And Then There Was No One

Chapter Four

The house was full. While the others were shown to a half-dozen reserved end-of-row seats, one of which, Umberto Eco’s I suppose, remained empty throughout, Jochen and I manoeuvred our tiptoeing way to the platform along a centre parting in which a half-dozen young people sat cross-legged on the wooden floor with bottles of mineral water on their laps. No applause as yet. Jochen spread his notes in front of him, tapped the microphone and, without, as they say, further ado, started to introduce me in German. Some laughter (I don’t know why), a smattering of applause at the end. He turned to me with an encouraging smile. I removed my glasses – I look better with but read better without them – opened my much-fingered copy of The Unpublished Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes, took a last unfocused look round the hall, lowered my gaze and began:

The Giant Rat of Sumatra

‘It has long been an axiom of mine,’ said Sherlock Holmes, wearily glancing up from the formidable web of beakers and test-tubes which seethed and bubbled before his eyes, ‘that it is when we indulge ourselves in some pursuit of pure relaxation, not when we are at our labours, tedious and repetitive though they may be, that we are most receptive to the gnawing torments of ennui.’

I turned my head in his direction. Having just re-entered the lodgings in Baker Street that we shared, from several hours passed at the bedside of a gravely ill patient of mine, I had at once buried myself in the day’s newspapers, perusing them from cover to cover, and had in consequence paid little attention to either my companion or his activities. I contemplated him now. He had evidently chosen to perform one of his amateur experiments with acids and sulphates and, as was all too often true of his intense but also intensely volatile temperament, had come to tire of the pastime with the same sudden swiftness as he had undoubtedly embarked upon it. I myself could have asked at that moment for no more than to continue reading the news without interruption; but, being made belatedly aware that my day, although fatiguing in its exertions and still uncertain as to its outcome, had been filled with incident, I was bound to observe the soundness of his observation.

‘Consider, for instance, my own case,’ Holmes broodily went on, as he took down from the pipe-rack by the fireside what looked to be the oiliest and most ancient of his extensive collection of clay pipes and viciously tapped the dottle into the grate. ‘Here have I been, today, with all the leisure in the world to do with as I pleased, to commence the monograph I have been planning to write on the significance of the typewriter key in modern detection or else’ – and with his languidly tapering forefinger he indicated the instruments arrayed in front of him – ‘undertake this amiable if futile little experiment. And yet, I swear, time has hung far heavier on my hands than on those of the potboy or crossing-sweeper who, since he awoke this morning, has assuredly done nothing but curse the drudgery of his quotidian round. No, my dear Watson,’ he concluded, shaking his head, which was already enhaloed by a cloud of noisome tobacco fumes, ‘it is some holiday excursion, or at the racecourse, or at the Opera when neither Madame Tetrazzini nor the divine Melba is singing – it is there, I say, that we learn to our cost what boredom truly means!’

Long experience had taught me to recognise the symptoms. Only a few days before, Holmes had brought to a satisfying conclusion a sordid affair of blackmail involving as its innocent party one of the noblest, most exalted names in England, and he was at present feelingly aware of his idleness.

‘You have overtaxed yourself of late,’ I said. ‘Perhaps such enforced inaction is a blessing in disguise.’

‘Bah!’ he practically snarled at me. ‘If there is one thing I abominate, it is a blessing in disguise. Surely blessings of any kind are sufficiently uncommon not to have to don a mask? Besides, it is not a blessing in disguise of which I stand most in need, but a criminal in disguise. Alas! The whole city of London appears to have reverted to “the straight and narrer”, as our good Lestrade enjoys putting it. Where are they now, the Napoleons of crime? Languishing on Elba, I dare say.’

‘If they are, then it is you yourself you must blame, Holmes,’ I returned good-naturedly, ‘for you have been their Iron Duke.’ Laying down my copy of the Gazette, I rose from the settee and stepped over to the window to draw the curtains. It was an evening in early autumn, grey and overcast but not yet dark; save for an occasional scudding cloud-ball, the dimmed lustre of the heavens was even and neutral-tinted. At once attracting my eye, however, was a gentleman of somewhat cadaverous aspect who stood on the pavement opposite and who seemed quite overwhelmed by a heavy tweed overcoat which enveloped his thin frame like a bell-tent. In his left hand he held a small, unfolded piece of paper, and alternated between consulting it and peering up at the succession of house-numbers which confronted him. At last, having located the number he was searching for (as I surmised), he picked up the travelling-bag which had been sitting on the pavement beside him, crossed the street with a forthright stride and soon quit my view altogether.

‘Well, I fancy your Calvary is at an end,’ I remarked, ‘for, unless I am much mistaken, the bell will ring this very minute to announce a new client.’

Holmes growled churlishly from the depths of his armchair. ‘A client, is it? Most likely the distraught owner of a terrier gone missing from Kensington Gardens.’

