Drury Lane’s Last Case (35 page)

“Do you think she will——?” said Gordon Rowe hoarsely for the twentieth time.

“I don't know, son.”

And then they heard the scrape of a key in the lock of the front door. They sprang to their feet and dashed into the foyer. The door opened. It was Patience. With a little cry she fell into the Inspector's arms. Rowe waited quietly. Not a word was said. The Inspector was uttering formless little noises that had no meaning, and Patience began to sob. She seemed harried, exhausted; white and drawn, as if she had undergone unbearable suffering. The suit-case lay on the sill, keeping the door open.

Patience looked up, and her eyes widened. “Gordon!”

“Pat.”

The Inspector turned and went into the living-room.

“Pat: I never knew until now——”

“I know, Gordon.”

“I love you, darling. I couldn't stand it——”

“Oh, Gordon.” She placed her hands on his shoulders. “You're a dear sweet boy. I was foolish to do what I did.” He seized her suddenly and held her so tightly that she could feel his heart straining against her breast. They stood that way for a moment, and then they kissed.

Without another word they went into the living-room.

The Inspector whirled; he was all a-grin, and a fresh cigar spurted smoke from his mouth. “All made up, hey?” he chortled. “That's swell, just swell. Gordon, my boy, congratulations. Now, damn it all, we'll have some peace——”

“Father,” whispered Patience; and he stopped and the joy went out of his face. Rowe gripped her lifeless hand; she returned the pressure faintly. “He knows everything? Really?”

“Everything? Who—oh, Lane! Well, that's what he said, Patty.” He came forward and put his long ape-like arms about her. “What the devil's the difference? The point is you've come back, and that's all that counts with me.”

She pushed him back gently. “No. There's something——”

“He told me,” frowned Thumm, “to let him know the minute you returned. Maybe I'd better put in a call.…”

“He did?” Patience's pallor fled; her eyes were suddenly feverish. Both men stared at her as if she had gone insane. “No, I tell you! It's better if we tell him personally. Oh, what a stupid, whining, revolting
fool
I've been!” She stood fiercely biting her lower lip. Then she sprang toward the foyer. “He's in the most horrible danger!” she cried. “Come
on
!”

“But, Pat——” protested Rowe.

“Come on, I tell you. I might have known.… Oh, we may be too late!” and she turned and raced out of the apartment. Rowe and Thumm looked at each other, their faces mirroring a sudden disturbance; and then they grabbed their hats and darted after her.

They squeezed into the roadster and were off. Young Rowe drove; and if he was a gentle bookworm under a lamp, at the wheel he was a fiend. For some time—until they fought clear of the city traffic—they were all silent; Rowe grimly intent on the rushing road ahead, Patience white and, from the peculiar expression in her eyes, faintly nauseated, big Thumm watchful as the Sphinx.

It was he who broke the silence when the city lay behind them and the open road stretched like white elastic before them. “Tell us all about it, Patty,” he said quietly. “Evidently Lane's in trouble. I don't get you at all. You should have told me——”

“Yes,” she said in cracked voice. “It's all my fault.… It's not fair that you shouldn't know, father. And you, Gordon. It's important that both of you know, now. Gordon, faster! There's—there's blood ahead, I tell you!”

Rowe's lips tightened; the roadster fled like a chased hare.

“Toward the end,” began Patience, her nostrils quivering inexplicably, “——but you saw it, too. We had come to the point of saying that the victim and the murderer were the Sedlars. We thought one of them had killed the other in the house. But then it changed. Last week—in the museum—it changed. We knew then that the dead man in the ruins was Hamnet, that the survivor was his brother William, and that William couldn't have been one of the two men in the house on the murder-night; you remember how I proved that: by the keys. So that meant our theory was exploded; we knew the victim, Hamnet Sedlar, but we didn't know the first visitor to the house that night, the man who tied up Maxwell, the hacker.… And when that struck me, I went back in my mind to things half-forgotten, never wholly grasped at the time they happened or I saw them. It was like a—like a streak of lightning.”

