The Big Book of Sherlock Holmes Stories (44 page)

This door was never locked, certainly not in the daytime when there was anyone at home, yet I could have sworn that I had heard a scurry of sound from within. When I tried to look in the window, my eyes were met by a gaily patterned teatowel, pinned up neatly to all the edges.

“Mrs. Hudson?” I called. There was no answer. Perhaps the movement had been the cat. I went around the house, tried the French doors and found them locked as well, and continued around to the front door, only to have it open
as I stretched out my hand. Mrs. Hudson stood in the narrow opening, her sturdy shoe planted firmly against the door's lower edge.

“Mrs. Hudson, there you are! I was beginning to think you'd gone out.”

“Hello there, Mary. I'm surprised to see you back down here so soon. Mr. Holmes isn't back from the Continent yet, I'm sorry.”

“Actually, I came to see you.”

“Ah, Mary, such a pity, but I really can't have you in. I'm taking advantage of Mr. Holmes's absence to turn out the house, and things are in a dreadful state. You should have checked with me first, dear.”

A brief glance at her tidy, uncovered hair and her clean hand on the door made it obvious that heavy housecleaning was not her current preoccupation. Yet she did not appear afraid, as if she was being held hostage or something; she seemed merely determined. Still, I had to keep her at the door as long as I could while I searched for a clue to her odd behaviour.

Such was my intention; however, every question was met by a slight edging back into the house and an increment of closure of the door, until eventually it clicked shut before me. I heard the sound of the bolt being shot, and then Mrs. Hudson's firm footsteps, retreating towards the kitchen.

I stood, away from the house, frankly astonished. I couldn't even peer in, as the sitting-room windows overlooking the kitchen had had their curtains tightly shut. I considered, and discarded, a full frontal assault, and decided that the only thing for it was stealth.

Mrs. Hudson knew me well enough to expect it of me, of that I was fully aware, so I took care to stay away that evening, even ringing her from my own house several miles away to let her know that I was not outside the cottage, watching her curtains. She also knew that I had to take the Sunday night train in order to be at the Monday morning lectures, and would then begin to relax. Sunday night, therefore, was when I took up my position outside the kitchen window.

For a long time all I heard were busy kitchen sounds—a knife on a cutting board, a spoon scraping against the side of a pot, the clatter of a bowl going into the stone sink. Then without warning, at about nine o'clock Mrs. Hudson spoke.

“Hello there, dear. Have a good sleep?”

“I always feel I should say ‘good morning,' but it's nighttime,” said a voice in response, and I was so startled I nearly knocked over a pot of herbs. The voice was that of a child, sleep-clogged but high-pitched: a child with a very faint German accent.

Enough of this, I thought. I was tempted to heave the herb pot through the window and just clamber in, but I was not sure of the condition of Mrs. Hudson's heart. Instead I went silently around the house, found the door barred to my key, and ended up retrieving the long ladder from the side of the garden shed and propping it up against Holmes's window. Of course the man would have jimmy-proof latches. Finally in frustration I used a rock, and fast as Mrs. Hudson was in responding to the sound of breaking glass, I still met her at the foot of the stairs, and slipped past her by feinting to the left and ducking past her on the right.

The kitchen was bare.

However, the bolt was still shot, so the owner of the German voice was here somewhere. I ignored the furious Scots woman at my back and ran my eyes over the scene: the pots of food that she would not have cooked for herself alone, the table laid for three (one of the place settings with a diminutive fork and a china mug decorated with pigs wearing toppers and tails), and two new hairbrushes lying on a towel on the side of the sink.

“Tell them to come out,” I said.

She sighed deeply. “You don't know what you're doing, Mary.”

“Of course I don't. How can I know anything if you keep me in the dark?”

“Oh, very well. I should have known you'd keep on until you found out. I was going to move them, but—” She paused, and raised her voice. “Sarah, Louis, come out here.”

