Reply Paid

by H. F. Heard

  I felt a small inner start at that, but felt also that I showed no sign of it. And anyhow, Mr. Mycroft was so interested in uncoiling his own fine, highly-prized web that I was merely audience kept in waiting to applaud the end.

  “I learned, when I had been able to make a few indirect inquiries, that he was already confined to his bed with a chill. Yes, a case of ‘acute influenza.’ He had had a doctor called in. As he was unable to leave his room, there was no reason why I should not be in the hotel lobby. It was quite easy to be leaving the hotel as the doctor came out and to ask whether I might share his cab. I know enough of medicine, as you know, to be able to pass for a doctor, said I had business with Intil (and this, as you know, is strictly true), said, whether it was a coincidence or no, another person whom I had been seeing on business had also gone down with the same sort of acute attack. The doctor, a nice, kindly fellow, as most are, said he didn’t like the look of the patient. ‘I expect,’ he said, ‘it’s one of those acute infections which seem to be the more deadly the less they are widely infectious. So I’m not raising an alarm and having him moved yet. That might spoil his chances. Keep a patient still, that is my experience. With sulphanilamide he may snap out of it in thirty-six hours.’”

  Mr. Mycroft paused. “You will have surmised the rest. The patient did snap out, or perhaps one ought to say, was snapped out: the biter bit.”

  “But—” I said.

  “Yes, you see what happened. It has a sort of inevitability, what the Greeks called ‘irony’ about it. I don’t think, and they didn’t, that it is chance. Indeed, as I’ve told you, I call it the basic element, Justice per se. The Greeks personified it as Ananke. It is in the nature of things, so deep that if you just splash about on the surface”—I thought his eye rested on me for a moment in a coldly appraising way—“you may never strike on it. But dive down deep enough and you will. If you have dived, as some of us have, just to detect as far as we can the basis of things, then you come up knowing that there is an adamant foundation below the tides, rising up, barring certain low paths and round which the sharpest of sharks cannot dive. If you dive simply as a shark to rip your fellow fish, well, you strike that unseen rock and split your skull. It is always taking place. I’ve seen it too often now to doubt. It looks as though all the cunning a murderer uses actually makes him blind to quite obvious things and, in the end, he seems actually to catch himself.

  “All that Intil did was to repeat, at his last move, the final mistake of those classical poisoners, the Borgias, father and son. They made ready everything. Father (who, of course, is also father of Christendom, Pope Alexander VI, ‘Christ’s vicar on earth,’ and also king of that comfortable little country, the Papal States) still is not contented. Son Caesar has, naturally with that name, also his dreams of bettering the family fortunes. Poison has already served them handsomely. But until now it has been piecemeal work—a brother there, a fellow cardinal here. Now is the time for a grand slam—invite all one’s obstacles (one is above having enemies) to a fine dinner. After which there would be an outbreak of colic and the field would have been cleared of all rivals. Everything went according to plan. The required guests accepted, and, what was more, arrived. The supply of wine for them and the supply of wine for their hosts were carefully distinguished. Yet, somehow, a mistake was made. The guests got the host’s own wine and the hosts got, and unknowingly drank, the wine prepared for their invited victims.

  “You see, Intil acted precisely like the Borgias. He prepares carefully a poisoned envelope for you and he has with it a normal, untreated one. Of course, only under the microscope would the poisoned one be distinguishable from the untreated one. He had to leave the gum which he had moistened when tincturing it with the anthrax culture, to dry. Perhaps then he made his mistake, when he was writing that careful little note which was to provoke you to reply. Anyhow, he took up one envelope and on it wrote his own name and address. Then he took the second and on this he wrote your name and address. He slipped his note and the envelope—no doubt very gingerly—into the envelope bearing now your name, and then, everything settled, he relaxes and licks the flap, seals it down, and mails it.”

