Drury Lane’s Last Case (33 page)

“We all do,” growled the Inspector. “Dr. Choate, will you be good enough to let us chin a while with Dr. Sedlar—alone? This is kind of confidential.”

“Confidential?” The curator, who had risen at his desk, stood still and stared from one to another of them. Then he looked down and fumbled with some papers. “Ah—of course.” A slow tide of red rose from the hairs of his goatee. He circled the desk and swiftly left the room. Dr. Sedlar had not moved, and for a moment there was silence. Then Thumm nodded to Lane, and Lane stepped forward. The Inspector's heavy breathing was the only sound in the room.

“Dr. Sedlar,” said Lane with no expression whatever, “it has become necessary, in the interests of—let us say—science, to put you to a very simple test.… Patience, your bag please.”

“Test?” A scowl appeared on the Englishman's face, and he thrust his hands into his pockets.

Patience quickly handed Lane her bag. He opened it, looked inside, took out a gayly coloured kerchief, and snapped the bag shut. “Now, sir,” he said quietly, “please tell me what colour this kerchief displays.”

Patience gasped, her eyes widening with a sudden shock of intelligence. The others stared stupidly.

Dr. Sedlar flushed. A remarkable mixture of emotions seemed to be struggling for mastery on his hawkish face. He took a little backward step. “This is the most frightful rubbish, you know,” he said harshly. “May I ask the purpose of this childish demonstration?”

“Surely,” murmured Lane, “there can be no harm in identifying the colour of this innocent little hander-chief?”

There was a silence. Then the Englishman said, without turning, in a flat voice: “Blue.”

The handkerchief was green, yellow, and white.

“And Mr. Rowe's necktie, Dr. Sedlar?” continued Lane, without changing expression.

The Englishman swung slowly about, his eyes tortured. “Brown.”

It was turquoise blue.

“Thank you.” Lane returned the handkerchief and bag to Patience. “Inspector, this gentleman is not Dr. Hamnet Sedlar. He is William Sedlar, sometimes known as Dr. Ales.”

The Englishman sank suddenly into a chair and buried his face in his hands.

“How the Great Horn Spoon did you know?” gasped Thumm.

Lane sighed. “Elementary, Inspector. You see, it was Dr. Ales, or William Sedlar, who visited your office on May sixth, leaving the envelope in your care. That man could not have been Hamnet Sedlar, as he himself once pointed out; Hamnet Sedlar was in London on May seventh attending a banquet in his honour. Now Dr. Ales, who brought the sealed envelope, was of course the man who had written down the symbol in the envelope—he admitted as much to you that morning in your office. What did the paper and symbol show?”

“Why, just a—a … Hell, I don't know,” said the Inspector.

“The paper,” explained Lane wearily, “was neutral-grey in hue, and the letter-head inscription of the Saxon Library at the top of the sheet was printed in a darker grey ink. That, combined with the manner in which the symbol had been written, struck me at once.”

“What d'ye mean? We just looked at it the wrong way, that's all. And by luck you happened to look at it the right way.”

“Precisely. In other words, William Sedlar had written the characters
W
^m
SH
^e
upside down! That is, when you read the symbol correctly,
the letterhead inscription was at the bottom of the sheet
, upside down. That was enormously significant. When a person picks up a letterhead with the intention of writing something upon it, instinctively he will turn the sheet right-side up—which is to say, with the name and address at the top. Yet the writer of the symbol had picked up the sheet and done exactly the opposite! Why?” Lane paused, took out a handkerchief, and dabbed at his lips. The Englishman had removed his hands from his face and now sat slumped in his chair staring bitterly at the floor.

“I know now,” sighed Patience. “Unless it was pure accident,
he simply didn't see that line of printing
!”

“Yes, my dear, that's precisely right. It seems on its face impossible. It was much more probable that Dr. Ales had been in haste and had simply written the characters with the sheet upside down, not realizing that it would make a difference to those who read the symbol later. But the other possibility logically existed, and I could not ignore it. I said to myself: By what miracle could this phenomenon, if it's true, have come about? Why didn't Dr. Ales see that line of dark-grey printing on the sheet of Saxon stationery? Was he
blind
? But that was inconceivable; the man who visited your office, Inspector, gave every evidence of possessing good eyesight. Then I remember another thing, and I saw the answer in a flash.…
The beard
.”

