ELLERY QUEEN MYSTERY MAGAZINE
Kindle Edition, 2012 © Penny Publication
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THE CHARLES DICKENS MYSTERY
by W. Edward Blain | 5557 words
Art by Allen Davis
Charles Dickens' 200th birthday is being celebrated with fanfare in England and many other places this year. Born on February 7, 1812, Dickens is often claimed as one of our own by the mystery community for his creation of characters such as Fagin, "receiver of stolen goods," and books such as The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Woodberry Forest School teacher and writer W. Edward Blain will be taking eleven of his students to the Dickens House Museum in July in honor of the Dickens bicentenary.
When the police arrived at the Dickens House Museum in London, the body of Ravi Vikram sprawled on the floor of the small bedroom, head against the wall, eyes still open, rope marks still visible on his neck. Driscoll Henley stood nearby, the purple velvet rope used for the strangulation now dropped by his feet. Within minutes the police advised Henley of his rights and handcuffed him, but before they could lead him downstairs to the waiting police car, he protested.
"I'm telling you that I'm a teacher, not a killer," he said. "Call the head of my boarding school in the United States. She'll vouch for me."
"Will she?" said the inspector, a tall man in a brown jacket. "Your hands were on his throat."
"I was removing the rope," said Henley. "I was trying to resuscitate him."
"We can discuss it in good time," said the inspector. "For now, Mr. Henley, you are under arrest for the murder of Ravi Vikram, actor."
"Give me five minutes," said Henley. "While everybody is still here in the building. Five minutes."
"Why should I do that?" asked the inspector.
"Because I have one advantage over you," said Henley. "I can eliminate myself as a suspect."
"You know who killed this man?"
"Five minutes," said Henley.
The inspector looked at his watch. "Starting now," he said, and Driscoll Henley desperately began to think. He had no idea who had murdered Ravi Vikram, but he needed to find out during the next four minutes and fifty-eight seconds.
Henley's ordeal began six months earlier, when Suzanne McClain, the head of Foxborough Hall, summoned him to her paneled office. "How would you like to spend a month in London?" she asked him. "All expenses paid by the school?"
He was delighted by the offer, but he didn't answer right away. School heads don't make such offers without ulterior motives.
"There's a catch, of course," she said, reading his face, if not his mind. "You have to solve a mystery." She smiled, and her green jacket set off her red hair in a way that always reminded him of Maureen O'Hara in a John Wayne movie.
"The mystery of the coy headmistress?" he asked, smiling in turn.
"The mystery of Charles Dickens, the playwright."
Had he misunderstood her? "Dickens was a novelist, not a playwright."
She shook her head. "He loved the theater all his life. He performed in plays and directed them throughout his career. He mounted four plays successfully in London before he published a novel. Why didn't Charles Dickens become the great Victorian playwright? That's what I want you to find out."
He realized that she was serious. "I'll do my best," he said eventually. "But why?"
"Because a prominent alumnus with a passion for Dickens has offered to build a new arts center if someone on the faculty can explain satisfactorily the great writer's career switch."
"Wasn't it simply a matter of money? Playwrights don't earn much."
"Our donor doesn't find that explanation sufficient. You need to saturate yourself in Dickens, come back here, meet with the man, and offer a plausible narrative for why Dickens stopped writing plays. Do that, and I'll be grateful."
It had sounded so manageable in January. Now, on a Wednesday in June, he was suspected of murder. How could the day have gone so wrong? It had started auspiciously enough. He had been full of confidence at nine-thirty a.m. as he had tossed a solitary apple into his briefcase and walked from his flat in Russell Square to Doughty Street, a sunny Bloomsbury thoroughfare. The Dickens House Museum sat in a block of modest townhouses nearly indistinguishable from one another: drab brick, unadorned rectangular windows, arched doorways.
Inside the museum a thin woman standing behind a glass counter smiled when he introduced himself.
"I'm Mrs. Pierce," she said. "You'll be wanting the director, won't you?"
"Yes, Mr. Jarvis Dedlock," said Henley.
