The Library Paradox (2 page)

‘As they came around the corner of the front of the house, they caught sight of this young man here, Mr Sachs, who was walking up the front path towards the
door and had heard nothing of the commotion within. Mr Sachs, perhaps it would be better if you would recount to Mrs Weatherburn what happened next.’

Professor Hudson folded his wrinkled hands and sat back with a small sigh of relief. Mr Sachs looked shy, but quickly began to speak.

‘I was coming up the path to the house to use the library,’ he said. ‘I wouldn’t be able to tell the time exactly, but they tell me it was just on five o’clock and that seems about right. I was too far to hear any sounds of a struggle, and as for the shot, I don’t think I heard it, but there was plenty of noise behind me, what with people and carriages passing in the street. At any rate, I walked up the path towards the house, and when I was about halfway there, about fifteen yards off I should say, I saw Mason and Chapman come tearing around the side of the house. They saw me as well, and shouted something like “There’s a fight going on in there!” and then they ran inside together. I rushed up after them and followed them in. One of them was already inside the professor’s study, and the other was in the doorway of it. The one inside, I think it was Mason, was bent over the professor’s body, feeling his pulse. He said, “I think he’s dead.” The other fellow reacted very quickly. He glanced around the library, then ran back to the main door and looked outside. No one was in sight. He ran around the house to the left and, understanding that he was looking for the murderer, I ran out with him and went round it to the right, but we saw each other coming around the back; there was nobody in the quadrangle at
all. I swear it was absolutely empty; it’s only grass, there isn’t a corner where anyone could hide. Then they asked me if I had seen anybody going out as I came in. Now, this is the funny thing.’ He hesitated, glanced up at me quickly, and continued. ‘I had seen someone going out as I came in, and it was a very odd sort of person to see in a place like that. I don’t know if you know the kind of person I mean, but it was an elderly gentleman of the Orthodox Jewish persuasion, dressed in traditional garb, with a long black overcoat that hung open, a black jacket beneath it from under which hung the fringes of his prayer shawl, and a large wheel-shaped fur hat on his head.’

‘Ah,’ I said.

‘Well, at first the police were all for tracking this person down,’ continued Mr Sachs. ‘In fact, they soon found that he was seen by other people as he approached the library grounds along Adelphi Street at about four-thirty, and then as he left it just on five o’clock. He was seen taking an omnibus in the direction of the East End. The police have been searching for him, but it’s like looking for a needle in a haystack; if you’re not from there, no one will talk to you, and most of them hardly speak English anyway. At any rate, after trying to reconstruct the crime, it turned out that it didn’t seem possible for him to have been the murderer.’

‘Why not?’ I said, surprised.

‘Because I crossed him just as I was entering the gate from the street. The timing is wrong. As soon as they heard the shot, Mason and Chapman ran around to the front of the house. The house is a square about twenty yards long on
each side, and they had only to run halfway around, so they can’t have taken more than nine or ten seconds to reach the front door. When I saw them coming around, I must have been about halfway to the house, which means a distance of fifteen yards or so from the street. I had walked those fifteen yards at a normal pace, say in eight or ten seconds, and I’d seen the man leaving as I came in. What that means is that I saw him going out the gate to the street at virtually the same moment that the others heard the shot. He’d have had to get there in no time at all, after the shot – not even a champion sprinter could do it! Besides, when I saw him, he was just walking normally out of the gate, not running. I didn’t notice him being out of breath or anything like that, either. The police have gone over it again and again with me, but it just never seems to add up.’

‘Couldn’t the other two gentlemen have run around the house more slowly than they thought?’ I asked.

‘The police had them do it again as they thought they had done it, and timed them. Nine or ten seconds.’

‘Well, then there must have been someone else in the library,’ I said.

‘We did think that someone might still have been in the library when we all dashed in, but he could not have done otherwise than be plainly visible. There is no place to hide in that large room. Still, even supposing that he managed it, and then slipped out during the moment we were all looking into Professor Ralston’s study, it would take him ten seconds or more to run out of the room and down the path to the main gate. But I’m sure much less
than ten seconds went by before Chapman ran out the front door to look around. You see, Mason and Chapman were a few seconds ahead of me going into the front door, so they got into the study before I did, and Mason was saying that Professor Ralston was dead just as I put my head in at the door. And I certainly saw no one. But Chapman ran outside as soon as he heard Mason’s words, and I followed him immediately. There was no one there, absolutely not a soul. On top of this, the police have managed to locate a handful of people who were outside in Adelphi Street around that time, and although more than one observed the old Jew and saw me entering as well, nobody observed anyone else coming out of the gate.’ He stopped, bewildered, and looked at me expectantly.

‘Perhaps the murderer rushed up the stairs leading to Professor Ralston’s private quarters,’ I suggested.

