“Really!” Constable Trout’s eyebrows crawled up his forehead. “You have plenty of household staff, Mrs. Webster. Don’t they polish the silver for you?”
“I am an archaeologist, Constable,” Mrs. Webster said coolly. “I restore and preserve ancient artifacts. In my work, I occasionally use a polishing compound to clean the metal tools and housewares we uncover. Surely that isn’t a crime.”
“Archa-ma-whatsis! Sounds suspicious to me.” The constable looked back to Julia. “Are you accusing Mrs. Webster of murder, then?”
“I don’t think that would be responsible, sir. I’m not ready to accuse anyone at all. There’s just not enough evidence.”
Constable Trout glowered. “Another excuse.” He jabbed a finger in the air once more, this time toward Mr. Rackham. “Next!” he said. “Have you got anything useful for me?”
Mr. Rackham cleared his throat. “I don’t put any stock in these new techniques, sir. In my years of experience, I have found that when you want to get to the heart of a case, it’s necessary to ask only one question: Where is the money?” He looked around the room at each detective in turn, letting the question hang in the air. “Mr. Abernathy, as you’ll recall, had a great deal of it—but what happens to it now that he’s passed away? Who stood to benefit most from his death?”
Miss Price shrugged. “Why don’t you tell us, dear?”
“I will!” said Mr. Rackham. “Ladies and gentlemen, I suggest to you that the person who killed Hugh Abernathy was his only friend, his closest companion, and the very person who now owns his vast fortune: Mr. Peartree!”
No one in the room looked more surprised to hear this than Mr. Peartree himself.
“I’m afraid there’s been a mistake!” he stammered. “I didn’t inherit any of Mr. Abernathy’s money. In fact, I witnessed his will. Apart from the money he’d set aside for this contest, Hugh left every cent of his fortune to the Colebridge Home for Ailing Detectives.”
Mr. Rackham squinted at him. “Are you sure?”
“I am,” said Constable Trout. “Do you think my deputies haven’t been to see Abernathy’s lawyer? It’s just like the little green man said: the funds go to charity, and no one named Peartree gets a penny.” He stared hard at Mr. Rackham. “Another waste of time.”
“Oh dear.” Mr. Rackham sat down unsteadily, and Julia patted his hand.
“Who’s left?” said Constable Trout. “Just the two of you, isn’t that right?” He pointed at Miss March and Miss Price. “Don’t tell me you’re as hopeless as the others.”
The women exchanged a look. “I’m very sorry, Constable,” Miss Price said kindly, “but we have no information to give you.”
“None at all?” Trout’s eyes narrowed. “Aren’t you those batty old ladies who always have their noses in other people’s affairs? Do you really expect me to believe that you know nothing?”
“That’s exactly what we expect,” said Miss March. “I can tell you, though, that you’ll be wasting your time digging into the backgrounds of every person in this room. Flossie and I are quite convinced that Mr. Abernathy’s murderer was an outsider—a person who slipped in, poisoned the digestive tonic, and left the grounds before anyone even knew a crime had been committed.”
“Yes,” said Miss Price. “There are so many escaped convicts roaming the countryside these days, you know. It’s a wonder more people aren’t poisoned every day!”
Ivy was chewing on her lip. “That can’t be true,” she whispered to Toby. “The murderer couldn’t have been an outsider, and they know it! Miss Price was the person who said so in the first place!”
Toby nodded. He was sure Miss March and Miss Price were lying to the constable, but he wasn’t sure why. “Maybe they don’t want Trout to solve the case,” he whispered back. “Or maybe they’re protecting someone.”
“Maybe,” said Ivy, “but who?”
“You two!” said Trout. Now his finger was pointing at Toby and Ivy. “I don’t like whispering, and I don’t like children. This is a serious criminal investigation. Isn’t there some sort of nursery you can be sent away to?”
“Nursery?” Ivy was livid. She flew out of her chair and faced down Constable Trout. Toby wondered if she realized he was three times her size. “How dare you! I’m a detective!”
For a horrible moment, Toby thought Ivy would take a swing at the constable—and for a moment after that, he wondered whether he should let her. Before anyone’s fists could start flying, however, there was a flurry of knocks at the front door and a rush of footsteps down the hall.
“Pardon me, Constable,” said a harried-looking police officer, “but this lady demanded to be let inside. She says she’s looking for a missing child.” He turned to the woman behind him—silver-haired, stern-faced, and very, very clean. Toby jumped to his feet. “What did you say the child’s name was?” the officer asked.