They came, not, as I had expected, from the pantry, but crawling out of the tiny cupboard in the corner. When they were standing in the room, eyeing me warily, Mrs. Hudson made the introductions.

“Sarah and Louis Oberdorfer, Miss Mary Russell. Don't worry, she's a friend. A very nosy friend.” She sniffed, and turned to take another place setting from the sideboard and lay it out—at the far end of the table from the three places already there.

“The Oberdorfers,” I said. “How on earth did they get here? Did Holmes bring them? Don't you know that the police in two countries are looking for them?”

Twelve-year-old Sarah glowered at me. Her seven-year-old brother edged behind her fearfully. Mrs. Hudson set the kettle down forcefully on the hob.

“Of course I do. And no, Mr. Holmes is not aware that they are here.”

“But he's actually working on the case. How could you—”

She cut me off. Chin raised, grey hair quivering, she turned on me with a porridge spoon in her hand. “Now don't you go accusing me of being a traitor, Mary Russell, not until you know what I know.”

We faced off across the kitchen table, the stout, aging Scots housekeeper and the lanky Oxford undergraduate, until I realized simultaneously that whatever she was cooking smelled superb, and that perhaps I ought indeed to know what she knew. A truce was called, and we sat down at the table to break bread together.

It took a long time for the various threads of the story to trickle out, narrated by Mrs. Hudson (telling how, in Holmes's absence, she could nap in the afternoons so as to sit up night after night until the door had finally been opened by the thief) and by Sarah Oberdorfer (who coolly recited how she had schemed and prepared, with map and warm clothes and enough money to get them started, and only seemed troubled at the telling of how she had been forced to take to a life of crime), with the occasional contribution by young Louis (who thought the whole thing a great lark, from the adventure of hiding among the baggage in the train from London to the thrill of wandering the Downs, unsupervised, in the moonlight). It took longer still for the entire thing to become clear in my mind. Until midnight, in fact, when the two children, who had from the beginning been sleeping days and active at night to help prevent discovery, were stretched out on the carpet in front of the fire in the next room, colouring pictures.

“Just to make sure I have this all straight,” I said to Mrs. Hudson, feeling rather tired, “let me go over it again. First, they say they were not kidnapped, they fled under their own power, from their uncle James Oberdorfer, because they believed he was trying to kill them in order to inherit his late brother's, their father's, property.”

“You can see Sarah believes it.”

I sighed. “Oh yes, I admit she does. Nobody would run away from a comfortable house, hide in a baggage car, and live in a cave for three weeks on stolen food if she didn't believe it. And yes, I admit that there seems to have been a very odd series of accidents.” Mrs. Hudson's own investigative machinery, though not as smooth as that of her employer, was both robust and labyrinthine: she had found through the servant sister of another landlady who had a friend who—and so forth.

There was a great deal of money involved, with factories not only here and in France, but also in Germany, where the war seemed on the verge of coming to its bloody end. These were two very wealthy orphans, with no family left but one uncle. An uncle who, according to below-the-stairs rumour collected by Mrs. Hudson's network of informants, exhibited a smarmy, shallow affection to his charges. I put my head into my hands.

It all rested on Sarah. A different child I might have dismissed as being prone to imaginative stories, but those steady brown eyes of hers, daring me to disbelieve—I could see why Mrs. Hudson, by no means an easy mark for a sad story, had taken them under her wing.

“And you say the footman witnessed the near-drowning?” I said without looking up.

“If he hadn't happened upon them they'd have been lost, he said. And the maid who ate some of the special pudding their uncle brought them was indeed very ill.”

“But there's no proof.”

“No.” She wasn't making this any easier for me. We both knew that Holmes, with his attitudes towards children, and particularly girl children, would hand these two back to their uncle. Oh, he would issue the man a stern warning that he, Holmes, would in the future take a close personal interest in the safety of the Oberdorfer heirs, but after all, accidents were unpredictable things, particularly if Oberdorfer chose to return to the chaos of war-ravaged Germany. If he decided the inheritance was worth the risk, and took care that no proof was available…

No proof here either, one way or the other, and this was one case I could
not
discuss with Holmes.

