by Otto Penzler
“On his death, Lady Rebecca Hull was to receive one hundred and fifty thousand pounds. William, the eldest, was to receive fifty thousand; Jory, the middler, forty; and Stephen, the youngest, thirty.”
“And the other thirty thousand?” I asked.
“Seven thousand, five hundred each to his brother in Wales and an aunt in Brittany (not a cent for her relatives), five thousand in assorted bequests to the servants at the town-house and the place in the country, and—you’ll like this, Holmes—ten thousand pounds to Mrs. Hemphill’s Home for Abandoned Pussies.”
“You’re joking!” I cried, although if Lestrade expected a similar reaction from Holmes, he was disappointed. Holmes merely re-lighted his pipe and nodded as if he had expected this, or something like it. “With babies dying of starvation in the East End and homeless orphans still losing all the teeth out of their jaws by the age of ten in the sulphur factories, this fellow left ten thousand pounds to a…a boarding-hotel for cats?”
“I mean exactly that,” Lestrade said pleasantly. “Furthermore, he should have left twenty-seven times that amount to Mrs. Hemphill’s Abandoned Pussies if not for whatever happened this morning—and whoever who did the business.”
I could only gape at this, and try to multiply in my head. While I was coming to the conclusion that Lord Hull had intended to disinherit both wife and children in favor of an orphanage for felines, Holmes was looking sourly at Lestrade and saying something which sounded to me like a total non sequitur. “I am going to sneeze, am I not?”
Lestrade smiled. It was a smile of transcendent sweetness. “Oh yes, my dear Holmes. I fear you will sneeze often and profoundly.”
Holmes removed his pipe, which he had just gotten drawing to his satisfaction (I could tell by the way he settled back slightly in his seat), looked at it for a moment, and then held it out into the rain. I watched him knock out the damp and smouldering tobacco, more dumbfounded than ever. If you had told me then that I was to be the one to solve this case I believe I should have been impolite enough to laugh in your face. At that point I didn’t even know what the case was about, other than that someone (who more and more sounded the sort of person who deserved to stand in the courtyard of Buckingham Palace for a medal rather than in the Old Bailey for sentencing) had killed this wretched Lord Hull before he could leave his family’s rightful due to a gaggle of street cats.
“How many?” Holmes asked.
“Ten,” Lestrade said.
“I suspected it was more than this famous locked room of yours that brought you out in the back of an open waggon on such a wet day,” Holmes said sourly.
“Suspect as you like,” Lestrade said gaily. “I’m afraid I must go on, but if you’d like, I could let you and the good doctor out here.”
“Never mind,” Holmes said. “When did he become sure that he was going to die?”
“Die?” I said. “How can you know he—”
“It’s obvious, Watson,” Holmes said. “It amused him to keep them in bondage by the means of his will.” He looked at Lestrade. “No trust arrangements, I take it?”
Lestrade shook his head.
“Nor entailments of any sort?”
“None.”
“Extraordinary!” I said.
“He wanted them to understand all would be theirs when he did them the courtesy of dying, Watson,” Holmes said, “but he never actually intended for them to have it. He realized he was dying. He waited…and then he called them together this morning…this morning, Inspector, yes?”
Lestrade nodded.
“Yes. He called them together this morning and told them that he had made a new will which disinherited them one and all…except for the servants and the distant relatives, I suppose.”
I opened my mouth to speak, only to discover I was too outraged to say anything. The image which kept returning to my mind was that of those cruel boys, making the starving East End curs jump with a bit of pork or a crumb of crust from a meat pie. I must add it never occurred to me to ask if such a will could not be disputed before the bar. Today a man would have a deuce of a time slighting his closest relatives in favor of a hotel for pussies, but in 1899, a man’s will was a man’s will, and unless many examples of insanity—not eccentricity but outright insanity—could be proved, a man’s will, like God’s, was done.
“This new will was properly witnessed?” Holmes asked, immediately putting his finger on the one possible loophole in such a wretched scheme.
