by Otto Penzler
“Wasn’t locked,” Lestrade said shortly. “As a rule he kept it closed to keep the cats out, but rarely locked it.”
“As for the shadows, they are just strips of felt, as you now see. His eye was good; they are about where they would have been at eleven this morning…if the glass had been right.”
“If he expected the sun to be shining, why did he put down shadows at all?” Lestrade grumped. “Sun puts ’em down as a matter of course, just in case you’ve never noticed your own, Watson.”
Here I was at a loss. I looked at Holmes, who seemed grateful to have any part in the answer.
“Don’t you see? That is the greatest irony of all! If the sun had shone as the glass suggested it would, the canvas would have blocked the shadows. Painted shadow-legs don’t cast them, you know. He was caught by shadows on a day when there were none because he was afraid he would be caught by none on a day when his father’s barometer said they would almost certainly be everywhere else in the room.”
“I still don’t understand how Jory got in here without Hull seeing him,” Lestrade said.
“That puzzled me as well,” Holmes said—dear old Holmes! I doubt if it puzzled him a bit, but that was what he said. “Watson?”
“The parlor where the four of them sat has a door which communicates with the music room, does it not?”
“Yes,” Lestrade said, “and the music room has a door which communicates with Lady Hull’s morning room, which is next in line as one goes toward the back of the house. But from the morning room one can only go back into the hall, Doctor Watson. If there had been two doors into Hull’s study, I should hardly have come after Holmes on the run as I did.”
He said this last in tones of faint self-justification.
“Oh, he went back into the hall, all right,” I said, “but his father didn’t see him.”
“Rot!”
“I’ll demonstrate,” I said, and went to the writing-desk, where the dead man’s cane still leaned. I picked it up and turned toward them. “The very instant Lord Hull left the parlour, Jory was up and on the run.”
Lestrade shot a startled glance at Holmes; Holmes gave the Inspector a cool, ironic look in return. And I must say I did not understand the wider implications of the picture I was drawing for yet a while. I was too wrapped up in my own recreation, I suppose.
“He nipped through the first connecting door, ran across the music room, and entered Lady Hull’s morning-room. He went to the hall door then and peeked out. If Lord Hull’s gout had gotten so bad as to have brought on gangrene, he would have progressed no more than a quarter of the way down the hall, and that is optimistic. Now mark me, Inspector Lestrade, and I will show you how a man has spent a lifetime eating rich foods and imbibing the heavy waters ends up paying for it. If you doubt it, I shall bring you a dozen gout sufferers who will show you exactly what I’m going to show you now.”
With that I began to stump slowly across the room toward them, both hands clamped tightly on the ball of the cane. I would raise one foot quite high, bring it down, pause, and then draw the other leg along. Never did my eyes look up. Instead, they alternated between the cane and that forward foot.
“Yes,” Holmes said quietly. “The good Doctor is exactly right, Inspector Lestrade. The gout comes first; then, (if the sufferer lives long enough, that is), there comes the characteristic stoop brought on by always looking down.”
“He knew it, too,” I said. “Lord Hull was afflicted with worsening gout for five years. Jory would have marked the way he had come to walk, always looking down at the cane and his own feet. Jory peeped out of the morning room, saw he was safe, and simply nipped into the study. Three seconds and no more, if he was nimble.” I paused. “That hall floor is marble, isn’t it? He must have kicked off his shoes.”
“He was wearing slippers,” Lestrade said curtly.
“Ah. I see. Jory gained the study and slipped behind his stage-flat. Then he withdrew the dagger and waited. His father reached the end of the hall. He heard Stanley call down to his father. That must have been a bad moment for him. Then his father called back that he was fine, came into the room and closed the door.”
They were both looking at me intently, and I understood some of the godlike power Holmes must have felt at moments like that, telling others what only you could know. And yet, I must repeat that it is a feeling I shouldn’t have wanted to have too often. I believe the urge for such a feeling would have corrupted most men—men with less iron in their souls than was possessed by my friend Sherlock Holmes is what I mean.
“Jory—old Keg-Legs, old Stoat-Belly—would have made himself as small as possible before the locking-up went on, knowing that his father would have one good look round before turning the key and shooting the bolt. He may have been gouty and going a bit soft about the edges, but that doesn’t mean he was going blind.”
“His valet says his eyes were quite good,” Lestrade said. “One of the first things I asked.”
“Bravo, Inspector,” Holmes said softly, and Inspector Lestrade favored him with a jaundiced glance.
“So he looked round,” I said, and suddenly I could see it, and I supposed this was also the way with Holmes; this reconstruction which, while based only upon facts and deduction, seemed to be half a vision, “and he saw nothing but the study as it always was, empty save for himself. It is a remarkably open room, I see no closet door, and with the windows on both sides, there are no dark nooks even on such a day as this.
“Satisfied, he closed the door, turned his key, and shot the bolt. Jory would have heard him stump his way across to the desk. He would have heard the heavy thump and wheeze of the chair-cushion as his father sat down—a man in whom gout is well-advanced does not sit so much as position himself over a soft spot and then drop into it, seat-first—and then Jory would at last have risked a look out.”
