Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 140, No. 5. Whole No. 855, November 2012

The Charles Dickens Mystery by W. Edward Blain

Charles Dickens’ 200th birthday is being celebrated with fanfare in England and many other places this year. Born on February 7, 1812, Dickens is often claimed as one of our own by the mystery community for his creation of characters such as Fagin, “receiver of stolen goods,” and books such as The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Woodberry Forest School teacher and writer W. Edward Blain will be taking eleven of his students to the Dickens House Museum in July in honor of the Dickens bicentenary.

When the police arrived at the Dickens House Museum in London, the body of Ravi Vikram sprawled on the floor of the small bedroom, head against the wall, eyes still open, rope marks still visible on his neck. Driscoll Henley stood nearby, the purple velvet rope used for the strangulation now dropped by his feet. Within minutes the police advised Henley of his rights and handcuffed him, but before they could lead him downstairs to the waiting police car, he protested.

“I’m telling you that I’m a teacher, not a killer,” he said. “Call the head of my boarding school in the United States. She’ll vouch for me.”

“Will she?” said the inspector, a tall man in a brown jacket. “Your hands were on his throat.”

“I was removing the rope,” said Henley. “I was trying to resuscitate him.”

“We can discuss it in good time,” said the inspector. “For now, Mr. Henley, you are under arrest for the murder of Ravi Vikram, actor.”

“Give me five minutes,” said Henley. “While everybody is still here in the building. Five minutes.”

“Why should I do that?” asked the inspector.

“Because I have one advantage over you,” said Henley. “I can eliminate myself as a suspect.”

“You know who killed this man?”

“Five minutes,” said Henley.

The inspector looked at his watch. “Starting now,” he said, and Driscoll Henley desperately began to think. He had no idea who had murdered Ravi Vikram, but he needed to find out during the next four minutes and fifty-eight seconds.

Henley’s ordeal began six months earlier, when Suzanne McClain, the head of Foxborough Hall, summoned him to her paneled office. “How would you like to spend a month in London?” she asked him. “All expenses paid by the school?”

He was delighted by the offer, but he didn’t answer right away. School heads don’t make such offers without ulterior motives.

“There’s a catch, of course,” she said, reading his face, if not his mind. “You have to solve a mystery.” She smiled, and her green jacket set off her red hair in a way that always reminded him of Maureen O’Hara in a John Wayne movie.

“The mystery of the coy headmistress?” he asked, smiling in turn.

“The mystery of Charles Dickens, the playwright.”

Had he misunderstood her? “Dickens was a novelist, not a playwright.”

She shook her head. “He loved the theater all his life. He performed in plays and directed them throughout his career. He mounted four plays successfully in London before he published a novel. Why didn’t Charles Dickens become the great Victorian playwright? That’s what I want you to find out.”

He realized that she was serious. “I’ll do my best,” he said eventually. “But why?”

“Because a prominent alumnus with a passion for Dickens has offered to build a new arts center if someone on the faculty can explain satisfactorily the great writer’s career switch.”

“Wasn’t it simply a matter of money? Playwrights don’t earn much.”

“Our donor doesn’t find that explanation sufficient. You need to saturate yourself in Dickens, come back here, meet with the man, and offer a plausible narrative for why Dickens stopped writing plays. Do that, and I’ll be grateful.”

It had sounded so manageable in January. Now, on a Wednesday in June, he was suspected of murder. How could the day have gone so wrong? It had started auspiciously enough. He had been full of confidence at nine-thirty a.m. as he had tossed a solitary apple into his briefcase and walked from his flat in Russell Square to Doughty Street, a sunny Bloomsbury thoroughfare. The Dickens House Museum sat in a block of modest townhouses nearly indistinguishable from one another: drab brick, unadorned rectangular windows, arched doorways.

Inside the museum a thin woman standing behind a glass counter smiled when he introduced himself.

“I’m Mrs. Pierce,” she said. “You’ll be wanting the director, won’t you?”

“Yes, Mr. Jarvis Dedlock,” said Henley.

She shook her head. “I’m afraid you just missed Mr. Dedlock. He’s been sacked.”

“What?” Henley had exchanged e-mails with Jarvis Dedlock for the past three months in order to arrange on-site research.