She shook her head. "I'm afraid you just missed Mr. Dedlock. He's been sacked."
"What?" Henley had exchanged e-mails with Jarvis Dedlock for the past three months in order to arrange on-site research.
She leaned forward to stage-whisper the rest. "Valuable items from the collection have gone missing."
"And Mr. Dedlock is responsible?"
Mrs. Pierce, clearly enjoying her role as bearer of sordid tidings, shook her head. "Mr. Dedlock assures me that the thief is still among us. Mark my words, Mr. Henley. Jarvis Dedlock is as innocent as a lamb."
Henley was primarily concerned with whether the archives would still be available to him. Mrs. Pierce reassured him that all would be well. "The new director is Mr. Thatcher Finn. He's in conference at the moment, but I'll alert him that you're here. Would you care to enjoy the exhibits while you wait?"
He retreated contentedly enough into what had been the Dickens family's dining room. His rubber-soled walking shoes were silent on the hardwood floors. There was little furniture. Locked glass cabinets held displays of Dickensiana—letters, manuscripts, reviews, first editions. Henley gravitated to an exhibit of a magazine called Household Words.
"He published nearly everything in periodicals first, you know," said a voice behind him. He turned to face the speaker and beheld, to his surprise, someone who looked like a fifteen-year-old surfer: blond hair in a choppy mullet, white T-shirt advertising Pimm's, pedal-pusher trousers that fell halfway between kneecap and ankle, and flip-flops.
Behind this young man was an older gentleman wearing waistcoat, pince-nez, and watch chain. His diaphanous white hair lifted off his head to form a halo in the doorway, and he smiled politely at the assertiveness of the chatty young man. Henley could not have conjured a more Dickensian director for the Dickens House Museum than the man in the doorway, who had just enough of a belly to qualify as generously proportioned but not quite enough for portly.
"Mr. Finn, I presume," said Henley, artfully dodging the young man, crossing to the chap in the doorway, and extending his hand. But the plump gentleman blushed.
"Right here, Mr. Henley," said the young man. He stood with hands in his pockets and one foot crossed over the other. "But please meet Mr. Ravi Vikram. He works for us."
Henley required a few moments to recalibrate his assumptions. Thatcher Finn, the director of the Dickens House, was this . . . this slacker? And the gentleman who looked exactly like Pickwick had an Indian name?
Ravi Vikram, who appeared to be in his mid fifties, extended a hand for Henley to shake. "Hope to see you at the show," he said, and when Henley looked puzzled, he added, "In the parlor. This evening."
"Mr. Vikram plays Dickens in a weekly performance," explained Thatcher Finn. "Every Wednesday night in the parlor. Including tonight."
Henley was still trying to sort out the cast of characters. "Mr. Finn," he said finally to the young man. "Forgive me for saying so, but you look so young."
"He is young," said Ravi Vikram, who spoke with an elegant Oxbridge accent. "How old are you, Thatch?"
"Twenty-eight." Finn was clearly accustomed to the question. "Before you ask, I read l
iterature at Durham and got the master's at Trinity, Cambridge."
"So all my arrangements with Jarvis Dedlock—?"
"Terribly sorry about the confusion," said Thatcher Finn. "One of those rather unexpected departures. He dropped by this morning to turn in his keys. You just missed him, in fact."
"That's what Mrs. Pierce said at reception," said Henley.
Thatcher Finn lofted several sheets of paper. "I have printouts of your e-mail messages here, Mr. Henley. You're interested in the plays, are you? Shall I show you the reading room? Ravi, might you pardon us?"
Ravi Vikram waved them away as Thatcher Finn led Henley back to the reception area and through a door into a large, well-equipped modern office.
"For security purposes, the only access to the reading room is through my workplace," said Finn. He guided Henley to a door on the opposite wall.
They descended a steep staircase into a small room with a single table offering comfortable seating for four. Abutting the table was an old-fashioned card catalogue, and except for a desktop computer tucked away in a cubbyhole, the rest of the room was filled with bookshelves.