I glanced at Holmes. “Go on, old man,” he said warmly. “You are doing splendidly. Absolutely first rate.” I saw he meant it. Thousands would have called him cold, and they would not have been wrong, precisely, but he also had a large heart. Holmes simply protected it better than some men do.
“Thank you. Jory would have seen his father put his cane aside, and place the papers—the two packets of papers—on the blotter. He did not kill his father immediately, although he could have done; that’s what’s so gruesomely pathetic about this business, and that’s why I wouldn’t go into that parlour where they are for a thousand pounds. I wouldn’t go in unless you and your men dragged me.”
“How do you know he didn’t do it immediately?” Lestrade asked.
“The scream came at least two minutes after the key was turned and the bolt drawn; I assume you have enough testimony on that to believe it. Yet it can only be seven paces from door to desk. Even for a gouty man like Lord Hull, it would have taken half a minute, forty seconds at the outside, to cross to the chair and sit down. Add fifteen seconds for him to prop his cane where you found it, and put his wills on the blotter.
“What happened then? What happened during that last minute or two, which must have seemed—to Jory Hull, at least—all but endless? I believe Lord Hull simply sat there, looking from one will to the other. Jory would have been able to tell the difference between the two easily enough; the parchment of the older would have been darker.
“He knew his father intended to throw one of them into the stove.
“I believe he waited to see which one it would be.
“There was, after all, a chance that his father was only having a cruel practical joke at his family’s expense. Perhaps he would burn the new will, and put the old one back in the safe. Then he could have left the room and told his family the new will was safely put away. Do you know where it is, Lestrade? The safe?”
“Five of the books in that case swing out,” Lestrade said briefly, pointing to a shelf in the library area.
“Both family and old man would have been satisfied then; the family would have known their earned inher
itances were safe, and the old man would have gone to his grave believing he had perpetrated one of the cruellest practical jokes of all time…but he would have gone as God’s victim or his own, and not Jory Hull’s.”
Again, that look I did not understand passed between Holmes and Lestrade.
“Myself, I rather think the old man was only savoring the moment, as a man may savor the prospect of an after-dinner drink in the middle of the afternoon or a sweet after a long period of abstinence. At any rate, the minute passed, and Lord Hull began to rise…but with the darker parchment in his hand, and facing the stove rather than the safe. Whatever his hopes may have been, there was no hesitation on Jory’s part when the moment came. He burst from hiding, crossed the distance between the coffee-table and the desk in an instant, and plunged the knife into his father’s back before he was fully up.
“I suspect the autopsy will show the thrust clipped through the heart’s upper ventricle and into the lung—that would explain the quantity of blood expelled from the mouth. It also explains why Lord Hull was able to scream before he died, and that’s what did for Mr. Jory Hull.”
“Explain,” Lestrade said.
“A locked room mystery is a bad business unless you intend to pass murder off as a case of suicide,” I said, looking at Holmes. He smiled and nodded at this maxim of his. “The last thing Jory would have wanted was for things to look as they did…the locked room, the locked windows, the man with a knife in him where the man himself never could have put it. I think he had never forseen his father dying with such a squall. His plan was to stab him, burn the new will, riffle the desk, unlock one of the windows, and escape that way. He would have entered the house by another door, resumed his seat under the stairs, and then, when the body was finally discovered, it would have looked like robbery.”
“Not to Hull’s solicitor,” Lestrade said.
“He might well have kept his silence,” Holmes said, and then added brightly, “I’ll bet Jory intended to open one of the windows and add a few tracks, too. I think we all agree it would have seemed a suspiciously convenient murder, under the circumstances, but even if the solicitor spoke up, nothing could have been proved.”
“By screaming, Lord Hull spoiled everything,” I said, “as he had been spoiling things all his life. The house was roused. Jory, probably in a panic, probably only stood there like a nit.
“It was Stephen Hull who saved the day, of course—or at least Jory’s alibi, the one which had him sitting on the bench under the stairs when his father was murdered. He rushed down the hall from the music room, smashed the door open, and must have hissed for Jory to get over to the desk with him, at once, so it would look as if they had broken in toget—”
I broke off, thunderstruck. At last I understood the glances between Holmes and Lestrade. I understood what they must have seen from the moment I showed them the trick hiding place: it could not have been done alone. The killing, yes, but the rest…
“Stephen testified that he and Jory met at the study door,” I said slowly. “That he, Stephen, burst it in and they entered together, discovered the body together. He lied. He might have done it to protect his brother, but to lie so well when one doesn’t know what has happened seems…seems…”
“Impossible,” Holmes said, “is the word for which you are searching, Watson.”
“Then Jory and Stephen were in on it together,” I said. “They planned it together…and in the eyes of the law, both are guilty of their father’s murder! My God!”
“Not both of them, my dear Watson,” Holmes said in a tone of curious gentleness. “All of them.”
I could only gape.
He nodded. “You have shown remarkable insight this morning, Watson. For once in your life you have burned with a deductive heat I’ll wager you’ll never generate again. My cap is off to you, dear fellow, as it is to any man who is able to transcend his normal nature, no matter how briefly. But in one way you have remained the same dear chap as you’ve always been: while you understand how good people can be, you have no understanding of how black they may be.”
