William Monk 19 - Blind Justice

intently.
    Monk bit his lip to stop himself from smiling. “Naturally I went up, and my wife came with me. We found ourselves in a large space with a few of the things we would expect to see—empty boxes, a trunk or two. It was the second, smaller room that mattered. There was a door into it, and as soon as we opened that, we saw the contraption.”
    There was not a sound in the entire courtroom.
    “Contraption?” Brancaster asked huskily.
    “A pistol on a table held steady by two weights. Tied to its trigger was a wire, which passed through a ring in the ceiling, and was attached at the other end to a tin can with a very small hole in the bottom,” Monk explained. “It is difficult to describe it so as to make its purpose clear, but the moment we saw it we understood. It was a device created so that as the water dripped out of the can, the can became lighter, slowly rising to the point where the cord went slack, thus releasing the trigger and firing the gun. The can was empty when we arrived, and we found the bullet in the far wall. The water that had dripped out had been caught by a container beneath the can, and had evaporated. And the window was wedged open.”
    Brancaster affected confusion. He shook his head fractionally.
    “Are you saying that Taft arranged this extraordinary piece of machinery to shoot himself?”
    “No, sir. As the medical examiner would testify, it seems Mr. Taft and his entire family were already dead, possibly for a couple of hours, when this gun went off. Because the window was open the sound of it could be heard by the neighbors, whose houses were approximately fiftyfeet away. The purpose of the shot was to establish the time of Mr. Taft’s death—wrongly.”
    “I see!” Brancaster’s face lit up. “So it was to mislead the police as to the time of Taft’s death, presumably so whoever killed him could prove that he was elsewhere at that precise moment?”
    “Exactly,” Monk agreed. “The police are now considering it to be murder of all four members of the family, Taft himself included.”
    There were gasps from almost everyone in the court, even several of the jurors.
    Brancaster cleared his throat.
    “And whom do they suspect, Commander Monk?”
    Monk spoke quietly. “It all comes back to the missing money. The paintings are actually registered as owned by Robertson Drew. They have already arrested him, and I imagine they will charge him with all four murders, if they are not already doing so as we speak.”
    “Ah!” Brancaster let out his breath in a sigh, as if it were now all perfectly clear. “So it is possible that Robertson Drew strangled Mrs. Taft and her daughters, shot Taft himself, and then rigged up this contraption in the attic to make it seem as if Taft’s death happened at five in the morning—a time at which Drew can fully account for his whereabouts, I imagine—when the neighbors heard the shot, rather than a couple of hours earlier?”
    “Yes,” Monk agreed. “It is quite possible.”
    “Just one other thing, Mr. Monk: If Drew went through all that trouble, why did he not remove the machine from the attic? If you had not found it, we would have known nothing about it at all. It seems extraordinarily dangerous, a careless piece of arrogance.”
    “He tried to,” Monk said with a bleak smile. “He had to be careful not to seem too eager to get into the house, or he might have aroused suspicion, but he did ask the police several times. In fact, it was his eagerness to gain access to the house that made us decide to look there as well.”
    “I see. But there is still one piece that puzzles me.” Brancaster knewthat every man and woman in the courtroom was listening to him, and he made the most of it. It was a superb performance. “If he had to ask for police permission to get into the house to remove this contraption, how did he get in, in the middle of the night, to murder the entire family?”
    Monk had been waiting for that. “On the night he killed them all, we suspect he entered through a loosely fitted larder window, at the back of the house where in the dark no one would have seen him climb in. After the deaths were discovered, and the police knew it was the scene of a crime, even if they did not understand the full nature of it, they secured all the windows and locked the inside doors. The house was then their responsibility, and there was a great deal that was of value still inside—silver, crystal, paintings, and such. So