She leaned forward to stage-whisper the rest. “Valuable items from the collection have gone missing.”

“And Mr. Dedlock is responsible?”

Mrs. Pierce, clearly enjoying her role as bearer of sordid tidings, shook her head. “Mr. Dedlock assures me that the thief is still among us. Mark my words, Mr. Henley. Jarvis Dedlock is as innocent as a lamb.”

Henley was primarily concerned with whether the archives would still be available to him. Mrs. Pierce reassured him that all would be well. “The new director is Mr. Thatcher Finn. He’s in conference at the moment, but I’ll alert him that you’re here. Would you care to enjoy the exhibits while you wait?”

He retreated contentedly enough into what had been the Dickens family’s dining room. His rubber-soled walking shoes were silent on the hardwood floors. There was little furniture. Locked glass cabinets held displays of Dickensiana — letters, manuscripts, reviews, first editions. Henley gravitated to an exhibit of a magazine called Household Words.

“He published nearly everything in periodicals first, you know,” said a voice behind him. He turned to face the speaker and beheld, to his surprise, someone who looked like a fifteen-year-old surfer: blond hair in a choppy mullet, white T-shirt advertising Pimm’s, pedal-pusher trousers that fell halfway between kneecap and ankle, and flip-flops.

Behind this young man was an older gentleman wearing waistcoat, pince-nez, and watch chain. His diaphanous white hair lifted off his head to form a halo in the doorway, and he smiled politely at the assertiveness of the chatty young man. Henley could not have conjured a more Dickensian director for the Dickens House Museum than the man in the doorway, who had just enough of a belly to qualify as generously proportioned but not quite enough for portly.

“Mr. Finn, I presume,” said Henley, artfully dodging the young man, crossing to the chap in the doorway, and extending his hand. But the plump gentleman blushed.

“Right here, Mr. Henley,” said the young man. He stood with hands in his pockets and one foot crossed over the other. “But please meet Mr. Ravi Vikram. He works for us.”

Henley required a few moments to recalibrate his assumptions. Thatcher Finn, the director of the Dickens House, was this... this slacker? And the gentleman who looked exactly like Pickwick had an Indian name?

Ravi Vikram, who appeared to be in his mid fifties, extended a hand for Henley to shake. “Hope to see you at the show,” he said, and when Henley looked puzzled, he added, “In the parlor. This evening.”

“Mr. Vikram plays Dickens in a weekly performance,” explained Thatcher Finn. “Every Wednesday night in the parlor. Including tonight.”

Henley was still trying to sort out the cast of characters. “Mr. Finn,” he said finally to the young man. “Forgive me for saying so, but you look so young.”

“He is young,” said Ravi Vikram, who spoke with an elegant Oxbridge accent. “How old are you, Thatch?”

“Twenty-eight.” Finn was clearly accustomed to the question. “Before you ask, I read literature at Durham and got the master’s at Trinity, Cambridge.”

“So all my arrangements with Jarvis Dedlock—?”

“Terribly sorry about the confusion,” said Thatcher Finn. “One of those rather unexpected departures. He dropped by this morning to turn in his keys. You just missed him, in fact.”

“That’s what Mrs. Pierce said at reception,” said Henley.

Thatcher Finn lofted several sheets of paper. “I have printouts of your e-mail messages here, Mr. Henley. You’re interested in the plays, are you? Shall I show you the reading room? Ravi, might you pardon us?”

Ravi Vikram waved them away as Thatcher Finn led Henley back to the reception area and through a door into a large, well-equipped modern office.

“For security purposes, the only access to the reading room is through my workplace,” said Finn. He guided Henley to a door on the opposite wall.

They descended a steep staircase into a small room with a single table offering comfortable seating for four. Abutting the table was an old-fashioned card catalogue, and except for a desktop computer tucked away in a cubbyhole, the rest of the room was filled with bookshelves.

“If you can’t find what you need on your own,” said Finn, “Manette Marley will be happy to assist you.”

“Manette Marley?”

“Our curator. Here she comes now.”

They could hear footsteps on the stairway. A moment later she entered. Manette Marley had ebony skin, dreadlocks, and three small rings in each ear. She smiled and offered a firm handshake.