  Yes, that, undoubtedly, was what had happened and why I was alive. All my old upset returned on me. How ghastly! I could now—I who a moment before had been serene, yes, nearly hard-boiled—hardly feel safe. I wanted to ask if I was really secure. But I knew Mr. Mycroft would be contemptuous of such natural self-concern and he’d also take it as a reflection on his own omniscience—for hadn’t he ruled pontifically that I was secure? Well, the best thing I could do would be to make an indirect inquiry.

  “Intil?” I questioned. “Is he …?”

  “Yes, he died last night—just like Miss Brown.”

  Whether it was relief, I don’t know; I think it may have been. “But,” I said, “you can’t leave highly infectious corpses about like that?”

  “I’m glad,” he remarked dryly, “that you are as actively concerned about the public health as you were over the public safety. Neither of these cases (and I don’t recall your making a similar inquiry about the first when you learned the cause of that fatality)—neither of these bodies is dangerous if handled with the due precautions which are taken in all cases of death by a rapid and acute infection. Why? Well, to be precise, this was Intil’s knowledge and intention—a very important part of his plan. If you will recall, I told you that he knew enough of anthrax to know that in cases where there is no natural resistance—and we have none, as do animals among whom the disease is common—the bubo, the anthrax, would not rise before the patient is dead. I believe that if it has not risen and there is no lesion, the dead body, if treated with the adequate disinfectants used in all mortuary service, can be handled with immunity.”

  “But his things,” I went on. “His beastly little collection of poisoned gums and so on?”

  “That, too, was easily dealt with. He evidently had no relatives, at least near about—a lone wolf. I told the doctor that I was probably the only person who knew much about him; I had wanted to see him about some prospecting he had been doing. As the doctor and I had got on well, he asked me, if I didn’t mind, to come into the bedroom where the body was lying just after death. I had stayed about in the lobby all the time, having taken a room in the hotel. Before calling the authorities he and I arranged the body—queer, that, the wish to fold a coat hastily thrown off. As I helped him (no, we took sufficient precautions against infection), my knee struck against the jacket which the dead man had taken off when he undressed for the last time and which he had hung on the back of a chair which he had drawn close to his bedside. Something quite large and hard was in the pocket. As the doctor turned to pull down the window shades, I slipped the object, a black metal box, into my coat. My guess was right.

  “After I had said good-bye to the doctor, gone to my room, and locked the door, I confirmed my suspicion. It was a box very like the one I was using four days ago here. It’s a specimen box which, of course, shuts hermetically. Inside was what I had also expected—an envelope and on it only one word: ‘Fur.’ I took sufficient precautions, so it was right for me to give myself complete proof. Handling the envelope as I did yours here, I cut it open. Inside it was a little grayish fur to which still clung some skin. Most of the hair, too, I noticed, was stuck together. Mr. Intil was a thorough and, in his way, a daring man. He was not only content with getting an anthrax-infected animal. He had cut skin and hair, I feel certain, from the place nearest where the actual lesion had taken place. He was right to have only a small supply, for it was fully sufficient. It would have kept him from having to make another trip to the desert. There was enough ‘culture’ there to have killed all of us—if he hadn’t muddled his envelopes when he wrote to you. There was one other object in the box—a small round ruler. I was puzzled for a moment. Then I remembered. It must have been the little rod which Sanderson probably actually had on him and round which the spiral piece of code paper was wrapped to m
ake it legible. That explained why Intil had hold of a complete reading of the code when he came to you. He kept the rod, I suppose, as a kind of trophy, together with the other ‘power,’ the anthrax that he brought back from the desert. Well, I lit a small spirit lamp and held the envelope in it until it was ash. Thank Heaven, though fungus spores can resist the utmost cold they are as helpless as we before the universal purifier, fire.”

  There was really nothing more to say or do. I must own I had listened to the old fellow’s clean-up of the business with considerable interest and not a little admiration. He was silent now. Evidently I was meant to close the proceedings. I thought out rather a neat one.

  “We’re British, Mr. Mycroft,” I said, “so we’re not effusive. We don’t like it and we do like going our own ways, don’t we? So I’ll just say a simple ‘thank you,’ and good wishes to your search, and good-bye.” I rose. He got up.

