The World's Greatest Detective

by Caroline Carlson

  “So, Tobias,” said Uncle Gabriel, coming back into the hall, “did you solve any crimes while I was away?” He said this every time he left Toby in charge of the agency, and then he would let out a boom of laughter, and Toby would laugh, too.

  This time, though, Toby couldn’t even manage a chuckle. He had to tell Uncle Gabriel about Mrs. Arthur-Abbot, her silk dress, and all the rest of it, but the truth was bound to make Uncle Gabriel upset, and Toby didn’t know where to begin. “I tried to solve the crime, sir,” he said; “I swear I did, but I don’t know much about motorcars, and I couldn’t figure out how to get the mouse out of the dress.”

  This stopped Uncle Gabriel’s laughter in a hurry. He looked around the parlor at the crooked drapes Toby had tried to tug into place and at the files he’d hurriedly stacked. He peered at the dustpan behind Toby’s back. Then he frowned and ran his fingers over the bristles of his beard. “I can see that something unusual has taken place in this room,” he said, “but, as a professional investigator, I find it hard to believe that a well-dressed rodent could have caused quite so much destruction. As much as I’d enjoy deducing the true course of events, it would probably consume most of the evening, and Mrs. Satterthwaite sinks into a gloom when I pay more attention to my work than I do to her dinner. You’d better tell me exactly what happened.” He lowered himself into a chair, which creaked even more under his weight than it had under Toby’s, and pulled out the small blank book he carried with him to crime scenes. “The mouse was driving a motorcar, you say?”

  “Not the mouse, sir,” said Toby. “Mrs. Arthur-Abbot. Only she wasn’t driving a motorcar; that was exactly the problem.”

  In a rush, Toby told his uncle as much as he could bear to confess. Uncle Gabriel scratched away in his notebook, interrupting Toby every so often to ask a question about the soles of Mrs. Arthur-Abbot’s shoes or the precise species of the mouse. By the time Toby had finished speaking, his mouth was dry. Uncle Gabriel set his notes aside, and Toby tried to read them upside down to see if any of them said orphanage.

  “There’s one more thing I’d like to know, Tobias.” Uncle Gabriel folded his hands together, looking grave. “When Mrs. Arthur-Abbot stormed out of our home, where did she go?”

  Toby wished he hadn’t asked. “To Mr. Abernathy’s,” he said as quietly as he could. “I’m sorry to say the name, sir; I know you don’t like hearing it.”

  “Mr. Abernathy!” said Uncle Gabriel. “That puffed-up, self-serving old ostrich! There’ll be no chance of getting the woman’s business back now, and I don’t suppose she’ll be recommending Montrose Investigations to any of her wealthy friends.” He slumped down in his chair and shrugged. “Truthfully, she sounds like an awful nuisance. I would have liked to get acquainted with her money, but I don’t envy Hugh Abernathy for having to tolerate her company.”

  Toby thought there were plenty of reasons to envy Hugh Abernathy, but the idea of seeing Mrs. Arthur-Abbot again, even for a moment, made him feel queasy. “She wants us to pay for the dress that got ruined,” he admitted. “She said she’d be sending you a letter about it.”

  “The peach silk.” Uncle Gabriel sighed. “I suppose it cost a fortune? Of course it did; the woman’s got her own motorcar.” He squinted at Toby. “You don’t happen to have any cash reserves hidden under your mattress, do you? Any gemstones scattered in the back lawn?”

  Toby squirmed. “I was hoping you did.”

  “I,” said Uncle Gabriel, “haven’t had a new case in weeks. I’m not the only one, either. Miss Price next door says business is as bad as she’s ever seen it. There are too many detectives in this town, Tobias, and there’s not enough crime to put food on all of our tables—or silk dresses on all of our backs, for that matter. If something doesn’t change soon, we’ll all be boarding up our windows by the end of the year, and Mr. Abernathy will have the whole Row to himself.” He pressed his fingers to his brow as though he felt a headache coming on. “Maybe I can persuade Mrs. Satterthwaite to make us a loan. Do you think she might secretly be a duchess?”