"If you can't find what you need on your own," said Finn, "Manette Marley will be happy to assist you."
"Manette Marley?"
"Our curator. Here she comes now."
They could hear footsteps on the stairway. A moment later she entered. Manette Marley had ebony skin, dreadlocks, and three small rings in each ear. She smiled and offered a firm handshake.
"Nigerian," she said in a flawless British accent. "Everyone always asks eventually, so there you are. Lovely to have you here, Mr. Henley. You're showing him round, Thatch?"
Her work station was the small cubbyhole attached to the reading room, and she tapped computer keys during Henley's brief tour.
"We keep some of the collection upstairs," Finn explained. "This catalogue will tell us where a particular item might be, including in the display cases. Manette or I can bring you manuscripts for anything that's not published, but I have to ask you to use these when you handle primary materials." He indicated a box of white cotton gloves, similar to what Henley had to wear when he was attending cotillion as a boy. "Even the oil from clean fingers can accelerate the deterioration of paper." Henley began to gather that Thatcher Finn belonged in this job after all.
"I'm trying to learn why Dickens never became a major Victorian playwright. Do you have any ideas?"
"Easy," said Thatcher Finn. "He wasn't very good at drama, was he?"
"Yes, he was," came the voice of the invisible Manette Marley. "He put on plays in his Tavistock Square house for years. And he acted."
Thatcher Finn grinned. "There you are. The cutthroat world of Dickens scholarship, where the discovery of even a greengrocer's bill can generate envy, acrimony, and knives in backs."
Henley soon settled into a comfortable routine. He would read for an hour, then take a break by visiting one of the rooms in the museum overhead. The Dickens House was vertical, with only a couple of rooms on each of the four floors, and by two p.m. Henley had explored his way up to the two bedrooms at the top of the house. The larger one had belonged to Dickens and his wife, Catherine. The smaller bedroom, however, offered a more macabre history: Here young Mary Hogarth, Dickens' sister-in-law, died at age seventeen. A half-dozen other visitors reverently milled about the cozy space, which, like all the other rooms, displayed Dickens artifacts under glass.
Between the bedrooms was a narrow dressing room where Henley suffered a scare. Behind a velvet rope was a square table covered with photographs of the Dickens family, a special exhibit in honor of the bicentennial of Dickens' birth. The red satin tablecloth fell all the way to the floor, and as Henley leaned over the restraining rope to get a closer look at Mary Hogarth's portrait, a hand came out from beneath the table and grabbed his ankle. He yelped. Then a small boy, surely no more than four years old, shouted, "Boo," and poked his head from beneath the tablecloth. In a moment the child's embarrassed mother had forcibly retrieved him and apologized, but it was enough to send Henley back to the quiet of the reading room, where he was working his way through a silly Dickens farce called Is She His Wife?
In his absence a petite woman in her early twenties had arrived. She wore slacks and a T-shirt and tiny reading glasses, and she quietly conferred with Manette before putting on a pair of white gloves and receiving from the archives five letters, still in their envelopes, each stored in a brown paper sleeve. She sat opposite Henley at the only table, and she nodded politely at him before she began her examination of the first document. In embarrassment he closed his open briefcase. The entire contents consisted of one red apple for snacking. Though Henley fully expected to accumulate abundant notes and papers by the end of the month, his briefcase for now served merely as a prop to distinguish him as a scholar, not a tourist.
Within ten minutes he heard loud footsteps clumping down the stairs. Then a young man in cowboy boots entered the room. His face was puffy and glistened with sweat. Henley guessed he was about twenty years old—a college student, and apparently a hungover one.
Manette Marley asked if she could help him.
"Bring me the Forster biography. Chop chop." An American accent.
Henley was mortified by the kid's rudeness. The woman working opposite Henley also glared at the newcomer until he finally responded.