‘We shall soon find out,’ I replied: ‘here he is now.’

In effect, the front doorbell had already chimed, two sets of footsteps were to be heard on the stairs, and an instant later Mrs. Hudson was ushering into our room the very gentleman I had spied in the street below.

At a first glance, the man who stood before us was somewhere in his fifties. The almost military erectness of his bearing was impaired by a slight but perceptible stoop in his shoulders. From each side of his head, which was totally bald at the middle, protruded a shapeless tuft of white, fleecy hair resembling the stuffing from a mattress. And, divested as he now was of his generously sized overcoat, he could be seen to be most amazingly lean and bony, with facial features so near-skeletal that, taken along with his keen, lively eyes and unexpectedly warm skin colouring, I thought of a death’s-head with a lighted candle posed inside it.

Since Holmes had not yet thrown off his fit of petulance, and appeared disinclined to do the honours, it was I who went forward, presented my companion and myself, and invited our visitor to take a chair.

‘My dear sirs,’ he murmured apologetically, ‘you must forgive me for intruding on your intimacy unannounced, and at this late hour, but I … I truly am at my wits’ end. If I had known where else I might turn, I assure you I would never have presumed to disturb you. Oh, but here I am so far forgetting myself that I have failed to offer you my card.’

‘And yet, even as you are, you are not entirely a stranger to us,’ said I. ‘Am I not right, Holmes?’

‘Why,’ said our visitor, perplexed, ‘what can you mean? To my recollection, we have not met before.’

‘I mean only,’ I answered, eager this once to exercise my own powers of deduction, ‘that you are obviously left-handed and a former Army officer, that you have a brother of far stockier physique than yourself and that, having lived in Devon for a good many years, you are naturally unfamiliar with our metropolis.’

‘But, bless my soul, sir, you astonish me!’ he cried. ‘I can hardly believe –’

‘Oh,’ I said lightly, ‘it was really very elementary, you know. Your left-handedness you gave away when –’

‘Dr. Watson,’ he interrupted me in no little degree of agitation, ‘if I say you astonish me, it is that I am in fact right-handed, I have never been a soldier, I was an only child, I have had to visit London four times this past fortnight and, far from living in Devon, I’ve not once set foot in the place!’

For a moment or two there was a disconcerting silence; then, to my relief, Holmes suavely intervened.

‘My friend Watson here,’ he said, ‘whom it has amused to chronicle a few of my trifling successes, has, as you may observe, his own rather underhand method of enquiry. To wit, by postulating the exact contrary of what he senses to be true, he hopes to elicit all the requisite information at once.’ He yawned. ‘It sometimes works.’

‘Most … most ingenious,’ responded our visitor, although, to judge by his prolonged scrutiny of me, his doubts as to my competence, and possibly even my sanity, were by no means allayed.

‘But to your problem,’ Holmes went on. ‘You are, I think, Dr. Eustace Gable, one of our most esteemed botanists. Oh, be assured,’ he drawled, seeing his interlocutor about to speak, ‘it is through no process of ratiocination that I have identified you. It happens that I recently attended an event at the Royal Botanical Society at which you read a most stimulating paper on the variety and luxuriance of South American fronds.’

‘Fronds are my passion, Mr. Holmes!’ Gable said fervently. ‘And, in a way, it is that passion that has brought me here tonight.’

‘Pray continue,’ said Holmes, placing the tips of his fingers together and pensively propping his chin upon them.

‘I should explain that I inhabit a large family estate called The Gables, by a curious coincidence, and situated halfway between Aylesbury and the village of Mentmore. The servants apart, the sole company I have in my rather lonely household are my sons James and Edward. They are not brothers, you understand, but half-brothers: my first wife died in childbirth, poor dear girl, and my second barely more than twelvemonth ago. Yet James and Edward have been as loving to one another as if they were indeed brothers, and their pranks have brightened many a winter evening for me.

‘Now it’s this way, Mr. Holmes. As I have said, I specialise, as a botanist, in those leaves characteristic of the palm or fern, and my enthusiasm has made of me a much-travelled man. There scarcely remains a corner of the globe to which I have not ventured in search of rare specimens, and I lately spent a fascinating two months in Sumatra in the Dutch East Indies. Well, exactly four weeks ago we docked at Southampton and the specimens I had had crated in Padang were forwarded to Aylesbury by the railway and then brought to the house by my man Jerrold in the dog-cart.

