The World's Greatest Detective

by Caroline Carlson

  Toby rubbed his eyes and tried to picture the notes he’d taken months ago. “Well, there’s means,” he said, “and motive, I think. And opportunity.”

  “Exactly,” said Ivy. “The three Ms.”

  “But—”

  “I know opportunity doesn’t begin with M, but ‘two Ms and an O’ is much harder to remember, don’t you think? Anyway, in this case, we already know the means of Mr. Abernathy’s murder. Someone put poison in his digestive tonic. That doesn’t help us much, though. Poison isn’t hard to get if you know where to look. Anyone in this house might have had the means to kill Mr. Abernathy.”

  “Right,” said Toby. He might not have remembered the three Ms right away, but he didn’t want Ivy to think he was completely useless. “And the same goes for opportunity. The person who put the poison in the tonic had to sneak into the Orchid Room sometime yesterday afternoon. I don’t think anyone outside the house could have gotten in without looking suspicious, but any of the detectives could have done it, or . . . well . . . any of your family. Sorry, Ivy.”

  “You don’t have to apologize. You’re only being logical. No one would have thought it was strange for Mother or Father to slip into a room in their own house, so they had the perfect opportunity.”

  “How about Lillie?” Toby couldn’t even remember seeing her yesterday after lunch. Maybe she’d been too busy tampering with Mr. Abernathy’s tonic to join the others playing badminton.

  Ivy twisted one of her scarves around her wrist. “If Lillie were going to commit a murder, I’m sure she’d do it as wonderfully as she does everything else. But I can’t even imagine what her motive would be.”

  “That’s the third M,” said Toby. “The most important one. If anyone in the house could have killed Mr. Abernathy, we need to figure out which person wanted to do it—and why.”

  “Good work, Detective,” said Ivy. “That’s exactly the conclusion I reached at three o’clock this morning.”

  Of course she had. Toby was starting to feel about as helpful to the investigation as Percival, who had jumped off the bed and begun scouting for mice under the wardrobe. “Don’t tell me you’ve already worked out who the murderer is.”

  “Not yet,” Ivy admitted. “I wish I had. Then I wouldn’t have to be Madame Ermintrude. But today, Toby, we are going to find out exactly who in Coleford Manor wanted Mr. Abernathy out of the way. You’ve practiced interviewing suspects, haven’t you?”

  “Sort of. At least, I’ve read the lesson about it. There weren’t as many likely criminals on Detectives’ Row as you might expect.”

  “Good enough,” said Ivy. “The other guests seem fond enough of you, and so do my parents. I bet they’ll tell you anything you want to know.” She had twisted her scarves from her wrist all the way to her shoulder by now. “I don’t know if they feel the same way about Madame Ermintrude, though. Most people don’t like me very much.”

  “I’m sure that’s not true,” Toby said. Secretly, though, he wasn’t sure at all. He liked Ivy now—or at least he thought he did, most of the time—but he hadn’t felt that way before he’d gotten to know her a little, and Ivy wasn’t easy to get to know. Especially not in her sun hat and motoring goggles. He tried hard to imagine the other detectives revealing their secrets to Madame Ermintrude. “Anyway, interviewing suspects isn’t the only thing we need to do today. One of us should search for the missing case files. If we can find out who took them, it might tell us who the murderer is.”

  “Genius!” said Ivy. “It’s the perfect plan.” She climbed out of the orange armchair and pulled Toby off his bed. “I know all the best hiding spots in the manor. With you interrogating suspects and me finding Mr. Abernathy’s files, we’ll have this case cracked by lunchtime.”

  Ivy sounded so confident of this that Toby almost believed it himself. Maybe they really could catch the other detectives off their guard and solve the mystery before anyone realized what they were up to. If they could pull it off, Uncle Gabriel was going to be really impressed.

  Ivy was studying his face. “You’re looking funny,” she said. “What’s going on?”

  “It’s nothing,” said Toby. “I mean, it’s probably not important, but I just remembered how much my uncle hated Hugh Abernathy. If anyone had a motive to murder him, Uncle Gabriel did.”

