The Library Paradox

by Catherine Shaw

  ‘It is often the reason, although there are others,’ I concurred. ‘Sometimes people are convinced that the obvious suspect, whom they consider innocent, will be arrested by the police. The detective at least has no power to do this. And the detective is expected to obtain full proof of his accusations, or at least enough to convince the person who hired him, whereas the police may content themselves with handing over their main suspect to judge and jury.’

  ‘But in our case, the would-be main suspect cannot be guilty, and yet you seem to sincerely believe that his letter may nevertheless have some bearing on Ralston’s murder,’ he observed slowly.

  ‘Yes. Instinctively, and by my imagination, I cannot help feeling that it may.’

  ‘Imagination,’ he repeated, in the tone of one who considers that faculty nothing but an annoyance and a troublemaker, and who is well content to need no part of it in his own work. ‘Well,’ he added dryly, ‘I will not ask you to spin your tales. I will show you the letter.’ And he rang a small bell to summon a freckled lad, somewhat younger than the one who guarded the entrance.

  ‘Bring me Gerard Ralston’s file,’ he said, handing him a ring of keys. The boy dashed off and returned quickly, bearing the keys and a heavy folder. I secretly wished I could have a good look into its depths, but I said nothing. Mr Upp opened it only a crack, fingered the papers within, and eventually extracted a letter, written with a bad pen on a piece of poor-quality paper, yet the handwriting of which showed traces of a decent education and a strong character.

  To Sir William Colton,

  I pray to G–d, Sir, that in your lifetime you have never committed and will never again commit an injustice as grievous as that which you have committed today. Because of today, your soul is black with murder, the murder of my brother condemned to death and also the murder of my soul condemned to despair.

  In your summing up to the jury and in your final judgement you were misled by the Devil. G–d forgive you. You emptied the court to hear the Devil speak, but you could not empty the court of the jury nor of the accused. Thus, although he turned his back to me, I saw the Devil with my own eyes.

  I am writing to you so that you know and he knows that throughout the ten years of my incarceration, I will have no other thought than to find him one day and send him back to where he came from.

  Baruch Gad

  The letter was signed with an angry flourish, underlined with a wide streak that nearly rent the paper. The whole letter breathed out the state of a soul in agony. I stared at it silently for a long time, feeling rather bad.

  ‘How old was Mr Gad at the trial?’ I asked.

  ‘I don’t know exactly, thirty or so, and his brother several years older.’

  ‘I – I suppose they really were guilty?’ I asked Mr Upp hesitantly.

  ‘How should I know?’ he said dryly. ‘I am in the habit of upholding the decisions of the Courts of Law insofar as possible. What I can assert with certainty, however, is that without Gerard Ralston’s testimony, the accusation would have foundered for lack of motive. Opportunity had been proven, but the evidence was purely circumstantial, and the malice of the accusers was rather patent. The accused, naturally, never ceased protesting their total innocence.’

  And what if they were innocent? I thought suddenly, reading the lines of the letter again and again, feeling the bitter despair behind the words echoing within me.

  I took my leave of Mr Upp rather quietly. Once outside in the street again, I made my way to Hyde Park and, seating myself upon a bench, I took out my faithful notebook and wrote down the text of Baruch Gad’s letter as exactly as I could remember it. I then put my notebook away and sat in the pale March sunshine, watching the birds pecking at crumbs on the green, the ladies and gentlemen walking, the nurses pushing perambulators along the paths. I felt seized by a sudden mixture of guilt and nostalgia and wanted Cecily and Cedric dreadfully. There is a magic circle around them, as around all tiny children, into which evil cannot penetrate; one feels so safe, so whole, so warm in their presence. Or at least, such is the illusion they give us, and the illusion perhaps creates some pale image of itself in reality. Yet it is pale indeed, for evil can touch children. I shivered, thinking of little James Wilson, who had been cruelly murdered, and whose killers may have been discovered and punished – or may have gone scot-free.

