‘The parlor where Lord Hull met with his wife and sons 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, Jory 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 parlor, Jory was up and on the run.’
Lestrade shot a startled glance at Holmes; Holmes gave the inspector a cool, ironic look in return. I did not understand those looks then, nor give them much thought at all, if the whole truth be told. I did not fully understand the wider implications of the picture I was drawing for yet awhile. I was too wrapped up in my own re-creation, 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 the price a man pays for a lifetime of rich food and strong drink. If you harbor any doubts when I’ve done, I shall parade a dozen gout sufferers before you, and each one will show the same ambulatory symptoms I now intend to demonstrate. Please notice above all how fixed my attention is . . . and where. ‘
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 the loss of balance; then (if the sufferer lives long enough), the characteristic stoop brought on by always looking down.’
‘Jory would have been very aware of how his father fixed his attention when he walked from place to place,’ I said. ‘As a result, what happened this morning was diabolically simple. When Jory reached the morning room, he peeped out the door, saw his father studying his feet and the tip of his cane — just as always — and knew he was safe. He stepped out, right in front of his unseeing father, and simply nipped into the study. The door, Lestrade informs us, was unlocked, and really, how great would the risk have been? They were in the hall together for no more than three seconds, and probably a little less.’ I paused. ‘That hall floor is marble, isn’t it? He must have kicked off his shoes.’
‘He was wearing slippers,’ Lestrade said in a strangely calm tone of voice, and for the second time, his eyes met Holmes’s.
‘Ah,’ I said. ‘I see. Jory gained the study well ahead of his father and hid behind his cunning stage-flat. Then he withdrew the dagger and waited. His father reached the end of the hall. Jory heard Stanley call down to him, and heard his father call back that he was fine. Then Lord Hull entered his study for the last time . . . closed the door . . . and locked it.’
They were both looking at me intently, and I understood some of the godlike power Holmes must have felt at moments like these, telling others what only he could know. And yet, I must repeat that it is a feeling I should not have wanted to have too often. I believe the urge to repeat such a feeling would have corrupted most men — men with less iron in their souls than was possessed by my friend Sherlock Holmes.
‘Old Keg-Legs would have made himself as small as possible before the locking-up happened, perhaps knowing (or only suspecting) 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.’
‘Stanley says his eyes were top-hole,’ Lestrade said. ‘One of the first things I asked.’
‘So he looked round,’ I said, and suddenly I could see it, and I suppose this was also the way it was with Holmes; this reconstruction which, while based only upon facts and deduction, seemed to be half a vision. ‘He saw nothing to alarm him; 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 and crannies even on such a day as this.
‘Satisfied that he was alone, 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 landed on it — a man in whom gout is well-advanced does not sit so much as position himself over a soft spot and then drop onto 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 most 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 parlor 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 several minutes after the key was turned and the bolt drawn; you said so yourself, and I assume you have enough testimony on that point not to doubt it. Yet it can only be a dozen long 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, a short time, which must have seemed — to Jory Hull, at least — almost 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 differing colors of the parchment would have been all the clew he needed.
‘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 the old devil 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 cruelest practical jokes of all time . . . but he would have gone as God’s victim or his own, and not Jory Hull’s.’
Yet a third time that queer look, half-amused and half-revolted, 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.