Drury Lane’s Last Case

11 3HS wM

Dromio cheerfully cursed a traffic officer beneath his breath and swung the black Lincoln off Fifth Avenue into one of the Forties. He picked his way through a labyrinth of traffic and brought the car to rest at the corner of Sixth Avenue, stopped by a red light.

Mr. Drury Lane sat silently in the tonneau of the car, tapping his lips with the sharp edge of a slip of yellow paper. For the dozenth time he glanced at the message typed upon it, and frowned. It was a telegram, its date-line reading: “June 21–12.06 a.m.” The message had been delivered to The Hamlet in Westchester in the early hours of the morning.

“Queer time for Thumm to send me a wire,” thought the old man. “Midnight! He’s never done a thing like that before... Urgent? It isn’t possible that—”

Dromio leaned on his klaxon. A car had locked fenders with another at the corner; they were straining at each other like two bulls, and there was an appalling tangle of traffic behind. Lane glanced over his shoulder at the mess extending to Fifth Avenue, and then leaned forward and tapped Dromio’s ear.

“I think I shall walk the rest of the way,” he said. “It’s only a block. Wait for me near Inspector Thumm’s office.”

He got out of the car, still holding the telegram. Then he put it carefully into the breast pocket of his spruce suit and strode off toward Broadway.

He found the Thumm Detective Agency in a strange state of turmoil. The lunar-eyed Miss Brodie in the ante-room seemed to have contracted the general infection: she sat nervously and stared with mournful uneasiness at Patience, who was striding up and down behind the railing like a fuming regimental sergeant-major, biting her lips and hurling passionate glances at the office clock on the wall.

At the sound of the opening door she jumped, and Miss Brodie uttered a gentle scream.

“So you’ve come!” cried Patience, grasping the old gentleman’s arm in a death-grip. “I thought you’d never get here. You’re a precious darling!” and to his astonishment she threw her soft arms about his neck and kissed him vigorously on the cheek.

“My dear child,” protested Lane, “you’re trembling! What on earth has happened? The Inspector’s wire was bursting with suppressed portents, but it told me exactly nothing. I trust he’s well?”

“As well as might be expected,” replied Patience grimly. Then her eyes sparkled and she touched a shining ringlet above her ear and said: “And now let’s attack the — the corpse.”

She pushed open the Inspector’s door and revealed a red-eyed but otherwise pale elderly gentleman who sat stiffly on the edge of his swivel-chair and like a determined boa-constrictor glared at an object on the desk before him.

“Eureka!” he shouted, scrambling to his feet. “Old Faithful, by God. I told you we could depend on the old rascal, Patty! Sit down, Lane, sit down. It’s swell of you to come.”

Lane sank into the leather armchair. “Heavens, what a reception! You make me feel like the returning prodigal. Now tell me what’s happened. I’m perishing of curiosity.”

Thumm grasped the object he had been so painfully studying. “See this?”

“I’ve excellent eyesight, as you know. Yes, I see it.”

The Inspector chuckled. “Well, we’re going to open it.”

Lane stared from Thumm to Patience. “But— Well, do so, by all means. Is this why you wired me to come in, Inspector?”

“We wired you to come in,” said Patience quickly, “because some maniac insisted that you be present at the grand opening. Father, please. I’ll go mad myself if you don’t open it this instant!”

It was the long brown manila envelope which the curious gentleman with the dappled beard and blue glasses had left in the Inspector’s safe keeping almost seven weeks before.

Lane took the envelope from Thumm’s hand and examined it with a swift experimental pressure. His eyes narrowed as he felt the contours of the squarish envelope within. “This mystery calls for an explanation. I should like to know the facts before... No, no, my dear, I’ve told you on several occasions in the past to cultivate — ha, ha — Patience. Proceed, Inspector.”

Thumm tersely related the story of the disguised Englishman’s visit on the sixth of May. With interpolations by Patience, it was a very complete tale, down to a minute description of the visitor. When the Inspector had finished, Lane glanced thoughtfully at the envelope. “But why didn’t you tell me this before? That’s not like you, Inspector.”

“Didn’t think it was necessary. Come on, let’s go!”

“Just a moment. I take it, then, that this being the twenty-first of the month, your mysterious client failed to telephone you yesterday on schedule?”

“He called up on the twentieth of May, though,” said the Inspector glumly.