“Indeed it was,” Lestrade replied. “Yesterday Lord Hull’s solicitor and one of his assistants appeared at the house and were shown into his study. There they remained for about fifteen minutes. Stephen Hull says the solicitor once raised his voice in protest about something—he could not tell what—and was silenced by Hull. Jory, the third son, was upstairs, painting, and Lady Hull was calling on a friend. But both Stephen and William saw them enter and leave. William said that when the solicitor and his assistant left, they did so with their heads down, and although William spoke, asking Mr. Barnes—the solicitor—if he was well, and making some social remark about the persistence of the rain, Barnes did not reply and the assistant seemed to actually cringe. It was as if they were ashamed, William said.”
Well, there it was: witnesses. So much for that loophole, I thought.
“Since we are on the subject, tell me about the boys,” Holmes said, putting his slender fingers together.
“As you like. It goes pretty much without saying that their hatred for the pater was exceeded only by the pater’s boundless contempt for them…although how he could hold Stephen in contempt is…well, never mind, I’ll keep things in their proper order.”
“How good of you, Inspector Lestrade,” Holmes said dryly.
“William is thirty-six. If his father had given him any sort of allowance, I suppose he would be a bounder. As he had little or none, he took long walks during the days, went out to the coffeehouses at night, or, if he happened to have a bit more money in his pockets, to a card-house, where he would lose it quickly enough. Not a pleasant man, Holmes. A man who has no purpose, no skill, no hobby, and no ambition (save to outlive his father), could hardly be a pleasant man. I had the queerest idea while I was talking to him—that I was interrogating an empty vase on which the face of the Lord Hull had been lightly stamped.”
“A vase waiting for the pater’s money to fill him up,” Holmes commented.
“Jory is another matter. Hull saved most of his contempt for Jory, calling him from his earliest childhood by such endearing pet-names as ‘fish-face’ and ‘keg-legs’ and ‘stoat-belly.’ It’s not hard to understand such names, unfortunately; Jory Hull stands no more than five feet tall, if that, is bow-legged, slump-shouldered, and of a remarkably ugly countenence. He looks a bit like that poet fellow, the pouf.”
“Oscar Wilde?” asked I.
Holmes turned a brief, amused glance upon me. “I believe Lestrade means Algernon Swinburne,” he said. “Who, I believe, is no more a pouf than you are, Watson.”
“Jory Hull was born dead,” Lestrade said. “After he remained blue and still for an entire minute, the doctor pronounced him so and put a napkin over his misshapen body. Lady Hull, in her one moment of heroism, sat up, removed the napkin, and dipped the baby’s legs into the hot water which had been brought to attend the birth. The baby began to squirm and squall.”
Lestrade grinned and lit a cigarillo with a match undoubtedly dipped by one of the urchins of whom I had just been thinking.
“Hull himself, always munificent, blamed this immersion for his bow legs.”
Holmes’s only comment on this extraordinary (and to my physician’s mind rather suspect) story was to suggest that Lestrade had gotten a large body of information from his suspects in a short period of time.
“One of the aspects of the case which I thought would appeal to you, my dear Holmes,” Lestrade said as we swept into Rotten Row in a splash and a swirl. “They need no coercion to speak; coercion’s what it wou
ld take to shut ’em up. They’ve had to remain silent all too long. And then there’s the fact that the new will is gone. Relief loosens tongues beyond measure, I find.”
“Gone!” I exclaimed, but Holmes took no notice. He asked Lestrade about this misshapen middle child.
“Ugly as he is, I believe his father continually heaped vituperation on his head because—”
“Because Jory was the only son who had no need to depend upon his father’s money to make his way in the world,” Holmes said complacently.
Lestrade started. “The devil! How did you know that?”
“Rating a man with faults which all can see is the act of a man who is afraid as well as vindictive,” Holmes said. “What was his key to the cell door?”
“As I told you, he paints,” Lestrade said.
“Ah!”
Jory Hull was, as the canvases in the lower halls of Hull House later proved, a very good painter indeed. Not great; I do not mean to suggest he was. But his renderings of his mother and brothers were faithful enough so that, years later, when I saw color photographs for the first time, my mind flashed back to that rainy November afternoon in 1899. And the one of his father, which he showed us later…perhaps it was Algernon Swinburne that Jory resembled, but his father’s likeness—at least as seen through Jory’s hand and eye—remainded me of an Oscar Wilde character: that nearly immortal roué, Dorian Gray.
