The Library Paradox

by Catherine Shaw

  ‘That’s just why we think we must find him!’ said Amy eagerly. But Jonathan’s face was still cloudy.

  ‘That’s all very well,’ he said. ‘I wish that could be how it happened. But then, where did that other murderer go?’

  Moving into the professor’s study, we all began looking around, trying to visualise the murderer’s actions. The study itself was inexorably square and bare, devoid of dark corners, curtains, or complicated, angled furniture.

  ‘In stories, the murderer hides behind the door!’ said Amy with a sudden flash of eagerness, starting up.

  ‘But this door opens outwards,’ said Jonathan. ‘I noticed that right away.’

  ‘That’s odd,’ I said. ‘Doors into rooms usually open inwards, don’t they?’

  ‘Well, this door opens into the library, so that doesn’t mean much. After all, it is also the exit door to Professor Ralston’s private domain, so in that sense it’s normal for it to open outwards. Maybe that’s what they thought of when they were making the alterations to turn this place into a library.’

  ‘So it’s impossible to use it to hide,’ sighed Amy. ‘The murderer would have to run out of the study and flatten himself against the wall here to hope to be hidden by the opening door. But that’s rubbish. Anyone coming into the library would see him at once. Is there really nowhere to hide in the whole of the library?’

  The difficulty was the same; the space was vast and open, containing neither nooks nor crannies. There was no furniture at all beyond some plain chairs scattered around, and the five or six desks, which were actually rather high tables with four spindly legs. Amy crouched hopefully under one of them.

  ‘It was still light at five o’clock,’ said Jonathan, taking a candle and shedding some light in her direction. ‘It’s unthinkable that he could have slipped out and hidden under one of those, although one could almost get away with it at this hour. Not in the daytime, though – not when three different people actually come into the room. I myself am perfectly certain there was no one here, and the others say the same. You can take in this whole space at a glance, you know. And I didn’t even go into the study itself. I turned around at once, as Chapman came out, and followed him back to the main door. We would have seen the fellow either staying or leaving.’

  ‘It is disappointing,’ I said. ‘We have tried and tried, and I simply cannot see how it was done.’

  ‘Do you think our reconstruction was in the least bit useful, then?’ asked Emily, looking a little crushed at my words, as we extinguished the lamps, took up our candles and wraps, and locked up all the doors, preparatory to making our way back home.

  ‘Oh, yes, indeed. It does clarify things. It shows at least what things are perfectly impossible.’

  ‘And it proves definitively that the rebbe couldn’t have been the murderer, yet must have been in the library during part of the time that the murderer was also there,’ added Jonathan. ‘Still, it’s annoying. I wouldn’t have believed that we could try all this without hitting on the actual solution. What on earth can have happened? It is really too provoking.’

  ‘We simply must find that rabbi – perhaps he will give us the key to the missing clue,’ said Emily with renewed optimism.

  ‘Yes indeed. We have more than one string to our bow,’ I said cheerfully. But my words did not really reflect my inmost feelings. To tell the truth, I felt a knot of tension and discouragement within me. It is not that I am generally overconfident of success in my endeavours, but I dislike nonetheless to be squarely confronted with failure, and failure is really the only honest description of this evening’s experiment. Oh well! I refuse to yield to gloom; I shall not give up.

  London, Saturday, March 14th, 1896

  My first act this morning was to make my way to the offices of Gumbadge, Gumbadge & Upp. To be honest, I thought it most unlikely that I should obtain any useful information; in fact, I would almost have been content with arranging for an appointment at a later date. However, the lad at the front desk asked me not only my name and whom I wished to see, but also the purpose of my visit, and raising his eyebrows when I mentioned the name of Professor Ralston, he disappeared into the mysterious depths of the back offices, and returned after some little time, saying, ‘Mr Upp will see you now. Come this way, please.’

