The Big Book of Sherlock Holmes Stories (15 page)

Jory Hull had painted the nothing under his father's coffee-table; had crouched behind the nothing as his father entered the room, locked the door, and sat at his desk with his two wills, the new and the old. And when he began to rise again from his seat, he rushed out from behind the nothing, dagger in hand.

“He was the only one who could execute such a piece of realism,” I said, this time running my hand down the face of the canvas. We could all hear the low rasping sound it made, like the purr of a very old cat. “The only one who could execute it, and the only one who could hide behind it: Jory Hull, who was no more than five feet tall, bow-legged, slump-shouldered.

“As Holmes said, the surprise of the new will was no surprise. Even if the old man had been secretive about the possibility of cutting the relatives out of the will, which he wasn't, only simpletons could have mistaken the import of the visit from the solicitor and, more important, the assistant. It takes two witnesses to make a will a valid document at Chancery. What Holmes said about some people preparing for disaster was very true. A canvas as perfect as this was not made overnight, or in a month. You may find he had it ready—should it need to be used—for as long as a year—”

“Or five,” Holmes interpolated.

“I suppose. At any rate, when Hull announced that he wanted to see his family in the parlour this morning, I suppose Jory knew the time had come. After his father had gone to bed last night, he would have come down here and mounted his canvas. I suppose he may have put down the false shadows at the same time, but if I had been him I should have tip-toed in here for another peek at the glass this morning, before the parlour gathering, just to make sure it was still rising. If the door was locked, I suppose he filched the key from his father's pocket and returned it later.”

“Wasn't locked,” Lestrade said shortly. “As a rule he kept it closed to keep the cats out, but rarely locked it.”

“As for the shadows, they are just strips of felt, as you now see. His eye was good; they are about where they would have been at eleven this morning…if the glass had been right.”

“If he expected the sun to be shining, why did he put down shadows at all?” Lestrade grumped. “Sun puts 'em down as a matter of course, just in case you've never noticed your own, Watson.”

Here I was at a loss. I looked at Holmes, who seemed grateful to have
any
part in the answer.

“Don't you see? That is the greatest irony of all! If the sun had shone as the glass suggested it would, the canvas would have
blocked
the shadows. Painted shadow-legs don't cast them, you know. He was caught by shadows on a day when there were none because he was afraid he would be caught by none on a day when his father's barometer said they would almost certainly be everywhere else in the room.”

“I still don't understand how Jory got in here without Hull seeing him,” Lestrade said.

“That puzzled me as well,” Holmes said—dear old Holmes! I doubt if it puzzled him a bit, but that was what he said. “Watson?”

“The parlor where the four of them sat has a door which communicates with the music room, does it not?”

“Yes,” Lestrade said, “and the music room has a door which communicates with Lady Hull's morning room, which is next in line as one goes toward the back of the house. But from the morning room one can only go back into the hall, Doctor Watson. If there had been
two
doors into Hull's study, I should hardly have come after Holmes on the run as I did.”

He said this last in tones of faint self-justification.

“Oh, he went back into the hall, all right,” I said, “but his father didn't see him.”

“Rot!”

“I'll demonstrate,” I said, and went to the writing-desk, where the dead man's cane still leaned. I picked it up and turned toward them. “The very instant Lord Hull left the parlour, Jory was up and on the run.”

Lestrade shot a startled glance at Holmes; Holmes gave the Inspector a cool, ironic look in
return. And I must say I did not understand the wider implications of the picture I was drawing for yet a while. I was too wrapped up in my own recreation, I suppose.

“He nipped through the first connecting door, ran across the music room, and entered Lady Hull's morning-room. He went to the hall door then and peeked out. If Lord Hull's gout had gotten so bad as to have brought on gangrene, he would have progressed no more than a quarter of the way down the hall, and that is optimistic. Now mark me, Inspector Lestrade, and I will show you how a man has spent a lifetime eating rich foods and imbibing the heavy waters ends up paying for it. If you doubt it, I shall bring you a dozen gout sufferers who will show you exactly what I'm going to show you now.”

