The World's Greatest Detective

by Caroline Carlson

  “Are you going to tell the other detectives?”

  “That the tonic really was poisoned?” Julia frowned. “I suppose I’ll have to. I’d like to be the first to solve this crime, but if I’m going to manage it in only two days, I’ll need information from the others—and I’m sure they’ll want information from me in return.” Carefully, Julia peeled off her gloves. “I feel as though I’m trying to put together a puzzle that’s missing half its pieces.”

  “So do I!” It was a relief to hear someone else say what Toby had been thinking all morning. “I mean,” he added hastily, “that’s probably how I’d feel if I were trying to solve the mystery.”

  He could tell right away that he hadn’t managed to fool Julia. She shook her head and laughed. “So you are snooping around after all! I thought you might be. Well, good for you. I’m all for it.”

  “You are?” Toby was surprised. “Don’t you think murder isn’t for children?”

  “Mrs. Webster said that, didn’t she?” Julia turned on the water tap, and Toby watched as she rolled up her sleeves to scrub her hands. “The Websters seem nice enough, but I don’t think they understand a thing about—” Julia broke off. Her eyes followed Toby’s. Then she yanked her sleeves back down to her wrists and turned off the tap so ferociously that Toby thought it might come off in her hands. “What did you see?”

  “Nothing!” said Toby. “I don’t know what you’re talking about!”

  All the laughter was gone from Julia’s face. Toby had never seen a person’s mood change so much in just a few moments. He backed away from her, knocking over a sack full of potatoes and making the whole disaster even worse. But Julia didn’t seem to notice. She braced her arms against the kitchen table and looked down at the bottle of Bertram’s instead of at Toby.

  “If you want to be a detective,” she said in a low voice, “don’t start by investigating me. Investigate Philip Elwood. Yesterday afternoon, when I came inside to fetch my sun hat, I spotted Mr. Elwood standing outside the door to the Orchid Room with his hand on the doorknob. He jumped a foot when he saw me coming down the hall. He might have been doing anything, I suppose, but if you ask me, he looked positively guilty. I wouldn’t be surprised if he’d had a bottle of Brandelburg acid in his back pocket.”

  Toby stared at her. “Why are you telling me this?”

  “Because you didn’t see anything,” Julia said, “and you won’t say a word to anyone.” Her voice was quiet, but so serious it made Toby shiver. “Do you understand?”

  Toby nodded. Then he ran. He zigzagged around the rolling potatoes, kicking one under the table and another behind the stove, but for once in his life, he didn’t even think of cleaning up. All he could think of was the thick, black line he’d seen etched into Julia’s skin, starting just above her wrist and curling all the way to her elbow.

  CHAPTER 14

  A CROWD AT THE GATES

  A lot of peculiar things lurked in the walls of old houses, and at Coleford Manor, one of those peculiar things was Ivy. As Toby stumbled out of the kitchen, she burst from a hallway cupboard and landed on her hands and knees on the floor a few inches in front of him. “Hey!” he shouted. “Look out!”

  With great dignity, Ivy picked herself up. She was still dressed as Madame Ermintrude, but her hat was missing, and her hair was mostly cobwebs. “It’s not my job to look out, Detective Montrose,” she said solemnly. “My job is to teach you about the element of surprise.” She looked Toby up and down. “From the way your knees are wobbling, I can tell I’ve been successful.”

  Toby’s knees had actually started wobbling sometime during his encounter with Julia, but Ivy’s flying leap hadn’t made him feel any calmer. “I don’t think I need any more lessons right now,” he told her. “Have you found Mr. Abernathy’s files yet?”

  Ivy tugged a cobweb from her hair. “Use your powers of observation, Toby. Am I beaming? Am I holding a stack of papers? Have I told you that your parents are sailing around the world on a Gyptian yacht and they’re due back next Tuesday?” She sighed. “I’m sorry. I’ve crawled through the attic, searched the broom cupboard, and ridden up and down in the dumbwaiter, but I haven’t found anything except mice and spiders and leaky bottles of hair tonic. Did you learn anything from Julia?”

