The Library Paradox

by Catherine Shaw

  These were my thoughts as the train pulled into Liverpool Street. An electric tension swept through me as I stood up; my bag was reached down by a helpful gentleman traveller who ushered me politely onto the platform ahead of himself. The moment I emerged, the very air of London struck me as different, and my excitement increased as I scanned the small group of people waiting to welcome the passengers, to see if I could spot Professor Taylor, who had confirmed that he would fetch me. Before I saw him, he was coming towards me and taking my valise out of my hand.

  ‘I cannot thank you enough for accepting my invitation,’ he said gravely, as though he had prepared the words. I could not help feeling a twinge of worry as to whether he truly believed in the success of my enterprise. I myself was, as always, tremendously uncertain about the outcome, meaning only to try my best.

  ‘Have you already arranged for a place to stay, or will you need a hotel?’ he continued solicitously.

  ‘I will be staying with a friend,’ I responded quietly. ‘But it is enough for me to go to her flat this evening. My case is not heavy; I can carry it with me, and I am ready to start working immediately.’

  ‘How exactly do you intend to begin?’ he said, looking slightly taken aback. ‘I am ready to help you in any way I can, but I must admit that I have not the faintest idea how a detective goes about his – er – or her work. I had thought of organising a small dinner party at my home, with several of my colleagues from the department, as soon as I can manage to send out the invitations. You may possibly learn something useful from them, although it may essentially come down to the fact that Gerard Ralston had but few friends and, as far as we know, no private life at all. What else were you thinking of doing?’

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘ideally, if it were possible, the very first thing I would do would be to look through all of Professor Ralston’s papers. I meant to ask you where they are now, and if such a thing is feasible. I hope the police have not seized them?’

  ‘As far as I know, the police have not actually taken any papers. Ralston kept all his papers in his study, and the police have looked through everything and sealed the place off. They asked me a number of questions and I did not get the impression that they had found anything conclusive. Indeed, I am afraid you are likely to find more drafts of articles and notes on research than revealing private letters. I cannot believe he had much in the way of non-professional correspondence. On the other hand, I cannot quite persuade myself that he was murdered, either; yet it is a fact that he was, so chances are that something may turn up.’

  ‘Would he not have kept personal papers in his flat rather than in his study?’ I asked.

  ‘Apparently not. The lady who came daily to clean and cook for him claims there wasn’t so much as a scrap in the house. But that’s normal enough, after all; his study was not really separate from his flat, it was just below it. He had a couple of large cabinets in his study, in which he piled and filed everything except whatever he was working on at the moment, which he kept in his desk.’

  ‘I see,’ I said. ‘All this makes me feel that I would dearly like to have a look around in his study. But I suppose it is hopeless, since you said that the police have sealed off the room.’

  ‘Well – at any rate they have locked it and carried off the key,’ he said.

  ‘And the spare one as well, I suppose,’ I replied. ‘Was there really no other?’

  ‘The police believe so,’ he replied with an indefinable expression, which might have been very slightly smug. ‘That is what the lady who did for him told them. But as a matter of fact, there is another. Ralston actually had his key copied, and he gave the copy to me on the eve of a trip to the Continent that he took one or two years ago. Of course he packed every document he thought he would need, but he still worried that once over there, he might realise that something he had left behind was absolutely indispensable after all. He wanted me to be able to fetch it out and send it to him in case that happened.’

  ‘And did he end up asking you to do so?’

  ‘No, he did not. In fact, I rather believe that he forgot about it altogether. He was a very possessive man, and I am quite certain that if he had remembered about the key, he would have asked me for it immediately upon his return. I forgot all about it myself, as a matter of fact. I simply added it to the ring of keys I usually keep at home. But I remembered it suddenly yesterday, when I got your telegram, and have brought the ring with me.’ And he proceeded to extract it from a leather case he carried. ‘I would be hard put to tell you which one it is on sight,’ he added, looking at the tightly crowded congregation of keys of all shapes and sizes, ‘but it must be here, and we shall find it. I only hope that our action cannot be considered illegal.’

  He flagged a cab and we climbed in and directed the driver to Adelphi Street. He occupied the drive in giving me sundry details and thumbnail sketches of the members of the department. I paid special attention to any mention of past conflicts, and retained a few names for further investigation. At length, the cab drew up in front of the library and we stepped out.

  It was peculiar to confront the tall iron grille, the impressive gate opening onto the street, and the wide path leading up between two narrow green swards to the heavy, square stone house, with the images that I had formed in my mind while listening to the descriptions of the place given to me in my own home. It was not really dissimilar to what I had imagined, yet it possessed the inexplicable additional sharpness of reality, which also distinguishes familiar figures seen in dreams from their actual embodiments.

  We walked up the path slowly. I tried to estimate how much time it took us, and to imagine suddenly seeing the two students come tearing around the corner of the house, and myself running to follow them inside. I wondered if the sequence of events could really be so impossible to adjust as the professors and police seemed to imagine, and if it would be possible, at some point, to make some experiments myself.

