The Library Paradox

by Catherine Shaw

  ‘I need to go back to that library and finish my work there,’ I said, repressing a shudder. ‘And then, I must do something else very important; banal, perhaps, but the first thing that must be done in any investigation of this kind. I must find out what I can about Professor Ralston’s last will and testament.’

  ‘Do you have the right to see it?’ said Amy in surprise. ‘Wills are private, aren’t they?’

  ‘Actually, they are not. All wills eventually end up at Somerset House and may be consulted by the general public.’

  ‘Somerset House? That’s convenient – why, it’s right next to the college! But I thought they had only marriages there.’

  ‘Marriages, births, deaths, wills,’ I answered. ‘I have been there before, and it is most useful. But I will not be going tomorrow. Professor Ralston’s will cannot be there yet; it is much too early. I have heard that his father is still travelling on the Continent and may not return to this country for another few days. The will must be opened and read in the presence of everyone concerned, so it may not even have been read as yet.’

  ‘Then what can you expect to find out, and where will you go?’

  ‘I shall go to see his lawyers. Probably I will not learn as much as I would like to. Lawyers are not forthcoming. But I hope that at the very least, I can find out if there is a will. And perhaps I can find out when the professor’s father is expected home.’

  ‘That and the researches will not take up your evening, will it?’ asked Amy eagerly. ‘We asked Rivka if we could come tomorrow evening, and she invited us all for dinner. Will that be all right?’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ I exclaimed. ‘I shall be happy to go there with you. In fact, I am most interested to meet them. Yet I still wonder – do you truly believe that they could somehow help us identify a completely unknown rabbi whose description could probably fit half the people in the East End?’

  ‘Not half,’ she smiled. ‘Seriously, we think it is possible. Rivka may not be able to help much, as she does not know the extended community very well, and even their language still holds some difficulties for her. But her husband has lived there for many years, and has a thousand and one friends and acquaintances. It is a strange community: news spreads like wildfire within it, but information from the outside world doesn’t always penetrate, and when it does, it is often given a very peculiar slant. People would be much more likely to know about the latest childbirth in the neighbouring street than about the fall of the Prime Minister, and if they did learn about it, they might attribute it to some curious cause that we would never imagine – the evil eye, for instance. Well, let me not exaggerate – they are more or less ordinary people, of course, and they read the newspapers just as we do. What I mean to say is that the community is as ingrown as a village and nobody’s doings within it are likely to remain secret.’

  ‘But what doings are we talking about? The man Jonathan saw may have done nothing more than simply taking an omnibus into town.’

  ‘A trip into London might have been noticed by someone. We’ll just have to feel our way – you are the detective, after all!’

  ‘Well, I guess it will not be any foggier than the beginnings of a certain number of my previous investigations,’ I remarked. ‘We shall see when we get there. Now, if we have had enough of still-rather-liquid rice pudding and only-slightly-cork-flavoured wine, we had better think of going straight to Professor Ralston’s library and attempting our experiment.’

  The three young people leapt up with alacrity, and swept away the dishes in record time. Wrapping ourselves warmly against the pinch of March, we stepped outside and made our way on foot to Adelphi Street. It was by now nearly ten o’clock in the evening and dark as pitch; we had decided that this would be a good time, as it would be too late for many people to be about on the street, yet not so late that passers-by or neighbours might get suspicious at the sight of lights and activity within, and call the police.

  ‘The street gate is locked,’ said Jonathan, rattling it as we drew up. ‘Oh, Vanessa, this is annoying! I hadn’t thought of it; they never used to lock it when the professor lived here. How shall we get in?’

  ‘I have the key,’ I said, taking it out.

  ‘Good work!’ he said admiringly. ‘Ho,’ he added, glancing around, ‘when I think that this is where it all happened! I was right here when the man came out, and just about in the middle there when I saw the other two.’

  Having unlocked and opened the gate, I moved to the place he indicated, at a distance about halfway between the street and the building.

  ‘How can you be sure of the exact spot?’ I asked.