“We sat here all the livelong day,” snapped Patience, “until midnight yesterday. Not a peep out of him. And now—”

“Did you by any chance make a transcript of the man’s conversation?” asked Lane absently. “I know you’ve a detectograph here.”

Thumm jabbed a button. “Miss Brodie. Get that transcript of the envelope case.”

They sat in agony while the old man very deliberately read the word-for-word report of the visitor’s call.

“Hmm,” he said, putting down the report. “Very strange. Quite true, of course, that the creature was disguised. Clumsy, clumsy! No slightest effort, apparently, at realism. The beard...” He shook his head. “Very well, Inspector, I think we may proceed. Do the honors.”

He rose, tossed the envelope on Thumm’s desk, sat down in a chair beside the desk, and leaned forward intently. Patience hurried around the desk to stand behind her father’s chair; she was breathing quickly and her usually serene features were pale and agitated. With shaking fingers Thumm pulled out the sliding leaf on the side of the desk near Lane, placed the envelope upon it, and sank into his swivel-chair. He was perspiring freely. Then he looked up at Lane — they faced each other across the utility board — and grinned feebly.

“Well, here goes,” he jeered. “And I hope it doesn’t jump out at me and say ‘April Fool’ or something.”

Behind him Patience sighed for sheer need of breath.

The Inspector grasped a letter-knife, hesitated, and then plunged the blade beneath the flap of the manila envelope. He cut the flap swiftly, dropped the knife, squeezed the ends of the envelope, and peered inside.

“Well?” cried Patience.

“You were right, Patty,” he muttered. “It’s another envelope.” And he took out a small square envelope, neutral-grey in tone, which was in turn sealed. The face was blank.

“What’s that on the flap?” asked the old gentleman sharply.

The Inspector turned the envelope over. His face went as grey as the paper.

Patience, scanning the flap over his shoulder, gasped.

Thumm licked his lips. “It says,” he said hoarsely, “it says — cripes! — it says: THE SAXON LIBRARY!”

It was the first indication they had had that the visit of the mysterious man with the Joseph’s beard might have been connected with the strange events at the Britannic Museum.

“The Saxon Library,” murmured Lane. “How curious.”

“So that’s how it is!” cried Thumm. “Good God, what’ve we run into?”

“Apparently,” said the old man with difficulty, “a coincidence, Inspector. It happens sometimes. With sufficient frequency to make one wonder at—” His voice trailed off, but he did not remove his gaze from the Inspector’s lips. Yet they saw nothing, for there was a gloss over them, as if a veil had dropped — a veil to mask the blinding realization that had leaped into them.

“But I can’t understand—” began Patience dazedly.

Lane shivered, and the veil disintegrated. “Open it, Inspector,” he said, leaning forward and cupping his chin in his hands. “Please.”

Thumm picked up the letter-knife again. He inserted the blade behind the flap and slowly exerted pressure. The paper was tough and yielded reluctantly.

Neither Lane nor Patience so much as blinked.

Thumm’s large fingers dipped into the envelope and emerged with a sheet of light grey stationery of the same tint as the envelope, neatly folded. He unfolded it. There was printing at one of the short ends of the sheet. The Inspector turned the sheet around; the legend at the top said simply: THE SAXON LIBRARY, in a darker grey printing ink. He spread the paper flat on the sliding board between him and Lane and stared. They all stared, and there was utter stillness in the office.

And reason for it. For if the disguised Englishman had been a mysterious figure, the message he had deposited in the Inspector’s care was even more mysterious. More than mysterious, it was cryptic. It made no sense at all.

At the top of the sheet there was the imprint of the Saxon Library. The rest of the sheet was as virgin as the day it had rolled off the printer’s press, except for a single inscription, or cryptogram. Roughly in the centre of the sheet below the imprint appeared the following:

And that was all. No intelligible message, no signature, no other pen or pencil mark of any kind.

A fierce suppressed paroxysm seized the aged body of Lane. He crouched in his chair, engulfing the cryptogram with his staring eyes. The Inspector’s fingers suddenly were stricken with palsy; the paper shook as his hand rested upon its lower corner. Patience did not stir. For a long moment none of them stirred. Then the old man tore his eyes slowly from the outspread sheet and looked up at Thumm. There was a queer triumph, almost exultation, in the crystal depths. He opened his mouth to speak.