With that I began to stump slowly across the room toward them, both hands clamped tightly on the ball of the cane. I would raise one foot quite high, bring it down, pause, and then draw the other leg along. Never did my eyes look up. Instead, they alternated between the cane and that forward foot.

“Yes,” Holmes said quietly. “The good Doctor is exactly right, Inspector Lestrade. The gout comes first; then, (if the sufferer lives long enough, that is), there comes the characteristic stoop brought on by always looking down.”

“He knew it, too,” I said. “Lord Hull was afflicted with worsening gout for five years. Jory would have marked the way he had come to walk, always looking down at the cane and his own feet. Jory peeped out of the morning room, saw he was safe, and simply nipped into the study. Three seconds and no more, if he was nimble.” I paused. “That hall floor is marble, isn't it? He must have kicked off his shoes.”

“He was wearing slippers,” Lestrade said curtly.

“Ah. I see. Jory gained the study and slipped behind his stage-flat. Then he withdrew the dagger and waited. His father reached the end of the hall. He heard Stanley call down to his father. That must have been a bad moment for him. Then his father called back that he was fine, came into the room and closed the door.”

They were both looking at me intently, and I understood some of the godlike power Holmes must have felt at moments like that, telling others what only you could know. And yet, I must repeat that it is a feeling I shouldn't have wanted to have too often. I believe the urge for such a feeling would have corrupted most men—men with less iron in their souls than was possessed by my friend Sherlock Holmes is what I mean.

“Jory—old Keg-Legs, old Stoat-Belly—would have made himself as small as possible before the locking-up went on, knowing that his father would have one good look round before turning the key and shooting the bolt. He may have been gouty and going a bit soft about the edges, but that doesn't mean he was going blind.”

“His valet says his eyes were quite good,” Lestrade said. “One of the first things I asked.”

“Bravo, Inspector,” Holmes said softly, and Inspector Lestrade favored him with a jaundiced glance.

“So he looked round,” I said, and suddenly I could
see
it, and I supposed this was also the way with Holmes; this reconstruction which, while based only upon facts and deduction, seemed to be half a vision, “and he saw nothing but the study as it always was, empty save for himself. It is a remarkably open room, I see no closet door, and with the windows on both sides, there are no dark nooks even on such a day as this.

“Satisfied, he closed the door, turned his key, and shot the bolt. Jory would have heard him stump his way across to the desk. He would have heard the heavy thump and wheeze of the chair-cushion as his father sat down—a man in whom gout is well-advanced does not sit so much as position himself over a soft spot and then drop into it, seat-first—and then Jory would at last have risked a look out.”

I glanced at Holmes. “Go on, old man,” he said warmly. “You are doing splendidly. Absolutely first rate.” I saw he meant it. Thousands would have called him cold, and they would not have been wrong, precisely, but he also had a large heart. Holmes simply protected it better than some men do.

“Thank you. Jory would have seen his father
put his cane aside, and place the papers—the two packets of papers—on the blotter. He did not kill his father immediately, although he could have done; that's what's so gruesomely pathetic about this business, and that's why I wouldn't go into that parlour where they are for a thousand pounds. I wouldn't go in unless you and your men dragged me.”

“How do you know he didn't do it immediately?” Lestrade asked.

“The scream came at least two minutes after the key was turned and the bolt drawn; I assume you have enough testimony on that to believe it. Yet it can only be seven paces from door to desk. Even for a gouty man like Lord Hull, it would have taken half a minute, forty seconds at the outside, to cross to the chair and sit down. Add fifteen seconds for him to prop his cane where you found it, and put his wills on the blotter.

“What happened then? What happened during that last minute or two, which must have seemed—to Jory Hull, at least—all but endless? I believe Lord Hull simply sat there, looking from one will to the other. Jory would have been able to tell the difference between the two easily enough; the parchment of the older would have been darker.