  Ivy had been right: no time was too early for good detective work, and the other detectives at Coleford Manor had practically emptied out the breakfast platters by the time Toby reached them. Only Miss March and Mrs. Webster lingered at the table, chatting about a stone statuette Mrs. Webster was working to restore at the city museum. “We can’t be sure yet,” Mrs. Webster was saying, “but my guess is that it’s an early representation of the Gyptian goddess of justice. We could certainly use her assistance here this weekend, now that— Ivy, what in heaven’s name are you wearing?”

  “I’m Madame Ermintrude,” said Ivy, piling most of the remaining pastries onto her plate.

  “Ah,” said Mrs. Webster. “I wondered where my old motoring goggles had wandered off to.”

  Toby grabbed the last pastry before Ivy could get to it. “Where are the other guests?” he asked. He wanted to get started with his interviews. He hadn’t seen any of the others on his way down to breakfast, but that wasn’t too surprising; Coleford Manor was enormous.

  “They’ve all come and gone,” Miss March told him. She counted off detectives one by one on her fingers. “Miss Hartshorn has commandeered the kitchen for her chemical experiments, and Miss Price and Mr. Elwood are taking a stroll in the gardens. Mr. Rackham is interrogating the poor servants; he’s probably frightening them to death as we speak. A lot of unnecessary bother, if you ask me, but Mr. Rackham didn’t.” Miss March double-checked her fingers. “As for everyone else, I believe they’re in the parlor. Mr. Peartree is writing to the lawyers who handle Mr. Abernathy’s affairs, and Mr. Webster is—”

  “Amina!” Mr. Webster burst into the room and slapped a newspaper down on the table in front of his wife. “Look at this! Look what they’ve printed! How the devil did they find out?”

  “—reading the paper,” Miss March finished. She winked at Toby. “Is everything quite all right, Mr. Webster?”

  Mr. Webster couldn’t do anything other than sputter, but Mrs. Webster had managed to keep hold of her words. “Oh dear,” she said. She laid the paper flat in front of her. “It seems we’ve sprung a leak.”

  WORLD’S GREATEST DETECTIVE FOUND DEAD, the Morning Bugle headline shouted. And then, in more measured letters: SCANDALOUS MURDER AT WEBSTER ESTATE. Underneath that was a photograph of Hugh Abernathy that took up half the page, outlined in black. Toby set down his pastry and leaned forward to get a better look.

  “Everyone in Colebridge will have seen this by now.” Mr. Webster collapsed into a chair and glared at the photo of Hugh Abernathy, as if Mr. Abernathy himself were personally responsible. “They’ll be on their way here with cameras and magnifying glasses. The police will want a crack at the case, and we’ll have a plague of tourists, too, climbing over the fence posts and crawling through the hedge maze. We’ll never have a minute’s peace again!”

  Toby was barely listening. He was halfway through the article now, and he didn’t think the Websters were the only people who’d dislike it. “Oh no,” he said quietly.

  It hadn’t been quiet enough for Ivy. She pounced. “What is it? Can you read it aloud?”

  Toby glanced at Miss March. “I’d rather not.”

  “Well, I’d rather you did,” Miss March said. “If the Morning Bugle knows something about this crime that I don’t, I’d like to hear it.”

  There wasn’t any way out of it. “‘Although several of the city’s best-known detectives were present at the time of the murder,’” Toby read reluctantly, “‘none of them showed any talent for crime solving, and they have already allowed important evidence to disappear from the scene. In fact, last night’s performance suggests that no living sleuth is likely to measure up to Hu
gh Abernathy’s standard of excellence. On Detectives’ Row, only Mr. Abernathy stood out as a truly great investigator, and the future of the Row seems bleak without him.’” Toby’s voice had gotten steadily quieter as he read, but that didn’t make the words on the newsprint sound any nicer. “Sorry, Miss March.”

  Miss March stiffened. “There’s nothing to be sorry about,” she said, taking the paper from Toby and rolling it up tight, as though she wanted to use it to smack something. “It’s all a bunch of flimflam and folderol if you ask me. No one will believe a word of it.”

  Toby hoped she was right. Otherwise, Uncle Gabriel wouldn’t be the only investigator who’d soon be out of business. If the Morning Bugle printed more stories like this one, the Row would be as empty and desolate as Slaughter’s Lane, and every detective at the manor would have to find a new line of work.