‘It was on that morning that was set in motion the inexplicable train of events which prompted me to seek outside assistance. We were in the kitchen – my two boys and I, along with one or two members of the staff – watching Jerrold screw open the crates with a crowbar. And it was when we were starting to lay the fronds out on the fine tissue paper which I purchase and store for just that purpose that, with a frightful scream, Jerrold suddenly withdrew his bare arm from within one of the crates. Gathering about him, we were all aghast to find him bleeding copiously from a profound and horribly corrugated gash in his wrist. Although he has always been of a robust constitution, I own I was quite afraid for him: he had in a trice turned white, there was terror in his eyes and my foremost anxiety was that he was about to faint. However, the thing appeared so abruptly I had no more time to think about him.’

‘The thing?’ echoed Holmes, rousing himself at last from the apathy into which he had sunk and fixing Gable with a penetrating eye. ‘What nature of thing?’

‘The rat!’ cried Gable.

‘I beg your pardon?’ said Holmes, now bolt upright.

‘A rat, a giant rat!’ Gable went on breathlessly. ‘Oh, when I call it a giant, you must not infer from the term that there was anything supernatural about its size – I make this distinction now that you may better understand the import of what is to follow – but by the standard of our common-or-garden English rodents it certainly was disagreeably large. It darted from the crate, scurried across the kitchen floor and vanished out of the door leading to the main hallway.’

‘But this rat,’ I asked: ‘where could it have sprung from?’

‘Well, Dr. Watson,’ Gable replied, ‘when you collect and study fronds, you learn to expect the discovery of all kinds of living creatures, spiders, beetles and a few rather more outlandish insects, which have crept unnoticed inside the packing crates. But a rat, and of such a dimension! I can only suppose that the native bearers, who are lazy at the best of times, had been especially dilatory. The point, Mr. Holmes, is that this … this rat has poisoned my whole existence! Although I myself am persuaded that it must have made its way into the grounds, where it would soon have perished for want of its natural sources of nourishment, it has not ceased to cast an evil shadow over my house.’

‘You interest me extremely,’ said Holmes, refilling his pipe. ‘Continue, do.’

‘I know not if it is the animal itself or its legend that has since grown to monstrous proportions, but we have all, for a month now, heard queer nocturnal patterings under the floorboards as of some huge, restless beast on the prowl. Meat has been found, half-devoured and spat out in a corner of the pantry. And if these manifestations already had the servants quivering with dread, just above a week ago one of the scullery maids, on her way upstairs to bed, saw what she swears was an enormous rat, with bright yellow phosphorescent eyes and a head the size of a full-grown otter’s, slithering across the first-floor landing! On that same night, too, as the first excitement was subsiding at last, there was a further alarum when Edward awoke to find the creature lurking in his bedroom.’

‘And Jerrold?’ Holmes asked. ‘How has he fared?’

‘Jerrold?’ said Gable, seeming distracted by the question. ‘Oh, he lay in a bad fever for several days but is now quite recovered. My worry is not with Jerrold. It is with servants who daily threaten to hand in their notice, with tradesmen who will no longer deliver their wares – the atmosphere in the household has become, as I say, poisonous, quite unbreathable. As a man of science, I refuse to lend credence to old wives’ tales of phantom rodents with phosphorescent eyes, but I tell you something must be done or I shall go insane! Will you help me, Mr. Holmes?’

For a while Holmes reflectively rubbed his fingertips against his chin. He finally said, ‘Well, Dr. Gable, it is a most interesting and outré story that you have told us. And though, notwithstanding my versatility, I have never before been hired as a rat-catcher, yes, I shall indeed take your case. What say you, Watson, are you game?’

Having done everything I could to make my patient as comfortable as was humanly possible for one in so touch-and-go a condition, I answered that I would be very pleased to join Holmes on this oddest of missions.

‘Then how shall we proceed?’ he asked his new client.

‘I hardly dare impose upon you further,’ said Gable hesitantly, ‘but if it would not inconvenience you to accompany me to Aylesbury this very evening on the 8.15 from King’s Cross, Jerrold will be waiting to take us on to The Gables.’

‘Capital,’ said Holmes. ‘To Aylesbury it is.’ And Mrs. Hudson was immediately instructed to prepare our bags.

*

The journey itself was uneventful. With Holmes immersed in a volume of Petrarch while Gable and I chatted about India, a land with whose mysteries we were both intimately familiar, we arrived at Aylesbury just after ten o’clock. And even if the station forecourt had not been deserted, I believe I should have recognised Jerrold from Dr Gable’s description: he was indeed of robust build, his right arm still bandaged at the wrist and hanging more slackly than the other.

There was a dog-cart standing by and we at once set forth for The Gables.

Not three-quarters-of-an-hour had elapsed when, without any apparent prompting from Jerrold, the horse turned in at a pair of wrought-iron gates then imperturbably trotted up the driveway to the house. It was a starless night; but although most of The Gables’ turreted façade was obscured in the enveloping gloom, I imagined I could make out a pinprick of light, as if from a waving lantern, directly in front of us. And so proved to be the case for, to our astonishment, before we had quite reached the main entrance, a wild-eyed young woman clad in a tartan dressing-gown, her hair all dishevelled, dashed forward into our path.

