by Otto Penzler
I sighed, and then we turned to my trap. I explained how the camera worked, told her where to take the film to be developed and printed, and then tidied away my tools and prepared to take my own departure.
“You’ll let me know if anything turns up?” I asked. “I could try to make it back down next weekend, but—”
“No, no, Mary, you mustn’t interfere with your studies. I shall write and let you know.”
I stepped cautiously over the taut fishing wire and paused in the doorway. “And you’ll tell me if Holmes seems to need any assistance in this Oberdorfer case?”
“That I will.”
I left, ruefully contemplating the irony of a man who normally avoided children like the plague (aside from those miniature adults he had scraped off the streets to form his “Irregulars” in the Baker Street days); these days he seemed to have his hands full of them.
I returned to Oxford, and my studies, and truth to tell the first I thought about Mrs. Hudson’s problem was more than a week later, on a Wednesday, when I realized that for the second week in a row her inevitable Tuesday letter had not come. I had not expected the first one, though she often wrote even if I had seen her the day before, but not to write after eight days was unprecedented.
I telephoned the cottage that evening. Holmes was still away, Mrs. Hudson thought, interviewing the Oberdorfer uncle in Paris, and she herself sounded most peculiar. She seemed distracted, and said merely that she’d been too busy to write, apologized, and asked if there was anything in particular I was wanting?
Badly taken aback, I stammered out a question concerning our camera trap.
“Oh, yes,” she said, “the camera. No, no, nothing much has come of that. Still, it was a good idea, Mary. Thank you. Well, I must be gone now, dear, take care.”
The line went dead, and I slowly put up the earpiece. She hadn’t even asked if I was eating well.
I was hit by a sudden absurd desire to leave immediately for Sussex. I succeeded in pushing it away, but on Saturday morning I was on the train south, and by Saturday afternoon my hand was on the kitchen door to Holmes’s cottage.
A moment later my nose was nearly on the door as well, flattened against it, in fact, because the door did not open. It was locked.
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 brea
k 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.
The Final Problem
BLISS AUSTIN
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).
THE FINAL PROBLEM
Bliss Austin
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 w
hole 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.
