‘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 grinned like a monkey. ‘Ten, Holmes,’ he said.
‘Ten. House is full of felines. Hull loved em.’ And with that he walked off.
‘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 colorful 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, and 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 parlor, 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 — ‘
‘I know more about Watson than you ever shall,’ Holmes said, ‘and this time he has hit upon it.
I know the look.’ He began to sneeze again; the cat with the missing ear had wandered into the room through the door, which Lestrade had left open. It moved directly toward Holmes with an expression of what seemed to be affection on its ugly face.
‘If this is how it is for you,’ I said, ‘I’ll never envy you again, Holmes. My heart should burst.’
‘One becomes inured even to insight,’ Holmes said, with not the slightest trace of conceit in his voice. ‘Out with it, then . . . or shall we bring in the suspects, as in the last chapter of a detective novel?’
‘No!’ I cried in horror. I had seen none of them; I had no urge to. ‘Only I think I must show you how it was done. If you and Inspector Lestrade will only step out into the hall for a moment . . . ‘
The cat reached Holmes and jumped into his lap, purring like the most satisfied creature on earth.
Holmes exploded into a perfect fusillade of sneezes. The red patches on his face, which had begun to fade, burst out afresh. He pushed the cat away and stood up.
‘Be quick, Watson, so we can leave this damned place,’ he said in a muffled voice, and left the room with his shoulders in an uncharacteristic hunch, his head down, and with not a single look back. Believe me when I say that a little of my heart went with him.
Lestrade stood leaning against the door, his wet coat steaming slightly, his lips parted in a detestable grin. ‘Shall I take Holmes’s new admirer, Watson?’
‘Leave it,’ I said, ‘and close the door when you go out.’
‘I’d lay a fiver you’re wasting our time, old man,’ Lestrade said, but I saw something different in his eyes: if I’d offered to take him up on the wager, he would have found a way to squirm out of it.
‘Close the door,’ I repeated. ‘I shan’t be long.’
He closed the door. I was alone in Hull’s study . . . except for the cat, of course, which was now sitting in the middle of the rug, tail curled neatly about its paws, green eyes watching me.