Drury Lane’s Last Case

20 A Beard and an Anagram

Old Maxwell shuffled before them into the odorous little hall, turned right a few paces and then left, crossing before the lowest step of a decrepit wooden staircase, badly carpeted, which led apparently to the sleeping quarters upstairs. He descended two stone steps to an alcove and stopped before a massive oak door. The door was closed. He opened it and stood aside. “Dr. Ales used to work in this room.”

It was a spacious study paneled from floor to ceiling in dark oak, and lined with built-in shelves for the most part empty. Only a few of the lower shelves held books, a sparse scattering of odd volumes.

“From the appearance of his library,” remarked Gordon Rowe, “he never did intend this house as anything but a temporary hideout.”

“It would seem so,” murmured Lane.

The ceiling was low and an ancient chandelier of hideous colored glass hung above a battered desk in the centre of the study. On the far wall stood a fireplace with a sturdy oak mantel above it made out of a single thick slab of wood; in the blackish grate there was a residue of charred logs and ashes. On the desk lay an old quill, a bottle of indian ink, a powerful reading glass, and a clutter of odds and ends.

The Inspector and Patience both exclaimed at once and pounced upon the desk.

“What is it?” cried Rowe, darting forward.

There was an ashtray upon the desk, a poor chipped thing of colored porcelain decorated with an impossibly buxom mermaid sporting among several grinning and ugly little dolphins. In the well of the tray lay five greyish-white fragments of clay; two of the largest were concave, and the in-curved surfaces presented a burnt appearance. Clots and scraps of dried dottle made a bed for the clay pieces.

“Looks like the remains of a cheap clay pipe,” said Rowe with a puzzled air. “What’s all the huzza-ing and banzai-ing for?”

“Donoghue,” muttered the Inspector.

Patience’s blue eyes shone. “There’s evidence!” she cried. “Gordon, Donoghue always smoked a clay pipe. We know he must have followed Dr. Ales that day from the museum. This virtually proves he’s been here!”

“Maxwell,” said Thumm harshly, “I thought you said a tough-lookin’ Irishman hadn’t been in this house recently. How’d the pipe get here?”

“I don’t know, sir. I’ve not been in this room since the day after Dr. Ales went away. I saw the pieces on the floor in front of the desk that morning before I sent the package off and picked them up and put them in the ashtray with the little pieces of ash and tobacco.”

Lane sighed. “Did you notice the fragments the night before, when Dr. Ales sent you away?”

“They weren’t there when I left, I’m positive.”

“Did Dr. Ales smoke a clay pipe?”

“Dr. Ales didn’t smoke at all. We found the ashtray in some old rubbish in the woodshed when we got here.” Maxwell blinked. “I don’t smoke, either,” he said rather tremulously.

“Then I think, Inspector,” remarked the old gentleman with a note of weariness, “that we can reconstruct events with a certain degree of assurance. After Ales sent Maxwell away the evening of the twenty-seventh, Donoghue, who had followed Ales from the city and was lurking in the bushes outside, entered the house. He was face to face with Ales in this room; of that we may be certain. What happened then is conjectural.”

“That’s a swell word,” said Thumm with a scowl. “Let’s look over the rest of this dump.”

They mounted the creaking staircase and found themselves in a narrow upper passage punctuated by doors. They investigated the rooms in order. Two were empty and festooned with spider-webs; apparently Maxwell was not the most conscientious of housekeepers. One was Maxwell’s own room; and it contained nothing but an iron bedstead, an old-fashioned washstand, a chair, and a chest of drawers resurrected from the cellar of some second-hand dealer’s establishment. The fourth was the bedroom of Dr. Ales — a small, not too clean room as poorly furnished as Maxwell’s although here a braver effort had been made to banish dust. The ancient bed, a scratched but hardy walnut piece, was neatly made.

Patience examined the bedclothes with a feminine eye. “Did you make this?” she asked severely.

