The Big Book of Sherlock Holmes Stories (14 page)

With this Lestrade rapped for the driver to go on.

We entered between two constables as stone-faced as Buckingham Palace sentinels. Here was a very long hall, floored in black-and-white marble tiles like a chessboard. They led to an open door at the end, where two more constables were posted. The infamous study. To the left were the stairs, to the right two doors: the parlour and the music room, I guessed.

“The family is gathered in the parlour,” Lestrade said.

“Good,” Holmes said pleasantly. “But perhaps Watson and I might first have a look at this locked room.”

“Shall I accompany you?”

“Perhaps not,” Holmes said. “Has the body been removed?”

“It had not been when I left for your lodgings, but by now it should be gone.”

“Very good.”

Holmes started away. I followed. Lestrade called, “Holmes!”

Holmes turned, eyebrows upraised.

“No secret panels, no secret doors. Take my word or not, as you like.”

“I believe I'll wait until…” Holmes began, and then his breath began to hitch. He scrambled in his pocket, found a napkin probably carried absently away from the eating-house where we had dined the previous evening, and sneezed mightily into it. I looked down and saw a large scarred tomcat, as out of place here in this grand hall as would have been one of those sulphur-factory urchins, twining about Holmes's legs. One of its ears was laid back against its scarred skull. The other was gone, lost in some long-ago alley battle, I supposed.

Holmes sneezed repeatedly and kicked out at the cat. It went with a reproachful backward look rather than with the angry hiss one would have expected from such an old campaigner. Holmes looked at Lestrade over the napkin with reproachful, watery eyes. Lestrade, not in the least put out of countenance, grinned. “Ten, Holmes,” he said. “
Ten
. House is full of felines. Hull loved 'em.” With that Lestrade walked off.

“How long, old fellow?” I asked.

“Since forever,” he said, and sneezed again. I still believe, I am bound to add, that the solution to the locked room problem would have been as
readily apparent to Holmes as it was to me if not for this unfortunate affliction. The word
allergy
was hardly known all those years ago, but that, of course, was his problem.

“Do you want to leave?” I was a bit alarmed. I had once seen a case of near asphyxiation as the result of such an aversion to sheep.

“He'd like that,” Holmes said. I did not need him to tell me who he meant. Holmes sneezed once more (a large red welt was appearing on his normally pale forehead) and then we passed between the constables at the study door. Holmes closed it behind him.

The room was long and relatively narrow. It was at the end of something like a wing, the main house spreading to either side from an area roughly three-quarters of the way down the hall. Thus there were windows on both sides and the room was well-lit in spite of the gray, rainy day. There were framed shipping charts on most of the walls, but on one was a really handsome set of weather instruments in a brass-bound case: an anemometer (Hull had the little whirling cups mounted on one of the roof-peaks, I supposed), two thermometers (one registering the outdoor temperature and the other that of the study), and a barometer much like the one that had fooled Holmes into believing the bad weather would finally break. I noticed the glass was still rising, then looked outside. The rain was falling harder than ever, rising glass or no rising glass. We believe we know a great lot, with our instruments and things, but we don't know half as much as we think we do.

Holmes and I both turned to look at the door. The bolt was torn free, but leaning inward, as it should have been. The key was still in the lock, and still turned.

Holmes's eyes, watering as they were, were everywhere at once, noting, cataloging, storing.

“You are a little better,” I said.

“Yes,” he said, lowering the napkin and stuffing it indifferently back into his coat pocket. “He may have loved 'em, but he apparently didn't allow 'em in here. Not on a regular basis, anyway. What do you make of it, Watson?”