“Nigerian,” she said in a flawless British accent. “Everyone always asks eventually, so there you are. Lovely to have you here, Mr. Henley. You’re showing him round, Thatch?”

Her work station was the small cubbyhole attached to the reading room, and she tapped computer keys during Henley’s brief tour.

“We keep some of the collection upstairs,” Finn explained. “This catalogue will tell us where a particular item might be, including in the display cases. Manette or I can bring you manuscripts for anything that’s not published, but I have to ask you to use these when you handle primary materials.” He indicated a box of white cotton gloves, similar to what Henley had to wear when he was attending cotillion as a boy. “Even the oil from clean fingers can accelerate the deterioration of paper.” Henley began to gather that Thatcher Finn belonged in this job after all.

“I’m trying to learn why Dickens never became a major Victorian playwright. Do you have any ideas?”

“Easy,” said Thatcher Finn. “He wasn’t very good at drama, was he?”

“Yes, he was,” came the voice of the invisible Manette Marley. “He put on plays in his Tavistock Square house for years. And he acted.”

Thatcher Finn grinned. “There you are. The cutthroat world of Dickens scholarship, where the discovery of even a greengrocer’s bill can generate envy, acrimony, and knives in backs.”

Henley soon settled into a comfortable routine. He would read for an hour, then take a break by visiting one of the rooms in the museum overhead. The Dickens House was vertical, with only a couple of rooms on each of the four floors, and by two p.m. Henley had explored his way up to the two bedrooms at the top of the house. The larger one had belonged to Dickens and his wife, Catherine. The smaller bedroom, however, offered a more macabre history: Here young Mary Hogarth, Dickens’ sister-in-law, died at age seventeen. A half-dozen other visitors reverently milled about the cozy space, which, like all the other rooms, displayed Dickens artifacts under glass.

Between the bedrooms was a narrow dressing room where Henley suffered a scare. Behind a velvet rope was a square table covered with photographs of the Dickens family, a special exhibit in honor of the bicentennial of Dickens’ birth. The red satin tablecloth fell all the way to the floor, and as Henley leaned over the restraining rope to get a closer look at Mary Hogarth’s portrait, a hand came out from beneath the table and grabbed his ankle. He yelped. Then a small boy, surely no more than four years old, shouted, “Boo,” and poked his head from beneath the tablecloth. In a moment the child’s embarrassed mother had forcibly retrieved him and apologized, but it was enough to send Henley back to the quiet of the reading room, where he was working his way through a silly Dickens farce called Is She His Wife?

In his absence a petite woman in her early twenties had arrived. She wore slacks and a T-shirt and tiny reading glasses, and she quietly conferred with Manette before putting on a pair of white gloves and receiving from the archives five letters, still in their envelopes, each stored in a brown paper sleeve. She sat opposite Henley at the only table, and she nodded politely at him before she began her examination of the first document. In embarrassment he closed his open briefcase. The entire contents consisted of one red apple for snacking. Though Henley fully expected to accumulate abundant notes and papers by the end of the month, his briefcase for now served merely as a prop to distinguish him as a scholar, not a tourist.

Within ten minutes he heard loud footsteps clumping down the stairs. Then a young man in cowboy boots entered the room. His face was puffy and glistened with sweat. Henley guessed he was about twenty years old — a college student, and apparently a hungover one.

Manette Marley asked if she could help him.

“Bring me the Forster biography. Chop chop.” An American accent.

Henley was mortified by the kid’s rudeness. The woman working opposite Henley also glared at the newcomer until he finally responded.

“No breakfast,” he said. While Manette went off to find the book he’d requested, the young oaf stood, reeled for a moment, and then fainted. Collapsing onto the table, he sent Henley’s briefcase flying before he slid from tabletop to floor in a shower of the documents being examined by the young woman, who shouted and ran for Manette. By the time Henley could reach him, the kid had regained consciousness. “No breakfast,” he said again as he struggled to sit up. In a moment Manette Marley arrived. She helped Henley get the young man seated while the woman retrieved her belongings. Just when everything seemed to be returning to normal, Manette gasped.