I looked at him silently, almost humbly.
“Not that there was much blackness here, if half of what we’ve heard of Lord Hull was true,” Holmes said. He rose and began to pace irritably about the study. “Who testifies that Jory was with Stephen when the door was smashed in? Jory, naturally. Stephen, naturally. But there were two others. One was William—the third brother. Am I right, Lestrade?”
“Yes. He said he was halfway down the stairs when he saw the two of them go in together, Jory a little ahead.”
“How interesting!” Holmes said, eyes gleaming. “Stephen breaks in the door—as the younger and stronger of course he must—and so one would expect simple forward motion would have carried him into the room first. Yet William, halfway down the stairs, saw Jory enter first. Why was that, Watson?”
I could only shake my head numbly.
“Ask youself whose testimony, and whose testimony alone, we can trust here. The answer is the fourth witness, Lord Hull’s man, Oliver Stanley. He approached the gallery railing in time to see Stephen enter the room, and that is perfectly correct, since Stephen was alone when he broke it in. It was William, with a better angle from his place on the stairs, who said he saw Jory precede Stephen into the study. William said so because he had seen Stanley and knew what he must say. It boils down to this, Watson: we know Jory was inside this room. Since both of his brothers testify he was outside, there was, at the very least, collusion. But as you say, the lack of confusion, the way they all pulled together so neatly, suggests something more.”
“Conspiracy,” I said dully.
“Yes. But, unfortunately for the Hulls, that’s not all. Do you recall me asking you, Watson, if you believe that all four of them simply walked wordlessly out of that parlour in four different directions at the very moment they heard the study door locked?”
“Yes. Now I do.”
“The four of them.” He looked at Lestrade. “All four testified they were four, yes?”
“Yes.”
“That includes Lady Hull. And yet we know Jory had to have been up and off the moment his father left the room; we know he was in the study when the door was locked, yet all four—including Lady Hull—claimed all four of them were still in the parlour when they heard the door locked. There might as well have been four hands on that dagger, Watson. The murder of Lord Hull was very much a family affair.”
I was too staggered to say anything. I looked at Lestrade and saw a look on his face I had never seen before or ever did again; a kind of tired sickened gravity.
“What may they expect?” Holmes said, almost genially.
“Jory will certainly swing,” Lestrade said. “Stephen will go to gaol for life. William Hull may get life, but will more likely get twenty years in Broadmoor, and there such a weakling as he will almost certainly be tortured to death by his fellows. The only difference between what awaits Jory and what awaits William is that Jory’s end will be quicker and more merciful.”
Holmes bent and stroked the canvas stretched between the legs of the coffee-table. It made that odd hoarse purring noise.
“Lady Hull,” Lestrade went on, “would go to Beechwood Manor—more commonly known to the female inmates as Cut-Purse Palace—for five years…but, having met the lady, I rather suspect she will find another way out. Her husband’s laudanum would be my guess.”
“All because Jory Hull missed a clean strike,” Holmes remarked, and sighed. “If the old man had had the common decency to die silently, all would have been well. He would, as Watson says, have left by the window. Taking his canvas with him, of course…not to mention his trumpery shadows. Instead, he raised the house. All the servants were in, exclaiming over the dead master. The family was in confusion. How shabby their luck was, Lestrade! How close was the constable when Stanley summoned him? Less than fifty yards, I should guess.”
“He was actually on the walk,” Lestrade said
. “Their luck was shabby. He was passing, heard the scream, and turned in.”
“Holmes,” I said, feeling much more comfortable in my old role, “how did you know a constable was so nearby?”
“Simplicity itself, Watson. If not, the family would have shooed the servants out long enough to hide the canvas and ‘shadows.’ ”
“Also to unlatch at least one window, I should think,” Lestrade added in a voice uncustomarily quiet.
“They could have taken the canvas and the shadows,” I said suddenly.
Holmes turned toward me. “Yes.”
Lestrade raised his eyebrows.
“It came down to a choice,” I said to him. “There was time enough to burn the new will or get rid of the hugger-mugger…this would have been just Stephen and Jory, of course, in the moments after Stephen burst in the door. They—or, if you’ve got the temperature of the characters right, and I suppose you do, Stephen—decided to burn the will and hope for the best. I suppose there was just time enough to chuck it into the stove.”
Lestrade turned, looked at it, then looked back. “Only a man as black as Hull would have found strength enough to scream at the end,” he said.
“Only a man as black as Hull would have required a son to kill him,” Holmes returned.
He and Lestrade looked at each other, and again something passed between them, something perfectly communicated which I myself did not understand.
“Have you ever done it?” Holmes asked, as if picking up on an old conversation.
Lestrade shook his head. “Once came damned close,” he said. “There was a girl involved, not her fault, not really. I came close. Yet…that was one.”
“And these are four,” Holmes returned. “Four people ill used by a foul man who should have died within six months anyway.”
Now I understood.
Holmes turned his gray eyes on me. “What say you, Lestrade? Watson has solved this one, although he did not see all the ramifications. Shall we let Watson decide?”
