And Then There Was No One

by Gilbert Adair

  ‘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 o
f 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.

  Chapter Five

  The applause was more than just polite; it was, I flatter myself, as genuine as applause ever is. Certainly, there was no hint of the muttered boos I had been advised to expect by the festival’s perhaps panic-prone organisers, and the mild euphoria I felt was marred only by the fact that nobody laughed, not once, at the cluster of jokes in the text.* There followed a few seconds of microphone-tapping indecision – traditional, in my experience, to these events and even reassuring to members of the public by its implication that intellectuals are human after all, as prone as they themselves are to stumbling on the twin tripwires of accident and error. Then Jochen proceeded to read, in his own German version, another tale from the collection (at greater length than the original, it seemed to me, but literature does tend to put on weight in translation). A lot of laughter this time and, at the end, warmer applause than there had been for me.

  Whereupon he suggested that we immediately move on to the public Q & A session. Now those of my fellow-writers who are reading me will understand what I mean when I say that what invariably occurs at this stage of every such event is that the audience sits there like a pile of Christmas toys for which batteries haven’t been included, and it’s only after the Q & A has been brought to an abrupt and rather ignominious end, with a wry apology to the visiting author for the congenital bashfulness of the local population, that half of those present make a beeline for the dais to ask all the questions they had been invited to ask during the one part of the evening which had been specifically set aside for their participation. Not, however, on this occasion. No doubt because I faced an assembly of specialists, some of whom were writers themselves, I found myself frantically fielding one question after another like a goalie during a penalty shootout.

  We started off with the usual hoary time-and tradition-honoured posers.† ‘Mr Adar [sic], where do you get your ideas from?’ Me: ‘From the dictionary.’ ‘What, if you please, is your definition of a writer, a real writer?’ Me: ‘A real writer is one who writes in the first-person-singular even when he doesn’t use the word “I”.’ ‘Do you meticulously plot out your novels before writing them?’ Me: ‘Quite the reverse. I leap from the plane and trust not just that my parachute will open but that I won’t land in a tree.’ ‘Have you ever been tempted to imitate the writings of Grim Grin?’ Me (venturing a wild guess): ‘Not in the least. However, I do increasingly admire those novels of his which he called “entertainments”.’ ‘You wrote two pastiches of Agatha Christie, The Act of Roger Murgatroyd and A Mysterious Affair of Style? Will there be a third?’ Me: ‘Absolutely not. I have had my fill of cardboard characters and preposterous plotlines. What I desire to write now is something more personal, a work of genuine depth and ambition.’ A comment that prompted an embarrassingly audible, head-turning snort from the back of the hall. Then a (planted) question from Düttmann: ‘What is the difference between bookshops in Switzerland and bookshops in Britain?’ Me (not impromptu): ‘Your bookshops sell fifty types of books and one type of coffee, while ours sell fifty types of coffee and one type of book.’ Which instantly provoked an unplanted query from Hugh Spaulding: ‘What type?’ Me: ‘Lite-lit.’ Adding (impromptu): ‘What you might call skinny litte.’ (Some chuckles, but only from the small contingent of real Anglophones.)

  Several more questions followed in the same unthreatening vein before we got down to cases. A bearded young man sitting in the centre of the front row having disserted at extravagant length on the sociology of those ‘relevant’ modern thrillers whose guilty party, whose least likely suspect, or most likely suspect, is infallibly revealed to be society itself, I answered, when he finally let me speak, ‘Relevance I can get at home.’ (It got the biggest
laugh of the evening.) A hand at the back waved an illustrated programme: ‘You were not of course the first to do it, not by a long chalk, but may we know what made you write a collection of apocryphal Sherlock Holmes stories?’ Me: ‘Interesting you should ask that. As it happens, it was a consequence of my rereading the entire Holmes canon in the stupendously annotated edition by Leslie Klinger, which I’m certain you all know well. I eventually arrived at the first of the “posthumous” volumes, The Return of Sherlock Holmes, after Conan Doyle had rashly tried to kill off his creation, his Frankenstein’s monster, you might say, by having him tumble over the Reichenbach Falls, and I had just begun reading its opening story, “The Mystery of the Empty House”, when – well, ladies and gentlemen, you can imagine the surprise and pleasure I experienced on discovering – on rediscovering after a great many years – that the victim of that first murder mystery to be investigated by the Great Detective in the wake of his resurrection was the Honourable Ronald … Adair. That for me was, as we British say, the clincher.’ (Somebody applauded, probably Düttmann.)

  Now came one of the warned-of anorak-y questions. ‘Mr Adair, in the story you just read to us, Sherlock Holmes, Dr Watson and Dr Eustace Gable travel to Aylesbury by the 8.15 train from the station of King’s Cross. I have to tell you this is not possible.’ Me: ‘Why not?’ ‘If you wished to travel from London to Aylesbury in the early years of the twentieth century, you must take a train from Marylebone, Paddington or Euston station, never King’s Cross.’ Me: ‘Thank you. I’ll make sure that is corrected in the second edition. If there is a second edition.’ From Sanary, who alone stood up to ask his question: ‘Why cannot you create your own detective instead of stealing somebody else’s?’ Me: ‘As a writer I’ve always been a shameless poacher of idiolects. As such I’ve never sought to conceal from the reader the referential mode, nor even the specific literary template, of any of my novels. Lewis Carroll, James Barrie, Jean Cocteau, Thomas Mann, Henry James, Alfred Hitchcock, a plump cinematic cuckoo in the literary nest, these among other more peripheral inspirers have furnished successive models for my published fiction. I read a book, Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan, Les Enfants terribles, Death in Venice, or whatever, I like it, I rewrite it. I am in short a pasticheur. Less by opportunism, though, than by superstition. I long ago discovered that I could embark on a new work of fiction only if its premise had already been legitimised by one of the writers in my personal Pantheon. Each of my novels is thus a palimpsest. Scrape away at its surface and you will find, underneath, another novel, usually a classic. I offer no apology for this.’