“And you were planning on sending them to your cousin in Wiltshire?”

“It's a nice healthy farm near a good school, and who would question two more children orphaned by zeppelin bombs?”

“But only until Sarah is sixteen?”

“Three years and a bit. She'd be a young lady then—not legally of course, but lawyers would listen to her.”

I was only eighteen myself, and could well believe that authorities who would dismiss a twelve-year-old's wild accusations would prick their ears at a self-contained sixteen-year-old. Why, even Holmes…

“All right, Mrs. Hudson, you win. I'll help you get them to Wiltshire.”

I was not there when Holmes returned a week later, drained and irritable at his failure to enlighten Scotland Yard. Mrs. Hudson said nothing, just served him his dinner and his newspapers and went about her business. She said nothing then, and she said nothing later that evening when Holmes, who had carried his collection of papers to the basket chair in front of the fire and prepared to settle in, leapt wildly to his feet, bent over to dig among the cushions for a moment, then turned in accusation to his housekeeper with the gnawed stub of a coloured pencil in his outstretched palm.

She never did say anything, not even three years later when the young heir and his older sister (her hair piled carefully on top of her head, wearing a grown woman's hat and a dress a bit too old for her slim young frame) miraculously materialized in a solicitor's office in London, creating a stir in three countries. However, several times over the years, whenever Holmes was making some particularly irksome demand on her patience, I saw this most long-suffering of landladies take a deep breath, focus on something far away, and nod briefly, before going on her placid way with a tiny, satisfied smile on her face.

IN HIS LIFETIME
a standout chemist and metals engineer, Dr. James Bliss Austin (1904–1988) today is celebrated for his two exceptional hobbies: preserving historic Japanese block prints and being one of the most prominent Sherlockians of his generation. Austin was in the first group of fifteen ever to receive an investiture in the Baker Street Irregulars (1944). Like several other early members of the BSI, he became a noted collector of Conan Doyle's signed first editions and foreign translations.

Today, Austin's own byline is eagerly sought by modern-day students of Sherlock Holmes. For more than forty years he was a frequent contributor to anthologies, magazines, and limited-edition pamphlets about the great detective. Among the gems he produced were “What Son Was Watson?” (1944), “Thumbing His Way to Fame” (1946), “The Atomic Holmeses” (1947), “On the Writing of Some of the Most Remarkable Books Ever Penned” (1978), and “William Gillette on the Air” (1982). Though he preferred literary criticism and writing about manuscripts as cultural objects, Austin also wrote Sherlockian poetry and historical retrospectives. Only on rare occasions did he venture into the world of short fiction.

Austin prepared the present story for an
Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine
detective genre contest. More than eight hundred entries were received, with the top fifteen stories published in book form as
The Queen's Awards
. By way of a prank, Austin's protagonists were also the contest's judges and his Sherlockian cronies: Christopher Morley, Howard Haycraft, as well as Frederic Dannay and Manfred B. Lee, who jointly were Ellery Queen. The quartet enjoyed the joke so much that they awarded Austin a surprise honorable mention and placed “The Final Problem” at the caboose-end of the anthology as a “dividend and bloodhound bonus” for their readers.

“The Final Problem” was first published in
The Queen's Awards
(Boston, Little, Brown, 1946).

CHRISTOPHER MORLEY FLUNG
his arm out wide in a sweeping gesture and with a low bow pushed Howard Haycraft ahead of him into Ellery Queen's study. It was a large room about fifteen feet square, completely lined from floor to ceiling with shelves which were ram-jam-full of books, so full in fact that there was no shelf-space for the hundreds of other volumes which cluttered the room. Piles of books leaning Pisa-like were stacked on the floor, on table tops, even on chairs, so that Queen was having some difficulty in finding a place to seat his guests. At last he succeeded in excavating two comfortable armchairs to which he escorted the visitors. He then settled himself in a red-leather easy chair, flanked on one side by a heterogeneous collection of copies of the
Strand, Black Cat
, and
Golden Book
, and on the other by a commodious smoking stand which served as a private cemetery for innumerable corpses of cigars, cigarettes, and pipe dottle. The whole effect seemed staged to give the appearance of a throne, so that Haycraft could not refrain from quoting:

“The King was in the counting house—”

“No, no,” laughed Morley. “The Queen was in the parlor.”