She kept her eyes on the road ahead. “The whole problem resolved itself, then, into discovering if possible the identity of that first visitor to the house. What had happened? After leaving Maxwell bound and gagged in the garage, this man had re-entered the house, using Maxwell's duplicate key. The door had shut behind him automatically, due to its spring lock. He had taken the small axe from the wood-box in the kitchen and attacked the study, obviously on the theory that the study would be the most likely hiding-place for the document which he was seeking. He hadn't the faintest idea where the document might have been hidden in the study: witness his indiscriminate attack on all sorts of objects. First, presumably, he had looked through the books, thinking the paper might be in one of them. Not finding it, he had attacked the furniture with the axe—the wood-pannelled walls, the floor. At precisely midnight, we know from the position of the hands, he shattered the clock, I suppose thinking it might have been the repository of the paper. But he was completely baffled; he could not find it in the study. Nor in the rest of the ground floor. So he went upstairs to William Sedlar's bedroom as the next most likely location.”

“We know all that, Pat,” said Thumm, looking at her strangely.

“Please, father.… We know he was in the bedroom at twelve-twenty-four from the smashed bedroom clock. Now Hamnet was killed in that house at twelve-twenty-six, according to his smashed wrist-watch—only two minutes after the hacker shattered the bedroom clock upstairs' The question was: At what time had Hamnet entered the house? He had to unlock the door, go to the study, see the wreckage there, go to the hollow panel above the bookshelves, take out the document, descend the ladder, perhaps examine the paper, then encounter his murderer, struggle, and be killed. Certainly this involved more than two minutes! Certainly, then, Hamnet must have entered the house
while the hacker was still in the house
.”

“Well, well?” growled Thumm.

“I'm getting there,” said Patience dully. “We know from William Sedlar's last statement that Hamnet was the one who wanted the document only to destroy it. What would Hamnet do, then, when he finally did lay hands on it in the study? Proceed immediately to destroy it. How? Well, by fire as the surest and quickest means. He must have struck a match, holding the document in his hand, and started to touch the flame to the paper.” She sighed. “This is only a theory, of course, and accomplishes nothing except to clear up one point.
It explains the presence of the slashes on Hamnet's wrist-watch and wrist
. For if at the moment Hamnet applied the match to the document the hacker came downstairs from the bedroom and saw what was happening, he would naturally—being interested in the salvation, not the destruction, of the document—attack Hamnet to
prevent
its destruction by fire. Therefore he would have swung like a flash at Hamnet's hand with the axe he still carried, striking Hamnet's wrist and wrist-watch, causing the vandal probably to drop both document and match. Undoubtedly Hamnet then put up a fight; in the struggle the hacker shot him dead. The struggle probably started in the study, where the hacker dropped the axe, and moved by degrees into the hall, where we found Hamnet's shattered monocle and where Hamnet was probably shot to death.… The hacker dragged Hamnet's body downstairs into the cellar nor knowing the bomb was there, and then—if the document hadn't been consumed before he struck at Hamnet's wrist—took the document and left the house. The important thing about the slash and the struggle is that the hacker was willing to go to any lengths—physical combat,
murder
—to preserve that document.”

The steep ascent to the cliff-tops on which The Hamlet was perched occupied young Rowe's whole attention; and Patience fell silent as the young man skilfully wrestled the roadster around the hairpin turns. Then suddenly they came to the outpost of the estate; and were passed across the quaint little bridge. The tyres sang against the gravel road.

“I still don't see,” said Rowe with a frown, “even if all this is true, Pat, where it gets you. You're still as far from the murderer as you were before.”

“You think so?” cried Patience. She closed her eyes and winced, like a child swallowing bitter medicine. “I tell you it's all clear as—as sin! The man's characteristics—his characteristics, Gordon. They're betrayed
by what happened in the house
.”

The two men looked at her blankly. They were through the main gates now, bowling along the curving main driveway. The gnomish little figure of Quacey, his hump a leathery knob on his shoulders, popped out of a clump of syringa, stared, then broke into a thousand-wrinkled grin, waved, and darted into the road.