“Yes, miss. The last time,” Maxwell gulped, “the morning of the twenty-seventh—”

“Indeed?” murmured Lane. “How is that? When you returned on the morning of the twenty-eighth to find Dr. Ales gone and the package in the hall downstairs, didn’t you also find this bed mussed?”

“No, sir. That’s how I knew Dr. Ales must have gone away the night before, the same night he sent me off to Tarrytown. Because on Tuesday morning I saw he hadn’t slept in his bed.”

“Why the dickens didn’t you say so before?” snapped Thumm. “That’s important. It means that whatever happened here that Monday night happened before Ales turned in. I mean — before Sedlar turned in.”

“Here, here, Inspector,” smiled the old gentleman. “Let’s not become involved. Suppose for the time being, at any rate, we continue to refer to the missing tenant of this establishment as Dr. Ales... Dr. Ales.” He smiled again, queerly. “Odd name, eh? Has it struck any of you how odd it is?”

Gordon Rowe, who was rummaging through a wardrobe closet, straightened up. “It’s struck me how odd it is,” he said sharply, “and if there is any sense or pattern to the phenomenon of this benighted world, its oddity makes the Inspector right and you wrong, Mr. Lane!”

“Ah, Gordon,” said Lane with the same queer smile. “I might have known it wouldn’t escape that terrier’s pertinacity of yours.”

“What do you mean?” cried Patience.

“Escape what?” roared the Inspector, crimson with exasperation.

Joe Villa dropped disgustedly into the single chair, as if he were bored to tears with the antics of these maniacs. As for Maxwell, he stared at them with his mouth half-open, the picture of idiocy.

“The fact,” snapped Rowe, “that Dr. Ales has six very peculiar letters to his name. Think that over.”

“Letters?” echoed Patience blankly. “A-l-e-s... Oh, Gordon, I’m so stupid!”

“Oh, yeah?” mumbled the Inspector. “A-l-e-s...”

“Not A-l-e-s,” said Lane. “D-r-a-l-e-s.”

“Drales?” frowned Patience.

Rowe shot a strange look at Lane. “So you did see it! Patience, don’t you understand that the letters of the name ‘Dr. Ales’ make a perfectly gorgeous anagram?”

Patience’s eyes widened, and she went a little pale. She breathed a name.

“Exactly. The letters of the name ‘Dr. Ales’ spell with the simplest sort of rearrangement the name... ‘Sedlar’!”

“How true,” murmured the old gentleman.

For a moment there was silence. Then Rowe very quietly returned his attention to the wardrobe.

“Say!” exclaimed the Inspector. “You’re not so dumb after all, youngster! Well, Lane, you can’t get around that.”

“Perhaps it doesn’t require getting around,” smiled Lane. “No, I agree with Gordon that the anagram ‘Dr. Ales’ is much too felicitous to be a coincidence. There’s design there. But what sort of design, springing from what source, with what purpose...” He shrugged. “I’ve learned one thing since the time I began to investigate the vagaries of the human mind. And that is never to leap at conclusions.”

“Well, I’m ready to leap at this one,” began the Inspector harshly, when there was a satisfied grunt from young Rowe.

He backed out of the wardrobe, muttering to himself. Then he turned quickly and thrust his unwounded hand behind him.

“Guess what I’ve found,” he said with a grin. “Dr. Ales, old boy, you’re a rotten and slightly mildewed Machiavelli!”

“Gordon! What have you found?” exclaimed Patience, taking a hasty step toward him.

He waved her off with his bandaged arm. “Now, now, little lady, live up to your name.” He dropped his grin abruptly. “This ought to interest you, Mr. Lane,” and he brought his sound arm forward. Among his fingers flowed a green-and-blue mat of false hair, neatly shaped. It was beyond question the extraordinary beard which Inspector Thumm’s client had worn on his memorable visit to the Thumm Detective Agency on the sixth of May.