‘Oh, Dr. Gable, Dr. Gable, thank God you’ve returned at last!’ cried this apparition, swinging her lantern crazily from side to side.

‘Why, Mary Jane,’ rejoined Gable, nonplussed by her greeting. ‘Calm yourself! What is the matter with you?’

‘’T’aint me, sir!’ she screeched. ‘’Tis Master James, sir!’

‘Master James?’ said Gable, and he turned ashen-grey. ‘What about Master James?’

‘Oh, he’s dead, sir! Killed, sir! Killed by the rat!’

Preceded by our guide, and by the lantern which swayed and pitched ungovernably in her trembling hand, we descended from the carriage and rushed inside the house. So hurried was our pace, and so dimly lighted the downstairs area, Holmes and I had next to no opportunity to note the style or disposition of its furnishings. For it was up two flights of a broad central staircase that Mary Jane led us, until we found ourselves in a dark top-floor corridor, at whose far end, assembled on the threshold of an open doorway, a tight little huddle of people were to be seen.

When we, in our turn, stood outside that open door, the spectacle we encountered was perhaps the most extraordinary that I have ever known, even in my long association with Sherlock Holmes.

The room itself was in the nature of an attic, stark and cell-like, higher than it was long, save where its ceiling sloped down to nearly the halfway mark of the wall furthest away from where we stood. It was very sparely equipped, its furniture consisting, for all in all, of a low, monkish cot, two cane chairs and a massive mahogany chest-of-drawers whose legs were curved and squat like those of a bull mastiff. Just above it, with perhaps a foot-and-a-half to separate them, was the room’s only window, which was small, rectangular and glassless, and crosscut by a pair of narrow iron bars.

But it was the awful sight of James Gable, a boy of some sixteen summers, which transfixed our gaze. He lay stretched out lengthwise on the cot in the exact pose, and with the same deathly pallor, of the dead Chatterton in Wallis’s celebrated painting, except that his two hands tightly gripped his own neck and his naïve and youthful features had been warped out of shape by a grimace of ineffable and indescribable horror.

With a ghastly moan the boy’s father made as if to fling himself on the cot, but Holmes, his lean frame suddenly exploiting that unexpected reserve of physical strength that has got the better of many a Limehouse bruiser, managed to hold him back.

‘Courage, man, courage!’ he cried. ‘Something foul has taken place here, and it would be best if the lad were left undisturbed for now.’ He turned to me. ‘Watson, there is, I fear, little doubt as to the ultimate diagnosis, but examine him nevertheless. And do so, pray, without moving him. Watson? Are you unwell?’

‘I am sorry, Holmes,’ said I, and my voice quivered. ‘It’s … it’s just that it is all so uncanny … like a stage-set. Forgive me.’

While Holmes continued to hold his client back by the shoulders, I quickly stepped over to the cot. Although no doubt remained that young James Gable was gone, I was obliged to prise his hands from off his neck to learn the precise cause of his death. And there I discovered a cut so deeply incised that it had utterly severed the jugular vein, a cut, as I observed to my consternation, corrugated in form – just as Jerrold’s was said to have been – and apparently effected by a row of huge razor-sharp teeth. Judging by the rictus on the youth’s face, I supposed that he had expired both from that cut and from the abrupt heart failure which would have been its immediate consequence.

This startling information I conveyed to Holmes as succinctly as I could, and I saw his hollow cheeks flush with horror. He ran his eyes over the assembled servants – they were still standing in the doorway, shivering with fear yet continuing to stare at the macabre tableau inside the attic room – and finally let them settle upon a handsome, tow-haired, barefoot young man dressed in nothing but a long white nightshirt.

‘You are Edward Gable, are you not?’ he enquired of him.

‘Yes, sir, I am,’ the youth answered rather hoarsely, no doubt in awe of Holmes’s masterful presence.

‘How old are you, Edward?’

‘Just passed eighteen, sir.’

‘Now, my boy,’ said Holmes, softening his tone, ‘you realise, don’t you, that your brother is dead?’

‘I do, sir,’ replied Edward, who, bar a faint trembling of his lower lip, allowed no expression of feeling to be visible on his face. ‘It was… it was I who found him so.’

‘Well, my name is Mr. Sherlock Holmes, and later I shall have to ask you and everybody else a number of important questions. But first, I think, your father should be comforted. Will you take him downstairs and pour him some brandy?’

‘Yes, sir, I will.’

And, without a further word being spoken by either, he took his father by the arm and guided that now visibly broken man along the corridor and down the staircase.

Holmes meanwhile, facing the others, spoke to the oldest and most responsible-looking person there, a woman whose plump and kindly face was still streaked with the copious tears which she had already shed.