To their surprise Ellery did not join their laughter. Instead, his face clouded, he rose from his chair and crossed over to his desk, from a drawer of which he took a playing card.

“Speaking of Kings and Queens,” he said, “what do you make of this?”

“Obviously,” replied Haycraft, “it's a King of Spades. What about it?”

“Only this,” said Ellery, “it came to me in the morning mail in a plain envelope with a typed address and bearing a New York postmark. Frankly, I'm quite puzzled over it because I can't figure out who sent it—or why.”

“Probably some friend of yours is indulging a misplaced sense of humor,” suggested Morley. “I notice it's a Bicycle card. Perhaps someone whose manuscript you rejected is threatening to take you for a ride.”

“Or,” added Haycraft, “someone is trying to take the Queen with a King.”

“Which would be quite a trick,” replied Queen, falling in with the bantering mood of the others.

He replaced the card in his desk drawer and was returning to his chair when he caught sight of the heap of tobacco ashes on the smoking stand.

“Pardon me, gentlemen,” he said, “I forget my duty as a host.” And pushing aside a row of old magazines he revealed an array of boxes and jars containing cigars, cigarettes, and pipe tobacco.

“What are you smoking, Ellery?” asked Haycraft, helping himself to a cigarette.

“This,” replied Queen, drawing from his pocket a fat and aromatic cigar.

“A Merlinda!” gasped Morley, recognizing the cigar band. “How long has
EQMM
supported you in this style?”

“Since the notices about the Short Story Contest, to be exact,” said Ellery, as he lit the cigar. “I'm sorry that I don't have one for each
of you but you will find those Cabañas in the humidor quite good. There's a story that goes with my cigar. I may as well tell it to you since it concerns one of the manuscripts submitted in the contest.

“Several days ago, I received a story from a young fellow named Hugh Ashton, a graduate student at Hale. So far as I can discover he has never written anything before, and for a first effort it's amazing. I don't want to influence your judgment, but I don't mind telling you that it's a honey—as we say in Hollywood, it's colossal!

“Unfortunately, the manuscript needs a bit of editing. Ashton seems to realize that himself because shortly after the story arrived he phoned me to say that a friend of his on the faculty had offered to polish it for him. This Professor was to be in New York yesterday—so he asked, as a special favor, that I meet him at the Hale Club and return the manuscript to him along with any suggestions I might care to make. I agreed to meet the Professor—for two reasons. First, because Ashton's story is so clever that I don't want to lose it, and second, because I was piqued by the Professor's name. What do you suppose it was?”

“Elementary, my dear Queen,” said Morley. “It was Moriarty, James Moriarty, I should guess.”

“Right,” said Queen. “So yesterday morning I went to the Hale Club and as I approached the door, a man stepped up and said: ‘Mr. Queen? Professor Moriarty.' ”

“What did he look like?” asked Haycraft.

“I'll bet I know,” put in Morley, and shutting his eyes as if to aid his memory he recited: “He is extremely tall and thin, his forehead domes out in a wide curve, and his two eyes are deeply sunken in his head. He is clean-shaven, pale and ascetic-looking, retaining something of the professor in his features. His shoulders are rounded from much study and his face protrudes forward and is forever slowly oscillating from side to side in a curiously reptilian fashion. He peers at you with great curiosity in his puckered eyes.”