  I was led through corridors and down halls, and eventually ushered into a large room luxuriously furnished with a deep pile carpet in dark red, and a great deal of burnished mahogany. The discreet lad left us, closing the door, and Mr Upp, a small, spare and elderly gentleman, examined me with great interest.

  ‘Do sit down,’ he said at length. ‘In what way can I be of service to you?’

  ‘I suppose I may as well tell you directly that I am a private detective, investigating the murder of Professor Gerard Ralston of King’s College,’ I said. I tend to really prefer to keep this fact to myself during investigations, but it seemed that in this case, there was much to be gained by presenting myself in some kind of an official capacity.

  ‘Ah,’ he said. ‘And who has retained you, if I may enquire?’

  ‘A group of the professor’s colleagues, worried about the reputation of the university and of the department,’ I replied. There was a short silence.

  ‘Well, that is rather regrettable,’ he said finally. ‘I had hoped you were a clue. A young lady having some connection to Gerard Ralston – that would have been news indeed! But it is not to be. Have you made any progress in your investigations?’

  ‘It is difficult,’ I told him. ‘I have some ideas, but it is not going to be easy for me to confirm them. I thought you might be of help to me on some of these matters.’

  ‘Which ones, for instance?’ he said, a little gleam in his eyes showing, to my relief, that curiosity about the case was going to get the better of the lawyer’s habitual discretion.

  ‘The question of a will, to begin with. The question of inheritance must necessarily be gone into in any case of murder.’ I allowed my tone to reflect a wealth of experience and knowledge, which I do not really possess. But it was my intention to establish between us some feeling of professional comradeship.

  ‘Professor Ralston left a will, which has not been officially opened yet,’ he said. ‘We must await the return of Professor Ralston senior from his travels, which should occur any day now. I know the contents, of course, as I wrote it myself, but I really cannot reveal them to you. It contains,’ he coughed slightly, ‘nothing surprising, I may say.’ He coughed again.

  ‘Just supposing that the will did contain something surprising, something that might constitute a clue,’ I asked him, ‘what would your duty be then? Would you or would you not be obliged to notify the police even though the will has not been officially opened yet, or would the choice be left up to you?’

  He glanced up at me quickly, and hesitated a moment before speaking. When he did, his tone was level and poised. ‘That is quite a subtle problem, dealing as it does with the question of what constitutes a clue,’ he said. ‘It would be largely a question of my personal discretion. But there is nothing of the kind in this will. Gerard Ralston’ – he seemed to dislike referring to him as ‘the professor’, a title he appeared to consider reserved for the father – ‘had no fortune to leave and no one very remarkable to leave it to. As you probably know, he had already presented his collection of books as a formal gift to the college. I really do not know that I can say any more. Perhaps you have some other ideas to follow up?’

  ‘Well, I do,’ I said. The peculiar emphasis on the words in this will intrigued me greatly; I felt that there was something he wished me to understand, but that he did not feel the moment ripe to speak of it openly. Not knowing how to open the oyster, I plunged ahead directly with my next question, hoping secretly that there might be some connection.

  ‘There is something I would very much like to ask you. But I am not sure whether or not you actually know anything about it.’

  ‘Fire ahead,’ he said unexpectedly.<
br />
  ‘It concerns the murder of a boy called James Wilson, for which a man was hanged, and another was condemned to ten years in prison for the murder,’ I said.

  ‘Aha, so you have come upon that!’ he said, interest in the matter obviously getting the better of discretion. ‘Good work, if I may say so.’

  ‘So you do know something about it?’

  ‘Something. And what about you?’

  ‘Almost nothing. Except that a newspaper article says the two men were condemned on the testimony of an expert witness on the subject of ritual murder. An anonymous witness, whose identity was known only to the judge. And I have discovered that Professor Ralston did research on the subject of ritual murder, and he seems to have become interested in the subject in the year 1886; the very year of the murder.’

  ‘How did you find that out? He never published anything on the subject.’

