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Less than five minutes later a shriek arose from the study. Stephen ran out of the music room, where he had been plinking out isolated notes on the piano. Jory met him at the study door. William was already halfway downstairs and saw them breaking in when Stanley, the valet, came out of Lord Hull's dressing room and went to the gallery railing for the second time. Stanley has testified to seeing Stephen Hull burst into the study; to seeing William reach the foot of the stairs and almost fall on the marble; to seeing Lady Hull come from the dining-room doorway with a pitcher of milk still in one hand. Moments later the rest of the servants had gathered.
"Lord Hull was slumped over his writing-desk with the three brothers standing by. His eyes were open, and the look in them… I believe it was surprise. Again, you are free to accept or reject my opinion just as you like, but I tell you it looked very much like surprise to me. Clutched in his hands was his will… the old one. Of the new one there was no sign. And there was a dagger in his back."
With this, Lestrade rapped for the driver to go on.
We entered the house between two constables as stone-faced as Buckingham Palace sentinels. Here to begin with was a very long hall, floored in black and white marble tiles like a chessboard. They led to an open door at the end, where two more constables were posted: the entrance to the infamous study. To the left were the stairs, to the right two doors: the parlour and the music room, I guessed.
"The family is gathered in the parlour," Lestrade said.
"Good," Holmes said pleasantly. "But perhaps Watson and I might first have a look at the scene of the crime?"
"Shall I accompany you?"
"Perhaps not," Holmes said. "Has the body been removed?"
"It was still here when I left for your lodgings, but by now it almost certainly will be gone."
"Very good."
Holmes started away. I followed. Lestrade called, "Holmes!"
Holmes turned, eyebrows raised.
"No secret panels, no secret doors. For the third time, take my word or not, as you like."
"I believe I'll wait until… " Holmes began and then his breath began to hitch. He scrambled in his pocket, found a napkin probably carried absently away from the eating-house where we had dined the previous evening, and sneezed mightily into it. I looked down and saw a large, scarred tomcat, as out of place here in this grand hall as would have been one of those urchins of whom I had been thinking earlier, twining about Holmes's legs. One of its ears was laid back against its scarred skull. The other was gone, lost in some long-ago alley battle, I supposed.
Holmes sneezed repeatedly and kicked out at the cat. It went with a reproachful backward look rather than with the angry hiss one might have expected from such an old campaigner. Holmes looked at Lestrade over the napkin with reproachful, watery eyes. Lestrade, not in the least put out of countenance, thrust his head forward and gri
"How long have you suffered this affliction, old fellow?" I asked. I was a bit alarmed.
"Always," he said, and sneezed again. The word allergy was hardly known all those years ago, but that, of course, was his problem.
"Do you want to leave?" I asked. I had once seen a case of near asphyxiation as the result of such an aversion, this one to sheep but otherwise similar in all respects.
"He'd like that," Holmes said. I did not need him to tell me whom he meant. Holmes sneezed once more (a large red welt was appearing on his normally pale forehead) and then we passed between the constables at the study door. Holmes closed it behind him.
The room was long and relatively narrow. It was at the end of something like a wing, the main house spreading to either side from an area roughly three-quarters of the way down the hall. There were windows on two sides of the study and it was bright enough in spite of the gray, rainy day. The walls were dotted with colourful shipping charts in handsome teak frames, and among them was mounted an equally handsome set of weather instruments in a brass-bound, glass-fronted case. It contained an anemometer (Hull had the little whirling cups mounted on one of the roofpeaks, I supposed), two thermometers (one registering the outdoor temperature and the other that of the study), and a barometer much like the one which had fooled Holmes into believing the bad weather was about to break. I noticed the glass was still rising, then looked outside. The rain was falling harder than ever, rising glass or no rising glass. We believe we know a great lot, with our instruments and things, but I was old enough then to believe we don't know half as much as we think we do, and old enough now to believe we never will.
Holmes and I both turned to look at the door. The bolt was torn free, but leaning inward, as it should have been. The key was still in the study-side lock, and still turned.
Holmes's eyes, watering as they were, were everywhere at once, noting, cataloguing, storing.
"You are a little better," I said.
"Yes," he said, lowering the napkin and stuffing it indifferently back into his coat pocket. "He may have loved 'em, but he apparently didn't allow 'em in here. Not on a regular basis, anyway. What do you make of it, Watson?"
Although my eyes were slower than his, I was also looking around. The double windows were all locked with thumb-turns and small brass side-bolts. None of the panes had been broken. Most of the framed charts and the box of weather instruments were between these windows. The other two walls were filled with books. There was a small coal-stove but no fireplace; the murderer hadn't come down the chimney like Father Christmas, not unless he was narrow enough to fit through a stovepipe and clad in an asbestos suit, for the stove was still very warm.
The desk stood at one end of this long, narrow, well-lit room; the opposite end was a pleasantly bookish area, not quite a library, with two high-backed upholstered chairs and a coffee-table between them. On this table was a random stack of volumes. The floor was covered with a Turkish rug. If the murderer had come through a trap-door, I hadn't the slightest idea how he'd gotten back under that rug without disarranging it… and it was not disarranged, not in the slightest: the shadows of the coffee-table legs lay across it without even a hint of a ripple.
"Did you believe it, Watson?" Holmes asked, snapping me out of what was almost a hypnotic trance. Something… something about that coffee-table…
"Believe what, Holmes?"
"That all four of them simply walked out of the parlour, in four different directions, four minutes before the murder?"
"I don't know," I said faintly.
"I don't believe it; not for a mo-" He broke off. "Watson! Are you all right?"
"No," I said in a voice I could hardly hear myself. I collapsed into one of the library chairs. My heart was beating too fast. I couldn't seem to catch my breath. My head was pounding; my eyes seemed to have suddenly grown too large for their sockets. I could not take them from the shadows of the coffee-table legs upon the rug. "I am most… definitely not… all right."
At that moment Lestrade appeared in the study doorway. "If you've looked your fill, H-" He broke off. "What the devil's the matter with Watson?"
"I believe," said Holmes in a calm, measured voice, "that Watson has solved the case. Have you, Watson?"
I nodded my head. Not the entire case, perhaps, but most of it. I knew who; I knew how.
"Is it this way with you, Holmes?" I asked. "When you… see?"
"Yes," he said, "though I usually manage to keep my feet."
"Watson's solved the case?" Lestrade said impatiently. "Bah! Watson's offered a thousand solutions to a hundred cases before this, Holmes, as you very well know, and all of them wrong. It's his bête noire. Why, I remember just this last summer-"