“Where’s the Ternan letter?” she asked. Trembling, she held one of five paper sleeves in her right hand. Only four of the sleeves now contained their original contents. The fifth held a blank sheet of paper folded to duplicate the shape and thickness of a letter. The original Dickens correspondence was missing.

The woman who had been studying the letters was both horrified and defensive. “If that’s what’s in the sleeve now, then that’s what you delivered to me. I haven’t taken anything.”

“No one will leave this room,” said Manette Marley. She glared at all three of them and called for Thatcher Finn. “Clearly this entire scene was a ruse,” she said after Finn had arrived. “They were attempting a distraction. I don’t know whether all three are involved, or only these two.” She gestured at the young man, who was pale and perspiring, but she included Henley in her look.

“I beg your pardon,” said Henley. “I had nothing to do with this episode. Please search me immediately.”

“And me,” said the woman.

“Me too,” said the young man. “I haven’t got your letter.”

All three did, in fact, submit to a search, and no letter surfaced.

“It could have been stolen months ago,” said Henley.

“No,” said Thatcher Finn. “The lot from the British Library were just here two days ago to examine that letter. They want to do a special exhibit for the Dickens bicentennial. It’s the only surviving letter from Charles Dickens to Ellen Ternan, his mistress. Extremely rare. It never should have come out of the archives.”

He was clearly upset with Manette Marley, who was distraught in turn. “She said she was looking at watermarks and had to see the originals.”

“I am looking at watermarks,” said the agitated woman. “I would have called your attention to the substitution immediately if I had seen it. I was just getting to that letter when—” She stopped talking and gestured at the woozy young man who had fainted.

Thatcher Finn closed the reading room until further notice. “We need to see if there are other such substitutions,” he said to Manette. “That means a systematic inventory of every letter in the collection.”

She nodded. There were hundreds of letters. It would take days.

“Meanwhile,” said Thatcher Finn, “I am going to ask all of you to leave your belongings here. I’m not an expert on secret compartments and the like. I want to get the police to examine your possessions properly. Please leave briefcases unlocked.”

They all consented.

Before Henley left the premises, Thatcher Finn pulled him aside. “Mr. Henley, I don’t believe you could have been involved in this incident, but I have to be sure.”

“Of course.”

“Why don’t you stop by tonight for your briefcase? I’ll give you a ticket to Ravi’s performance in apology for all the inconvenience.”

Henley was touched that the young director, in his first hectic day on the job, would be so thoughtful. That evening he returned for the show and was greeted by Thatcher Finn and Manette Marley at the door. “Mr. Henley,” said Finn, now dressed in black jeans and a black T-shirt, “I must apologize. Somehow your briefcase has disappeared.”

Henley tried to soften his annoyance. “Weren’t the police coming to examine it?”

Finn nodded. “They were coming round at seven o’clock. I left the case on my desk when we closed the house at five. When I returned to reopen at six forty-five, it was gone. I can’t find it anywhere.”

Henley resisted the temptation to berate him. Jarvis Dedlock, Finn’s predecessor as director of the museum, had been sacked because materials were missing. Obviously security here was as sloppy as Finn’s clothing. But the young director was embarrassed and bewildered by the disappearance of Henley’s property. Resignedly Henley joined the rest of the audience in the parlor to nibble bland cheese squares and sip cheap wine before the show. Of the three dozen people already present, the loudest contingent consisted of American college students traveling with their professor — a brash man with a ponytail.

“No, my wife couldn’t join us,” boomed the professor. He held a glass of red wine in one hand and pointed with the other. “She was too humiliated by the behavior she witnessed this afternoon.” He glared at his target, and Henley followed his gaze to the young man who had fainted that afternoon, now red with embarrassment but defiantly guzzling wine. Interesting, Henley thought. The scholarly young woman was married to this blow-hard professor, and the oaf was one of his students.

The show started promptly at eight with the ringing of a hand bell. The snug parlor somehow accommodated chairs for forty people. Henley realized that he was attending not a play but a reenactment of a reading by Dickens. Ravi Vikram, in a brown nineteenth-century pinstriped suit, squared goatee, and a curly pompadour wig, stood at a lectern and spoke of “his” early life of poverty, of the effect of having to work in a factory, of how those early memories crept into his fiction. Then he read passages from Oliver Twist and Nicholas Nickleby.