  We entered. The vast, square room with its enormous windows looking out in all directions was peopled only by two lonely figures. One, a young man with spectacles, sat at a desk just within the main door, a pile of books before him.

  ‘This is Edmund Bryant,’ said the professor, pausing briefly before the desk to introduce me to him. ‘Our department has hired him to watch the library by day, so that it may continue to be used by students and faculty.’ I greeted him quietly, observing with interest his pale face equipped with a rather long, very narrow nose, a high forehead and oddly light eyes which seemed to emerge with difficulty from a state of deep concentration.

  ‘You are studying?’ I asked him.

  ‘I am working on my dissertation,’ he replied, and something like a flash of resentment appeared briefly in his eyes and disappeared immediately as he turned to his books again.

  The other occupant of the library, a student with disarranged clothes and tousled hair, stood on a ladder fetching down a book from a high shelf. Upon hearing us enter, he descended. At the sight of Professor Taylor, he turned somewhat pale.

  ‘Ah, Randall,’ said the professor with a vinegary smile. ‘I am indeed pleased to have encountered you. How fortuitous. I believe you have something for me, do you not? It is already somewhat late.’

  ‘Oh, um, ahem, yes, of course,’ mumbled the student in deep embarrassment. ‘It is … that is … it is at home, have not had time yet to …’

  ‘Please do give it to me at the first opportunity,’ said Professor Taylor. ‘I am beginning to correct them today.’ And he continued to stand fixing the student with his sharp eyes. Completely flustered, the poor young man murmured a hasty assent, and putting the book he had selected down on the nearest table, left the library as quickly as he could.

  ‘One of the students in my advanced Medieval Commerce class,’ said the professor with some annoyance. ‘Brilliant, but disorganised and permanently late. He has still not given me his draft on Early Apprenticeships in the Art of Metalworking, and has been avoiding me lately beca
use of it. I expect he has not completed it yet. Well, he is gone now; to finish it, I hope. Now for the other one.’ He turned to the studious gentleman at the front desk.

  ‘I will be remaining here for some time, Bryant,’ he said. ‘You may leave for the afternoon. Leave me the keys to the front door and the main gate; I will lock up, and you can get them back tomorrow morning if you come to me before classes.’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ said Edmund respectfully but reluctantly, beginning to gather up his things. He looked put out, as though he had been perfectly happy where he was, and did not particularly want to be sent away, and piled his books with distinct lack of energy. He seemed about to say something, but the professor forestalled him.

  ‘Oh, and will you be going to the main building? You couldn’t stop off and put this note into Professor Hudson’s letter box, could you? It would be most helpful.’ Taking up a notepad, he wrote something upon the first page, folded it carefully and handed it over. Edmund could not but take it, and I admired the professor’s dexterity.

  ‘I wrote out the dinner invitation for Sunday to Hudson,’ he confided to me when Edmund had disappeared down the path and out of the main gate. ‘Why not? This way it’s done, and Bryant is got rid of. Now let us deal with anyone else who might choose to appear.’

  He wrote THE LIBRARY IS CLOSED TODAY in large letters on the notepad, tore off the page, and pinned it to the heavy wooden front door, then closed it and locked it from the inside with the key he had authoritatively removed from Edmund’s possession.

  ‘Here we are, then,’ he said.

  It took him several minutes of patience, trying the keys on his ring in the keyhole of the locked door to Professor Ralston’s study in turn, but he eventually located the right one and the door swung open.

  ‘Ah, there we go,’ he said with satisfaction.

  The study presented a peculiar sight. The police had apparently left the furniture exactly as it had been when the murder took place. There was not much of it, in fact; apart from two large, solid oaken cabinets on either side of the large window looking out over the grass at the back of the house, the study had been furnished only with an impressive, massive desk and two black wooden chairs, one with arms and one without. Probably the professor had one chair behind his desk and the other was for visitors, but it was not possible to tell immediately which chair had occupied which position, for they had apparently been flung about the room. The smaller of the two appeared to have crashed against the wall, smashing the glass of a picture, which still lay among the shards. The desk had been pushed over, but had not fallen entirely to the floor, having partially and crookedly come to rest upon the other chair, which lay flat on its back on the floor, rather miserably upholding the full weight of the desk on the edge of its upthrust seat. The desk was a handsome one; its burnished wooden surface was free since everything on it had slid to the ground. I spotted a little dent in its centre, as though it had received rather a sharp blow from a heavy object. I peered closely at this dent. It seemed to have been newly made; infinitesimal splinters of wood showed, clean and fresh, at its edges. The papers and pens which had been lying on the desk lay scattered on the floor, as did a nearly empty inkpot and an elegant brass lamp, its shade awry. A thick carpet covered the central section of the floor. Before the tragedy, the study must have been quite a pleasant place to be.

  ‘You see how the floor is raised above garden level,’ observed Professor Taylor. ‘One goes up several steps from the path to the front door; the higher level keeps out the damp. It means that the windows are quite high; they are at waist level in here, as you see, and thus above head level outside. That is why the students who heard the sounds of the struggle which produced all this’ – he indicated the mess with a wave of his hand – ‘could not simply peer within to ascertain what was going on.’