"No breakfast," he said. While Manette went off to find the book he'd requested, the young oaf stood, reeled for a moment, and then fainted. Collapsing onto the table, he sent Henley's briefcase flying before he slid from tabletop to floor in a shower of the documents being examined by the young woman, who shouted and ran for Manette. By the time Henley could reach him, the kid had regained consciousness. "No breakfast," he said again as he struggled to sit up. In a moment Manette Marley arrived. She helped Henley get the young man seated while the woman retrieved her belongings. Just when everything seemed to be returning to normal, Manette gasped.
"Where's the Ternan letter?" she asked. Trembling, she held one of five paper sleeves in her right hand. Only four of the sleeves now contained their original contents. The fifth held a blank sheet of paper folded to duplicate the shape and thickness of a letter. The original Dickens correspondence was missing.
The woman who had been studying the letters was both horrified and defensive. "If that's what's in the sleeve now, then that's what you delivered to me. I haven't taken anything."
"No one will leave this room," said Manette Marley. She glared at all three of them and called for Thatcher Finn. "Clearly this entire scene was a ruse," she said after Finn had arrived. "They were attempting a distraction. I don't know whether all three are involved, or only these two." She gestured at the young man, who was pale and perspiring, but she included Henley in her look.
"I beg your pardon," said Henley. "I had nothing to do with this episode. Please search me immediately."
"And me," said the woman.
"Me too," said the young man. "I haven't got your letter."
All three did, in fact, submit to a search, and no letter surfaced.
"It could have been stolen months ago," said Henley.
"No," said Thatcher Finn. "The lot from the British Library were just here two days ago to examine that letter. They want to do a special exhibit for the Dickens bicentennial. It's the only surviving letter from Charles Dickens to Ellen Ternan, his mistress. Extremely rare. It never should have come out of the archives."
He was clearly upset with Manette Marley, who was distraught in turn. "She said she was looking at watermarks and had to see the originals."
"I am looking at watermarks," said the agitated woman. "I would have called your attention to the substitution immediately if I had seen it. I was just getting to that letter when—" She stopped talking and gestured at the woozy young man who had fainted.
Thatcher Finn closed the reading room until further notice. "We need to see if there are other such substitutions," he said to Manette. "That mean
s a systematic inventory of every letter in the collection."
She nodded. There were hundreds of letters. It would take days.
"Meanwhile," said Thatcher Finn, "I am going to ask all of you to leave your belongings here. I'm not an expert on secret compartments and the like. I want to get the police to examine your possessions properly. Please leave briefcases unlocked."
They all consented.
Before Henley left the premises, Thatcher Finn pulled him aside. "Mr. Henley, I don't believe you could have been involved in this incident, but I have to be sure."
"Of course."
"Why don't you stop by tonight for your briefcase? I'll give you a ticket to Ravi's performance in apology for all the inconvenience."
Henley was touched that the young director, in his first hectic day on the job, would be so thoughtful. That evening he returned for the show and was greeted by Thatcher Finn and Manette Marley at the door. "Mr. Henley," said Finn, now dressed in black jeans and a black T-shirt, "I must apologize. Somehow your briefcase has disappeared."
Henley tried to soften his annoyance. "Weren't the police coming to examine it?"
Finn nodded. "They were coming round at seven o'clock. I left the case on my desk when we closed the house at five. When I returned to reopen at six forty-five, it was gone. I can't find it anywhere."
Henley resisted the temptation to berate him. Jarvis Dedlock, Finn's predecessor as director of the museum, had been sacked because materials were missing. Obviously security here was as sloppy as Finn's clothing. But the young director was embarrassed and bewildered by the disappearance of Henley's property. Resignedly Henley joined the rest of the audience in the parlor to nibble bland cheese squares and sip cheap wine before the show. Of the three dozen people already present, the loudest contingent consisted of American college students traveling with their professor—a brash man with a ponytail.
"No, my wife couldn't join us," boomed the professor. He held a glass of red wine in one hand and pointed with the other. "She was too humiliated by the behavior she witnessed this afternoon." He glared at his target, and Henley followed his gaze to the young man who had fainted that afternoon, now red with embarrassment but defiantly guzzling wine. Interesting, Henley thought. The scholarly young woman was married to this blow-hard professor, and the oaf was one of his students.
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