“I also had a lifelong interest in crime,” said Vikram in character as Dickens. “After the interval, I’ll read to you some of my most gruesome descriptions of violence, including the murder of Nancy by Bill Sykes. Let me warn you now: Sometimes members of the audience faint.”

He winked at Henley, who sat in the front row, then he exited through the crowd before the audience had come to its feet. Henley was the last member of the audience to file out. When he reached the door, Manette Marley stopped him.

“Ravi left a note for you,” she said, and she handed him a small piece of paper. Meet me upstairs at the interval, it said, and it was signed with an initial, R.

Henley was flattered by the invitation. He must have made quite an impression during their brief introduction this morning. Most actors had business to tend to at intermission — costume changes, touching up makeup, looking after props, and, most important, staying in character. While the rest of the audience milled about in the ground-floor dining room, Henley peeked into the office to make sure that Vikram wasn’t waiting there. The only inhabitant was Thatcher Finn, who talked on a cell phone, so Henley proceeded to the upper floors.

In the smaller upstairs bedroom, where young Mary Hogarth had died, he found Ravi Vikram. The actor, still in makeup and costume, lay on his back with his head propped against the wall. His eyes were open but stared at nothing. The velvet rope from the neighboring dressing room was wrapped tightly around his throat. One end of Vikram’s necktie was knotted to his left wrist, while the other end twisted around the handle of a black briefcase — Driscoll Henley’s briefcase, to be exact.

Henley rushed to the body and loosened the rope around Vikram’s neck. This attack could not have happened more than a moment before Henley’s arrival, and he hoped that CPR might yet revive the man. As he unwound the last of the rope, he heard footsteps on the stairs.

“Mr. Henley?” It was the horrified voice of Manette Marley. She was with Thatcher Finn, who was already dialing 999 on his cell phone.

In what seemed like no time at all, a dozen police officers converged on the house, cordoned it off, forbade anyone to leave the premises, and arrested Driscoll Henley.

“Give me five minutes,” Henley begged. But what could he prove in five minutes?

“You acknowledge that this is your briefcase,” said the inspector.

“Yes,” said Henley. “I left it this afternoon at the request of Mr. Finn. I was going to take it with me after the show.”

“What’s inside?”

“Only an apple,” said Henley. “See for yourself.”

But when the inspector opened the briefcase, out spilled three periodicals from 1863, a first-edition autographed copy of David Copperfield, and the missing letter from Charles Dickens to Ellen Ternan. Henley was dumbfounded.

“The book and magazines came from this very display case,” said Thatcher Finn, indicating the glass enclosure along the far wall.

“Do you have CCTV cameras?” asked the inspector.

Finn shook his head. “My first priority. But there’s no camera system at present.”

Henley felt sick. “I did not take those items,” he said.

“You were present when that letter disappeared today,” said Manette Marley.

“You saw the contents of the case,” said Henley. “Except for the apple, it was empty.” He looked at Thatcher Finn. “You told me this briefcase was missing. But you had it all along, and you packed it with these stolen materials.”

“I’d never do that,” said Finn. “I’m here to protect the collection, not to pillage it.”

“Didn’t your predecessor lose his job because bits of the collection were disappearing?” asked Henley. “He can’t be blamed for this latest episode, can he?”

Thatcher Finn reddened.

Encouraged, Henley continued. “You could have stashed these items in my case after you killed Ravi Vikram. As a diversion.”

Finn shook his head. “When would I have had time to do all that? You saw me on the telephone in my office at the interval. Ravi was only a few moments ahead of you.”

The police inspector interrupted. “There’s what remains of your apple.” He pointed to the apple core under a window. “Didn’t want to stain the valuables, did you?”

Henley stared at the apple core and at the evidence in front of him. He considered asking the police to check his briefcase for fingerprints, but anyone wishing to conceal fingerprints would have easy access to the scholars’ gloves provided by the museum itself.

For a moment he wondered whether the dead man himself might have been stealing the documents, but he immediately dismissed that idea. Anyone who caught Vikram in the act of thievery would have raised the alarm, not killed him. And why put these artifacts into Henley’s briefcase? Were they planning for Henley to serve as an unsuspecting mule, for him to carry the contraband off the premises and then, what? A street crime, a quick grab-and-snatch? Henley would report being mugged, and the thieves would escape with priceless Dickens materials. It would work, he supposed, but it seemed awfully complicated as a way of stealing from the collection.

