The Hunt Ball Mystery

by Sir William Magnay

"Whatever my first conclusions were I can see now the most probable explanation of how Henshaw came by his death-wound. He had forced the chisel away from the girl; he had kept it in his hand; in his eagerness to prevent his victim's escape he had not realized that he was holding it point upwards, and when he fell it had pierced him with all the force of his heavy body falling plump on it."

"Then you know it was an accident?" Edith Morriston drew a great breath of relief from the painful tension with which she had listened.

"I can see it was a pure accident," Gifford answered. "All the same it was an accident with an ugly look about it, and I quickly realized that I was in an equivocal—not to say dangerous, situation."

"It was a terrible predicament for you," the girl said sympathetically.

"It was indeed. And one which called for prompt action. Moreover the very fact that I was not in evening clothes made it all the more suspicious. I pulled my wits together and proceeded to make quite sure that the man was actually dead. That I found was beyond all doubt the case, and it now remained for me to make my escape before being found there in that hideous situation.

"I went out to the landing, closing the door after me, with the idea of getting down the stairs and escaping into the garden as secretly as I had come in. I had crept down a very few stairs when I found this was not to be. A chatter of voices just below told me that people were in the tower, and leaning over I could see couples passing between the passage to the hall and the room below me.

"At any moment, I realized, some of them might take it into their heads to explore the topmost room, when the result would be disastrous. Certainly in my mufti I could not get past the next floor just then without exciting fatal notice, and to wait for an opportunity when the coast might be clear was too dangerous, seeing the risk of someone coming up.

"It was not easy to see my way of escape. I went to the top room and locked the door. My nerves were pretty strong, but they were severely tried when I shut myself in with the dead man and had the consciousness of having laid myself open to the charge of being his murderer. I stood there by the door thinking desperately what I could do. Fool that I had been to venture into the place in that garb. But who could have foreseen the result? Anyhow there was no time for reflection; it was necessary to act and seek a possible expedient. Hopelessly enough I went into the little inner room and struck a match. In a moment a thrill of hope came to me, for the first object the light showed me was a big coil of rope conspicuous among the odds and ends of lumber in the recess. The idea of escape by the window had only occurred to me to be dismissed as a sheer impossibility; the height of the tower made that quite prohibitive, but here seemed a chance of it. If only the rope was long enough.

"I got hold of the coil as my match burned out, and pulled it away from the surrounding rubbish. Its weight gave me hope that it would be sufficient. In haste I dragged it to the outer room into which the moonlight was now streaming. With a shuddering glance at the dead man, whose ashen face stared up in ghastly fashion in the moonbeams, I opened the window and looked out to make sure that no one was below. Satisfied on that point I brought forward the rope and began paying it out of the window. To my content I saw that there was a strong iron stanchion at the side which would allow of the rope being fastened to it.

"There was light enough just then to enable me to see pretty well when the end of the rope reached the ground, and upon examining what was left in the room I calculated that not much more than half was outside. In a flash the discovery gave me an idea. Why should I not simply pass the rope behind the stanchion and use it doubled? By that means I could pull it down after me when I reached the ground, and so not only effect my escape but also leave the fact unknown. That, together with the door locked on the inside, would tend to make Henshaw's death a mystery with a strong probability in favour of suicide, which would be altogether the happiest conclusion to arrive at. In fact my hastily formed calculation was, as we know, subsequently borne out and the suicide theory would probably have been quietly accepted had it not been for the intervention of Gervase Henshaw with his smartness and incredulity.