Before they could recover from their stupefaction, Rowe turned and dug again into the wardrobe. He brought out in succession three other objects — a fedora hat of peculiar shade of blue, a pair of blue-tinted spectacles, and a luxuriant grey moustache.

“This is my lucky day,” chuckled the young man. “Well, what do you think of these little exhibits?”

“I’ll be eternally damned,” said the Inspector blankly, regarding Rowe with grudging admiration.

“Oh, Gordon!”

Lane took beard, spectacles, moustache, and hat from Rowe. “I suppose there’s no doubt,” he murmured, “that the beard and glasses are the same?”

“Listen,” growled Thumm. “There couldn’t be two brushes like that in the whole world. Can y’ imagine a sane man wearin’ that thing?”

“Certainly.” Lane smiled. “Under certain very odd circumstances. Maxwell, have you ever seen these articles before?”

The servant, who had been staring at the beard with horrified fascination, shook his head. “Except for the hat, I never saw them, sir.”

The old gentleman grunted. “The hat... Villa, is this the hat Dr. Ales was wearing the day you followed him to the Britannic? And the moustache?”

“Sure. I tol’ you this guy’s up to somepin’. I ain’t—”

“Tangible proof,” Lane said in a musing way. “There’s no doubt but that the man who left the envelope with you on May sixth, Inspector, and the man who burgled the Britannic on the afternoon of May twenty-seventh, were identical. On the face of it—”

“On the face of it,” said the Inspector with a bitter savagery, “it’s a clear case. With this evidence, and with the testimony of Crabbe and Villa and the swell proof of that snapshot, there’s nothing to it. I tell you there’s no Sedlar in this case at all!”

“No Sedlar? Inspector, you astonish me. What do you mean?”

“But there is a Sedlar,” objected Rowe, and Patience frowned at her father.

Thumm grinned. “I’ve busted the back of this mystery, by God! It’s simple as pie. The man who showed up at the museum claiming to be the new curator they hired, Dr. Sedlar, isn’t Dr. Sedlar at all! He’s Dr. Ales, whoever he is! But I’ll bet you a good smack in the whiskers that Ales managed to do away with Sedlar when Sedlar landed in New York and before the English johnnie could make tracks for his new job, took Sedlar’s place — impersonating him maybe on the basis of a superficial resemblance, in build, height, and so on; these limeys look all alike anyway — and then started the whole train of monkeyshines. I tell you your slippery Dr. Ales is not only a thief but a murderer.”

“The question, it seems to me,” remarked Rowe, “is: Who is Dr. Ales?”

“You could put your theory to a very simple test, you know,” said Lane with a twinkle. “Simply cable your friend Trench of Scotland Yard to dig up a photograph of Hamnet Sedlar and send it to you.”

“There’s an idea!” cried Patience.

“Come to think of it, I’m not so sure—” began Lane.

The Inspector, whose underlip had been creeping forward by marked degrees during this interlude, suddenly turned scarlet and threw up his hands. “Nuts!” he roared. “I’m finished with this whole damned case. I’m not going to do another lick of work on it. I’m through, I tell you. It’s got me so I can’t sleep nights. The hell with it. Patty, come on!”

“But what shall I do?” asked Maxwell helplessly. “I’ve got some of Dr. Ales’s money left, but if he isn’t coming back—”

“Forget it, old boy. Close up the joint and go home. Patty—”

“I think not,” murmured Mr. Drury Lane. “No, Inspector, I think not. Maxwell, it might be an excellent idea for you to remain on the premises quite as if nothing had happened.”

“Yes, sir?” said Maxwell, scratching his doughy cheeks.

“And if Dr. Ales should return — which is not at all without the realm of possibility — I’m sure the Inspector will be glad to hear the news.”

“Yes, sir,” said Maxwell with a sigh.

“Damn it, I won’t—” grumbled the Inspector.

“Come, you old thunderer,” smiled Lane, “give Maxwell one of your cards... That’s better!” He linked his arm in Thumm’s. “Remember, Maxwell, the instant Dr. Ales returns!”