  ‘I wasn’t right near the street nor yet near the house,’ he said, hesitating slightly. ‘The path isn’t long, so I must have been about here.’

  ‘Well, that will give us a little leeway,’ I observed. We walked up the path and entered the building. The great room was not in pitch darkness, for the sky vaguely shone its dim reflection of the city lights through the numerous large windows, which glowed pale in the darkness. Quickly, we lit a few candles we had had the foresight to bring with us. There was a lamp on Edmund’s desk, and we lit that as well. It shed a warm glow, which lifted the shadows.

  Half-consciously, I glanced at the desk in the corner where I had been working earlier in the afternoon.

  ‘Oh, look,’ I remarked, going over to it. ‘I just remembered that I jumped up and rushed out, leaving a mess behind. I had forgotten all about it. Edmund must have piled everything neatly. Oh – I hadn’t realised that I had left my notebook here as well!’

  It lay upon the desk, still open to the page where I had left it, with Professor Ralston’s repulsive list visible to any passers-by. My friends looked into it with interest. At the same time, I noticed to my surprise that the books arranged in a neat pile next to it each contained many more slips of paper as bookmarks than I had put into them myself, and that a few new books had actually been added to the pile.

  ‘What has been happening here?’ I wondered, taking up the top one, and opening it to the first marked passage.

  An elderly Italian monk-priest, Padre Tommaso, disappeared in Damascus, Syria, after having visited the Jewish quarter in the city. Twelve Jewish leaders were arrested and tortured. Four died from the mistreatment; most of the rest confessed to involvement in a ritual murder.

  ‘Someone has been doing my research for me,’ I said. ‘I suspect it must have been the young man who keeps the library. He seems very knowledgeable. Yet it was a strange thing to do.’

  I turned to the flyleaf of the book, and saw a pasted-in ex libris label inscribed with the name Gerard Ralston and the year 1886. Putting it down, I picked up the one underneath it: The Jew, by Sir Richard Burton. Inside, at the place marked by another neat paper slip, I found a virulent and more detailed summary of the story of poor Padre Tommaso. With rising revulsion, I forced myself to glance quickly at the marked pages of the other books, and my companions gathered around the table and followed my example. All the items on the professor’s list were references to accusations of ritual murder, and more than half the books bore the acquisition date of 1886, although others had been acquired earlier. Like those I had noticed earlier, many of the passages we read had been marked in pencil in the margin.

  ‘This is disgusting!’ said Emily, letting fall an account of the torture and disappearance of little Anderl von Rinn. ‘What is all this about draining the blood of a Christian child for baking in their unleavened bread? It says here that Jews do that – oh!’ she added, embarrassed, glancing at her friends.

  I thought that they could not but be pained by the horrific nature of the accusations against their people. But if they were, they restrained themselves from showing it.

  ‘You shouldn’t bother with all this rubbish,’ said Amy simply, although a little loudly, slapping her book shut and dropping it on the table. ‘It’s ancient history, how can it help us? Even if Professor Ralston were interested in such things, which doesn�
�t surprise me given all that we know about him, it’s just some kind of research about the distant past, isn’t it?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I hesitated. ‘I would say you are right if it weren’t for the story of James Wilson. That is too recent to be of interest to a medieval historian.’

  ‘Yes, but the list makes it look as though he wanted to study all such cases. It would be normal for him to count that one in among the others,’ she observed, pointing to my notebook.

  ‘Perhaps,’ I said. I did not wish to argue about it. Yet I remembered the list the way Professor Ralston had written it, and the heavily underscored words James Wilson added in at the very bottom. Was ritual murder the subject of his research, and was James Wilson just another case among many? Or was James Wilson, rather, the stimulating influence behind Professor Ralston’s researches into ritual murder? Why had many of these books been purchased precisely in 1886? An idea began to form itself in my mind.

  ‘I’ve just learnt far more than I ever wanted to know about the different ways of obtaining and using fresh human blood,’ said Emily. ‘Do let’s start reconstructing the crime instead. At least the professor was shot; that seems like an improvement over what I’ve just read.’