Although my eyes were slower than his, I was also looking around. The double windows were all locked with thumb-turns and small brass side-bolts. None of the panes had been broken. The framed charts and weather instruments were between these windows. The other two walls, before and behind the desk which dominated the room, were filled with books. There was a small coal-stove at the south end of the room but no fireplace…the murderer hadn't come down the chimney like St. Nicholas, not unless he was narrow enough to fit through a stove-pipe and clad in an asbestos suit, for the stove was still very warm. The north end of this room was a little library, with two high-backed upholstered chairs and a coffee-table between them. On this table was a random stack of books. The ceiling was plastered. The floor was covered with a large Turkish rug. If the murderer had come up through a trap-door, I hadn't the slightest idea how he could have gotten back under that rug without disarranging it, and it was not disarranged in the slightest: it was smooth, and the shadows of the coffee-table legs lay across it without a ripple.

“Did you believe it, Watson?” Holmes asked, snapping me out of something like a hypnotic trance. Something…something about that coffee-table…

“Believe what, Holmes?”

“That all four of them simply walked out of that parlour, in four different directions, four minutes before the murder?”

“I don't know,” I said faintly.

“
I
don't believe it; not for a mo—” He broke off. “Watson! Are you all right?”

“No,” I said in a voice I could hardly hear myself. I collapsed into one of the library chairs. My heart was beating too fast. I couldn't seem to catch my breath. My head was pounding; my eyes seemed to have suddenly grown too large for their sockets. I could not take them from the shadows of the coffee-table legs upon the rug. “I am most…most definitely not…not all right.”

At that moment Lestrade appeared in the
study doorway. “If you've looked your fill, H—” He broke off. “What the devil's the matter with Watson?”

“I believe,” said Holmes in a calm, measured voice, “that Watson has solved the case. Have you, Watson?”

I nodded my head. Not all of it, perhaps, but most. I knew who; I knew how.

“Is it this way with you, Holmes?” I asked. “When you…see?”

“Yes,” he said.

“
Watson's
solved the case?” Lestrade said impatiently. “Bah! Watson's offered a thousand solutions to a hundred cases before this, Holmes, as you very well know—all of them wrong. Why, I remember just this late summer—”

“I know more about Watson than you shall ever know,” Holmes said, “and this time he has hit upon it. I know the look.” He began to sneeze again; the cat with the missing ear had wandered into the room through the door, which Lestrade had left open. It headed directly for Holmes with an expression of what seemed to be affection on its ugly face.

“If this is how it is for you,” I said, “I'll never envy you again, Holmes. My heart should burst.”

“One becomes enured even to insight,” Holmes said, with not the slightest trace of conceit in his voice. “Out with it, then…or shall we bring in the suspects, as in the last chapter of a detective novel?”

“No!” I cried in horror. I had seen none of them; I had no urge to. “Only I think I must
show
you how it was done. If you and Inspector Lestrade will only step out into the hall for a moment—”

The cat reached Holmes and jumped into his lap, purring like the most satisfied creature on earth.

Holmes exploded into a perfect fusillade of sneezes. The red patches on his face, which had begun to fade, burst out afresh. He pushed the cat away and stood up.

“Be quick, Watson, so we can be away from this damned place,” he said in a muffled voice, and left his perfect locked room with his shoulders in an uncharacteristic hunch, his head down, and with not a single look back. Believe me when I say that a little of my heart went with him.

Lestrade stood leaning against the door, his wet coat steaming slightly, his lips parted in a detestable grin. “Shall I take Holmes's new admirer, Watson?”

“Leave it,” I said, “but close the door.”

“I'd lay a fiver you're wasting our time, old man,” Lestrade said, but I saw something different in his eyes: if I'd offered to take him up on the wager, he would have found a way out of it.

“Close the door,” I repeated. “I shan't be long.”

He closed the door. I was alone in Hull's study…except for the cat, of course, which was now sitting in the middle of the rug, tail curled neatly about its paws, green eyes watching me.

I felt in my pockets and found my own souvenir from last night's dinner—bachelors are rather untidy people, I fear, but there was a reason for the bread other than general slovenliness. I almost always kept a crust in one pocket or the other, for it amused me to feed the pigeons that landed outside the very window where Holmes had been sitting when Lestrade drove up.