  “A little,” said Toby. He told her about the brilliant blue glow of the Brandelburg acid and about Julia’s opinion of Hugh Abernathy, although he decided to keep what she’d said about Uncle Gabriel to himself. And he wondered whether he should tell Ivy about the marks he’d seen on Julia’s arm. He’d promised he wouldn’t say a word—but Ivy was his partner! Partners told each other everything, didn’t they? Surely they weren’t supposed to keep secrets from each other. “There’s one more thing about Julia,” he said quietly. “She’s got a tattoo—a wavy black line that goes halfway up her arm—and she got awfully upset when I saw it. I don’t know what it means, but I saw the same mark on my carriage driver’s arm yesterday, and he turned out to be a thief.”

  “A thief?” said Ivy. “Are you sure?”

  “I’d be a lot less sure if he hadn’t stolen my suitcase.”

  Ivy wrinkled her forehead. “All right,” she said, “but why would a detective and a criminal have the same tattoo? It doesn’t make any sense. If Miss Hartshorn didn’t want you to see that mark, though, it must mean something important. Maybe I can ask Father about it.”

  “You can’t tell anyone else! I promised Julia. And she gave me something in exchange.” Toby looked up and down the hallway to make sure no detectives were listening in the doorways. “Philip Elwood was trying to get into Mr. Abernathy’s room yesterday afternoon while the other detectives were outside. Julia caught him in the act. She says he looked guilty.”

  Ivy began to smile. “And we caught him sneaking around in the broom cupboard! Oh, he’s definitely up to something. You haven’t spoken to him yet, have you?”

  “I was just on my way to find him, actually,” said Toby, “before we—um—ran into each other.”

  “Then I’ll come with you.” Ivy pushed her motoring goggles down over her eyes. “Despite what some people might think, a great detective can’t spend all her life crawling around in the cobwebs.”

  Philip Elwood wasn’t in his bedroom or the breakfast room or the library. In fact, he didn’t seem to be inside the manor at all. Ivy was convinced they’d cornered him in one of the washrooms, but when the door swung open, only Lillie stepped out, clutching a damp ball of fabric to her chest. She gave a little gasp when she spotted them.

  “Heavens!” she said. “What are you two doing lurking in the shadows? You startled me half to death!”

  “It’s not any of your business,” Ivy informed her, “but we thought you might be Philip Elwood. Tragically, though, you’re not.” She looked hard at the bundle in Lillie’s arms, and a rapturous smile grew on her face. “Oh, Lillie! Did you ruin your best dress?”

  “Hush!” Lillie held the bundle tighter. Now that Ivy had mentioned it, Toby could see it was the same dress she’d been wearing yesterday afternoon. It was dripping wet now, though, and stained with an enormous brown splotch. “You can’t tell Mother and Father. They’ll be furious!”

  Ivy looked positively gleeful. “What did you do?”

  Lillie sighed. “I leaned against a fence in town yesterday, and it must have been freshly painted. I’ve been scrubbing for ages, but the stuff just won’t come out! Please, Ivy, promise you won’t tell.”

  “Hmm,” said Ivy. “What will you give me if I don’t?”

  Lillie rolled her eyes. “I can tell you where Philip is. He’s outside in the summerhouse; I just saw him through the window. Is that payment enough?”

  Toby hoped it was. He felt sorry for Lillie; she looked desperately nervous. He didn’t blame her, either; if he’d just ruined his nicest clothes, he would have felt exactly the same.

  “All right,” said Ivy at last. “I won’t say a word to Mother.”

  “Or to Father!”
Lillie said.

  Ivy grinned at her sister. “We’ll see,” she said. “Come on, Toby. We’ve got work to do.”

  Outside the manor, Mr. Webster’s prediction had already begun to come true. There was a crowd at the gates, and it seemed to Toby as though it was growing bigger by the minute, like an advancing army. On the front lines were the journalists, sticking their noses through the gaps in the iron bars and shouting out questions to anyone they spotted on the grounds. Behind them were the tourists—just a handful so far, in their best holiday clothes, pointing up at the manor and posing stiffly for the newspaper photographers. A quick-thinking florist had set up a stall where well-wishers could buy mourning bouquets to lay at the gates, and Toby knew that later, there would be candy vendors and street musicians, tour guides reciting the history of the manor, and painters selling hasty portraits of the unfortunate victim. At the very back of the crowd, looking as though they’d been unpleasantly interrupted from a good night’s sleep, were half a dozen city police officers. Toby guessed they’d been last of all to hear the news about Mr. Abernathy.