‘You are …?’

‘Mrs. Treadwell, sir. I am Dr. Gable’s housekeeper, if you please,’ replied this typical specimen of the housekeeping breed.

‘I do not imagine, Mrs. Treadwell,’ said Holmes, ‘that anyone has had the mind to send for the police?’

‘Why no, sir … that’s to say … if you please, sir, it all happened so sudden …’

‘Quite so. Then, Jerrold, may I suggest you take the dog-cart back to Aylesbury and alert the constabulary there.’

Tapping his cap respectfully with his bandaged hand, Jerrold left at once to carry out the request.

Holmes now closed the attic door. ‘As for you young women,’ he continued in his most authoritative manner, addressing Mary Jane and two other hysterically twittering maids, ‘I propose that you go downstairs also, that you stay close together and await the arrival of the police from Aylesbury. Mrs. Treadwell, if you will remain behind, I would like to ask you a few questions.’

Once the maids had left, Holmes turned towards that good lady.

‘Now, Mrs. Treadwell,’ said he, ‘it was Edward, I understand, who discovered his brother’s body?’

‘By rights, sir, it was him and me both.’

‘How so? Please tell me everything that occurred and omit no detail, however insignificant it may strike you.’

‘Well, sir, the facts are these. There’s been a fearful state of affairs in this house ever since Dr. Gable’s crates were shipped here and a horrid great rat –’

‘Yes, I know all about that,’ Holmes smoothly interrupted. ‘I wish you to relate only what happened here this evening.’

‘It’s just that, because of the rat and the stories that were being spread of it, young Master James, who was such a lively boy, always full of humour, had of late sunk into a kind of terror. And this very evening, when we heard its scratchings louder than ever, he swore he wouldn’t pass the night in his own bedroom – there being no lock on its door, you see – but would sleep in the attic, a room that no one ever entered or cleaned but could at least be locked from the inside. And that he did, sir, and turned the key behind him, at about half-past nine, I should say. Well, I was undressing in my own room when, no more than five or ten minutes after, I heard a scream coming from upstairs, a scream that changed me to stone, sir! I rushed out, just as you see me now, and I met Master Edward in the corridor, him only half-undressed himself. We came up here, and knocked on this door as loud as could be, but no answer was forthcoming. We cried, “Jamie! Jamie!” fit to wake the dead in Mentmore graveyard, but there wasn’t a stirring from him.’

‘And the door was locked from inside?’

‘Oh yes, sir. We tried rattling it, but it wouldn’t budge. At last Master Edward thought that it could be brought down by force – it was old and damp, sir, quite eaten up with rot – and it took just two heaves with his strong young shoulder to break it open. And there … Oh, Mr Holmes,’ she said, now openly weeping, ‘it was the most inhuman thing I ever saw …’

‘Please bear up, Mrs. Treadwell. What happened next?’

The housekeeper endeavoured to gather her thoughts. ‘Next …? Yes, Master Edward told me to go and wake Mary Jane that she might keep a lookout for Dr. Gable who, as we knew, was due back from London. I did wake the girl, and returned here within the quarter-hour to find him still standing watch at the door.’

‘You did not examine James to make certain he was dead?’

‘Master Edward did, and hoped to revive him too. But the boy was dead, sir, with not a breath of life left in him. And his face … If I live to be a hundred …’

‘Yes, indeed, it is a terrible business. But you have been of the greatest assistance to me, Mrs. Treadwell, and I would ask you now to join the others downstairs.’

After she had taken her leave, Holmes smiled grimly. ‘Well now, Watson, let us, you and I, turn our attention to the scene of the crime. For I believe we’ll have a clear run of an hour or more until the police arrive, and I am most anxious to explore the room before the hobnailed boots of the Aylesbury constabulary contrive to stamp out what evidence there yet may be.’

Inside the attic, Holmes undertook his investigation as coolly as if there had been nobody at all on the cot, let alone the mangled corpse of a once personable young lad whose expression of naked terror appeared to pursue me wherever I moved. The door, as Holmes ascertained, had indeed been forcibly burst open, and its key was still in the lock – on the inside. That key impressed me as being, so to speak, the key to the whole affair, for I could not conceive how either a human being or a rodent had entered and subsequently quit the room without in some fashion causing it to be disturbed. And it was then it occurred to me that, if the cot on which James was lying sat too low on the floor to conceal a man, there was certainly space enough for a rat still to be lurking …

At that moment Holmes, with a negligent disregard for his trouser knees, clambered atop the chest-of-drawers and peered out of the barred window.

‘Interesting, by Jove,’ said he, as, with remarkable agility even for him, he leapt back down on the floor.

‘What is?’ I asked, one eye warily on the cot.