“Bravo!”
laughed Ellery. “That's not quite right but it will do. To go on, I was studying him carefully when he jolted me by saying—”

“Don't tell me,” broke in Morley again, “that he actually told you that you had less frontal development than he expected?”

“Exactly,” replied Queen. “I told him it was evident that he was a keen student of Sherlock Holmes, at which he smiled and said that the Moriartys always have been. He then invited me into the Club where we had oyster cocktails without cocktail sauce, blast it! In the end I traded the manuscript of the story for this cigar.”

Here Queen paused and looked at the cigar a trifle apprehensively, as if he were not sure that the swap had been an advantageous one.

“The Professor promised to do the rewriting at once, so you will have a chance to read the story for yourselves very soon, I hope. And now let's get on to selecting the prize-winning stories in
EQMM
's first short story contest. There are, as you know, fifteen finalists so far.”

He rose and started toward his desk on which stood a pile of fifteen manuscripts, but before he got there he began to sway and stumble. He opened his mouth as if to say something but seemed to have difficulty in drawing his breath. Suddenly he pitched forward to the floor, knocking over several piles of books and magazines, so that he lay almost buried under them. Haycraft and Morley, stupefied, remained frozen in their chairs, but finally roused themselves and rushed to Ellery's side. By the time they got to him and swept away the books, it was too late.

Ellery Queen was dead.

Sometime later, Ellery's physician, Dr. Dundy, entered the study accompanied by two men whom Morley and Haycraft, standing in glum silence, recognized as Ellery's father, Inspector Richard Queen, and Sergeant Thomas Velie.

“Inspector,” said Morley, “I never dreamed I would meet you under such distressing circumstances. This is simply dreadful.”

The Inspector, overcome, sank into a chair
and mumbled some reply which no one heard. His eyes, usually so bright and alert, were glazed over with a dull film. For the first time in his life, he showed his age. He sat motionless, like a man in deep shock.

Morley averted his head, then turned briskly to the physician.

“Well, what's the verdict?” he asked.

“We aren't quite certain,” the doctor replied. “That's why we should like to have your help. Could you tell us exactly what happened?”

“There isn't much to tell. Ellery, Haycraft, and I are the judges in the Short Story Contest which Ellery's
Mystery Magazine
is sponsoring. Ellery invited us here this morning to discuss the final selections for the prize winners. We had been here only a few minutes—in fact, Ellery was just going to his desk when he fell to the floor—”

“I would particularly like to get his symptoms straight,” said the doctor with a glance at the Inspector. “As I understand it, he tried to say something but couldn't; his face became livid and convulsed and his teeth clenched. Right?”

“Right,” replied Morley.

Here the Inspector roused himself and spoke clearly for the first time.

“Did Ellery seem in good spirits?”

“Quite,” said Haycraft. “Except that he was puzzled by the fact that someone had sent him a King of Spades in this morning's mail.”

“Who did that?” asked Sergeant Velie.

“He didn't know,” said Morley. “But it's over there in his desk drawer if you want to see it.”

Velie went quickly to the desk, found the card, and handed it to the Inspector, who examined it absent-mindedly.

Dr. Dundy resumed his questioning. “Was there anything else unusual?”

“Not much,” replied Morley. “He told us about an extraordinarily good story submitted by a graduate student at Hale—Ashton, I think the name was—but it was rather poorly written and needed editing. The other day Ashton called Ellery on the phone to say that a friend of his on the Hale faculty had offered to rewrite it for him. So he asked Ellery to meet his friend at the Hale Club yesterday. Ellery did, and that's about all there is.”

“Did he offer you anything to drink?” asked Velie. “Any of that Harvey's Bristol Cream sherry that he liked so much?”

“No—only cigarettes and cigars,” said Morley.

“What did Ellery smoke?” asked the doctor.

“A cigar the Professor from Hale had given him,” said Haycraft. “He was about half through it when—”

The Inspector rose suddenly from his chair, sharp and bird-like at the hint of a clue.

“A half-smoked cigar? Where's the butt?”

