“Excuse me, sir?” Toby couldn’t help thinking of Mrs. Arthur-Abbot, swatting at the mouse in her peach silk dress, and the thought was almost enough to make him laugh. “I don’t think you need me to tell you that.”
“Oh, I know how I did it, of course. I’m just curious to see if you do. Have you really outwitted every other detective on the Row, or have you just made a lucky guess?” He tapped the barrel of his pistol. “If you do well enough, I might not have to fire this.”
“All right.” He didn’t know exactly how Mr. Abernathy had murdered his assistant, and he didn’t know why, but he certainly wasn’t going to admit that. If there was one thing Ivy had taught him, it was how to lie with confidence. “I know you came to Coleford Manor on Friday dressed as yourself,” he said, “and so did Mr. Peartree. It was the real Mr. Peartree who welcomed me to the house. You were still yourself at the badminton game that afternoon—I don’t think a fake Mr. Abernathy could have gotten Julia Hartshorn quite so mad.”
Mr. Abernathy nodded. “Surely not.”
“You told me then that you wanted me to come see you before dinner,” Toby said. “I wondered about that. I thought you were going to give me news about my parents’ case, but you never planned to do that at all. You didn’t even have their case file with you. I think you just wanted to make sure that someone would find the body—someone you thought you could fool easily enough.”
“Harsh,” said Mr. Abernathy, “but accurate. Please continue.”
Toby hesitated. What had happened that day after the badminton game? All he could do was guess. “You and Mr. Peartree went back inside the manor,” he said. “That’s when you switched clothes. I bet you told Mr. Peartree that it was part of the contest—that you wanted to see if the detectives would notice you’d traded places. You dyed your hair using that leaky bottle of hair tonic you’d hidden in the broom cupboard, where no one was likely to notice it. Mr. Peartree shaved his mustache, but I don’t think he could have dyed his hair, too. It’s a lot harder to turn dark hair golden.”
“As golden as a sheaf of wheat,” Mr. Abernathy said. “You’re right. He wore a wig.”
“Then you switched bedrooms. You went into the Fern Room, and Mr. Peartree went into the Orchid Room. I’m guessing you’d already poisoned your own bottle of Bertram’s digestive tonic by that time. Did you remind him to drink it? Did you tell him the detectives would notice if he didn’t act exactly the way you would? Either way, Mr. Peartree drank the Bertram’s—it was so bitter that he didn’t notice the taste of Brandelburg acid—and you locked the door to the Orchid Room. By the time I came to see Mr. Abernathy, you were ready to help me discover the body. You probably splashed water in your eyes to make it look like you regretted the whole thing.”
Mr. Abernathy leaned back against the wall. “Not bad work,” he said. “Of course, Gabriel was impressive, too, when he was your age. Underestimating the Montrose family is one of my worst tendencies. You did miss a few details, but they’re small ones. For example, did you know that being poisoned with Brandelburg acid can cause a person to cry out in pain? It’s not a pleasant noise, so I put on one of my opera records to mask the sound. As for my tears, they were genuine. I was never very kind to Mr. Peartree, but he was the closest thing I had to a friend. It’s a shame, really—he spent his life writing wonderful stories about me, but no one will ever know the story of why he had to die. It would have made an excellent piece in the Sphinx.”
Mr. Abernathy was tossing his pistol from one hand to the other now, and Toby wished he’d stop. On the other hand, if he stopped, he might shoot. “You could tell me the story,” Toby said. “I’d like to hear it.”
There was Mr. Abernathy’s spring drizzle of laughter again. Even as Mr. Peartree, he hadn’t quite been able to disguise it. “You’re buying time,” he said. “I’m not a fool, Toby. But I will tell you what happened, and not only because I enjoy the sound of my own voice.” He pushed up the sleeves of his meadow-colored coat and removed his verdant felt hat. “For many years, Mr. Peartree and I worked wonderfully together. I was the world’s greatest detective, and he was the world’s greatest assistant. I counted on Mr. Peartree to polish my cuff links and my image, and that’s exactly what he did. I paid him well, and in return, he put up with me. At least, that was our agreement.”