  “No,” Mr. Webster was telling them through the bars, “you may not come in! Not the police, not the journalists, and certainly not the puppeteer or the toffee salesman. Our detectives have the matter well in hand, and I refuse to say anything more until the case has been resolved.”

  On the hill above them, Ivy gave Toby a nudge. “Father must be really angry,” she murmured. “He normally adores toffee.”

  Toby was happy to let Ivy’s father defend the manor. After all, they had more urgent business to attend to. Philip Elwood was sitting in the summerhouse, just where Lillie had said he’d be, absorbed in his little notebook. “I’ve spotted our suspect,” said Ivy, narrowing her eyes behind her motoring goggles. “Follow my lead.”

  “I’ve done this before, you know,” said Toby. “I just talked to Julia!” But Ivy was already halfway to the summerhouse. Toby sighed and ran after her.

  Philip Elwood snapped his notebook shut when he saw them coming across the grass. “Mr. Montrose!” he said. “Just the person I was hoping to speak to! And Miss Ivy, it’s nice to see you again.”

  Ivy didn’t look as though there were anything nice about it: Madame Ermintrude meant business. “You want to speak to Toby?” she said. “Then you can speak to me, too.”

  “If you’d like,” said Philip. He sounded awfully cheerful for a murderer. “I’ve got a few questions, and I hoped Toby could come up with the answers.”

  “But we’ve got questions for you!” Toby said. The interview was already starting off badly. Murder suspects weren’t supposed to be happy to see their interrogators, and they definitely weren’t supposed to ask questions of their own.

  “In that case,” said Philip, “maybe we can all help one another. Why don’t you both have a seat?”

  Toby looked over at Ivy. He wasn’t sure he wanted to give Philip Elwood any sort of help, and he couldn’t imagine what Philip wanted to ask them. Did he already know they suspected him of murder? What would he do if he found out? Would the tourists at the gates have a whole new crime to gossip about the next morning?

  If Ivy was having any of the same worries, she didn’t show it. She only shrugged and sat down on the summerhouse bench, so Toby sat next to her, keeping his eyes on Philip. The detective leaned forward and smiled at him. “I’ll go first,” he said. “I’d like to know about your uncle.”

  Toby would have been less surprised if Philip had pulled a pistol out of his coat pocket. “My uncle? What does my uncle have to do with anything?”

  “He isn’t even here,” said Ivy. She tossed one of her scarves over her shoulder. “He’s in Gallis. Weren’t you paying attention last night?”

  Somehow, Philip managed to ignore Madame Ermintrude. “He knew Mr. Abernathy well, didn’t he?” he asked Toby. “They were partners once, many years ago.”

  “You knew about that, too?” Now Toby was really upset. It wasn’t fair that everyone he met seemed to know more than he did about his own uncle. Why hadn’t Uncle Gabriel told him the truth? What else was he keeping to himself?

  Ivy looked as though she’d been kicked. “They were partners? And you didn’t tell me?”

  “I didn’t have any idea!” said Toby. “I only found out this morning!”

  “It’s practically afternoon,” Ivy muttered.

  “But Uncle Gabriel’s never said anything to me about working with Mr. Abernathy. He turns all sorts of awful colors whenever he hears Mr. Abernathy’s name, and he calls him an ostrich.”

  “Interesting!” Philip drummed his fingers on the summerhouse bench. “They must have been friendly once, but something went wrong. Do you know what came between them? A failed case, maybe, or an argument about money?”

  Toby glared at him. “I just told you I don’t know anything about it. Even if I did, I don’t see why I should tell you. Uncle Gabriel has nothing to do with this case.”

  “But he had something to do with Hugh Abernathy,” said Philip, “and I want to learn everything I can about our victim. Who were his friends? Who were his enemies? What were his secrets? I’m certain that if we can answer these questions, we’ll find the key to Mr. Abernathy’s murder.”

  Ivy rolled her eyes. “You mean you will.”