‘Running underneath the wall there appears to be a stream, which doubtless serves as a drainage conduit for the house. Watson, have you something the matter with your eye?’

‘Not at all,’ I answered impatiently; then, mutely signalling my suspicion as to what might still be cowering under the bed, I said, ‘There is, I suppose, absolutely nothing to this queer story of a rat?’

Holmes looked up at me interrogatively and managed the closest to a true smile that I had seen on his features since we had ventured into this tragic house.

‘Your conjecture is,’ he said, ‘that the Sumatran rat is even now preparing to ambush us from beneath the bed?’

‘No, no, of course not,’ I muttered, none too convincingly, I fear. ‘However, as I see it, no man could have left this room, but a small animal might have climbed on to the chest-of-drawers, crept out of the window and plunged into the stream below.’

‘Precisely!’ said Holmes in triumph. ‘A small animal. Logic, man, logic! Oh, I grant you a giant rat might just have slain the boy – but then, it could no more have squeezed itself under the bed nor escaped by the window than I could. And no normal rodent capable of taking flight in the way you have just conjectured could ever have inflicted those teeth marks. No, Watson, instead of searching for major monstrosities, you should confine yourself, as I do, to minor oddities – such as this,’ and he drew his forefinger along one of the floorboards and held up its tip for my inspection.

‘Why,’ I said upon examining it, ‘I see nothing there.’

‘That,’ said Holmes, ‘is the minor oddity.’

*

Nearly two hours elapsed before the police arrived from Aylesbury, in the person of an Inspector Cushing, who turned out to be a genial red-haired man in his middle forties with a tendency to stoutness, and who came accompanied by two uniformed constables. Just a few minutes after that, we were all discreetly conversing in the library, Holmes, Cushing and myself standing some way apart from the members of the household staff, most of whom were gathered about the pathetic figure of Dr. Gable. The poor man, he sat still and hunched in an armchair, his head lolling limply forward over his chest like that of an unstrung marionette.

This library was a dark, splendidly-proportioned room, three of whose walls were lined with tall bookcases and the fourth dominated by a superb Adam fireplace above which had been mounted the stuffed heads of a trio of magnificently antlered Highland stags. Sprawled in front of the blazing fire, a pair of cocker-spaniel dogs, so alike one to the other as to be surely twins, mournfully contemplated their master’s distress.

Cushing, already conversant with Holmes’s exploits, was more than amenable to the prospect of my friend assisting him in his inquiries. He had heard, too, of the story of the rat as, before he decided to seek help from farther afield, it was the Aylesbury police that Dr. Gable had originally approached with his strange narrative.

‘Alas, Mr. Holmes,’ said Cushing, ‘I informed the Doctor that the matter which exercised him seemed hardly to fall under our domain. I even suggested that he send out for a rodent-killer such as are to be found in these farming areas. I realise now that I was too hasty in dismissing him and should have paid closer attention.’

‘You cannot be faulted for having failed to anticipate such a fantastical crime as this,’ answered Holmes, puffing on his briar. ‘Besides which, I categorically assure you that, until this very night, you would not have found one solitary clue as to what was about to occur.’

‘Why, Mr. Holmes,’ said Cushing, staring at him open-mouthed, ‘you are speaking as if you know exactly what lies at the heart of the mystery.’

‘Scarcely that, Inspector. Naturally, I know who killed young James Gable, but I still have a very incomplete picture as to how the thing was done and no conception at all as to why.’

‘Ah! And the rat?’ asked Cushing, his tone now inflected with a touch of sarcasm. ‘Would you be knowing where that might currently hide out?’

‘The rat?’ Holmes drawled. ‘I haven’t the faintest idea.’

I had been observing Holmes throughout this exchange and could not help noticing that, although he appeared to give all his attention to the Inspector, his gaze had almost imperceptibly begun to shift to some point above the other’s head.

Suddenly, his face illumined from within, he slapped the palm of his hand against his brow.

‘Blind, blind, blind!’ he exclaimed. ‘I have been here in this library for well-nigh two hours and I have observed nothing! And like every blind man I flattered myself that I was some kind of a seer. Well, now I know where the rat is!’

Once again he addressed himself to the police officer.

‘Inspector Cushing, you were good enough to express a certain respect for my past successes in the forensic sciences, were you not?’

‘That I was,’ answered the other; ‘and considerably more than “a certain respect”, I’d like to add.’

‘Then in the light of that respect will you now indulge me to the extent of lending me your carriage and one of your constables, and granting me no more than, shall we say, four hours to prove a point?’

‘Well … yes, sir, I suppose I can do that if you believe it’ll be of service to you,’ said a puzzled Cushing.

‘It will be of immeasurable service,’ said Holmes. ‘Mrs. Treadwell, if I may trouble you again,’ he called over to the housekeeper.