Toby remembered how Mr. Peartree had sighed as his pocket watch had flown from Hugh Abernathy’s hands and shattered on the floor. What else had Mr. Peartree been asked to put up with? “Did he know you were blackmailing your clients?” Toby asked.
“He knew enough not to gripe about it. After all, as I told him more than once, why shouldn’t criminals pay for their crimes? It’s not strictly legal, of course—but neither is purchasing a stolen artifact, say, or giving out government secrets, as my friend Lord Entwhistle was doing.”
The trouble was crawling up Toby’s shirt collar now, and he tried to brush it away. “That doesn’t make it all right to steal people’s money.”
Hugh Abernathy cast his eyes to the heavens. “You sound just like your uncle. Fortunately, Mr. Peartree kept whatever thoughts he might have had to himself. Last winter, though, completely out of the blue, he came to me and handed in his resignation. He was tired of being nothing more than an assistant, he said; he had the bizarre impression that his talents were being wasted, and he planned to open a detective’s practice of his own. I’m sure you can imagine the pickle that put me in: if Mr. Peartree left my employment, he’d take all my secrets with him, and I couldn’t allow that. The man wasn’t a very good detective, but he knew enough about me to be dangerous. Unlike your uncle and those nosy neighbors of his, Mr. Peartree had real proof of my private business, and I knew he’d be willing to share it with the world for a price. What else could I do? I asked Mr. Peartree to stay on my staff for six more months, out of kindness to me, and I began to plan the greatest case of my career: the Murder at Coleford Manor.”
“The third M,” Toby said quietly. Fear had been Mr. Abernathy’s motive for getting rid of his assistant, then—but that hardly answered all of Toby’s questions. “It would have been easy for you to poison Mr. Peartree’s breakfast,” he said, “or to make sure he died in an awful accident. No one would have known it was murder. Why did you do it in public? And why invite all the detectives in the city to the scene of the crime?”
“Two excellent questions!” Mr. Abernathy clapped one hand against the pistol, making Toby jump. “You’re using that brain of yours, aren’t you? Now try to use it just a little more. Tell me, how’s business on Detectives’ Row these days?”
Toby squirmed. “Not good, sir.”
“Exactly. I still have a handful of loyal clients, but even the Abernathy name isn’t what it used to be. Everyone’s a detective these days! Armchair sleuths think that if they read a few of my stories, they’ll learn enough to be able to solve their own cases! That’s alarming enough on its own, but to make matters worse, I noticed that some other detectives on the Row—Miss Hartshorn, Miss March and Miss Price, Mr. Rackham, even your uncle—were still bringing in some clients here and there. Why weren’t those clients coming directly to me?
“You see, Toby, I had to do something extraordinary! Something that would put my name back on the front page of every newspaper, make my competitors look like fools, and remind everyone that only Hugh Abernathy is truly the world’s greatest detective. If that same extraordinary plan could help me clean up my mess with Mr. Peartree, too, so much the better.”
“So you faked your own death?”
“It worked!” cried Mr. Abernathy. “Did you see that picture of me in the Morning Bugle? Did you read the articles? Did you see the crowds of fans and admirers? You can’t find a person in Colebridge who won’t tell you I was the finest investigator in the city. Even better, my competitors’ reputations are in shambles. I’d hoped those files I’d left behind about their suspicious backgrounds would be leaked to the press, but even if that never happens, they’re still
famous for being incompetent at best and dangerous at worst. They couldn’t even solve my murder. They’ll all be out of business within the month.”
“So will you!” said Toby. “Everyone thinks you’re dead!”
“That is inconvenient,” Mr. Abernathy agreed. “I can’t say I’m thrilled about losing all that money to charity, either, or about giving my belongings to that dust trap of a museum. But just think of how stunning it will be when, in a year or two, I make my miraculous return from the grave. I can imagine the headlines already: ‘The Detective Who Outwitted Death Itself!’ I’ll earn back all the money I’ve lost, and more besides. I’ll be a legend, Toby. What do you think of that?”
Toby’s throat felt dry. “I think that’s awful,” he said. “I think you’ve hurt a lot of people, and you don’t even care.”