‘The police thought of that,’ intervened Professor Taylor, opening his mouth only for the second time. He was a tall, rather dry man of reserved appearance, who seemed reluctant to take part in the conversation even as he spoke. However, as he knew the deceased professor much better than the other two, he was clearly aware of many relevant facts. ‘The door to the stairs was locked and the key was in the professor’s pocket.’

‘Why would he lock the door to his rooms while he was sitting in his study?’ I said. ‘Doesn’t that seem a little strange? Surely he went in and out?’

‘He did, but he had the habit of locking that door always. For he also left his study frequently to go to look up books
in the library, or even to have an informal chat outside with a colleague, and he disliked the idea that someone could slip in and go upstairs during those times. So he had it fitted with a lock that locked itself automatically whenever he came out and shut the door, and if he wanted to go back upstairs, he would just unlock it.’

‘Is it possible that there was another key to the door? People usually have a spare.’

‘He had exactly one spare; his housekeeper knew that. She told us he kept it in his bedside-table drawer, and it was there.’

‘Was the housekeeper in the rooms upstairs?’

‘No, she leaves every day at three. There was no one at all in the flat.’

I remained silent for a moment, reflecting on the peculiar arrangement of the facts.

‘Was any weapon found?’ I asked.

‘Yes, indeed, the gun was on the floor. Professor Ralston was lying on the floor behind his desk, which had been pushed over. The chair opposite had also fallen, and the desk was partly propped up on the chair. Books and papers had slipped off the falling desk, and one or two things, a chair for instance, had been thrown violently across the room.’

‘And where was the gun?’

‘It was lying on the floor near the door of the study. We presume the murderer dropped it as he fled.’

‘The police believe that he was shot from the doorway?’

‘Ah no, he was shot at point-blank range. The police
believe the murderer fled instantly, dropping or tossing the gun.’

‘And have they tried to trace the gun?’

‘The gun belonged to Professor Ralston, and was habitually kept in his desk drawer.’

‘Oh! It was his gun? Why did he have a gun in his study?’

There was an embarrassed silence, during which everybody looked at somebody else. Both mathematicians ended up looking at Professor Taylor with silent firmness, so he resigned himself to speaking once again.

‘Professor Ralston was a very special kind of person,’ he said, choosing his words carefully. ‘He had … let us say that through his researches, he had made a certain number of enemies, and was aware of it. I always found him a very suspicious and perhaps even rather paranoiac individual, although given what happened his fears appear to have been justified. In any case, he cared very much about his library being freely accessible to researchers, but at the same time, this put him in a rather risky position with respect to anyone who might wish to harm him. That is why he purchased a pistol and in fact learnt to use it and kept it by him at all times.’

‘So he may have had the pistol out, and it must have been snatched from him during the struggle,’ I visualised.

‘That is what we assume must have happened. But it seems impossible to understand what occurred next.’

‘Were there fingerprints on the gun?’

‘There were smudged traces of Ralston’s own fingerprints, which is normal enough, but according to police, they were
much smeared over as though the gun had been somehow loosely wiped.’

‘Did anything interesting come up at the inquest?’

‘Nothing we have not already told you, I believe. Naturally, they brought in a verdict of murder by person or persons unknown.’

We sat silently for some moments, each engaged in trying to form some picture of the violent events he was describing. It was strange indeed, that the obvious and straightforward explanation seemed excluded merely by a bother over a few seconds. No other solution appeared possible, so there simply must be some way to arrange the timing in order to understand how the old man could have shot the professor and so quickly arrived at the gate. Unless it were not he, but a different person, who had managed to hide himself somewhere in the room (under the overturned desk, perhaps?) and darted out later. Perhaps the most urgent aspect was to try to discover the motive for the crime, and form some idea of who could have borne a personal grudge against the man.

‘The case sounds most interesting,’ I began. ‘I really think one must concentrate on the question of motive. Is it possible for you to give me a thumbnail sketch of Professor Ralston’s circle of family and friends?’

‘It is only too easy,’ said Professor Taylor with dry displeasure. ‘He was a single and very lonely man, with an acrid and vinegary nature. He lived entirely alone, with a housekeeper who came in by the day, but who had already left the building and is known to have been at home at the
time of the murder. His father is a well-known historian, but in an area quite remote from that of his son; he studies the royal history of France and Poland at the time of Catherine de Medici. Their joint history, you know; her son Henri was chosen King of Poland before becoming Henri III of France. The professor travels to the Continent quite often; indeed, he was away on a journey at the time of his son’s murder, and it is taking the police some little time to locate him. The telegram has been following him about Europe, but it is expected to reach him and bring him back to England within a few days. Ralston’s mother died, from what I have heard, when he was a small boy. She was a foreigner; his father had met and married her on his travels. He had no other family. His social life was essentially restricted to his professional contacts at the college; he rarely ate at home, preferring the company and opportunity for open discussion at high table twice a day. I have lunched and dined with him frequently, by which I mean that I have actually sat next to him and spent the hour listening to what he had to say; he was not one to listen much to other points of view. He also had students whose research he guided. But I cannot say that I knew him to have any particular friends. It is true that he travelled on occasion, visiting other universities, and he also had a lot of contact with journalists, not all of it friendly, for apart from scholarly articles, he was a great contributor to political newspapers and magazines. He had an enormous correspondence and published reams of Letters to the Editor in both British and French newspapers.’