She appeared at once before us.

‘Please forgive me, Mrs. Treadwell, for trespassing further upon your time, but I should like to ask you two final questions.’

‘Yes, sir?’

‘First, do you know the name of Dr. Gable’s solicitor?’

‘That would be Mr. Hunter, sir, of Hunter and Dove in Aylesbury.’

‘Excellent. Now – and I wish you to reflect very carefully before answering – when you returned upstairs to the attic bedroom after awakening Mary Jane, am I right in assuming that young James Gable had shed rather more blood than when you first saw him?’

The housekeeper did not wait to reflect. ‘Why yes, sir!’ she replied with a look of surprise on her corpulent features. ‘I didn’t think of it again till this very minute, but there was more blood on the poor boy’s nightshirt.’

‘Then,’ cried Holmes, ‘the problem admits of only one solution and, if I may prevail upon you now, Cushing, for the man and the carriage that you have promised me, I feel certain I shall be able to disclose it to you before tomorrow morning is out.’

*

Holmes proved to be as good as his word. It was at sunrise that he set off from the house, to return exactly as the library clock was striking the tenth hour. Followed by the constable who had accompanied him on his enigmatic excursion – and who now carried a shapeless bundle wrapped up in a linen kerchief – Holmes invited Cushing and myself to join him in the billiard-room where we would be able to talk undisturbed.

On seeing how solemn his countenance was, in a chilling contrast to the barely suppressed excitement and even jubilation which I had read on his face as he departed, I ventured to remark that he had been disappointed in his mission.

‘Au contraire, Watson,’ he answered. ‘It is only that I was so intoxicated by the thrill of the chase that I near forgot the implications of what I would uncover were I to be proved right.’

‘And,’ said the Inspector, his gruff voice betraying the profound curiosity he felt, ‘were you proved right?’

‘I was, Cushing, I was, and when you have listened to what I have to say, I do not doubt that you will at once decide to arrest Edward Gable for the murder of his half-brother James.’

The police officer was dumbfounded by this extraordinary statement, although not more so than I was myself.

‘Unfortunately,’ Holmes continued, ‘it is the very truth. And my fear is that the poor father will take it badly, this blow following so soon upon the other.’

‘Really, Holmes,’ I expostulated, ‘you owe us an explanation. For I believe I speak for Cushing here when I say that we are both utterly in the dark.’

‘And yet, Watson, it was an astute observation of yours which first put me upon the scent.’

‘Of mine?’ I echoed incredulously, for I had the impression of having contributed next to nothing to his investigation.

‘Yes, indeed. When faced with that ghoulish scene upstairs, you likened it to a stage-set, as I remember. Well, that is precisely what it was, a stage-set, a tableau vivant, very possibly inspired by those for which our Baker Street neighbour Madame Tussaud is justly famous.’

‘Not truly vivant, after all,’ I demurred.

‘Yet it was initially so,’ retorted Holmes. ‘But we ought to begin at the beginning. Never having been a devotee of Penny Dreadfuls, I at once eliminated the hypothesis of the rat. Rats, especially giant ones with phosphorescent eyes, tend to make footprints; and when I noted the complete absence of dust in a room that I was told was never occupied and never cleaned – the minor oddity, Watson, which I tried to call to your attention – I suspected that we must be dealing with murder, and a murder that was particularly cold-blooded in its execution.’

‘Very well, but why Edward?’ asked the Inspector.

‘My suspicions of him were aroused almost at once. As you will recall, Watson, Mrs. Treadwell told us that, on hearing James’s scream, Edward had rushed into the corridor partially undressed. Yet, when you and I arrived not more than half-an-hour later, we found him in nothing but his nightshirt. Now who, upon discovering his own sibling violently slain, would still go tranquilly about preparing for bed? No, Cushing, I fancy young Edward was obliged to remove his clothes in haste because they had become stained with his half-brother’s blood, and you would do well to have one of your constables search his bedroom, as he certainly cannot have had the time to dispose of them.

‘I had, then, a strong conviction as to the perpetrator of the crime: the riddle was understanding how it had been committed. But, in that, I let myself be guided by one of my principal articles of faith, which is – as my poor friend Watson is doubtless tired of hearing – that when you have excluded the impossible, that which remains, however improbable, must be the truth. And at once that truth revealed itself to me: when Edward and the housekeeper burst into the attic, James Gable was alive. It was only after Mrs. Treadwell departed, and the two brothers were left alone together, that he was murdered.

‘Edward, I fear, had long been plotting how best he might rid himself of his half-brother. Despite being the elder son, he would not have inherited the family estate – as I learned this morning at Messrs. Hunter and Dove – because he is the offspring of the first Mrs. Gable, and the estate belonged, not to the doctor, but to his second wife, whose will specified that, in the event of her premature death, it should pass to James directly he attained his majority. You see, Watson, when Dr. Gable chanced to remark to us that his house was called The Gables “by a curious coincidence”, he was telling us that its name had nothing to do with his own: he meant simply that, like many another so-called, it was gabled.