  “Probably not,” Toby said glumly. He didn’t think secret duchesses usually found work as part-time cooks, and he was sure Mrs. Satterthwaite couldn’t afford even one sleeve of a silk gown on the meager paycheck they gave her every month. “This is all my fault, sir. If I could only do something to fix it—”

  He hadn’t even finished his sentence before Uncle Gabriel started shaking his head. “My business troubles have nothing to do with you, Tobias, and I shouldn’t have brought them up. Forget I said a word. Eleven-year-old boys shouldn’t be worrying about money—and while we’re at it, they certainly shouldn’t be calling me sir. Do you understand?”

  Toby nodded. He wondered what eleven-year-old boys should be worrying about, but this didn’t seem like the right moment to ask. He didn’t want Uncle Gabriel to call him an ostrich.

  The clock on the mantel struck five, accompanied by a symphony of sharp knocks at the door—Mrs. Satterthwaite, prompt as usual. Uncle Gabriel stood up to let her in. Halfway across the hall, however, he paused. “There is one thing you can do,” he said, turning back to Toby. “The next time any clients show up when you’re here alone, why don’t you ask them to have a seat and wait until I return? That’s all a detective’s assistant really needs to do.”

  So much for not disappointing Uncle Gabriel. “Yes, sir,” said Toby. “I mean—well—yes.”

  “Excellent,” said Uncle Gabriel. The symphony of knocks had progressed into its next movement, much more energetic than the first. “Now, Tobias, let’s banish all thoughts of detection from our minds and think only of the mystery of tonight’s dinner.”

  CHAPTER 2

  INSPECTOR WEBSTER’S DETECTION CORRESPONDENCE COURSE

  From the window of his bedroom at the top of the house, Toby could see the entire length of Detectives’ Row. To the east, it bumped up against the busy High Street, lined with mansions and shops; to the west, it sputtered out in a weedy little garden that Toby had never seen anyone tend. The detectives who lived at the western end of the Row were talentless newcomers—or at least that was what Uncle Gabriel said—and the nicer, eastern end of the Row was where the more successful investigators kept their offices. They had been there since the early days of detection, long before the famous Colebridge Cutthroat murders had captivated the city and turned half its residents into armchair sleuths.

  Even now, the people of Colebridge loved a good crime. The Cutthroat had been locked up in Chokevine Prison years earlier, but following crime reports in the newspapers, swapping theories about unsolved cases at dinner parties, and visiting famous murder sites on the weekends were still the city’s most fashionable hobbies. No one would dream of missing the serialized detective stories that ran in the Sphinx Monthly Reader, and every neighborhood park was full of children playing at sleuths and robbers. Even Toby’s parents had promised him that one day, when Toby was old enough, they would scrape together the funds to pay for a grand tour of Entwhistle House. That was where the Colebridge Cutthroat had planned to commit one last, terrible murder—and been caught in the act by a heroic young detective named Hugh Abernathy.

  Hugh Abernathy wasn’t young any longer, but he was more heroic than ever, and he lived with his assistant, Mr. Peartree, in a tall white house at the easternmost end of the Row. Times were lean for the detectives of Colebridge: the surge of interest in crime solving had sent a number of criminals to jail and encouraged the rest to reconsider their careers. Still, crowds of visitors gathered outside Mr. Abernathy’s door each weekday morning, waiting for a chance to hire the detective or just to catch a glimpse of his famous silhouette. Toby would have liked to catch a glimpse of his own, but he didn’t dare join the crowds outside the door; he knew perfectly well what Uncle Gabriel thought of Hugh Abernathy. On the day he’d brought Toby to Detectives’ Row, Uncle Gabriel had spotted the stack of Sphinxes in Toby’s suitcase and wrinkled his nose as though he’d smelled something rotten. “Keep
that nonsense out of my sight, Tobias,” he’d ordered. “Better yet, burn it. That miserable man may have charmed the whole city, but he hasn’t charmed me.” Toby had been shocked (didn’t everyone like Hugh Abernathy?), but he supposed it wasn’t easy for his uncle to live only a few houses away from the world’s greatest detective. After all, the Sphinx never published any stories about Gabriel Montrose.

  Uncle Gabriel’s house, number one-fifteen, sat squarely in the middle of Detectives’ Row, although he was quick to tell anyone who asked that its walls tilted ever so slightly to the east. Toby’s third-story window gave him an excellent view of all the carriages and motorcars that squeaked down the street toward Montrose Investigations, though lately there hadn’t been many of either. More importantly, on the morning three weeks after Mrs. Arthur-Abbot’s disastrous visit, it allowed him to keep a careful eye on the mailbox that stood in front of the house.