  “Besides,” said Toby, “we all know everything about Mr. Abernathy already. His whole life’s been published in the Sphinx! He eats two poached eggs every morning for breakfast after tending to his topiary, his hair is as golden as a sheaf of wheat, he spent five years in the jungle searching for poison antidotes, he loves the opera and the harmonica, he doesn’t like animals, his mother’s name was Vivian, and he disguised himself as a merchant seaman and worked on a ship for seven months before anyone realized he didn’t know a thing about the sea.” Toby had to stop to take a breath. “I don’t think Mr. Abernathy could have had any secrets.”

  “Oh, everyone has secrets,” said Philip. “Detectives’ Row would never do any business if they didn’t. Some of us just happen to be better at hiding our secrets than others.”

  Ivy pounced. “So you do have secrets! We thought so, didn’t we, Toby? What were you doing in Mr. Abernathy’s room yesterday afternoon?”

  “And in the broom cupboard?” Toby added. He didn’t want Ivy to ask all the questions before he’d gotten a chance to help. “We saw you there, so you can’t deny it. If you’ve got something to confess, you’d better do it now.”

  “Confess?” Philip scratched his nose and looked over Toby’s head, as though something much more interesting were happening just beyond them. “Is it against the law to go in search of a fresh bath towel? I didn’t want to bother the servants, so I took the liberty of letting myself into the cupboard. I hope I didn’t inconvenience anyone.”

  “Hmm,” said Ivy. “And the Orchid Room?”

  Philip shook his head. “That,” he said, “you’re right about. It’s true that I spent the afternoon exploring the house, and I’ll admit I did try to slip into Mr. Abernathy’s room while everyone else was outside playing badminton. I thought I might be able to sneak a look at his plans for the contest.”

  “You mean you were going to cheat,” said Toby.

  “That’s an awfully strong way of putting it—but all right, I suppose I was. In any case, it doesn’t matter now. Miss Hartshorn came down the hall just as I was about to open the door, and my nagging conscience got the better of me. I do have one, you know.”

  Ivy looked as though she doubted it. “Did you like Mr. Abernathy? Or were you jealous of him?”

  “I didn’t know him well enough to like him,” said Philip. “We’d never met before, in fact. But I certainly wasn’t jealous. I’ve got a good career, enough money to make ends meet, and a girl I’m going to marry. I didn’t have a single reason to want Hugh Abernathy dead.” He shrugged. “I’m sorry I can’t be more helpful, but I’ve got no more idea of what happened to him than you do. Has Julia found out what’s killed him yet?”
>
  Ivy poked Toby in the ribs, but he didn’t see the point of lying to Philip; everyone would know about the poison sooner or later. “Brandelburg acid,” he said grudgingly.

  Ivy buried her face in her scarves.

  “The doctor was right, then,” said Philip. “I’m told that’s nasty stuff.” He looked over his shoulder toward the manor gates, where the crowd was growing larger and louder. “Is that all you wanted to ask me? If it is, I’d better excuse myself. I’d like to solve this crime before the bystanders get restless.”

  Philip stood up to leave the summerhouse, but something about his story still poked at Toby, as if it were a pebble stuck in his shoe. He tried to think back to the moment he’d bumped into Philip the day before. “There’s just one more thing, sir,” he said quickly. “Why do you wear your hat indoors?”

  Philip gave Toby a strange, crooked smile. “You think I’m keeping something under it?”

  In one grand motion, he pulled off his hat. Underneath it, to Toby’s disappointment, was nothing more than a perfectly normal head of hair.

  “My hat,” said Philip, “is my trademark. I hope that, in time, it will become just as famous as Mr. Abernathy’s poached eggs or his awful harmonica. Someday, with any luck, all those tourists in the lane will be clamoring for straw boaters of their own.” He bowed to Toby and Ivy, stepped out of the summerhouse, and strode across the lawn toward the manor, tossing his hat in the air as he went.

  When Philip Elwood was too far away to overhear them, Ivy pushed her goggles onto her forehead. “So?” she said to Toby. “What do you think?”

  “He’s lying about something. Maybe about lots of things.” Toby was sure of it. He’d been dying to say so to Ivy for the past five minutes. “Did you see him scratch his nose? That’s one of the telltale signs of a liar. And he looked over our heads when he talked to us; that’s another.”

  Ivy grinned. “You’ve read lesson eight of my correspondence course,” she said. “Well done, Toby. It’s no wonder we hadn’t heard of Philip Elwood or his silly old hat. If he were any good at being a detective, he’d know how to tell a fib.”