“Come to think of it, I haven't seen it,” said Morley. “It must be on the floor somewhere.”

Sergeant Velie started rummaging through the fallen books and magazines. The others joined him when there came a somewhat muffled shout from the doctor who emerged from the kneehole of the desk with a cigar butt in his hand.

“Is this it?” he asked.

Morley took a look at the band and nodded.

Without another word, the doctor handed the butt to the Inspector who examined it carefully and finally sniffed it. He handed it back to the doctor who likewise sniffed it and laid it carefully on the desk.

“I had hoped I was wrong,” he said to the Inspector, “but I guess it's a case for you after all.”

The Inspector gave a little shudder, his eyes filming over again. Then the film passed as quickly as it had appeared. He set his narrow shoulders and turned to Morley and Haycraft.

“Gentlemen,” he said, “the significance of the King of Spades is now all too clear. Someone was threatening Ellery's life. Dr. Dundy was suspicious as soon as he heard the symptoms. Now there is no doubt about it. That cigar reeks of cyanide. Ellery was murdered.”

“Good God—no!” Morley shouted.

The Inspector continued, his voice thin and hard: “I'm in it now two ways, and by heaven I'll find the man who did it if it's the last thing I do!
Velie, call headquarters and get the boys started while I ask these gentlemen a few questions.”

As Velie disappeared, he continued: “First thing I want to know is the name of the Professor who gave Ellery the cigar?”

“James Moriarty,” replied Haycraft hesitantly.

“Please,” said the Inspector. “This is no time for any of your damned Baker Street Irregular shenanigans.”

“So help me, Inspector,” put in Morley, “that's exactly what Ellery told us.”

“All right, all right, skip it,” said the Inspector. “What else do you know about him? Where does he live? What does he teach?”

“All we know is that Ashton said he was on the faculty at Hale,” replied Haycraft.

“Didn't he tell you anything about his looks?” snapped the Inspector, making no effort to conceal his growing impatience.

“Only roughly,” said Morley. “When I heard the name I quoted the description of the real Moriarty as given by Dr. Watson in
The Final Problem
. Ellery said it wasn't exact but it would do.”

He went to a shelf, took down a book, thumbed through it, then offered the open volume to the Inspector.

“Read it for yourself.”

At this point Sergeant Velie returned. The Inspector ignored the book in Morley's hand. “There's nothing further to be gained here,” said the Inspector, “but I should like to know where I can reach both of you at any time.”

“If you don't mind,” said Morley, “Haycraft and I would like to take these manuscripts up to my place and look them over. Here's my address and phone number.”

“Make a note of it, Velie,” said the Inspector, already leaving the room.

While Morley spoke to Velie, Haycraft gathered up the manuscripts on the desk.

“Who would have thought,” said Morley, after Velie's departure, “that the Short Story Contest would turn out to be the Ellery Queen Memorial Competition?”

Late that evening Morley and Haycraft were sitting in Morley's smoke-filled study. The
EQMM
manuscripts lay on Morley's desk untouched; neither had had any heart for looking at them. They had discussed Ellery's murder for hours and were now gloomily silent. Suddenly the phone rang. Morley dashed for the instrument, upsetting his chair in his haste.

“Hello,” he said. “Yes…Yes…I'm sure I can. I'll ask Howard….It's Velie,” he said to Haycraft. “The Inspector wants to know if we'll meet him in Grand Central at nine in the morning and go up to Old Haven for a day or two.”

“Try and stop me,” said Haycraft.

Morley talked again to Velie. Then came a long pause during which Morley listened intently. Finally, with a mere “Goodbye,” he hung up.

“Velie says there isn't any Professor Moriarty on the Hale Faculty, nor is there anyone who answers the description we have.”

“I can't say I'm surprised,” said Haycraft.

“Nor I,” replied Morley. “What does surprise me is that this morning a crushed body was found at the foot of a big cliff near Old Haven called North Rock. It was the body of Hugh Ashton.”