‘From what you say, it sounds like there are people who may have had a professional motive of resentment against Professor Ralston. Perhaps it would help to know more details about his writings. Of course, I suppose the police are already working on all these angles.’

Professor Taylor sighed rather loudly.

‘These are not easy questions,’ he observed. ‘You see, some of Professor Ralston’s research … was of a very special nature. Not everything he did, naturally,’ he added hastily. ‘He was a specialist of Christian history, particularly medieval history: medieval saints, you know, and the Spanish Inquisition. His collection of books was to a large extent concentrated around that period of time. But he …’

His voice trailed off, and he once again looked embarrassed.

‘He had bitter relations with the Semitic community,’ put in Professor Hudson firmly. ‘You see, he published a continuous stream of articles on the role of Jews in medieval and modern society. His views on the subject were quite radical. They were more than views, as it happens; he had built up an entire theory attributing, shall we say, many of the ills of modern British society to the agency of its Jews and their occult but fundamental, as he believed, role in its development. In defending such views he was certainly not alone, although it isolated him within the university.’

‘He published virulent articles refuting Herzl, and several on the Dreyfus affair as well,’ put in Professor Taylor. I felt a little dismayed, hoping the professor did not assume that I recognised these names as a matter of course. If this
constituted a motive, then I feared I would have difficulty penetrating its depths. However, the professor was still speaking.

‘You know of Theodore Herzl, of course,’ he said, in a tone which clearly implied that he was well aware that I did not. ‘An Austrian journalist, but based in Paris. Ralston knew him personally and was fundamentally opposed to his vision. This Herzl came out very recently with a most inflammatory pamphlet on the subject of the Jewish State, whose thesis asserts, essentially, that the sufferings and persecutions of the Jewish people, together with the perceived ills they cause to the fabric of society in the many European countries which harbour them, could all be resolved in a single blow if the people were to be given an independent state of their own, located in their historic land of Palestine. The subject is not my speciality, of course – my research concerns guilds and apprenticeships – but the thing was in the newspapers. Anyway, I had only too many opportunities of becoming familiar with Ralston’s attitude to these things.’ He made a face rather as if he had tasted a lemon, but continued valiantly. ‘You see, Ralston was convinced, as a great many people seem to be, that the Jewish community in England, as in each European country, wields power and influence far out of proportion to its relative size. It is no secret that the proportion of Jews among intellectuals and financiers is greater than that of the general population; I have frequently heard this fact attributed to the ancient tradition of study of that people, and possibly also to the fact that in certain countries, they
have been forbidden access to the land and to many of the manual employments. I have no claim to being a specialist, and personally do not have any realistic idea as to whether the disproportionate presence of members of that race in the professions relating to money is a consequence of some natural propensity or simply of the many social restrictions imposed upon them. In any case, it is not to be denied that they have made a success of it, in what concerns their profit at least, if not in what concerns their popularity as a group. At any rate, Ralston was filled with resentment against what he perceived as their undue influence, and very fired up with concrete plans to diminish it. It is a natural thought that might occur to anyone, that if the Jewish people were given a state of their own, a large number of them would certainly depart thither, and that in fact by various pressures and persecutions, that number might be augmented, so that many of those – and there are many – who share Ralston’s point of view welcome the ideas in Herzl’s paper with alacrity. But Ralston did not; he was very acrid about what he considered such foolishness. Since the recent appearance of Herzl’s pamphlet, Ralston discoursed upon the subject at practically every opportunity. His view was that the role of the Jewish community within a given country, England for instance, would be comparable on a world scale with the role of a Jewish state among the states of the world, and that therefore, if a state of its own were to be attributed to the Jewish people, it would soon come to wield among the nations of the world the same undue and disproportionate influence and power as he perceived is wielded by the local
community. This appeared to him as a far graver ill, for it would threaten global peace and not merely the well-being and cohesion of each population separately. His view was positively doomsday and even apocalyptic; he was convinced that, not content with seeking peace, well-being and profit for themselves, the Jews have a natural desire to foment discord and failure in others. Ceaselessly he cited example after example from history, from ancient to modern times. And such examples are easy enough to come by, especially if one is willing to be tendentious in one’s interpretations. Consider merely the books of the Old Testament. Time and again, after their escape from bondage in Egypt, the arrival of the Jewish people sowed trouble and discord in other lands.’