His canvases were long, slow processes, but he was able to quick-sketch with such nimble rapidity that he might come home from Hyde Park on a Saturday afternoon with as much as twenty pounds in his pockets.
“I wager his father enjoyed that,” Holmes said. He reached automatically for his pipe and then put it back. “The son a Peer of the Realm quick-sketching well-off American tourists and their sweethearts like a French Bohemian.”
“He raged over it,” Lestrade said, “but Jory wouldn’t give over his selling stall in Hyde Park…not, at least, until his father agreed to an allowance of thirty-five pounds a week. He called it low blackmail.”
“My heart bleeds,” I said.
“As does mine, Watson,” Holmes said. “The third son, Lestrade—we’ve almost reached the house, I believe.”
As Lestrade had said, surely Stephen Hull had the greatest cause to hate his father. As his gout grew worse and his head more befuddled, Lord Hull surrendered more and more of the company affairs to Stephen, who was only twenty-eight at the time of his father’s death. The responsibilities devolved upon Stephen, and the blame devolved upon him if his least decision proved amiss…and yet no financial gain devolved upon him should he decide well.
As the only of his three children with an interest in the business he had founded, Lord Hull should have looked upon his son with approval. As a son who not only kept his father’s shipping business prosperous when it might have foundered due to Lord Hull’s own increasing physical and mental problems (and all of this as a young man) he should have been looked upon with love and gratitude as well. Instead, Stephen had been rewarded with suspicion, jealousy and his father’s belief—spoken more and more often—that his son “would steal the pennies from a dead man’s eyes.”
“The b——d!” I cried, unable to contain myself.
“He saved the business and the fortune,” Holmes said, steepling his fingers again, “and yet his reward was still to be the youngest son’s share of the spoil. What, by the way, was to be the disposition of the company by the new will?”
“It was to be handed over to the Board of Directors, Hull Shipping, Ltd., with no provision for the son,” Lestrade said, and pitched his cigarillo as the hackney swept up the curving drive of a house which looked extraordinarily ugly to me just then, as it stood amid its dead lawns in the rain. “Yet with the father dead and the new will nowhere to be found, Stephen Hull comes into thirty thousand. The lad will have no trouble. He has what the Americans call ‘leverage.’ The company will have him as managing director. They should have done anyway, but now it will be on Stephen Hull’s terms.”
“Yes,” Holmes said. “Leverage. A good word.” He leaned out into the rain. “Stop short, driver!” he cried. “We’ve not quite done!”
“As you say, guv’nor,” the driver returned, “but it’s devilish wet out here.”
“And you’ll go with enough in your pocket to make your innards as wet and devilish as your out’ards,” Holmes said, which seemed to satisfy the driver, who stopped thirty yards from the door. I listened to the rain tip-tapping on the roof while Holmes cogitated and then said: “The old will—the one he teased them with—that document isn’t missing, is it?”
“Absolutely not. It was on his desk, near his body.”
“Four excellent suspects! Servants need not be considered…or so it seems now. Finish quickly, Lestrade—the final circumstances, and the locked room.”
Lestrade complied in less than ten minutes, consulting his notes from time to time. A month previous, Lord Hull had observed a small black spot on his right leg, directly behind the knee. The family doctor was called. His diagnosis was gangrene, an unusual but far from rare result of gout and poor circulation. The doctor told him the leg would have to come off, and well above the site of the infection.
Lord Hull laughed at this until tears streamed down his cheeks. The doctor, who had expected any other reaction than this, was struck speechless. “When they stick me in my coffin, sawbones,” Hull said, “it will be with both legs still attached, thank you.”
The doctor told him that he sympathized with Lord Hull’s wish to keep his leg, but that without amputation he would be dead in six months…and he would spend the last two in exquisite pain. Lord Hull asked the doctor what his chances of survival should be if he were to undergo the operation. He was still laughing, Lestrade said, as though it were the best joke he had ever heard. After some hemming and hawing, the doctor said the odds were even.
