I felt in my pockets and found my own souvenir from last night’s dinner — men on their own are rather untidy people, I fear, but there was a reason for the bread other than general slovenliness. I almost always kept a crust in one pocket or the other, for it amused me to feed the pigeons that landed outside the very window where Holmes had been sitting when Lestrade drove up.
‘Pussy,’ said I, and put the bread beneath the coffee-table — the coffee-table to which Lord Hull would have presented his back when he sat down with his two wills, the wretched old one and the even more wretched new one. ‘Puss-puss-puss.’
The cat rose and walked languidly beneath the table to investigate the crust.
I went to the door and opened it. ‘Holmes! Lestrade! Quickly!’
They came in.
‘Step over here,’ I said, and walked to the coffee-table.
Lestrade looked about and began to frown, seeing nothing; Holmes, of course, began to sneeze again. ‘Can’t we have that wretched thing out of here?” he managed from behind the table-napkin, which was now quite soggy.
‘Of course,’ said I. ‘But where is the wretched thing, Holmes?’
A startled expression filled his wet eyes. Lestrade whirled, walked toward Hull’s writing-desk, and peered behind it. Holmes knew his reaction should not have been so violent if the cat had been on the far side of the room. He bent and looked beneath the coffee-table, saw nothing but the rug and the bottom row of the two bookcases opposite, and straightened up again. If his eyes had not been spouting like fountains, he should have seen all then; he was, after all, right on top of it. But one must also give credit where credit is due, and the illusion was devilishly good. The empty space beneath his father’s coffee-table had been Jory Hull’s masterpiece.
‘I don’t — ‘ Holmes began, and then the cat, who found my friend much more to its liking than any stale crust of bread, strolled out from beneath the table and began once more to twine ecstatically about his ankles. Lestrade had returned, and his eyes grew so wide I thought they might actually fall out. Even having understood the trick, I myself was amazed. The scarred tomcat seemed to be materializing out of thin air; head, body, white-tipped tail last.
It rubbed against Holmes’s leg, purring as Holmes sneezed.
‘That’s enough,’ I said. ‘You’ve done your job and may leave.’
I picked it up, took it to the door (getting a good scratch for my pains), and tossed it unceremoniously into the hall. I shut the door behind it.
Holmes was sitting down. ‘My God,’ he said in a nasal, clogged voice. Lestrade was incapable of any speech at all. His eyes never left the table and the faded Turkish rug beneath its legs: an empty space that had somehow given birth to a cat.
‘I should have seen,’ Holmes was muttering. ‘Yes . . . but you . . . how did you understand so quickly? ‘ I detected the faintest hurt and pique in that voice, and forgave it at once.
‘It was those,’ I said, and pointed at the rug.
‘Of course!’ Holmes nearly groaned. He slapped his welted forehead. ‘Idiot! I’m a perfect idiot!’
‘Nonsense,’ I said tartly. ‘With a houseful of cats — and one who has apparently picked you out for a special friend — I suspect you were seeing ten of everything.’
‘What about the rug?’ Lestrade asked impatiently. ‘It’s very nice, I’ll grant, and probably expensive, but — ‘
‘Not the rug,’ I said. ‘The shadows.’
‘Show him, Watson,’ Holmes said wearily, lowering the napkin into his lap.
So I bent and picked one of them off the floor.
Lestrade sat down in the other chair, hard, like a man who has been unexpectedly punched.
‘I kept looking at them, you see,’ I said, speaking in a tone which could not help being apologetic.
This seemed all wrong. It was Holmes’s job to explain the whos and hows at the end of the investigation. Yet while I saw that he now understood everything, I knew he would refuse to speak in this case. And I suppose a part of me — the part that knew I would probably never have another chance to do something like this — wanted to be the one to explain. And the cat was rather a nice touch, I must say. A magician could have done no better with a rabbit and a top-hat.
‘I knew something was wrong, but it took a moment for it to sink in. This room is extremely bright, but today it’s pouring down rain. Look around and you’ll see that not a single object in this room casts a shadow . . . except for these table-legs.’
Lestrade uttered an oath.
‘It’s rained for nearly a week,’ I said, ‘but both Holmes’s barometer and the late Lord Hull’s’ —
I pointed to it — ‘said that we could expect sun today. In fact, it seemed a sure thing. So he added the shadows as a final touch.’
‘Who did?’
‘Jory Hull,’ Holmes said in that same weary tone. ‘Who else?’
I bent down and reached my hand beneath the right end of the coffee-table. It disappeared into thin air, just as the cat had appeared. Lestrade uttered another startled oath. I tapped the back of the canvas stretched tightly between the forward legs of the coffee-table. The books and the rug bulged and rippled, and the illusion, nearly perfect as it had been, was instantly dispelled.
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, and at last had rushed out from behind the nothing, dagger in hand.
‘He was the only one who could execute such an extraordinary 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 parlor this morning, I imagine 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 faux shadows at the same time, but if I had been Jory I should have tip-toed in here for another peek at the glass this morning, before the previously announced parlor 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 laconically. ‘As a rule he kept the door shut 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 puzzles me as well,’ Holmes said — dear old Holmes! I doubt that it puzzled him a bit, but that was what he said. ‘Watson?’