“Pussy,” said I, and put the bread beneath the coffee-table—the coffee-table to which Lord Hull would have presented his back when he sat down with his two wills—the wretched old one and the even more wretched new one. “Pussy-pussy-pussy.”

The cat rose and walked languidly beneath the table to investigate.

I went to the door and opened it. “Holmes! Lestrade! Quickly!”

They came in.

“Step over here.” I walked to the coffee-table. Lestrade looked about and began to frown, seeing nothing; Holmes, of course, began to sneeze again. “Can't we have that wretched thing out of here?” he managed from behind the table-napkin, which was now quite soggy.

“Of course,” said I.
“But where is it, Holmes?
”

A startled expression filled his eyes above the napkin. Lestrade whirled, walked toward Hull's writing desk, and behind it. Holmes knew his reaction should not have been so violent if the cat had been on the far side of the room. He bent and looked beneath the coffee-table, saw nothing but empty space and the bottom row of the two book-cases on the north wall of the room, and straightened up again. If his eyes had not been spouting like fountains, he should have seen the illusion then; he was right on top of it. But all the same, it was devilishly good. The empty space under that coffee-table had been Jory Hull's masterpiece.

“I don't—” Holmes began, and then the cat, who found Holmes much more to its liking than the bread, strolled out from beneath the table and began once more to twine ecstatically about his ankles. Lestrade had returned, and his eyes grew so wide I thought they might actually fall out. Even having seen through it, I myself was amazed. The scarred tomcat seemed to be materializing out of thin air; head, body, white-tipped tail last.

It rubbed against Holmes's leg, purring as Holmes sneezed.

“That's enough,” I said. “You've done your job and may leave.”

I picked it up, took it to the door (getting a good scratch for my pains), and tossed it unceremoniously into the hall. I shut the door behind it.

Holmes was sitting down. “My God,” he said in a nasal, clogged voice. Lestrade was incapable of any speech at all. His eyes never left the table and the faded red Turkish rug beneath its legs: and empty space that had somehow given birth to a cat.

“I should have seen,” Holmes was muttering. “Yes…but you…how did you understand so
quickly
?” I detected the faintest hurt and pique in that voice…and forgave it.

“It was
those
,” I said, and pointed at the shadows thrown by the table-legs.

“Of course!” Holmes nearly groaned. He slapped his welted forehead. “Idiot! I'm a perfect idiot!”

“Nonsense,” I said tartly. “With ten cats in the house and one who has apparently picked you out for a special friend, I suspect you were seeing ten of everything.”

Lestrade finally found his voice. “What about the shadows?”

“Show him, Watson,” Holmes said wearily, lowering the napkin into his lap.

So I bent and picked one of the shadows off the floor.

Lestrade sat down in the other chair, hard, like a man who has been unexpectedly punched.

“I kept looking at them, you see,” I said, speaking in a tone which could not help being apologetic. This seemed all wrong. It was Holmes's job to explain the whos and hows. Yet while I saw that he now understood everything, I knew he would refuse to speak in this case. And I suppose a part of me—the part that knew I would probably never have another chance to do something like this—
wanted
to be the one to explain. And the cat was rather a nice touch, I must say. A magician could have done no better with a rabbit and a top-hat.

“I knew something was wrong, but it took a moment for it to sink in. This room is extremely well lighted, but today it's pouring down rain. Look around and you'll see that not a single object in this room casts a shadow…
except for these table-legs
.”

Lestrade uttered an oath.

“It's rained for nearly a week,” I said, “but both Holmes's barometer and the late Lord Hull's”—I pointed to it—“said that we could expect sun today. In fact, it seemed a sure thing. So he added the shadows as a final touch.”

“Who did?”

“Jory Hull,” Holmes said in that same weary tone. “Who else?”

I bent down and reached my hand beneath the right end of the coffee-table. It disappeared into thin air, just as the cat had appeared. Lestrade uttered another startled oath. I tapped the back of the canvas stretched tightly between the forward legs of the coffee-table. The books
and the rug bulged and rippled, and the illusion, nearly perfect as it had been, was dispelled.