  ‘This won’t do,’ I said to myself, jumping up from the bench and dusting off my skirts. ‘Action, girl. No moping.’ I felt very hungry and wandered the streets for a while, looking for a tea shop, but alas, as I had already discovered, tea shops in London where a woman can enjoy a peaceful cup or a quiet meal alone are distressingly rare. Again I thought lovingly of tranquil Cambridge, with its medley of little shops and tea rooms. London is exciting, but what haste and bustle in its crowded, dirty streets! I am glad I do not live here. In the end I contented myself with purchasing a loaf of bread, and after having broken off and nibbled enough of it, in secret, to still the worst of the pangs, I put it away and hailed a passing growler.

  Somerset House was my next destination.

  I felt doubly on familiar ground as I approached the large stone building surrounding its two noble paved courtyards. The whole area around King’s College was already beginning to feel like home; as for the place itself, I had already had occasion to visit it and knew the functioning of the inner sanctum. I entered the first courtyard, paused for a moment to admire its spacious breadth, and then made my way to the bureau of marriages, births and deaths. The young man behind the counter at the entrance waved me languidly within. A number of people were already busily consulting the large, alphabetically arranged ledgers, leaning them upon the slanted stands arranged between the bookshelves for that purpose. I moved first to the marriage section, in which the heavy tomes were bound in green. I wished to discover if either of the Gad brothers had been married.

  ‘What were their Christian names again?’ I asked myself, turning over the leaves of my notebook to recall the unfamiliar syllables. ‘Ah yes, Baruch, of course, and Menachem was the one who was hanged.’ I was uncertain of the exact pronunciation of these archaic appellations, and could not help smiling at the idea of their being described as ‘Christian’.

  A little calculation told me that if Baruch Gad was thirty years old in 1886, then he could hardly have been married before 1875 at the earliest. Mr Upp had said that his brother was ‘several years older’. I decided to give him ten years, and begin searching from 1865 and continue until I found what I wanted, or reached the fatal year of 1886. I thought I had better note down every marriage in which one of the partners bore the name of Gad, for the family might have ramifications that I should know about.

  The work took a long time, for each ledger covered but three months, so that I had to make an alphabetical search for the name ‘Gad’ in some eighty different tomes. Each name appeared only with a reference number next to it, the year being inscribed on the binding of the volume and the month at the top of the page. To learn more about a given marriage, it was necessary to write down the reference number and carry it over to the part of the room where the marriage certificates were kept.

  I was helped in my lengthy task by the rarity of the name of Gad, which actually failed to appear in the large majority of tomes, several dozen of which were thus back on the shelf within less than a minute of my having taken them down. In this way, I worked my way through more than thirty tomes, marking down nothing but the marriages of Nathan Gad in September 1865, Judith Gad in April 1867 and Eder Gad in June 1871 – when I struck gold! In January 1874, I found the record of the marriage of Menachem Gad, and added it to my list in a trembling hand. So there was a Mrs Gad somewhere out there, after all – a woman whose husband had been hanged, whose life had been destroyed, a woman who had every reason to wish Gerard Ralston to burn in the fires of hell.

  I restrained myself from rushing off immediately in my impatience to find out the name of this lady, and forced myself to doggedly continue my work
through to the end of the year 1886. In this way I noted down the marriages of Charles Gad in March 1877 and Emory Gad in 1884; Baruch’s name never appeared. I heaved the last tome back onto the shelf with relief, and carried my list of seven to the registers containing the marriage certificates, where my researches produced the following result:

  Nathan Gad to Nehama Dan, September 1865

  Judith Gad to Simon Sachs, April 1867

  Eder Gad to Mary Ann Brittle, October 1871

  Menachem Gad to Britta Rubinstein, January 1874

  Charles Gad to Myra Stern, 1877

  Emory Gad to Sarah Lewin, May 1884

  I carried this list to the young man at the front desk.

