You wonder if I have made any investigation into the forging of birdshot? Obviously it was the first thing to occur to me, as no doubt it was to Sherlock. The round shot is still used in fowling, although before the invention of the rifled barrel and the shell and cartridge it formed the ammunition of our armies as recently as forty years ago.[7] I am sure it will not surprise you that the first suggestions that soldiers might fire anything other than a ball from their firearms was rejected by the British Board of Ordinance in 1826 on the grounds that spherical shot had been good enough for the last three hundred years! Such shot is forged by dropping molten lead through a copper sieve, and, as it falls through the air, it solidifies into a perfect sphere. The fall needed is a considerable one, as the spherical shape is formed by the surface tension of the molten metal, and towers for the purpose of this forging exist at many metal works. As a point of interest there is such a tower,[8] which opened nigh on sixty years ago, at the Lambeth Lead Works between Waterloo and Hungerford Bridges. Well within the distance that a drugged man or a body could be conveyed by hansom cab. As to the method of the inflicting of the singularly uniform and regular injuries then, I fancy we are in agreement.
Your contention then is that his men, in ignorance of the tower’s function but aware of it as a landmark, conceived the idea of leaving the freshly shaved Rourke there, with a view to spying upon his awaking in such incongruous environs, bereft of his military moustache. Returning from a carouse to find him dead, as a result of some random accident sending a fusillade of shot down upon him where he lay, the men then panicked and, swearing their cabbie to secrecy, perhaps with bribes, carried the body to the wasteland where it was discovered and there left it – no doubt quaking in their boots at the thought that this crime might be brought home to them.
So, no doubt, a kind-hearted Watson, inclined always to see the best in mankind, was willing to construe as an accidental result of high-spiritedness what was in actuality one of the vilest and most inhuman crimes to come to my brother’s, and hence my, notice.
The fact of the body being exquisitely positioned to receive the fatal shot, with its breast bared, will not admit of accident.
There are many reasons why a man might shave his own face, from vanity to disguise. There are many reasons why a man might shave the face of another man who will go on living, from the obvious one of being employed as a barber, to the japery you wished to suggest to me. But to shave the face of a man only with the intent of killing him thereafter?
Only three theories occurred to my brother. The first, so as to facilitate the substitution of a bearded brother for a clean-shaven one, he quickly discounted. There was no such person in the case. Rourke was well known to many in the area, and both his superior officers and the men under him identified his body, despite the alterations. He had no dependants, was, so far as his men knew, unmarried, and in the event of his death, his goods were to be sold and the monies sent by a firm of lawyers to distant relatives in Ireland. Thus any question of substitution perhaps in pursuit of the suggestive legacy was ruled out.
The second theory I myself favoured for a little while. I do not know if you are aware, but the presence of certain poisons taken over time can be proven by the subjecting of samples of body hair to certain reagents. As the hair grows out from the follicle it forms a record of the chemical composition of its – ah – native soil. Perhaps because of relative rates of growth, while hair abounds on the human body, the analytical technique is most effective when carried out upon the hairs of the head. Rourke’s baldness has already been remarked; I confess to wondering then if his beard and sideburns might have been removed in order to render less discoverable a cause of death that owed nothing to the impact of the falling shot. Sherlock also went along this blind alley – though for longer than I, working from pure logic alone. He haunted public houses, and discovered that the teetotal Rourke had, with other members of the Temperance League, lectured and argued with the regular drinkers and the publicans alike. In the process – for Rourke, despite his age and his baldness was in other respects a virile and even an imposing figure – he had conceived a friendship with a member of the Ladies League Against Alcohol, one Margaret Athol, on one occasion violently defending her from the attack of several inebriated young men who had taken drunken offence at her characterisation of their behaviour and determined to live down to the description she gave of it. There was an understanding between them, and while not officially engaged, she had given him a lock of her hair to keep, and he – recently enough for it to be of interest to Sherlock – had provided her with, of all things, a scented pillow favour, stuffed with aromatic herbs and cuttings from his own hair.
Whereas you or I might perhaps have taken the lady into our confidence, given that this was a matter of murder, the vanity of my brother, which knows no bounds of good taste nor any check to his actions, led him to proceed to burglarise the lady’s boudoir in order to extract a lover’s keepsake which he then went on to render down to its constituent parts and subject to minute chemical analysis.
The spectacle of my brother, diligently teasing apart tufts of a man’s whiskers and boiling them in a variety of reagents is, I confess, an amusing one – and I must not let it deflect my mind from the fact that this was – and remains – a very brutal crime. Nevertheless, albeit grimly, I am inclined to smile at the mental image. Even Watson – I have little doubt – must have chided him for this graceless action, the more so because it availed nothing in terms of practical proof.
The theory was sound – something must have caused Rourke to lie unmoving while the hail of shot let out his life, and the absence of wounds at the wrists and ankles spoke against any physical restraint. Although the hair proved nothing either way as to poison, it might have been removed by an extremely careful assassin as a precaution. More likely though it spoke of a poison that required only a single dose, rather than a gradual building up of toxicity in the body. I do not share my brother’s interest in the minutia of murder, but any classicist must have been struck by the possibility of hemlock, and Sherlock considered the most likely poisonous agent to be conium maculatum – the poison which, in legend at least, was imbibed by Socrates. Hemlock tea can be given as a pleasantly tasting tisane – easily pressed upon a teetotaller. Its action is mild, and its predominant effect short of death is of a complete muscular paralysis. Under its influence, a victim – even if he had not in fact ingested a sufficiency to die – might well prove unable to stir a muscle to save himself from the slow drop, drop, drop of the fatal metal. Though unproven, my brother (and I) considered such a drug to be the likely means by which the victim was rendered helpless.
You’re right; I did mention a third theory, other than disguise, or the removal of evidence, which might account for the removal of the sideburns and moustache.
7
While gun barrel rifling began in the sixteenth century in Germany, the end of smoothbore musket usage by the British Army was considerably delayed. The “Brown Bess” musket was in use until 1838, and the percussion-cap musket that replaced it also did not have a rifled barrel and remained in use until 1851.
8
Designed by David Riddal Roper for Thomas Malby & Co in 1826, the tower was still in use as late as 1949.