  Everything looked just as it usually did at seven o’clock on a Tuesday. A line of anxious clients was already starting to form outside Hugh Abernathy’s door. Miss March and Miss Price, the detectives who lived in the house next to Uncle Gabriel’s, were taking their morning constitutional down to the High Street, their elbows linked together and their heads bent low in conversation. Across the street, a girl stood on the curb looking bored as her small brown dog investigated a patch of weeds. (This was a little surprising, since Toby had never seen the girl or the dog before, and he especially hadn’t seen them at seven o’clock on a Tuesday. Then again, he’d been watching the mailbox for only twelve days.) And at two minutes past seven, just as Toby had hoped he would, the mailman strode down Detectives’ Row, reached Uncle Gabriel’s house, and stopped to remove a bundle of letters from his sack.

  Toby catapulted himself away from the window, out of his bedroom, and down two flights of narrow, brown-carpeted staircase. “Getting the mail!” he called as he slid across the front hall in his socks. Uncle Gabriel looked up from his desk in the parlor, but Toby was into his shoes and out the door before his uncle could ask any questions. It had been this way for the past eleven mornings.

  Toby could already tell, though, that this morning was different. To start with, the girl across the street was still walking her dog. She wore a wool coat that looked too big for her and a pair of square-framed wire spectacles that kept sliding down the bridge of her nose, and she was staring intently at Toby. Toby stared back at her. The girl frowned. Finally, after what seemed to Toby like ages, she dropped her gaze and tugged her dog away toward the garden at the end of the Row, leaving Toby alone to sort through the contents of the mailbox.

  There was the usual bundle of envelopes—bills for Uncle Gabriel, mostly, and letters from his few remaining clients. At least there wasn’t anything new from Mrs. Arthur-Abbot. Her promised nasty note had arrived last week, and although Uncle Gabriel hadn’t told Toby how much the peach silk would cost them, he’d sworn under his breath as he’d read the letter. In addition to the bills and notes, there was a catalog from a detection supply company, its illustrated pages full of advertisements for fingerprint powders and little pistols with ivory handles. There was also a square envelope addressed to Uncle Gabriel in elegant green calligraphy; it looked like it might be a party invitation. Uncle Gabriel would like that, Toby thought. He didn’t get invited to many parties.

  At last, Toby reached the bottom of the mail stack. There, underneath the letters and bills, was a lumpy brown parcel stuck shut with an abundance of tape. To anyone who wasn’t a detective’s assistant, it would have looked very much like a plain, unremarkable package. Toby, however, knew better: unlike all the other pieces of mail that had landed in the box over the past eleven days, this package was addressed to him.

  Toby grinned and did a little hop there on the sidewalk. He wanted to tear the brown paper open right away, but the dog down at the end of the Row was starting to bark, and the girl was frowning at him more intently than ever, so he stuffed the parcel into the back waistband of his pants instead and pulled his sweater over it as well as he could. It made a sort of crunching noise as he walked up the stairs and into the house. Toby hoped he didn’t look too suspicious.

  “You’re up early again,” Uncle Gabriel said as Toby handed him the rest of the mail. “What have we got today? Oh dear.” He flipped through the envelopes, sighing a little every time his fingers brushed against an unpaid bill. His desk was covered with stacks of similar envelopes; most of them were stamped PAST DUE in bright red ink, and one or two said FINAL WARNING. In front of them, the Montrose Investigations money ledger lay open to the page Uncle Gabriel had been studying. Toby wasn’t allowed to touch the ledger—it was another of the things eleven-year-old boys weren’t supposed to worry about—but he couldn’t help sneaking a look at it over Uncle Gabriel’s shoulder. All he could see were long, gloomy columns of zeroes.

  “Uncle Gabriel,” said Toby, “do we have any money left at all?”

  Uncle Gabriel looked startled. He pushed the stacks of bills to the back of his desk and snapped the money ledger shut. “You’re an observant child, Tobias,” he said. “It’s a useful quality for a detective to have, but it’s far less useful in a nephew.”