  “Never mind all that,” said Mrs. Webster. “I’d like to know how the paper got this information. I locked the gates myself yesterday afternoon. None of those journalists in the street could have heard anything that happened last night, and Doctor Piper promised to keep the whole matter quiet.”

  “Isn’t it obvious, Mother?” Ivy waved her scarves in the air, narrowly missing Mrs. Webster’s teacup. “One of us spoke to the journalists. Someone in this house is a double-crossing snake!”

  Mrs. Webster rested her head in her hands. “Oh, Ivy. This isn’t the time for dramatics.”

  “I don’t see why not,” Miss March said. “The child is right: it’s clear that someone here is not to be trusted.” She shrugged and pushed back her chair. “It’s a shame, but I can’t say I’m surprised. No secret lasts long in a city full of detectives.”

  CHAPTER 13

  BRANDELBURG BLUE

  Julia Hartshorn was washing glass jars in the kitchen sink, but she looked up when Toby knocked. “Raiding the pantry?” she asked cheerfully. “Don’t worry; I won’t tell a soul.”

  “Actually,” said Toby, “Miss March told me you were doing things with chemicals. I wondered if I could watch.”

  Julia wiped the jars with a clean white cloth and laid them out on the big table in the center of the room. She’d transformed the kitchen into a sort of laboratory, sweeping recipe books and pie pans out of the way to make space for vials of jewel-colored liquids stopped up with corks, and industrial jugs stamped all over with warnings. This, Toby assumed, was the stuff of science. He hadn’t expected it to look quite so deadly.

  “Don’t eat or drink anything Julia gives you,” Ivy had warned him a few minutes earlier, before she’d snuck off to search for the missing files. “If she poisoned Mr. Abernathy and you find out about it, she might try to poison you, too.”

  Right now, Julia was frowning at him. That was dangerous enough. Toby had seen how upset she’d gotten with Mr. Abernathy yesterday, which was why she was at the top of his list of suspects to interview. “All right,” she said at last, pulling on a pair of gloves. “I don’t mind if you watch, but you’ve got to stand back. I’m not entirely sure what’s going to happen.” She uncorked the half-empty bottle of Bertram’s Remarkable Digestive Tonic, sniffed at it, and made a face. “This stuff is horrible even when it hasn’t been poisoned.”

  Toby stood by the sink and watched as Julia decanted the Bertram’s into a clean jar. Then, carefully, she added a spoonful of powder from one of her vials. It looked almost like salt, but Toby didn’t think it would improve the taste of the tonic. “We’re testing for Brandelburg acid,” Julia explained as she stirred the mixture. “If Mr. Abernathy’s tonic contains it, it should glow blue—quite a nice shade, really, but not one you’d want to see in your digestive medicine. As far as we’re concerned, blue is the color of death.”

  Toby thought of Mr. Abernathy’s body, which had gone right past blue and on to purple. If that was what science could do to people, he wasn’t sure he trusted it, and he definitely didn’t trust Julia. “Don’t most detectives let the medical examiner test for poisons?” he asked.

  “They do,” said Julia, “but that’s because most detectives don’t have university degrees in chemistry. I don’t know why not. Scientists are like detectives, in a way. They’re always trying to discover the truth, and as far as I’m concerned, the truth is much easier to find in the swirl of a criminal’s fingerprints than in the twists and turns of his mind.” She struck a match and lit the kitchen stove. “Now that Mr. Abernathy’s gone, though, I’m the only one on the Row doing my own chemical tests.”

  Toby remembered the long rows of doors he’d seen in Mr. Abernathy’s house, and the room full of glass bottles and tubes. “Did you and Mr. Abernathy work together very often?”

  Julia laughed. “We were neighbors,” she said, “but the only times I spoke to him were when I had to ask him to clear his parade of clients away from my front steps. The only person Hugh Abernathy ever wanted to work with was himself. I’m surprised your uncle hasn’t told you that.” She’d taken a metal contraption out from somewhere and was busy assembling it over the flame. “They used to be investigative partners, did you know?”

  At first, Toby thought Julia was joking. “They couldn’t have been!” he said. “Uncle Gabriel hated Mr. Abernathy! And besides, he’s not in any of the stories in the Sphinx.”