  ‘Yes, let us do that,’ I said. ‘Only we had better leave all these books exactly the way we found them. We don’t want anybody knowing that we came here in the night-time.’ I piled them up neatly, and turning away from the loathsome heap with relief, I unlocked the door to the professor’s study.

  ‘Oh – the furniture is still as it was,’ said Jonathan in surprise.

  ‘Yes. Is this exactly how it was when you saw it?’

  He looked around carefully.

  ‘Well, I didn’t actually enter the study, you know. I came up to the doorway here, and just glanced in. I saw that fellow Mason bending over the body, which was mostly hidden behind the desk. But as far as I can remember, it was just like this.’

  ‘Did you actually see the gun? Could you show me its exact position?’

  ‘I did see it. I remember it shining. Let me see. It must have been right about here; just a yard or so inside the door, I should guess.’

  ‘Well, we had better not move anything in here ourselves,’ I said, carefully taking note of the position he indicated. ‘Nobody touch anything. Now, let us see. When you first entered the library and saw this door, was it open?’

  ‘Of course. Mason and Chapman had already gone in. I don’t know whether they found it open or closed.’

  ‘We’ll try both ways. Let’s leave it open now, to reduce the time necessary for the murderer to flee. Amy and Emily, you will be Mason and Chapman. I’ll be Jonathan, and Jonathan will be the mur—let us say, the elderly Jew. We shall try to see whether there is any possibility that he might have been the murderer, and if not, how someone else could have been.’

  I felt a little as though I had temporarily become the director of a theatre play. ‘Emily and Amy, go and station yourselves under the window of this study here, at the back of the house. Jonathan, stay here, and when they are ready, make a noise for the shot; call out or something. The moment you hear it, girls, dash around the house and in at the front door. I will stay at the front gate, and start walking up the path towards the house as soon as Jonathan passes me there.’

  We took up our stations; I went out to Adelphi Street and waited. The quiet moments that preceded our action were dense with their secret content; the dark blanket of the night and the pale, louring cloudbank overhead seemed so heavy as to stifle sound. The street was empty, but glancing up the path, I could make out the shapes of the large windows set into the black mass of the house, by the dim glow of the few candles we had lit within. The iron grille surrounding the grounds was thickly covered with ivy, so that if I stepped back onto the pavement, I could no longer see anything at all of what transpired inside. In order to lose no time, I moved back in and stood on the path itself. I heard nothing at all, until the front door of the library opened, and a black silhouette appeared outlined there for the briefest moment. The door closed behind him and I could no longer make out a thing, but I could easily hear Jonathan’s footsteps as he came pelting towards me, his feet making a muffled scraping noise on the gravel. He winged past me onto the pavement, and I instantly began walking towards the house, but I had no sooner taken my first step than I heard Amy and Emily’s running steps, and was able to make them out as they pulled open the door from which he had just emerged and piled inside, treading on each other’s feet and laughing.

  Jonathan and I returned to the library together.

  ‘Where exactly did you and the man pass each other?’ I said.

  ‘Exactly at the gate, I told you. I turned in as he stepped out. I hadn’t seen him before and didn’t realise he was there till we nearly bumped into each other.’

  ‘Did you pass left or right of him?’

  ‘On the left. He passed right of me and turned right behind me down the street.’

  ‘We’ll do it more carefully next time,’ I said.

  ‘But it isn’t just a matter of that,’ he insisted, as we stepped into the library and joined the others. ‘The man I saw simply wasn’t running. I don’t think he had been running before – he wasn’t even breathing fast. At any rate, he certainly wasn’t when he reached the gate. What I mean to say is: he was old, Vanessa. He was hale enough, but he just can’t have been running like that at his age. Not like I just did.’

  ‘How old would you guess that he was?’ I asked.

  ‘Well, it’s hard to tell, but I would have said nearer eighty than seventy,’ he replied.

  ‘Nearer eighty than seventy!’ I said in surprise. ‘You didn’t tell me he was as old as that. Are you sure?’

