Free Blind Justice by Bruce Alexander Page B

eighteen years of age, stepped forward. “Aye: Ebenezer Tepper.” He seemed a stalwart sort.
    “Thank you for identifying yourself. We shall return tomorrow morning. Please be available to answer questions.” Then Sir John added, “You too, Mr. Potter.”
    He then clapped me on the shoulder and let his hand remain there as I led him up the stairs as we had come. Potter trailed behind in a manner less certain.
    As we arrived in the hall. Sir John dropped his hand but stayed close as we made our way swiftly to the street door. But ere we arrived a figure on the grand staircase above detained us. It was Lady Goodhope dressed in a robe of such finery it would have done for a ball gown.
    “Sir John,” she called out.
    He stopped and turned to the voice.
    Potter puffed up behind us. “Your ladyship, I regret the intrusion. I had no choice but to admit them. He—”
    She cut him off: “Never mind. Potter. They are rightly here.” Then: “What have you found, Sir John, on your return visit?”
    “I have two matters to communicate and a question to ask.”
    “What is the question?”
    “Was your husband right- or left-handed?”
    “Why, left-handed, always the exception.”
    “So. Yes, thank you.”
    “And what have you to communicate?”
    “First, that I shall return tomorrow to question members of your household staff. There will also be a surgeon who will come to examine the body of your late husband.”
    “Are those the two matters?”
    “No, I count them as one. The second matter is that indeed you were right, Lady Goodhope: He was not a suicide.”
    What struck me then was how little she altered in either posture or expression. She removed her hand from the rail of the stairs and clasped her robe a bit tighter at her throat. If what Sir John had told her caused any change in her face, I could not detect it. “Thank you. You will, of course, be welcome here, and your surgeon, too. Please keep me informed of your findings. Good night.” And with that she turned and marched up the stairs.
    It was not until we two were settled in his Bow Street kitchen, gnawing on two-day-old cold leg of mutton and fresh bread and butter, that Sir John deemed it proper to tell me what it was that had persuaded him to change his mind so completely. By then, of course, I had my own suspicions, so that what I heard from him did not come as a complete surprise.
    “You’ll recall, Jeremy,” he said to me, “that Lord Goodhope’s face bore powder burns.”
    “One side of his face was dark as any blackamoor’s.”
    “So it must be with a pistol of such power fired at such close range,” he explained. “It takes considerable black powder to propel a ball the size of the one Mr. Bailey dug out of the wall. With the ball comes also a great quantity of black powder: enough to be-soot his face complete.” He paused. “You see where this leads, perhaps?”
    “I think so,” said I.
    “Then tell me.”
    “Well, if powder comes out the front of the pistol along with the … ball, then some of it must also leak out the back: I mean to say, it’s an explosion inside that makes the ball go. Isn’t that how guns work?”
    Sir John smiled indulgently and nodded. “It is. Yes.”
    “The explosion at the back of the gun would be enough to dirty the hand that held it. Lord Goodhope’s hands were clean, so he did not hold the pistol when it was fired.”
    “Exactly.” He pulled a morsel of rare mutton away from the bone, dropped it on a chunk of Mrs. Gredge’s bread, and popped the two together into his mouth. Taking time to chew thoughtfully and silently, he washed the generous mouthful down with a gulp of beer: enough, in any case, to encourage a manly belch from him.
    “I take it,” he said to me then, “you’ve had no experience of firearms.”
    “Oh, no sir.”
    “Your father: Did he shoot?”
    “Him neither. He had a great dislike of guns.”
    “He sounds a good man from what you say of him.”
    “Oh, he was, sir.