  ‘What can I do for you?’ he asked kindly. Somerset House is a place where people largely take care of themselves, and perhaps he was thirsting for a little activity.

  ‘I have this list of marriages,’ I said, showing it to him. ‘I am wondering if I could find out whether some or all of these people named Gad belonged to the same family. How do you think I could go about it?’

  He took the list, scanned it and smiled. ‘They don’t go in much for intermarriage, do they?’ he observed.

  ‘What do you mean?’ I said, surprised at this remark.

  ‘Jews, aren’t they?’ he said impatiently.

  ‘How do you know that?’ I said, and immediately felt that it must be a stupid question. He laughed openly.

  ‘I spend all my time working with names, don’t I? I know names! I’ve seen a thousand names from every country in the world. This is London, the melting pot, isn’t it? Why, half of these names here are nothing but the names of the twelve tribes, the sons of Jacob, you know: Dan, Gad, Benjamin, and Lewin, which is the same as Levy.’

  ‘Very true,’ I observed, struck by this simple remark, and feeling that I should have realised it by myself. ‘But Eder’s certificate says he was married in a church, whilst most of the others were married in a synagogue.’

  ‘What was the father’s profession?’ he asked curiously.

  ‘I noticed it particularly; his father was a horse-nail maker called Mark Gad,’ I told him.

  ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Mark is very New Testament, isn’t it? That means they could be converted several generations back, or maybe this particular Gad is a deformation of some other name. At any rate, the marriage certificate gives you the age of the bride and groom, and the names of their fathers. So what you can do is calculate their birth year up to a year or so from the age, and try to look up their birth records in the red books over there. Then, on their birth certificates you will find the names and ages of both parents, and you can try to work backwards. However, the information in our office may not go back far enough for your needs. Records before 1837 were not central, they used to be kept in the parishes, and somebody married in the seventies might easily have been born before 1837. Also, if these people were not born on British soil, you won’t find any birth records for them here. You’ll just have to do the best you can with that.’

  ‘I see,’ I said. ‘Yes, I suppose that I can at least try working backwards from their birth years. What a pity it is that they give the ages and addresses of the newlyweds on the certificate, but not their exact date of birth or the place where they were born! It would be so very helpful. Oh well, I will see what I can do. Thank you very much for your help.’

  I moved now to the area containing birth records. The system was the same as for marriages: the names were listed in enormous ledgers – bound in dark red, these – and the certificates themselves were referred to by number. I looked up each one of my six Gads and their spouses as best I could, but found little. Nathan Gad, born in 1833, was too old to be in the register, whether or not he was born in England, as were Simon Sachs and Eder Gad. I calculated the birth years of the others, to within a year, and found 1845 for Nehama Dan, 1846 for Judith Gad, 1841 for Anna Gershon, who was a widow, and 1853 for the one who interested me more than any other, Britta Rubinstein. However, not one of these ladies appeared in the register. All must have been foreign-born. The same was true for Menachem Gad himself, whose year of birth I calculated to have been around 1851. I did discover that Charles and Emory were born in Bournemouth in 1851 and 1858, and were brothers, and that their wives were born, respectively, in London and in Devon. But Charles being born in the same year as Menachem seemed like a bad sign in terms of their being related, although I determined to contact the British Gad brothers if I could locate them and make some enquiries.

  Having made notes of all my discoveries, I lifted the last volume back onto its shelf and was about to depart, when a thought suddenly struck me. Pulling down the ledger for the year 1874, the year of Menachem Gad’s marriage, I began to search for entries under the name of Gad. It had occurred to me that he may have had a child. And amazingly, I found mention of a certain Rebecca Gad just two tomes later, born in April 1875. My heart pounding, I continued searching for births of little Gads through to the end of 1886, noted down a total of four, and rushed to the birth certificates to confirm my idea.