  ‘It is a pity,’ I said thoughtfully, ‘that they did not think of climbing on each other’s shoulders.’

  ‘Peering in windows goes against the grain, instinctively, doesn’t it?’ he replied. ‘It probably did not even occur to them. I think that in their place I should have done exactly the same as they did.’

  I walked rather tentatively around the fallen desk and looked at the spot where Professor Ralston had presumably been wont to sit.

  ‘This is where his body was found,’ said the professor. ‘He was apparently shot at very close range while standing behind his desk. There was not much blood. The police took away samples, I expect, to do whatever they do with them in their chemical laboratories, but I don’t believe it yielded anything unexpected. The gun was over there,’ he added, indicating a position one or two yards in front of the fallen desk, rather near the door. He then turned to the cabinets, and tried a drawer. ‘Perhaps we should begin by having a look at these?’

  It had not occurred to me that he might actually intend to offer me his collaboration. I would much have preferred to work alone. It was my habit; after all, one could never tell who might be involved in the events one was trying to uncover, or at least have a secret interest in them. But he was already opening some drawers and peering inside them, and for the life of me I could not see how to send him away.

  ‘This one holds drafts of his own papers and articles, and copies of newspapers and magazines containing things that interested him,’ he remarked, lifting out some of the contents.

  ‘I think I will begin by inspecting the desk,’ I said, and leaning down, I began to look at the papers that lay upon the floor. ‘I don’t suppose we had better disarrange things too much, had we? I mean, the police will be expecting to find this room as they left it.’

  ‘True, true,’ he said, quickly putting the papers he had spread out on the floor in front of the window back into a neat pile. Then he changed his mind. ‘Well, it’s not likely they’ll have memorised the exact order of every paper, is it? I don’t suppose it matters much. I’ll look at them drawer by drawer. Dear me, look at this – most interesting! Quite a collection of copies of original documents from the Spanish Inquisition! Notes from a trial, here. Not surprising, I suppose,’ he added, leafing through an article he had discovered, and looking as pleased as a cat with a saucer of cream. ‘Yes, I suppose that makes sense, with his interests, doesn’t it? Most interesting, this,’ and he continued reading busily. Within a few minutes he was utterly absorbed. It did not seem that he was going to be much of a disturbance to me after all.

  Quietly, I picked up the few sheets from the floor and began to peruse them. One contained a careful outline of a lecture, and a couple of others contained a list of what looked like possible topics for dissertations. Besides this, there was a letter in French addressed to Professor Ralston, and a final sheet, which appeared to be the beginning of an answer to this letter. I picked it up quickly, my heart beating. It seemed likely that this was the very last thing he ever wrote.

  Dear Lazare,

  I have received your news. Surely you realise that vague nonsense concerning rumours of a lost or found ‘petit bleu’ is unlikely to have the slightest effect on the Affair. If the thing really exists, which appears highly doubtful to me, it is almost certain to be a forgery …

  I could not help imagining the professor seated at his desk, writing these lines with a pinched expression on his face, pausing for a moment to consider his next words … and hearing a knock at the door.

  Picking up the letter in French, I read it carefully. It was extremely short, and from what I could judge, the tone seemed to be aggressive, almost accusatory. However, it was too telegraphic in style for me to be able to understand what it referred to.

  Vous allez pouvoir arrêter vos agissements. Un nouveau document est apparu, cette fois définitif; il s’agit d’un petit bleu trouvé au même endroit que le bordereau, mais cette fois avec mention explicite d’un nom: celui du vrai coupable. La justice suivra son cours.

  Bien à vous. B.L.

  ‘Do you know what this is all about?’ I asked Professor Taylor, carrying the letters
over to where he knelt upon the parquet.

  ‘Eh? What’s that?’ he said, emerging with difficulty from the profound concentration inspired in him by the yellowed articles into which he was plunged.

  ‘Look at this,’ I said, pushing the documents under his nose. ‘Do you have any idea what it is all about?’

  ‘I’ve often wondered how a detective works,’ mused the professor unexpectedly, paying no attention to the papers I was holding out to him. ‘I mean, there must be such a wealth of information; far too much, one would think. Just look at all the papers in this room. Looking for a clue is like looking for a needle in a haystack, isn’t it? And the talking with people – why, what can one hope to discover by talking with my colleagues, for instance? I mean, I know them all very well, and can already imagine everything they will probably say. And I must say I can’t see what use any of it could possibly be in elucidating Professor Ralston’s death.’

  His words distracted me momentarily from Lazare’s letter.

  ‘It is hard to explain exactly how I proceed,’ I admitted, quelling the slight feeling of worry that his words aroused in me. ‘I really don’t know just what I am trying to do. Maybe the best description would be that I form a picture in my mind of what constituted the normality of the situation I am investigating, and once I have developed a clear enough picture, I notice anything that stands out, and restrict myself to investigating that. Now, of course, it is still too early for me to have formed a picture. Examining the papers in this room will help me to start. These particular letters strike me as very interesting. Please do have a look.’ And I thrust them towards him once again. The professor pushed his glasses up on his nose.