  “Oh, it was ages before the Sphinx, and ages before I came up to the Row. I don’t really know much about it, but I’ve heard the partnership didn’t end well.” Julia shrugged and balanced the jar full of chemicals on the metal frame, just a few inches above the hot stove. “Anyway, I’m not surprised your uncle didn’t like Mr. Abernathy. Lots of people didn’t.”

  Toby had a thousand more questions about Uncle Gabriel, but he couldn’t ask them now, not when he had to find out if Julia Hartshorn had a motive for murder. “You didn’t like Mr. Abernathy, either,” he said, “did you?”

  Julia looked up sharply from the stove. “What do you mean?”

  “You were mad at him yesterday, during the badminton game.” Toby tensed the muscles in his legs, just in case he needed to run. The long kitchen table stood between him and Julia Hartshorn, but Julia looked fast.

  “Oh, that!” Julia sighed. She sounded almost relieved. “I’ve already told you that Hugh wasn’t any good at working with other people. As it turns out, he wasn’t any good at playing with them, either. Thank goodness Mr. Peartree came outside when he did. If I’d had to play doubles with Hugh for much longer, I might have broken my racquet over his head.” She knelt down and stared into the warming jar. “But I didn’t murder him, Toby, if that’s what you’re thinking. I promise you: no one cares that much about badminton.”

  The minutes ticked away on the kitchen clock, the mixture in its jar grew hotter, and Toby grew more frustrated. He wasn’t getting very far with Julia Hartshorn. She had arrived at Coleford Manor just before ten o’clock the previous morning, eaten lunch with the others, and spent most of the afternoon winning all the points Mr. Abernathy would allow her on the badminton court. She’d run inside for a few minutes to fetch her sun hat, which would have given her more than enough time to tamper with Mr. Abernathy’s tonic, and Toby was sure most of the things in her vials and jugs were poisonous. But Ivy had sent him to find out why Julia might have wanted Mr. Abernathy dead, and by the time she took the jar off the heat, he still hadn’t managed it. If Julia Hartshorn had any secrets, she wasn’t about to share them with Toby.

  A thick brown sludge was starting to collect at the bottom of the jar, and Julia looked happy to see it. “We’re almost done,” she said as she reached for one of her large, dangerous-looking jugs. “If we’ve managed the experiment properly, the precipitate should turn blue when I add the acid. If we haven’t . . . well, we might be in trouble.” She peered at Toby. “You don’t like trouble, do you?”

  “No, Miss Hartshorn.” The question was bewildering. Who could like that slinking, shadowy thing? Did anyone actually enjoy the prickling burns at the backs of their necks, or the terrible twists in their stomachs? To
by had spent most of the past three years trying to get out of trouble’s way; it had never occurred to him to like it. “I don’t think anyone does.”

  “I do,” said Julia. “Occasionally, at least. I’ve found that trouble can be very educational. If I never got into it, I’d never learn a thing.” She collected a few drops of liquid from the jug inside a long thin tube. “Are you ready?”

  The only thing Toby had ever learned from trouble was that the world would be much better off without it. He guessed it would be educational if the jar of chemicals exploded, or if the bottle of acid burned a hole in the kitchen floor, but he wasn’t sure that was the sort of education he needed. Still, he didn’t want Julia to think he was too small or too nervous to face whatever might happen. “I’m ready,” he said.

  “Good,” said Julia. “Watch the jar.”

  Slowly, hardly moving her hand, Julia let the acid drip little by little into the jar. Toby stared at the brown sludge resting on the bottom. The first drop changed nothing. Neither did the second, or the third, or the fourth. With the fifth drop, though, the sludge began to glow, brilliant and deadly and blue.

  “Presto,” Julia said with a grin. “We’ve got our poison.”

  Toby hadn’t expected it to be beautiful. It was summertime blue, the blue that came just after sunset, before night crept in and pinned the world all over with stars. If Julia had told him she’d collected that color by climbing a ladder and scraping up the sky, Toby would have believed her. “Are you sure that’s what killed Mr. Abernathy?” he asked.

  “As sure as I can be. It wouldn’t have taken much—no more than a few sips—and that awful tonic would have masked the taste of it. Our murderer must have known something about poisons.” Julia shrugged as she picked up the jar and poured it down the sink. “Of course, Brandelburg acid is easy enough for anyone to find these days. There’s no way of telling how it got into the bottle of Bertram’s.”