Rowe stopped the car. “Quacey!” said Patience in a stiff voice, half-rising between the two men. “Is—is Mr. Lane all right?”

“Hallo, Miss Thumm!” squeaked Quacey cheerfully. “He's better to-day, thank you. Feeling almost chipper. Inspector, I was just going to mail this letter to you!”

“Letter?” echoed Thumm, puzzled. “That's funny. Let's have it.” Quacey handed him a square large envelope and he tore an edge off.

“Letter?” said Patience in the blankest of voices, and she sat down between the two men again and stared up at the blue sky. Once she murmured: “Thank God, he's all right.”

The Inspector read it silently; and then, with a deep pucker between his brows, read it aloud:

“D
EAR
I
NSPECTOR
:

“I trust Patience has returned none the worse for her harrowing experience. My ‘personal' will bring her safely back to you, I know. While you are waiting, you may wish to distract your mind by learning the answers to some of the mysteries which have confounded your investigation of the case.

“The chief puzzle, as Patience and Gordon both remarked, is certainly this: Why should a sane, intelligent, and cultured man like Hamnet Sedlar have wished to destroy an authentic holograph so rare, so precious, so irreplaceable, as a letter written in the immortal hand of William Shakespeare? I can tell you the answer, having solved the mystery in my own way.

“The letter, written to an ancester of Sir John Humphrey-Bond's, evidently a dear friend of the poet's, besides saying that the writer—Shakespeare—suspected he was being slowly poisoned, actually added in Shakespeare's own script the
name
of the suspected poisoner.… This is a strange, strange world. The man Shakespeare accused of poisoning him was named
Hamnet Sedlar
. Hamnet Sedlar, Inspector, from whom the brothers Hamnet and William Sedlar are directly descended!

“Strange, eh? It is now comprehensible why this student, this man of culture, this earnest and enlightened antiquarian, this proud Englishman, should against every dictate of education and scientific instinct have desired to keep from the world, even at the expense of what will become one of the world's dearest treasures, the knowledge that the immortal Shakespeare, the Bard of Avon, whom Carlyle characterized as ‘the greatest of intellects' and Ben Jonson as ‘not of an age but for all time,' revered and worshipped by over three centuries of sensitive mankind, was murdered by Hamnet Sedlar's own ancestor; a forbear who—horror of horrors—bore his own name! Some will find in his passion a touch of madness, and others will not believe; but pride of ancestry is, like old age, an incurable disease, and it consumes itself in its own cold flame.

“William was not touched with this disease; in him the scientific spirit rises triumphant. But he too was afflicted with the touch of earth; he wanted the document not for posterity but for himself. The third man, who entered the case as a protagonist for the first and only time on the night of the murder, was willing to take even human life to preserve the document for the world.

“Please tell Patience, Gordon, and whoever else may be interested—the truth will be known soon enough, old friend—that they may have no fears about the safety of the document. I have myself seen to it that it is on its way to England where it belongs, to become the property of England legally and the world spiritually; since its legitimate owner, the late Humphrey-Bond, is dead without issue or heirs and his properties have reverted to the Crown. If I have had anything to do with this work of restoration, Inspector, I know my friends will always think of me kindly. I prefer to think, in the customary egotism of all men, that even in the twilight of my life I have been of some service to humanity.

“Patience and Gordon, if I may presume to intrude an old man's concern into your very intimate affairs—I think you will both be happy together. You have a communion of interests, you are both intelligent young people, and I know that you will respect each other. May God bless you. I have not forgotten you.

“My dear Inspector, I am old and so tired that there no longer seems … I shall be going away soon, I think, for a long rest; which is what prompts this inordinately long letter. And since I leave unattended, as it were, and without your knowledge, I shall say to myself these shining farewell words:

‘They say he parted well, and paid his score;

And so, God be with him!'

“Until we meet again——

“D
RURY
L
ANE
”

The Inspector wrinkled his flat nose. “I don't see——”