  ‘He did not. I checked. That is what raised my suspicions. You see, I found a list of historical cases that he had written down, and when I studied the entries on the list to see what they were all about, I realised that they were all cases where people of the Jewish religion were accused of ritually murdering Christians. I looked up the cases in books, which were part of his own library, and I found that many of them had been heavily annotated by him, and that several of them had been purchased in the year of the trial. I did think at first that hearing about the murder trial might have stimulated his interest in the subject, but after looking up his published articles, it struck me as odd that he never actually wrote anything about it. So I began to wonder why he had gone to all that trouble.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And I thought he himself might have been the anonymous witness,’ I said bluntly.

  ‘Mrs … Weatherburn,’ he said, glancing down at the paper with my name on it which the boy had brought him, ‘I will say this: I know the answer to your question. Yet, I am not sure that it would be right to discuss it here.’ He hesitated, leaning his elbows on the table and tapping his lower lip with the tip of a lean index finger.

  ‘It is not secret information, is it?’ I said hopefully. ‘I mean, it is not a legal secret, like the will. In the interest of discovering your client’s murderer, would it not be best to communicate all the circumstances to me?’

  ‘Certainly, if they had a bearing on his murder,’ he replied. ‘In that case, I would have also communicated them directly to the police. But as a matter of fact, I have come to the conclusion that they do not.’

  ‘How can you tell that?’

  ‘If I were to confirm your suspicion, what would your conclusion as to its relevance be?’

  I had not wanted to put my ideas into words, much less aloud and in front of a third party, but it seemed as though this would be a necessary concession to obtain what I wanted. I consoled myself with the thought that Mr Upp had every appearance of being discretion itself.

  ‘Well,’ I admitted, ‘the man who was condemned to prison in 1886, Baruch Gad, might have managed to discover the identity of the witness, perhaps through friends working for him on the outside. Now, he was condemned to ten years, so if he was freed recently, he might himself be the murderer. It would be understandable,’ I added quickly, feeling a stab of guilt at thus tossing out accusations.

  ‘That would indeed be the ideal solution, although I must take exception to your statement: murder is never understandable. However, I do not see how Baruch Gad could possibly have discovered the identity of the anonymous witness, and even if he had been able to learn it by some means that I cannot imagine, I must disappoint you by telling you that he has not yet been released. The murder took place in April, and as the term of his imprisonment is counted from when he was first arrested, he is due to be released in a little over one month from now.’

  ‘Oh dear,’ I sighed. ‘Are you sure? I know that prisoners may sometimes obtain early release.’

  ‘It was the very first thing I took care to ascertain when I heard of Gerard Ralston’s death,’ he responded immediately.

  ‘Did you? Then it must have occurred to you as it did to me that he might have learnt about the identity of the witness somehow.’

  ‘Unlikely though it appeared to me, the idea did cross my mind, and I felt it important to verify.’

  ‘It’s almost lucky for him that he was not released early,’ I mused. ‘He would certainly have been suspected and perhaps even rearrested, and he wouldn’t have been the right person. The poor man may not even be the least bit interested in revenge.’

  ‘Well, I will tell you what worried me,’ he said, as though finally coming to a decision. ‘Baruch Gad was interested in revenge. He did not know who the witness was, at least at the time of the trial, but he meant to find out if he could. And you are right. Gerard Ralston was indeed the witness, as you have correctly deduced. The fact is that in spite of his confidence that his anonymity had been preserved, Ralston was still somewhat nervous about Gad’s imminent release.’

  ‘How do you know that Baruch Gad was – or is – thinking of revenge?’