  It was as I hoped. Rebecca Gad was the daughter of Britta and Menachem. The other three children had been born to Eder and Charles. Full of this knowledge, I emerged into the late afternoon, thinking intensely about a little girl called Rebecca who lost her father in a horrible way when she was only eleven.

  My first act once I recovered my spirits was to stop at a library to enquire whether they carried a published directory of London householders. I wished to attempt to find out if a Britta Gad, a Rebecca Gad or even a Britta or Rebecca Rubinstein were listed, though I was well aware of the unlikelihood of it all; would they have remained in London? Would they have kept the same name? Would they have the slightest chance of being registered householders, rather than mere lodgers? The answer to all of these questions was ‘very probably not’, and I was not surprised at the failure of my quest. What, I wondered, could I possibly do now to try to locate them?

  Suddenly I thought of my old friend Inspector Reynolds of Scotland Yard. I have crossed his path more than once in the last few years, and he has always been most kind. I believe he took a particular liking to me once, when I realised that a colleague and rival of his was entirely on the wrong track, and our relations have been of the most cordial since then. Would he be able to help me?

  Who else might know? Baruch Gad, of course, and I know well enough where to find him. I wonder if it would be possible to visit him in prison. What pretext could I imagine to obtain the right to a visit? Decidedly, I must visit Inspector Reynolds. I wrote this down in my notebook and, consulting the time, hastened my steps towards home.

  Jonathan had already arrived when I reached the flat, and he and Amy were fermenting with excitement about our coming visit to their cousin. They exchanged frequent glances and their nervousness struck me oddly. We must, I thought, be going to a strange place indeed.

  Emily was her usual self, tranquil as milk, perfectly well-bred, equally at home in any situation. We started out about an hour before sundown. The city was already grey with shadow.

  ‘Are we getting out here?’ I asked in surprise, as Amy stopped our cab in a part of London which, although not particularly familiar to me, did not seem to be the heart of the East End.

  ‘Uh, we thought we would walk the rest of the way,’ mumbled Jonathan.

  ‘You see,’ Amy said, speaking clearly, ‘religious Jews are not allowed to take cabs on the Sabbath, that is from Friday sundown until Saturday sundown. We do it, of course, but we feel that it wouldn’t be right to appear on a Saturday at Rivka and David’s in a cab, or even to go driving into the East End where they all live. I hope you are not too tired to walk a short distance?’

  ‘Oh no, it’s quite all right,’ I said hastily, although I had already walked a great deal that day. Still, comfortable shoes go a long way towards making such walks pleasant.

  ‘I did not know that the Israelites rested on Saturday rather than Sunday,’ I added, obse
rving the quietness in the streets around me, which contrasted sharply with the busy Saturday bustle in the part of London I had just come from.

  ‘They rest on the seventh day, observing the fourth commandment, just as Christians do,’ she said dryly. ‘Both traditions come straight from the book of Genesis and the Creation in six days, you know. We Jews just count the days differently. Sunday is the first day of the week for us. If it doesn’t fall on the same seventh day as it does for Christians, why, I don’t know where that comes from; the desire to differentiate themselves, no doubt. Don’t you know anything about it? Does it say anything in your Bible about changing the Sabbath to Sunday?’

  I felt a pang of guilt as I became uncomfortably aware that before her last words, I had stupidly and automatically applied the words ‘the desire to differentiate themselves’ to the Jews, imagining momentarily that they had chosen to rest on a different day than the Christians. I tried to imagine a time and place in which Judaism was the norm and to be a Christian was a recent fashion, adopted only by a few. The absolutism of Christian thought and Christian values is more deeply embedded into our unconscious minds than we realise. And oddly enough, we Christians often spontaneously think of Christianity as having been born in Rome rather than in Jerusalem, although Rome is really only the place of its flowering. But it is so convenient; there are no pagans left to reveal the original nature of Christianity as a choice among others. And the observance of Sunday worship seems to us as old as the religion itself … yet …