  “Yet somehow,” he remarked, more to himself than to me, “we do run across one another. By the way, I suppose you wouldn’t really like to know the real meaning of the code you were working on?” I hesitated. It was a clever cast. He continued, “I should certainly have told Miss Brown, as I owed the decipherment so largely to the curious visualizing intuitions of her subconscious. And I feel, in a way, now she is gone, that I owe it to you as the man who introduced me to her to tell you, if you still wish to know?”

  If it hadn’t been for Kerson and his visit I really believe I should have had the good sense to say no. But the fact that I was lying low about that visit, keeping the old man in the dark, both made me feel a little guilty and also rather anxious to get any further information on a puzzle which had aroused my specialized curiosity and on my “reading” which, at the back of my mind, I didn’t feel was “the thing.”

  “You are still sure I’m wrong!” I said, in what I felt was a challenging way, but which of course involved me in further conversation.

  “As I say, I couldn’t have been, but for our good friend, Miss Brown. I should like to give you, as a tribute to her, the proof of her powers.”

  “Well, tell me what she said,” was the least I could say to that.

  “You remember my hunch that Sanderson’s being a Scotchman ought to give us a line as to the kind of code he’d construct? As an expert in code, you know that book codes are the easiest to make and the best for holding fast—the bigger the book the better, and best of all, a big book all divided up into chapters and verses.”

  I wasn’t so slow as not to get it now. “The Bible,” I said.

  “Right: a book little known now, at least among the clever, but a mine for codes and clues to all who are familiar with it. I often wonder why people read detective novels when in all the last hundred years of ‘lower’ and ‘higher’ criticism of this set of books such beautiful studies in detection have gone on being made. But, you see, I myself had let myself become rusty there. Well, Sanderson makes his code out of the Bible—though perhaps I oughtn’t to call it a code; rather, a mnemonic—a condensed, disguised set of readings to guide himself.”

  “But friars are surely a little later than the Bible,” I rather smartly rejoined.

  “That did puzzle me for a while,” he answered. “But the solution of that I ought to have understood. Do you recall that on our evening visit to the old Scotchman’s house, we saw those books on archaeology? Prospectors are, I believe, often very largely unmercenary men. What drives them mainly is romance. They could make better money in a city. But they long to find, behind the veil of sand and dust, behind the site which busy men have left as being a waste-heap, the shining, forgotten treasure. In new lands that has to be ore and nuggets. Here you must work and look for what the earth’s mysterious heart chooses to yield or the stars to cast down.” He paused.

  “Those gifts may well make all Pharaohs’ hoards look like tinsel. Still,” he resumed, “the prospector is a romancer wherever he is, looking to uncover some buried wonder. His real thrill is to dig, his spade to strike and there at his feet, at this moment, he is looking at some secret which ‘went to earth,’ was lost to men since that undated moment when the long-forgotten man or race, or natural accident made the cache and left it. Epoch beckons right across history to epoch. He feels himself on a pinnacle of time raised for a moment above the generations. Sanderson was no exception. He cared for two puzzles. His book puzzle, his ‘literary’ source, we now know—the Bible. His other riddle was nondocumentary history, history written not by the pen but by the spade.”

  “Friars aren’t spade history, I should have thought,” I interrupted. I knew enough history to know that.

  His reply startled me. “That was a good reason for thinking your reading of the code—though ingenious—wrong. Don’t think, though, I should myself have caught onto the right clue but for Miss Brown. Directly I asked her ‘control’ about the passage beginning ‘Cloc’ she began giving a description. Her mind saw some vague image which at once, for me, laid friars by the heels.”

  “Did she give you the same fanciful description she gave to me and,” I hesitated, “to Intil?” He waited for me to go on. “When I was with her last, in trance she said she saw a sort of circle with prongs sticking up round it.” I didn’t tell him how rude the idiotic little “control” had become. I thought he might suspect that Miss Brown’s subconscious looked down on me as much as he did. “That image seemed to me unhelpful.”

  “What more did she say?” he questioned.

  “Only that outside the circle of prongs was another one, standing all by itself, and that was, of course, equally unhelpful.”