But the Inspector mumbled: “3HS wM,” in wondering tones, rolling the syllables on his tongue as if to extract their hidden meaning from the mere sounds.

A faint perplexity came over Lane’s face. He glanced swiftly at Patience.

And she said: “3HS wM,” like a child repeating the words of a foreign language.

The old man buried his face in his hands, and sat that way without moving.

“Well!” said the Inspector at last with a long sigh, “I give up. Damn it, I give up. When a guy walks in dressed up like Paddy at the Grand Street Masquerade and leaves a string of crazy damn-fool nonsense after his yarn about a ‘secret worth millions’ — I tell you I give up. It’s a joke. Somebody’s idea of a joke.” And he threw up his hands and snorted in disgust.

Patience came swiftly around her father’s chair and seized the piece of stationery. She concentrated upon the hieroglyphics with fiercely drawn brows. The Inspector scraped his chair back and went to the window, where he brooded out upon Times Square.

Drury Lane suddenly raised his head. “May I see that a moment, Patience?” he asked quietly.

Patience sat back, baffled, and the old man took the sheet from her fingers and studied its enigmatic inscription.

The symbol had been hastily set down with the heavy nib of a pen in almost brush-like strokes, and in the blackest of black inks. The swiftness and sureness of the strokes indicated a complete lack of hesitation. The writer had apparently known exactly what he wanted to write, and had written it with no faltering of his hand.

Lane set down the sheet and picked up the square neutral-grey envelope. He examined it, back and front, for a moment; the inscription THE SAXON LIBRARY on the flap seemed to fascinate him. He fingered the flap; the engraved characters of the three words, a shining black, titillated the tactile nerves of his finger-tips.

He laid the envelope down, closing his eyes and leaning back. “No, Inspector,” he murmured, “not a joke.” And he opened his eyes.

Thumm wheeled. “Then what the devil does it mean? If it’s on the level, it must mean something... Cripes, he said it was just a ‘clue,’ and he was right. Muddiest clue I ever saw. Purposely made it tough, hey? Hmph!” and he turned back to the window.

Patience frowned. “It can’t be so difficult. Cryptic as he might have desired to make it, he would still make it essentially simple enough to be grasped after a reasonable amount of study. Let’s see, now... Of course it might be an original kind of shorthand, mightn’t it? Concealing a message of some sort.”

The Inspector grunted without turning around.

“Or,” continued Patience thoughtfully, “it might be a chemical symbol. H is the symbol of hydrogen, isn’t it? — and S of sulphur. Hydrogen — hydrogen sulphide. That’s it!”

“No,” said Lane in a low tone. “That would be H₂S, I believe. I don’t think HS is chemically possible. No, not chemistry, Patience.”

“And then, too,” said Patience in despair, “the small w and the capital M... Oh Lord! it’s hopeless. I wish Gordon were here. He knows so many useless things.”

The Inspector swung about slowly. “Hopeless it is,” he said in a strange tone. “For us, Patty. And for your frisky Mr. Rowe, too. But don’t forget this mysterious bird said he wanted Lane in on it. So maybe he figured Lane would know what it meant... hey, Lane?”

Lane in the face of this palpable challenge sat very still. Then the wrinkles appeared at the corners of his eyes. “Suspicions?” he said. “Yet perhaps I do, old Roman, perhaps I do.”

“Well, what the devil does it mean, then?” asked the Inspector flatly, coming forward.

Lane waved a limp white hand. He kept staring at the sheet before him. “The peculiar part of it is,” he murmured, “I believe he thought you would know what it meant, too.”

The Inspector flushed, straightened, and went to the door. “Miss Brodie! Come in here with your book.”

Miss Brodie came in quickly, pencil poised.

“Take a letter to Dr. Leo Schilling. Medical Examiner’s office. ‘Dear Doc: Get busy on this right away. Under your hat. Does the following string of crazy pothooks mean anything to you, question mark.’ Then put this down: ‘3 capital H capital S space small w capital M.’ Got that?”

Miss Brodie looked up dazedly. “Y-yes, sir.”

“Send the same letter to Lieutenant Rupert Schiff, Bureau of Intelligence, Cypher Department, Washington, D.C. Scoot.”

Miss Brodie scooted.

“That,” said the Inspector savagely, “ought to get results.”

