Free Full Fury by Roger Ormerod

car had been seen, parked by the gate. Drover said that such a car was owned by Gaines, and when we went to The Beeches he’d done nothing to cover up. There was a suit and shoes plastered with red mud, and he admitted the whole thing. He made a statement. He had gone up there with a gun with the intention of shooting Andy Paterson, and in the end he’d done it, finishing by standing over him at the cow byre and emptying the gun into him. His prints were on the gun we’d found, in spite of the mud.
    A couple of days later things started to go severely wrong. Seven empty shell cases had been bad enough, because it was a bit too good to be true. But now the experts got into their stride and started doing things with spent bullets, and bullets in the body, and whatnot. They sent Crowshaw a report, which of course I never saw, which showed that four bullets had lodged in the body, one had gone straight through, and three spent ones had not gone through flesh at all. That was eight, not counting a sixth hole in Paterson, for which no bullet was ever found. Nine in all.
    Crowshaw says he’ll always remember that report landing on his desk. They were in his office, he and Freer. ‘They must be crazy,’ he said, wanting desperately to reject it.
    Freer had a touching faith in science. He just smiled, and suggested they had another go at Gaines.
    ‘ But it’s only a seven-shot gun,’ Crowshaw protested.
    They had Gaines in a cell below, and they had already seen him a number of times. But Gaines was already emerging as a vague and unworldly type of person, and anyway he was in a state of delayed shock.
    Neville Gaines was a massive man with great shoulders and a head of long and shaggy hair. I was there at the arrest, and I remember most his eyes, soft, dreamy and emotional. He had hard and strong hands, but they moved with persuasive and not aggressive gestures. There was nothing aggressive in him that I saw, and when they got to him that day he was weary and defeated—resigned. He had done what he had to from an intense inner urge, and it had drained him. Crowshaw told me that he had to go very carefully with Gaines, and I’ve tried to reconstruct the scene as he remembered it.
    ‘ We would like to know,’ said Crowshaw, ‘how many spare cartridges you took with you.’
    Gaines took a long time to answer, dredging down into his mind. ‘Spare… no, there weren’t any spares.’
    ‘ How many shots did you fire into him?’
    ‘ All of them.’ He spoke dully, and there were twitches at the corner of one eye, one for each impact as he pulled the trigger. But going on and on. ‘I did what the man said. I pulled the trigger. I just went on pulling it.’
    Crowshaw tried again. ‘How many times?’
    Startled eyes came up. ‘On and on. Oh… a dozen times. Twenty. I don’t know.’
    ‘ Twenty? There were only seven in it.’
    ‘ It was a long time I stood over him. At the end. Yes... I remember, a long time—and I kept doing it. But there wasn’t anything happening. Not then. The thing wouldn’t do anything at all. I threw it away and ran off.’
    To Crowshaw it sounded so real and true.
    ‘ But you managed to re-load it?’
    But they’d gone over all that before, when Crowshaw had been probing Gaines’s familiarity with guns. Gaines seemed not to remember. ‘I just bought the thing from this man called Lovejoy, and he’d said it would fire seven.’
    ‘ Which seemed to you enough?’
    ‘ Enough?’ Crowshaw watched as the brain struggled with the memory. ‘Enough for what? I don’t know.’ Gaines shook his head and his wild hair flew. ‘I didn’t think about that. The thing… that gun itself, was enough. Just the buying of it. Just having it. Yes, yes I suppose you could say it was enough.’
    Crowshaw left it at that. He was worried because this was a loose end in his case. The prosecution could prove—would undoubtedly have to prove—that at least nine shots were fired, and the defence could