He recalled the scene in the reading room that afternoon. “The man who collapsed this afternoon. He was evidently faint from not eating breakfast. He could have eaten my apple. Did anyone notice whether he left the performance before intermission?”

“I sat at the door,” said Manette. “No one left.”

“If you were at the door, then you could have slipped out yourself,” said Henley.

“To do what?” asked Manette. “Ravi was alive at the end of the first act. And everyone in the audience exited the room before I did. You were the last to leave, and that’s when I gave you the note.”

Yes, the note. Exactly why would Vikram invite Driscoll Henley, a virtual stranger, to meet him upstairs between acts?

“He wrote a note to me but asked you to deliver it? That’s awfully cumbersome. Why put the invitation in writing? He could have spoken to me directly as he walked past.”

She shrugged. “Perhaps he didn’t want to break character.”

Henley thought about that. There was one logical conclusion.

“Tick tock, Mr. Henley,” said the inspector.

He took a chance. “The note wasn’t for me, was it, Manette?” When she didn’t answer, he knew that he’d guessed right. “It was you that he wanted to meet upstairs, not me. You must have known what was going to happen to him, and you wanted me to find the body.”

Now all stared at him — and at her. Two fat tears slid down her cheeks. “It’s not like that,” she said. “I’m sorry. Ravi wrote that note to me six weeks ago. Tonight I used it to send Mr. Henley to find him.” She looked at the policemen. “I didn’t know Ravi was going to be assaulted. I just wanted to embarrass him. He had to stop.”

“Stop what?” asked Henley.

She gestured at the display cases in the room. “Ravi would open the exhibits. Handle the books, touch the miniatures. He said it helped him stay in character. But of course it was entirely inappropriate.”

“You had the keys to the display cabinets,” Henley prompted her. “And you’d open them up for him.”

She nodded. “But after today, I couldn’t. Not after Mr. Jarvis was sacked and we had a letter missing.”

Henley nodded. “In the process of opening up the display cases to connect directly with Dickens, Vikram must have discovered that some original items had been replaced with replicas. Tonight he came face-to-face with the thief, who killed him and tied my briefcase to his hands after stashing these stolen items inside. It was a literal means of tying me to the murder.”

“But how could the thief get into these locked exhibits?” asked Manette. “Ravi had no keys.”

“And there’s no broken glass,” said Finn. The room fell silent. Finn stared at Manette. “You and I are the only ones with keys to these cases.”

Manette stared back. “What did you do with the keys turned in this morning by Jarvis Dedlock? Someone could have used those.”

Finn pulled two sets of keys from his pocket. “I’ve carried both Jarvis’s and my own all day.”

A long silence, and then Manette spoke. “I know I didn’t kill him, Thatch.”

“I know I didn’t,” said Finn.

“Neither one of you killed him,” said Henley. He recalled the scene from this afternoon. The young woman — the wife of the professor downstairs — had known the boorish young man sitting next to her. Surely they had collaborated on an elaborate scheme to steal from the collection. In the confusion after the young man pretended to faint, somebody could snatch the Dickens letter and stash it in the reading room, perhaps inside the card catalogue. In case of a search, the thief would not be holding incriminating evidence and could return to fetch the letter later. The young man had spent the entire evening downstairs. But couldn’t the young woman be here too, somewhere out of sight? Her husband had loudly proclaimed that she wasn’t attending the performance. That could have been a classic act of misdirection. Could the woman have been hiding in the house all day, waiting for an opportunity to retrieve her stolen goods? Was that possible? For a visitor to lurk unbeknownst to the staff for so many hours after closing time?

Only a couple of minutes had passed between Ravi Vikram’s exit at the end of Act One and Henley’s discovery of the body. No one could have killed the man and then had time to slip down the stairs undetected. There was no fire escape or elevator or laundry chute. Whoever had killed Ravi Vikram must still be on this floor of the house.

“What’s that?” asked Henley, pointing to a door in the corner.