The Englishman raised agonized eyes; there was a fleeting curiosity in them now. “The beard?” he muttered.

“You see?” smiled Lane. “To this moment he does not know that there was anything wrong with the false beard he wore! Mr. Sedlar, the beard you sported that day was appalling, a monstrosity! It was streaked with blues and greens and heaven only knows what else.”

Sedlar's mouth fell open; he groaned. “Good God. I purchased it at a costumier's. I suppose I didn't make myself clear and the creature thought I wanted a—a
comic
beard for a masquerade, or something as insane as that.…”

“Very unfortunate,” said Lane dryly. “But the beard and the stationery confirmed each other. I felt the excellent possibility that the writer of the symbol was
totally colour-blind
. I had heard of such things and consulted my physician, Dr. Martini. He told me that cases of total colour-blindness are extremely rare; but when they occur the victim sees the entire spectrum in varying tones of grey, like a pencil drawing. There was a possibility, he said, that instead of being totally colour-blind the victim had suffered a complete loss of colour-sense; which would account even better than colour-blindness for the fact that the printing and the shade of the paper were so much alike to his eyes that the printing virtually became invisible. When Dr. Martini examined a sheet of the stationery at the Saxon house, he felt fairly certain that some such optical condition afflicted the writer of the symbol.”

The Englishman stirred. “I have never,” he said hoarsely, “seen a
colour
.”

They were all silent for a while. “Dr. Ales, then,” continued Lane with a sigh, “was colour-blind, I was morally convinced. You, sir, have just demonstrated that you are afflicted with the same condition; you guessed wildly at the colours of Miss Thumm's kerchief and Mr. Rowe's necktie, not having the faintest notion what their true colours might be. Now you claim to be Hamnet Sedlar. But Hamnet Sedlar was
not
colour-blind! The first day we met him, in the Saxon Room of this museum, he looked over the repaired case from which the 1599 Jaggard had been stolen and plainly and correctly distinguished not only various antipathetic colours of the bindings of the books in the cabinet; but shades of the same colour, since he designated one binding as
golden
brown, a subtle differentiation impossible to a colour-blind person. Since you are either William or Hamnet, then, and Hamnet had normal eyesight while William was colour-blind, and you are colour-blind, obviously you must be William. It's the simplest sort of syllogism. I suggested the test to determine whether you lied or not. You lied. Most of the tale you told us in the hospital was fabrication, although I suspect much of it is true. Now please be good enough to give my friends the complete story.”

He sank into a chair, dabbing at his lips again.

“Yes,” said the Englishman in a low voice, “I am William Sedlar.”

He had first visited the Inspector as Dr. Ales, leaving the symbol in the Inspector's hands as a clue should anything happen to him in his pursuit of the Shakesperian document—an eventuality which at that time he considered remote. The reason he had not telephoned on June twentieth was that he could not; the remote eventuality had occurred. His brother Hamnet who, as William now knew, had accepted the curator-ship of the Britannic Museum for the sole purpose of getting closer to the Saxon copy of the 1599 Jaggard, had kidnapped him the very evening of the day on which William had stolen the Jaggard from the museum. This was only shortly after the visit of Donoghue, and the same night on which Donoghue had been kidnapped by Hamnet, the Irishman's sense of time having been warped by his ignorance of how long he had been unconscious.… William had been
hors de combat
, therefore, from the day of the museum theft until the day the police rescued him from the isolated shack where he had been kept a prisoner!

He had despite all Hamnet's threats refused to divulge the hiding-place; Donoghue, of course, being ignorant of even the existence of the document, could tell Hamnet nothing. Hamnet, whose visits to the house of captivity were perforce hurried and spasmodic, due to the necessity of visiting the museum and maintaining a cloak of innocence, finally became desperate. He told William one day that, knowing the document to be in William's house, he had set a bomb in the cellar to explode and destroy the house with the document in it!—a bomb which he himself had had made secretly by an underworld chemist. It was only then that William realized what his brother's real purpose was in pursuing the Shakespearian document; not to save it but to
destroy
it!