Mr. Abernathy sighed. “I was hoping you’d be more impressed. I’ve gone to a lot of trouble to keep you alive, you know. When I first realized that you and Ivy might actually be intelligent enough to solve the crime, I could have squashed you as flat as a pancake, but I decided to give you a good scare instead: the griffin, the ransacking, et cetera. I wanted you off the case, but I didn’t want you gone altogether. I could shoot you now”—he gave his pistol a twirl—“but I’d really prefer not to. Do you remember when I said I’d give you a chance to repay me?”
Toby nodded. “Yes, sir.” Ivy had been right; he was too polite.
“Then I’ll be frank. Your parents are dead, Toby. They didn’t survive that accident at the seashore. And I’m sorry to say it, but it sounds as though your uncle is also gone for good. What’s next for you? The orphanage?” Mr. Abernathy peered at Toby through the rising swarm of trouble; soon it would be past Toby’s neck, and over his eyes, and then it would swallow him whole. He couldn’t move. He could barely think. “A boy like you shouldn’t be in an orphanage,” Mr. Abernathy said. “I meant what I told you back at the manor: I think you’ll go on to do remarkable things, and I’d like you to do them with me. With Mr. Peartree gone, I happen to be in need of an assistant. If you’re willing, we’ll leave for Gallis next week. There’s plenty for you to do: correspondence to send, clothes to iron, stories to write for the Sphinx. But if you’re not willing . . .” He raised his pistol. “Well, you know how I feel about my secrets. I can’t allow them to get away.”
The trouble was clouding Toby’s vision now; he could hardly see through the shadows. He could feel it pressing against him, as cold and as frightening as the steel of Mr. Abernathy’s pistol, and he could hear it taunting him. Even if he went with Mr. Abernathy—and did he really have a choice?—the trouble would follow. After all, he knew the truth for sure now: his parents weren’t coming home. Whether he went all the way to Gallis or stayed at the Colebridge Children’s Home, there would always be someone else to please, someone else to be afraid of, more messes to clean up, and more things to apologize for, and right now, in the middle of the most disastrous moment of the eleven years of his life, Toby was sick of it.
“Go away!” he said to the trouble. “Stop following me around, stop laughing at me, and get out of here. I don’t care where you go, as long as you never come back!”
Mr. Abernathy looked confused. “Are you talking to me?”
But Toby hardly heard him. It was as though he’d pulled the plug out of a bathtub drain. All around him, the trouble was receding, swirling lower and lower as he watched. First his eyes were clear, then his throat, then his waist and his ankles. It was the funniest thing: in all the years the trouble had spent chasing after him, he’d tried to hide from it, fix it, and ignore it, but he’d never once thought of telling it to leave. Now that he’d done it, though, the trouble wasn’t wasting any time. With a last reluctant gurgle, it disappeared entirely, and Toby could finally see what he hadn’t noticed just a moment before: three long shadows in the hallway just beyond where Mr. Abernathy sat, and the tip of a tail that might have belonged to a small brown dog.
“I do have something to say to you, actually,” Toby told Mr. Abernathy. For once, it felt wonderful not to be polite. “My uncle was right about you. You really are a puffed-up, self-serving old ostrich.”
“Well said, Tobias!”
Gabriel Montrose stormed into the room like a one-man hurricane, grabbing hold of Mr. Abernathy’s arms and twisting them backward, trying to wrestle the pistol away. Percival went after Mr. Abernathy, too, howling loudly enough to rattle the window glass. And then there was Ivy. “Get down, Detective!” she shouted as she crashed into Toby and knocked him to the floor. At least he was used to it by now. As he fell, he thought he could see the smart leather shine of a police sergeant’s boots. Then his face hit the floorboards, and the pistol went off.
CHAPTER 28
A FULL HOUSE
No one could manage to keep Uncle Gabriel in bed. Toby tried, at least for the first few days, and so did Mrs. Satterthwaite, who came to Detectives’ Row full-time for a while to help. More often than not, however, the two of them would find him puttering around in the kitchen or balancing on a ladder, taking a hammer to whichever part of the house had most recently come loose. “All with a bullet in his hip!” Mrs. Satterthwaite remarked to Toby each time they’d dragged Uncle Gabriel back to his bedroom. “And to think I was ever worried about that man. He’s simply impossible.”