“A cupboard,” said Thatcher Finn.

What Americans call a closet. “It’s locked, I suppose.”

A policeman tried it. The door was unlocked, but the closet was empty.

“That’s odd,” said Thatcher Finn. “That door is supposed to be locked always.”

“That’s where the killer was hiding until Ravi Vikram arrived.”

“But where is this mysterious figure now, Mr. Henley?” asked the inspector. “There are no more cupboards to check. Who is this person, and where?”

The answer came too easily. “The killer is in the room next-door.”

“The other bedroom is empty.”

“Not the other bedroom. The dressing room. Look under the tablecloth of the special exhibit. It’s long enough to conceal someone.”

Two policemen left the room. He heard them enter the dressing room, then the sounds of a brief scuffle. In a moment they reentered the room escorting a handcuffed, writhing prisoner. It was a man Henley had never seen before, a diminutive bald man in a dress shirt, suit trousers, and sneakers.

“Jarvis Dedlock,” said Thatcher Finn, shocked.

The former director of the museum.

“They said I’d just missed you this morning,” said Henley. “But you never left the house, did you? Mrs. Pierce looked the other way when you slipped upstairs. You convinced her that you were innocent and were springing a trap for the real thief.”

“But he turned in his keys,” said Finn.

“Duplicates,” said Henley. He turned to Jarvis Dedlock. “When did you steal the letter?”

Dedlock didn’t even bother to ask who Henley was. He must have overheard the entire conversation from his hiding place next-door. After a moment, he shrugged. “Two days ago. As soon as the authenticators from the British Library left the building.”

“And where did you hide it?”

Dedlock snorted. “I didn’t hide it. I took it home with me.” He paused, as if waiting to see if Henley would work it all out.

“You took a priceless letter home,” said Henley, “but you brought it back with you this morning when you came to turn in your keys. Why would you do that?”

Dedlock said nothing.

Henley worked it out as he talked. “You hid all day in this cupboard with perhaps the most valuable letter in the collection. Why? You weren’t trying to return it to the archive. You could have done that at five o’clock when the place closed and you had the premises to yourself.”

Now everyone was listening to him.

“You slipped out, found my briefcase downstairs, and loaded it with Dickens memorabilia. But if you’d simply been planning to steal, you could have left immediately while the museum was still deserted. Instead, you went back to your hiding place and waited for everyone to return for the performance tonight.”

Dedlock appeared to gain some respect for Henley. “You’re clever for a Yank. Cleverer than most.” He glared with loathing at Thatcher Finn.

Then Henley caught on. “You came for revenge. You must have really hated Ravi Vikram. To wait here for him to arrive at intermission.”

“He got me sacked,” said Dedlock. “Complained to the board that materials were missing. All the evidence against me was circumstantial, but they held me accountable.”

Henley nodded. His eye caught on the apple core still in the corner of the room. “You were so tidy. Why eat the apple and toss the remains onto the floor?”

“I thought it was Finn’s apple,” said Dedlock. “I thought I was taking his briefcase from his desk.”

Henley understood it all. “You thought you were framing Thatcher Finn, not me. In one move you’d get rid of your accuser and your replacement. Did you expect to get your job back?”

Dedlock stared straight at him. “Not only would I get my position back, but the Governing Board would apologize for ever doubting me.”

When Henley eventually spoke to Suzanne McClain on the telephone, it was midnight in London, seven p.m. in the States. “I solved the mystery,” he said.

“Already?” She sounded genuinely impressed. “So tell me. Why did Dickens write novels instead of plays?”

“Because he could be in complete control as a novelist,” said Henley. “In plays actors could change lines or ad-lib or otherwise tamper with his scripts. When he was the narrator of a story, he was in total command of each gesture, speech, thought. He got to play every part himself, always perfectly.”

She approved. “How did you conclude that so quickly?”

He told her about his evening. “Jarvis Dedlock had scripted the plot right down to what the Governing Board would say when they reinstated him. But a couple of actors improvised and spoiled his production.”

She congratulated him. “What are you going to do in London for the next month?”

He had thought about that too. “I might as well take care of the Shakespeare authorship question while I’m here,” he said. “Stay tuned.”

Copyright © 2012 by W. Edward Blain