“He knew his father intended to throw one of them into the stove.

“I believe he waited to see which one it would be.

“There was, after all, a chance that his father was only having a cruel practical joke at his family's expense. Perhaps he would burn the new will, and put the old one back in the safe. Then he could have left the room and told his family the new will was safely put away. Do you know where it is, Lestrade? The safe?”

“Five of the books in that case swing out,” Lestrade said briefly, pointing to a shelf in the library area.

“Both family and old man would have been satisfied then; the family would have known their earned inheritances were safe, and the old man would have gone to his grave believing he had perpetrated one of the cruellest practical jokes of all time…but he would have gone as God's victim or his own, and not Jory Hull's.”

Again, that look I did not understand passed between Holmes and Lestrade.

“Myself, I rather think the old man was only savoring the moment, as a man may savor the prospect of an after-dinner drink in the middle of the afternoon or a sweet after a long period of abstinence. At any rate, the minute passed, and Lord Hull began to rise…but with the darker parchment in his hand, and facing the stove rather than the safe. Whatever his hopes may have been, there was no hesitation on Jory's part when the moment came. He burst from hiding, crossed the distance between the coffee-table and the desk in an instant, and plunged the knife into his father's back before he was fully up.

“I suspect the autopsy will show the thrust clipped through the heart's upper ventricle and into the lung—that would explain the quantity of blood expelled from the mouth. It also explains why Lord Hull was able to scream before he died, and that's what did for Mr. Jory Hull.”

“Explain,” Lestrade said.

“A locked room mystery is a bad business unless you intend to pass murder off as a case of suicide,” I said, looking at Holmes. He smiled and nodded at this maxim of his. “The last thing Jory would have wanted was for things to look as they did…the locked room, the locked windows, the man with a knife in him where the man himself never could have put it. I think he had never forseen his father dying with such a squall. His plan was to stab him, burn the new will, riffle the desk, unlock one of the windows, and escape that way. He would have entered the house by another door, resumed his seat under the stairs, and then, when the body was finally discovered, it would have looked like robbery.”

“Not to Hull's solicitor,” Lestrade said.

“He might well have kept his silence,” Holmes said, and then added brightly, “I'll bet Jory intended to open one of the windows and add a few tracks, too. I think we all agree it would have seemed a suspiciously convenient murder, under the circumstances, but even if the solicitor spoke up, nothing could have been
proved
.”

“By screaming, Lord Hull spoiled everything,” I said, “as he had been spoiling things all his life. The house was roused. Jory, probably in a panic, probably only stood there like a nit.

“It was Stephen Hull who saved the day, of course—or at least Jory's alibi, the one which had him sitting on the bench under the stairs when his father was murdered. He rushed down the hall from the music room, smashed the door open, and must have hissed for Jory to get over to the desk with him, at once, so it would look as if they had broken in toget—”

I broke off, thunderstruck. At last I understood the glances between Holmes and Lestrade. I understood what they must have seen from the moment I showed them the trick hiding place: it could not have been done alone. The killing, yes, but the rest…

“Stephen testified that he and Jory met at the study door,” I said slowly. “That he, Stephen, burst it in and they entered together, discovered the body together. He lied. He might have done it to protect his brother, but to lie so well when one doesn't know what has happened seems…seems…”

“Impossible,” Holmes said, “is the word for which you are searching, Watson.”

“Then Jory and Stephen were in on it together,” I said. “They planned it together…and in the eyes of the law, both are guilty of their father's murder! My God!”

“Not both of them, my dear Watson,” Holmes said in a tone of curious gentleness. “
All
of them.”

I could only gape.

He nodded. “You have shown remarkable insight this morning, Watson. For once in your life you have burned with a deductive heat I'll wager you'll never generate again. My cap is off to you, dear fellow, as it is to any man who is able to transcend his normal nature, no matter how briefly. But in one way you have remained the same dear chap as you've always been: while you understand how good people can be, you have no understanding of how black they
may
be.”