blown away from the hand and the gun’s recoil had altered the trajectory of the slug, yadda yadda, in short, it was suicide.

“But in fact, the impossible was that it was suicide. And if it was impossible for the murderer to have been in the room, then the murderer had to be outside the room. That meant he shot through a hole which he later covered up. Once you accepted that, it was not hard to see where that hole had been, because, as you correctly deduced, Henry, the shot came from the fireplace.”

Henry did a lot of slow nodding, then smiled at Dehan. “I’ll ask you again, Carmen, how do you tolerate him?”

She offered him a lopsided smile. “He takes me on these amazing holidays.”

Inspector Harris was scratching his head. “But, hold on there a