He slipped into a chair, lighted a cigar, stretched his columnar legs, and puffed a thoughtful cloud at the ceiling.

“First tack, seems to me,” he said, “is the letterhead angle. This guy breezes in, gives us a cock-and-bull story, and leaves a note with this blarney in it. Didn’t want us to know it had anything to do with the Saxons; that’s why he stuck the small envelope into the manila, which didn’t have an identifying inscription. But if anything happened to him, he wanted us to open the envelope. So he wanted us to read The Saxon Library and work on that angle. Seems clear enough so far.”

Lane nodded. “I thoroughly agree.”

“What he didn’t figure on is that George Fisher would come in here and tell us about Donoghue, and that that would take us to the Britannic Museum and get us mixed up in that funny business of the stolen books. Where that comes in, I’m damned if I know. Maybe it’s just coincidence, this Saxon stationery.”

“No, father,” said Patience wearily, “I’m sure that’s not so. I’m convinced that the man with the false beard and the queer events in the Britannic are connected. And that this symbol written on the Saxon Library stationery is the connecting link. I wonder—”

“What?” asked Thumm with a shrewd squint at his daughter.

Patience laughed. “It’s an inane thought. But then the whole thing’s inane... I’m wondering if this chap with the false beard mightn’t — mightn’t have been somebody of the Saxon household dressed in disguise!”

“Not so silly,” murmured the Inspector with exaggerated indifference. “I kind of had the same notion, Patty. Take, now, this Rowe feller—”

“Nonsense!” said Patience sharply, and both men looked at her quickly. “It — it couldn’t have been Gordon.” She had the grace to blush.

“Why not?” demanded Thumm. “Seems to me he was almighty anxious to sit in on our confab that day when we left the museum.”

“I assure you,” said Patience stiffly, “that his... er... anxiety had nothing to do with the case. It... it... mightn’t it have been personal? I’m not exactly an old crone, father.”

“Damn’ sight rather it wasn’t personal,” snapped Thumm.

“Father! Sometimes you exasperate me to tears. What on earth have you against poor Gordon? He’s a very nice young man, and as frank and honest as a — as a child. And besides he has very strong wrists, and the man who came here May sixth hadn’t.”

“Well, he’s one of these here, now, bibliophiles, isn’t he?” said Thumm belligerently.

Patience bit her lip. “Oh — shoot!”

“Lookin’ it over,” continued the Inspector, rubbing the tip of his squashed nose, “it couldn’t have been Mrs. Saxon, though I did have a crazy feeling at one time it might have been a woman. But Mrs. Saxon’s a fat horse, and this bird was skinny. So maybe — mind you, I’m not eliminating Rowe, either! — maybe it was Crabbe.”

“That’s different,” said Patience, tossing her head. “He certainly fits all the physical qualifications.”

Mr. Drury Lane, who had been a silent and amused listener to this colloquy, held up his hand. “If I may be permitted to interrupt this profound discussion,” he drawled, “may I point out a possible objection to this whole theory? Your visitor maintained, and I see no reason to doubt it, that if he did not telephone on a twentieth it would mean that something drastic had happened to him. If young Gordon Rowe — preposterous, Inspector! — or Crabbe had been your visitor on May sixth, why hasn’t one of them disappeared, or turned up murdered, or in some other way incapacitated?”

“That’s true, too,” said Patience eagerly. “Of course! There you are, father. I lunched with Gordon yesterday, and this morning I spoke to him on the telephone, and he... he didn’t say a word about any such thing. I’m sure—”

“Listen, Patty,” said the Inspector in a thick, alarmed voice. “Listen to your old man for once. Patty, you got a shine on that young squirt? He been makin’ love to you? Why, I’ll wring his fool neck—”

Patience rose. “Father!” she said furiously.

“Come, come, Inspector,” murmured the old gentleman, “don’t revert to the Middle Ages. Gordon Rowe’s an excellent young man and quite Patience’s intellectual equal, which is saying a good deal.”

“But I tell you I’m not in love with him!” cried Patience. “Father, you’re being beastly. Can’t I be nice to a man—”

The Inspector looked tragic.

Mr. Drury Lane rose. “Stop squabbling. Inspector, you’re an infant. Put this sheet of paper and the envelopes very carefully away into your safe. We must visit the Saxon house at once.”