  ‘Because of a letter he wrote. When his brother was hanged, he wrote to the judge who had presided over the trial, a letter in which he swore to him that he would spend the rest of his life, if necessary, tracking down the anonymous witness. The judge knew Ralston, of course, and had personally vouched for his credentials. His name was Sir William Colton; he died some years ago. He gave Gad’s letter to Ralston, and told him he might need to use it some day. Ralston gave it to me, and told me that if he was murdered, I should use it to have Gad convicted. Obviously the first thing I did when he was murdered was to check on the fellow’s whereabouts, but as it turns out, he is sitting in the same jail cell he has occupied for the last ten years. It wasn’t he.’

  ‘Do you think I could see his letter?’ I asked timidly.

  He hesitated.

  ‘When the judge had this letter transmitted to Ralston,’ he said, ‘it worried him a great deal. He kept it for a while, and then brought it to me in order to consult me about what it would be best to do. I advised him to do nothing as long as Gad remained in prison, and to use the letter to obtain police protection, if necessary, when he should be released. He then gave it into my care, and we agreed that it should be unsealed and used only in the event that he should meet a violent death, in order to identify and convict the murderer. Naturally, Ralston did not suppose for a moment that he might meet a violent death at the hands of somebody else, and neither did I. And we made no provision for that contingency. The letter was to be used to identify and convict the murderer – and this, on the assumption that Baruch Gad was the murderer – it was not intended for any other use. As I told you, my first thought when I heard about the murder was that we had missed the train, somehow – that Baruch Gad must have been released a little early. I hastened to unseal the letter, reread its terms carefully to see if they were as I remembered them from ten years ago, and then, as I told you, I was easily able to verify that Gad was still in prison. So Ralston has met a violent death, and the letter has been unsealed, but it does not seem to be relevant. Legally speaking, it is not clear what course is to be taken in this regard.’

  ‘But you told me that if his will contained some clue, you would have been almost duty bound to give the information to the police, even before his father arrived for the official unsealing. Should not the same be true of this letter?’

  ‘Are we justified in considering that the letter contains a clue?’ he asked. ‘It is a threat of murder by a person who cannot have committed the murder.’

  ‘Well …’ I hesitated. Thoughts swirled in my mind, though I did not express them. I pictured someone from the family of the imprisoned man, perhaps a wife remaining faithful and loving year after year, realising that at the very moment of his release, he intended to forfeit the remainder of his ruined life by committing another murder, and taking the sin upon herself in order to offer him the gift of freedom. I hesitated, then said, ‘Even if Gad is n
ot the murderer, I still think the letter should be shown to the police.’

  He smiled thinly.

  ‘What the police know sometimes leaks into the newspapers,’ he observed. ‘If this Gad is not the murderer, then what is the point of letting the public know about Ralston’s role in his trial? Let us be blunt; it was not a pretty thing. It would be a stain on his memory and on the college where he studied and taught. I very much doubt that those of his colleagues who retained your services would appreciate the result.’ He paused a moment, thoughtfully. ‘In general, we lawyers do not consider the police as allies. They have their own means of enquiry, and they are efficient and thorough at it. If you could discover Ralston’s connection with the James Wilson case, then so can they. In this case, as I have explained to you, I do not consider the letter to contain a clue so flagrant as to warrant my transmitting it to them immediately. In fact, for the reasons I have just explained to you, I do not want to take the responsibility of giving them the letter at all. What I mean to do is to give the letter to its present rightful owner, Professor Ralston senior, upon his return, and wash my hands of the whole affair. I cannot predict what he will choose to do with it, but I will be very glad when the decision is off my shoulders and in his hands.’

  ‘I seem to detect that you were not fond of Professor Gerard Ralston,’ I observed.

  ‘The man was a monster,’ he answered simply. ‘But we do not allow such personal opinions to interfere with the exercise of our profession in any way. Do you know,’ he added suddenly, ‘I am going to let you see the letter. After all, you already know the damning fact it contains. And if it were to turn out that it could shed any light whatsoever on the murder in spite of appearances, why, it would be a good thing if you were made aware of it, while remaining discreet. Discretion, after all, is the main reason for which people address themselves to private detectives, is it not?’