  What Uncle Gabriel meant, as far as Toby could tell, was that he wasn’t going to answer the question. Toby wished he’d never asked it. His cheeks prickled with embarrassment, and he could feel the brown paper parcel sliding farther into the seat of his pants. It was going to be hard to move without crunching. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’ll go back up to my room now.”

  “Well, there’s no need for that!” Uncle Gabriel stood up from his desk. “I’m famished, Tobias, and I suspect you are, too. Why don’t we see if we can scrounge up some food?”

  “Oh! I can’t.” The parcel was heading down Toby’s pant leg now. “Not yet, at least. I’ve got to, um, get ready.”

  Uncle Gabriel frowned. “You look ready enough to me.”

  “My hair!” said Toby in a hurry. “I haven’t combed it! Aunt Janet always says you can’t eat a meal with messy hair.”

  “That does sound like Janet,” Uncle Gabriel admitted. “I’m sure she means well, but I’d never dream of bringing that sister of mine along to a crime scene; she’d tidy up all the evidence.” He ran a hand through his own thicket of hair. “All right, then, Tobias. You make sure you’re suitably coiffed, and I’ll make breakfast. I think we’ve got just enough flour left for pancakes.”

  Back in the safety of his bedroom, Toby shut the door, rolled up his pant leg, and let the parcel drop onto the carpet. His fingernails (freshly trimmed and very clean) were useless against the bulwark of tape, but this room had been Uncle Gabriel’s storage space before Toby had moved in, and all sorts of useful objects from previous cases were still stashed in boxes and stacked along the walls. In one of these boxes, Toby found a silver-handled dagger. Its blade was edged with something red that he hoped was rust. In any case, it was sharp enough to slice the parcel open.

  Inside the brown paper wrapping were a small black notebook, a round fabric badge, and a thick sheaf of paper that had been folded over twice. The badge read JUNIOR DETECTIVE in wobbly embroidery, and the top piece of paper in the sheaf said INSPECTOR WEBSTER’S DETECTION CORRESPONDENCE COURSE, LEVEL ONE.

  Toby flopped happily onto his bed and flipped through the pages of instructions and exercises. Inspector Webster had written out lessons on dozens of subjects, from deciphering codes to assembling disguises. It would take days for Toby to read through it all, but the advertisement in the back of the Sphinx Monthly Reader had promised that Inspector Webster’s correspondence course could turn even the most untalented beginner into a first-class detective in only three months, and a first-class detective was exactly what Toby needed to become. The sight of Uncle Gabriel’s money ledger had made him more certain than ever: if Montrose Investigations didn’t bring in more clients, the business would close, Uncle Gabriel would board up his windows, and he’d have no more use for a troublesome nephew
who needed to be clothed and fed. Toby couldn’t risk that. He needed to make himself useful, and being useful meant making money. With two detectives on its staff, wouldn’t Montrose Investigations be able to solve twice as many crimes? Instead of pouring tea for new clients, couldn’t Toby impress them with his talents? Uncle Gabriel had already said he was observant, and now that he was a Junior Detective (Level One), he was sure he’d be able to learn enough to solve a few smaller cases here and there. He could make back the money he owed to Mrs. Arthur-Abbot, and he might even convince some of the people waiting outside Hugh Abernathy’s house to come down the street to Montrose Investigations instead. Uncle Gabriel would swell with pride.

  For now, though, Toby would have to pretend that nothing had changed. He’d paid for the correspondence course with the last of the pocket money Grandfather Montrose had given him before he died, and if Uncle Gabriel learned that Toby had sent almost ten dollars to an utter stranger with only a stack of lessons to show for it, he’d probably send Toby to the orphanage on the spot. Even holding the papers from Inspector Webster felt dangerous in the daylight, so Toby rolled off his bed and stuffed them into his suitcase alongside his collection of Sphinxes. In spite of what Uncle Gabriel had said, Toby hadn’t burned the magazines; some nights he couldn’t sleep without reading a few more pages of a Hugh Abernathy story. The pages were smudged with soot and fingerprints, and the words were all familiar, but Toby didn’t mind. His parents had read those stories aloud by the fireplace after dinner—“The Adventure of the Clockwork Spider,” “The Case of the Fourteen Lemons,” and dozens of other tales that Toby knew practically by heart. As he tucked his new lessons away, it occurred to him in one wild and thrilling moment that someday, if he studied hard, the Sphinx Monthly Reader might even write stories about him.