  ‘He was old, I tell you.’

  ‘Nearly eighty! Then I really don’t see … Listen, let us give it one more try. Where in the study were you standing before you started running?’

  ‘Right here near the door.’

  ‘All right, stand just outside the doorway this time, with the door open, that’s right. Then run anyway. But girls, you run more slowly this time. Imagine that it’s slippery or something, or that your shoes are tight. What I want is to see you come around the corner when I am already on the path.’

  Once again, in the darkness, we went through the little scene. Jonathan came pounding down the gravel path, then skidded to a stop near me, so that we passed each other most civilly. Yet even so, I had barely taken three or four steps up the path when I heard Amy and Emily come trotting rather tentatively round the corner of the house.

  ‘Bother!’ I exclaimed. Instead of entering the library, they came towards us and we joined each other.

  ‘Well, look,’ I said to Jonathan hopefully. ‘This is a little better already. They are coming around the house, and I am on the path.’

  But he looked disgruntled.

  ‘Well, you can believe me or not, but I was much farther up when I saw the other fellows, and they were dashing full speed, not tripping along like the girls are doing now.’

  I sighed.

  ‘I admit it doesn’t work very well. It was easy for me to see that you had just been running when you reached me, even though you stopped before I could see you. And I could hear you awfully well, even though I realise that there is more noise around here during the day.’

  ‘And when you’ve just shot someone, I don’t suppose you have the time to think of things like stopping running just before the gate,’ said Emily.

  ‘I still don’t think he was running at all.’

  ‘And anyway, the major objection is Jonathan’s claim that he was simply farther up the path when he saw the other two come around the house. Girls, let’s time it separately. First we’ll time how long it takes the murderer to rush to the gate and Jonathan to walk up to where he thinks he was. Then, we’ll see how slowly you have to go to get to the front corner in that amount of time.’

  For the third time, Jonathan dashed down the path an
d skidded to a walk, and I crossed his path at a quick clip and headed up to the point he had indicated to me as being the farthest one from the house he would accept.

  ‘Twelve seconds,’ I announced.

  The girls then proceeded to the back of the house again and tried to come around to the front corner in twelve seconds. It was simply absurd. They trotted along as though going to the fair. It is amazing that over a short distance, three seconds signifies all the difference between racing and strolling.

  ‘This is really not going to work,’ I said finally. During the ensuing silence, we all looked at each other.

  ‘You see?’ said Jonathan. ‘I know Mason and Chapman are no gymnasts, but they were running faster than that when I saw them. And I tell you, I think I was even farther up the path than where you stopped this time, and on top of that, I simply cannot believe that that old man had just been running at the speed I was going. It’s not possible this way, Vanessa. It has to be something else.’

  ‘All right,’ I said. ‘Let’s proceed on the hypothesis of another murderer. Amy, that will be you. Jonathan will continue to be the elderly man. This time, let us suppose that Mason and Chapman circled the house in eight to nine seconds, running fast, and that the old man walked from the house to the gate at a normal speed, before the murder took place. Jonathan, walk from the gate to the house, and stop when you pass the point where you think you were when you saw them.’

  He walked up the path; halfway up, he glanced over his shoulder and said, ‘Here.’

  ‘Eight seconds,’ I said. ‘That means that Jonathan would have started walking exactly when Mason and Chapman started running, which was exactly when they heard the shot. What that means – pay attention to this – is that the shot must have been fired at almost exactly the moment when Jonathan met the old man at the gate. The old man would have left the library about seventeen seconds earlier. But remember that Mason and Chapman stood for a moment under the window before the shot, and they heard shouting and throwing of furniture. If that struggle lasted more than seventeen seconds, that means that the old man would still have been inside, and he would certainly have heard something of it. Perhaps that is even why he suddenly left. At any rate, he can hardly avoid knowing something about what was going on in Professor Ralston’s room. Perhaps he could even see the murderer through the open door to the study. Or even if the door was closed, he might have seen someone go in, or heard something.’