“But why?” roared Rowe, his hands clenched. “That's—that's the most barbaric sort of vandalism! Why destroy it, for the love of God?”

“Was your brother insane?” cried Patience.

The Englishman's lips tightened; he flashed a look at Lane, but the old gentleman was gazing quietly into space. “I don't know,” he said.

Hamnet had set the time-bomb for twenty-four hours. Realizing that by permitting the bomb to go off the document would be irrevocably lost, William at the last moment capitulated, reasoning that any delay would be better than none; he might be able to free himself and save the document. So he told Hamnet where the secret compartment was and how to open it. He had, however, been unable to escape. Hamnet had exclaimed with gloating that he intended to return to William's house and actually destroy the document with his own hand; there was plenty of time. He would pull the teeth of the bomb.… Hamnet had left with William's key, the original, and William had never seen him alive again. He knew nothing whatever of what had happened until he was rescued by the police after Donoghue's escape. In the hospital he read the newspapers and listened to the talk of reporters; it was then that he learned of the explosion and the discovery in the ruins of a body thought to be that of one of the Sedlar brothers. He realized in a flash what must have happened: while Hamnet was in the house getting the document he must have had a fatal encounter with still a third person after the document, this third person must have killed Hamnet over possession of the document—ignorant of the fact that the bomb was ticking away in the cellar—and made away with the precious sheet of paper. With Hamnet dead there was no one who knew of the bomb except William, who was helpless in the house where he was a prisoner; the explosion occurred on schedule, destroying the house.

“I saw at once,” said the Englishman in a wrathful voice, “that there was still a third person gaddin' about who now actually possessed the document. I have sacrificed so much—so many years of my life—in pursuit of that holograph.… I had thought the document destroyed; now I was sure it still existed, unharmed! I had to start over again, solve this mystery of who murdered my brother, get back my document. To have acknowledged myself William Sedlar would have been fatal to this plan; I am wanted by the police of Bordeaux. By the time I had been extradited to France and had faced the charge, the document would probably have been lost to me for ever. So, taking advantage of the fact that the police did not definitely know which of our bodies had been found in the ruins, and the fact that my brother and I were striking twins—even to the voice—I decided to say I was Hamnet. I'm sure Dr. Choate has been suspicious; I've been treading on dangerous ground all the week.”

By the time he had finished they knew that it had been Hamnet who had held up Patience and Rowe on the road to The Hamlet. Having followed Lane and read Lane's wired instructions to Thumm to bring the document to The Hamlet, he had thought the sealed envelope contained the precious paper itself.

The Inspector was grim-lipped, and Patience was in the glummest of moods. Rowe paced up and down, frowning. Only Lane sat quietly.

“Listen here,” said Thumm finally. “I'll tell you right now I don't believe you. I'm willing to believe you're William, but that doesn't prove
you
weren't the second man in the house that night! I say there's a good chance you're lying. I say there's nothing to show you didn't escape from the place where your brother had you tied up, trailed him to your own house, and killed him for the paper. I claim this business of a third person killing Hamnet and getting the paper is all poppycock—don't believe there's a third person or ever was!”

William Sedlar went pale by degrees. “Oh, I say——” he began in a shocked voice.

“No, father,” said Patience wearily. “You're wrong about that. Mr. Sedlar is innocent of his brother's murder and I can prove it.”

“Ah,” said Lane, blinking. “You can, Patience?”

“We know now he is William; we know now that since the dead man was one of the two Sedlar brothers the dead man must be Hamnet. The question is: was Hamnet the first or second man to visit the house on the murder-night? We know that the first man had been forced to appropriate Maxwell's key in order to get back into the house after imprisoning the old man in the garage. The first man, then,
didn't
have a key when he arrived. But Hamnet Sedlar did have a key when he arrived—the original he had taken from his brother William, and which we later found on the body. Then Hamnet must have been the second visitor.