“Bunk,” said I.
“Exactly what Lord Hull said,” Lestrade replied. “Except he used a term a bit more vulgar.” Hull told the doctor that he himself reckoned his chances at no better than one in five. “As to the pain, I don’t think it will come to that,” he went on, “as long as there’s laudanum and a spoon to stir it within stumping distance.”
The next day, Hull finally sprang his nasty surprise—that he was thinking of changing his will. Just how he did not say.
“Oh?” Holmes said, looking at Lestrade from those cool gray eyes that saw so much. “And who, pray, was surprised?”
“None of them, I should think. But you know human nature, Holmes; how people hope against hope.”
“And how some plan against disaster,” Holmes said dreamily.
This very morning Lord Hull had called his family into the parlor, and when all were settled, he performed an act few testators are granted, one which is usually performed by the wagging tongues of their solicitors after their own have been silenced forever. In short, he read them his new will, leaving the balance of his estate to Mrs. Hemphill’s wayward pussies. In the silence which followed he rose, not without difficulty, and favored them all with a death’s-head grin. And leaning over his cane, he made the following declaration, which I find as astoundingly vile now as I did when Lestrade recounted it to us in that hackney cab: “So! All is fine, is it not? Yes, very fine! You have served me quite faithfully, woman and boys, for some forty years. Now I intend, with the clearest and most serene conscience imaginable, to cast you hence. But take heart! Things could be worse! If there was time, the pharaohs had their favorite pets—cats, for the most part—killed before they died, so the pets might be there to welcome them into the after-life, to be kicked or petted there, at their masters’ whims, forever…and forever…and forever.” Then he began to laugh at them. He leaned over his cane and laughed from his doughy livid dying face, the new will—signed and witnessed, as all of them had seen—clutched in one claw of a hand.
William rose and said, “Sir, you may be my father and the author of my existence, b
ut you are also the lowest creature to crawl upon the face of the earth since the serpent tempted Eve in the Garden.”
“Not at all!” the old monster returned, still laughing. “I know four lower. Now, if you will pardon me, I have some important papers to put away in my safe…and some worthless ones to burn in the stove.”
“He still had the old will when he confronted them?” Holmes asked. He seemed more interested than startled.
“Yes.”
“He could have burned it as soon as the new one was signed and witnessed,” Holmes mused. “He had all the previous afternoon and evening to do so. But that wasn’t enough, was it? What do you suppose, Lestrade?”
“That he was teasing them. Teasing them with a chance he believed all would refuse.”
“There is another possibility,” Holmes said. “He spoke of suicide. Isn’t it possible that such a man might hold out such a temptation, knowing that if one of them—Stephen seems most likely from what you say—would do it for him, be caught…and swing for it?”
I stared at Holmes in silent horror.
“Never mind,” Holmes said. “Go on.”
The four of them had sat in paralyzed silence as the old man made his long slow way up the corridor to his study. There were no sounds but the thud of his cane, the laboured rattle of his breathing, the plaintive miaow of a cat in the kitchen, and the steady beat of the pendulum in the parlour clock. Then they heard the squeal of hinges as Hull opened his study door and stepped inside.
“Wait!” Holmes said sharply, sitting forward. “No one actually saw him go in, did they?”
“I’m afraid that’s not so, old chap,” Lestrade returned. “Mr. Oliver Stanley, Lord Hull’s valet, had heard Lord Hull’s progress down the hall. He came from Hull’s dressing chamber, went to the gallery railing, and called down to ask if Hull was all right. Hull looked up—Stanley saw him as plainly as I see you right now, old fellow—and said he was feeling absolutely tip-top. Then he rubbed the back of his head, went in, and locked the study door behind him. By the time he reached the door (the corridor is quite long and it may have taken him as long as two minutes to make his way up it without help) Stephen had shaken off his stupor and had gone to the parlour door. He saw the exchange between his father and his father’s man. Of course his father was back-to, but he heard his father’s voice and described the same gesture: Hull rubbing the back of his head.”