Toby agreed. He was starting to really enjoy impossible people.
On the rare occasions when Uncle Gabriel was actually lying down, he told Toby all about what had happened in Gallis. “The greatest case of my career,” he said happily, “and the one that finally gave that ostrich his comeuppance. Do you know how long I spent trying to pin down solid evidence of Hugh Abernathy’s blackmailing scheme?”
“Twenty years?” Toby guessed.
“Eighteen, actually,” said Uncle Gabriel, “although it felt more like a hundred. His victims were too frightened to turn him in, or too crooked to admit to their own crimes, and I knew it was useless to go to the police with only my word against his. At last I got wind of a Gallian cat burglar who’d received dozens of threatening letters from Mr. Abernathy and saved each one. The rumors said she was on her deathbed, and I hoped I could persuade her to hand over the letters to the authorities. Unfortunately, she was only half as close to dying as I’d been told, and ten times wickeder. I got those letters in the end, though, and only just in time.” Uncle Gabriel patted the bandage on his hip and flinched a little. “If Ivy hadn’t run into me coming down the Row that morning, Tobias, I shudder to think where this bullet might have ended up.”
Toby shuddered, too. Owing his life to Ivy had quickly become annoying—she’d already reminded him several times of how skillfully Mitzi, the world-famous trapeze artist and spy, had shimmied up the walls of Mr. Abernathy’s wine cellar, smashed open a high window with the help of a few expensive bottles from the racks, and walked straight into Uncle Gabriel, who’d mistaken the red wine she’d been drenched in for blood. Still, listening to Ivy brag was much nicer than the alternative.
“You didn’t have to take quite so long to find a police officer, though,” he’d told her. “And you could have warned me before you knocked me over.”
But Ivy had brushed him off. “Oh, Detective Montrose,” she’d said. “You still have so much to learn about the element of surprise.”
Ivy visited the Row as often as she could slip away from Coleford Manor, and there had been other visitors, too. Mr. Rackham brought over a basket of eggs from his hens every morning, Julia Hartshorn stopped by with a bottle of medicine for Uncle Gabriel’s hip, and one evening, Miss March and Miss Price showed up, laden with a questionable meat pie, a copy of the newspaper, and several bucketfuls of gossip.
“Did you hear they found poor Mr. Peartree, dear?” Miss Price said to Toby as they ate dinner by Uncle Gabriel’s bedside. “Do you remember Doctor Piper, who came to take the body away? Well, she’d had it all along. I’m afraid she was one of Mr. Abernathy’s blackmail targets. He’d fou
nd out she’d been selling cadavers to anatomists at the university—not a very nice practice, dear—and he threatened to expose her unless she helped him with his plan.”
Toby thought, suddenly, of Egbert. He nearly choked on his forkful of pie.
“After a few minutes of prodding, any good medical examiner would have discovered that the body wasn’t Mr. Abernathy’s at all,” Miss March added. “The wig on its head, for example, would have been a very useful clue. It’s no wonder Mr. Abernathy had to hide the evidence. In any case, this is good news: Mr. Peartree will have a proper send-off, and Doctor Piper has agreed to testify at the trial. With her evidence and yours, and with those letters your uncle found, I don’t think Mr. Abernathy is likely to see the outside of Chokevine Prison anytime soon.”
Toby frowned. “Aren’t people always escaping from Chokevine?”
“Hmm,” said Miss March. “I hadn’t thought of that. Well, I suppose if Hugh Abernathy ever does escape, he’ll make an attempt to be the world’s greatest criminal, and all of us on the Row will see a lot more business.”
Miss March and Miss Price had plenty of news to pass along about all the people they and Uncle Gabriel knew, but most of it wasn’t very interesting to Toby. “I was wondering,” he said when they’d finally paused for breath. “Did you know all along that Mr. Abernathy was still alive? You seemed to know everything else about everyone.”
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