  “Well,” he said, genially enough, “we can agree, at least, on how remarkable it is that the medium’s subconscious ran so accurately along the same track with two different sitters. It does look as though she must have had some real hunch.”

  “Perhaps so,” I allowed, “but mediums, once they get an idea into their heads, generally stick to it. And certainly it doesn’t make any waking sense.”

  “Are you sure? Certainly such a picture isn’t of a monk or a monastery, but what about a megalithic ruin, a stone circle?”

  “Why?” I asked, for this seemed the vaguest of fishing.

  For answer he slipped his hand into one of the enormous pockets of his big, flapping gray alpaca dust coat—which made him look more than usually like a crane. Out came a small volume. He flicked a page open and extended it to me. I was looking at a drawing of Stonehenge, the British Druid monument.

  “Sanderson, as I’ve said,” he went on, “was interested in archaeology. So, at one time, was I—perhaps all detectives would be, if they had time; it’s right along our line and Time is the master trail-layer. His interest, Miss Brown’s control’s word-picture—well, I felt, it would be no waste of time to glance at some books on megalithic prehistoric stone-circles. Here was the first, perhaps naturally so, for it is about the most famous. It’s beautifully done, this little piece of detection. It’s Cunnington’s Stonehenge. And it is helpful—this chart you are looking at, as far as it goes.” His long finger darted onto the page. “The circle with the prongs sticking up—the upright single stones in a circle and you see outside the ring one standing off by itself.”

  “That’s pretty vague,” I said. “The control’s words would fit quite a number of other things; for example—as she said at my sitting—a birthday cake with its candles on it—and certainly that’s a much more likely fancy for a child mind.”

  “I own I wouldn’t have depended simply on that,” he answered, quite uncrestfallen, “though, of course, birthday cakes don’t have one candle standing out on the table all by itself and this circle emphatically has. No, that was simply a starter and made me read the book through. And it’s in the print, not the pictures, that I picked up the real clue. After all, the clue here isn’t what we called, a moment ago, a spade clue—something dug up. It’s a pen clue or a word clue—something right in your line, Mr. Silchester.

  “Listen to this,” he said, taki
ng back the book. “I’ll summarize as good a piece of word detection as ever I’ve come upon.” So, peering at the page and then over the top of it at me, he ran on: “Stonehenge: use and purpose of building not really known. Still—you see the true archaeological caution—a possible clue is given by the traditional name bestowed on one of the outstanding sarsens (the big monoliths) which stands at some distance east of the circle. A local story recounts that as the devil was building this lonely monument (all big stone circles were attributed to that hard-working liar, because they were the temples of pre-Christian peoples) there strolled up that ubiquitous gossiping ‘kibitzer’ of the late Middle Ages—a friar.” I started. He went on. “As the old gossip wouldn’t clear off, the devil seized one of the huge stones he was handling and hurled it at the nuisance who, while running away, was struck on the heel, and the stone still stands where it fell, outside the circle, pitched there by the devil’s throw.”

  Our eyes met. “What an absurd story,” I said, “but how odd those words coming in it, ‘friar’s heel.’”

  “Absurd stories often, as you know, conceal clues. Now, what does our detective of pre-history suggest? First, that the story is evidently a construction. I think we agree with that.” I nodded. “Something is being explained by someone who really has no idea what it is that he is explaining.” I felt this to be a dig at me, but I had to allow its general truth. “The words which have to be explained are ‘friar’s heel,’ and they are applied to an outstanding stone which is like neither a friar nor a heel. So, step two: Are these words really what they sound to be? The answer to that lies in another question, ‘Why should they be?’ Surely, indeed, they shouldn’t be! This place, Stonehenge, we don’t know much about it, but we do know it was built long before any English was spoken, when, pretty certainly, some Keltic dialect was common speech in Britain. Now, as children say, we are getting quite warm, for ‘friar’s heel’ is none too badly recorded Keltic and in Keltic it has nothing to do with a monk’s anatomy but with a celestial phenomenon.”