‘Edward therefore waited for his opportunity, and it eventually presented itself in the guise of an implausibly large rodent that escaped from one of his father’s packing crates and is perhaps even now, a bewildered and maligned innocent, roaming the Buckinghamshire countryside. The two brothers were fond of playing practical jokes together, as we were told by both Dr. Gable and Mrs. Treadwell, and I imagine that they were oftentimes heedlessly cruel, as young people’s pranks will be. So, with the elder of the two taking upon himself the role of evil genius, they proceeded to foster the legend of a supernatural rat at large, with easily contrived scamperings under the floorboards and half-masticated chunks of meat in the pantry. As for the phantom creature which so terrified one of the maids, that, I speculate, was one of Dr. Gable’s cocker spaniels with its fore and hind legs roped together and its canine identity craftily concealed under some phosphorescent Hallowe’en mask.

‘At any rate, the events of last night were to constitute the pièce de résistance, as it were, of the whole charade, in which James would be found “dead” in the attic, gored by the Sumatran rat, before leaping up with a triumphant grin on his face to be scolded and, I should say, almost at once forgiven for having frightened the household out of its collective wits. A callous hoax, no doubt, but not untypical of youthful high spirits.

‘Alas for poor James, Edward had quite a different project in mind; and when, with the housekeeper’s departure, he was all alone with his brother, he smothered the younger boy with the very pillow his head rested upon and tore deep and hard into the veins of his neck’ – whereupon Holmes untied the bundle which the constable had brought in with him and which we saw to contain a large rock, a bloodstained pillow and the stuffed head of a wolf, its lower jaw snapped off so that just the vividly snarling upper teeth remained.

‘Take care how you handle that,’ Holmes warned the Inspector, ‘for these fangs are far sharper now than when the beast still had his employment of them. In a sense, the whole case hinged upon the incisions made in James’s neck, and it was only when, in the library, I found myself idly admiring the doctor’s collection of mounted animal heads that it dawned on me how they might have been effected. In Aylesbury I did the round of its curiosity shops and learned in the third that Edward had recently purchased just such a head. Its teeth, as you may observe, he honed down until they had become as sharp and vicious as jack-knives. And it was of course with this pillow that he stifled his victim, having first stained it with the blood – most likely that of some rabbit or squirrel – which he had also smeared on James’s neck to achieve the effect of a violent and sanguinary death. When the boy was murdered in earnest, he naturally shed more blood, as Mrs. Treadwell confirmed, real blood this time, his own.’

‘And the rock?’ I asked.

‘It acted as ballast,’ said Holmes. ‘After committing the deed, Edward hastily wrapped his accessories up in a bundle and shoved them through the window into the stream below, whence the constable and I extracted them on our return from Aylesbury. They too would have been got rid of in due time.

‘There you have the whole dreadful story,’ he concluded. ‘And now, Inspector, I fear it is my melancholy duty to advise my client as to the outcome of my investigation. Shall I leave you, then, to proceed with the arrest?’

*

That same evening, back in Baker Street, I was seated at my small writing-desk, busy composing a first draft of the case I had already decided to call ‘The Giant Rat of Sumatra’, while Holmes had gone to his violin, as was customary with him after some professional exertion, and had started to essay the opening bars of one of Paganini’s more fiendishly intricate Caprices.

‘I realise, Watson,’ he suddenly said to me in a meditative tone of voice, ‘how much you have enjoyed turning my casebook into a cycle of forensic romances, but I cannot help wondering whether, on this occasion, you might prefer to leave the crime private and unrecorded.’

‘Whyever so?’ said I, glancing up from my notes.

‘Oh, it is simply that Eustace Gable is one of our most distinguished public men, and his life has been so blighted by this tragedy that I am afraid his constitution has been shattered beyond repair. It would surely be unworthy of us to advertise our success, but equally his ghastly plight, in the pages of a popular magazine.’

‘Perhaps you are right, Holmes,’ I answered after a moment of reflection. ‘And yet I am not resigned to giving it up altogether. What if I were to write it up now but stipulate that it remain unpublished for, let’s say, a hundred years?’

Holmes plucked a frivolous little pizzicato on his bowstring.

‘A hundred years? 2011?’ He laughed. ‘Oh, how you do exaggerate, Watson! I can assure you that in 2011 the name of Sherlock Holmes will have been consigned to the most complete and utter oblivion.’

In virtually everything – save, of course, those matters which pertain to my own professional skills – I readily acknowledge my friend’s superior acumen. In this instance, however, I fancy he might be mistaken.