“Toby Montrose!” said Aunt Janet.
Not even the offer of a hot cup of tea could quell Aunt Janet’s fury. “Thank you, but I won’t be staying,” she informed Mrs. Webster. “I’ve only come to collect Toby and bring him safely home.” She kept one efficient hand on Toby’s shoulder so he couldn’t run away—not that he had any idea where he might run to. “If I’d known earlier that he’d invited himself to your house without permission, I would have retrieved him at once. I can’t apologize enough for his behavior.”
“That’s really not necessary,” Mrs. Webster said. She gave Toby a sympathetic sort of look.
“Oh, but it is! Do you know what you’ve put me through, Toby? When I went to Detectives’ Row and found you weren’t there, I almost fainted from worry.”
“I’m sorry,” said Toby, even though he didn’t think Aunt Janet had ever been in real danger of fainting from anything. “I didn’t want anyone to worry. I left a note!”
“And it’s lucky I found it,” Aunt Janet said, “or you’d still be missing.”
“I wasn’t missing!” Toby protested. “I knew exactly where I was the whole time.”
But Aunt Janet was already guiding Toby toward the doorway. “Come along,” she said. “We have a lot to discuss, but we won’t do it here. We’ve already disrupted these poor people’s weekends quite enough.”
Ivy stepped in front of them. “Toby can’t leave!” she said. “This is a crime scene, and he’s got to stay here until the crime is solved.”
“That’s right,” said Toby. Surely even Aunt Janet wouldn’t dare to interrupt a murder investigation. “We still haven’t figured out who killed Mr. Abernathy.”
“I’m sure the constable can do that without any help from you,” Aunt Janet told him. “Isn’t that right, sir?”
Constable Trout nodded. “The last thing I need is another child getting underfoot.”
“He’s a detective!” said Ivy, but no one listened.
“You’ll come back to Colebridge with me,” said Aunt Janet, “and you’ll stay there until we’ve decided what’s to be done with you. After all that’s happened this weekend, I can’t risk losing you, too.”
Toby stared up at her. The corners of her eyes were glistening in a way he’d only seen once before, three years ago, when the police officer had come from the seashore and knocked on her door. “What do you mean?” he asked her. The words felt brittle and stale at the back of his throat. “Who else have you lost?”
“Oh, Toby.” Aunt Janet’s voice wavered. “I’ve gotten a message from Gallis. It’s about your uncle Gabriel.”
PART V
WHODUNIT?
CHAPTER 25
A VISIT TO MR. PEARTREE
In the days since Aunt Janet had hustled Toby out of Coleford Manor and back to her house in the city, Toby had hardly left his bedroom. Aunt Janet knocked on his door every few hours to bring him thick bowls of oatmeal, and a cousin or two came by every so often to ask if he wanted to talk, but Toby couldn’t see what there was to talk about.
He especially didn’t want to talk about Uncle Gabriel, w
ho hadn’t been heard from for a week now. After stepping off the ferry in Gallis, Uncle Gabriel had told the proprietress of his shabby hotel that he was a detective working on the most important case of his career. If he didn’t return to the hotel the following evening, he told her, it would mean he was in trouble. When that evening had come and gone with no sign of Uncle Gabriel, the hotel proprietress had contacted the police, and an apologetic young sergeant had shown up to make contrite, worried faces on Aunt Janet’s doorstep. Aunt Janet kept telling Toby through the door, although he didn’t want to talk about it, that Uncle Gabriel was a persistent sort of person, and that he could wriggle his way out of a sticky situation if anyone could. As the days trudged past, however, she said this less and less.
Every morning, Toby read the newspaper, searching for stray bits of information about the investigation at Coleford Manor. Sometimes Constable Trout’s face leered up at him from the front page, but the constable hadn’t yet made any more progress than the detectives had in solving Mr. Abernathy’s murder, and Toby couldn’t help feeling pleased. Every afternoon, he studied the notes he’d taken that weekend, looking for clues he might have missed the first hundred times through. And every evening, he lay in bed while the trouble howled around him, keeping him awake.
On Friday morning, while Toby was reading in the Morning Bugle that Constable Trout had sent all the guests home from the manor but come no closer to solving the case, a thin, bloodless man from the Colebridge Children’s Home came to see Aunt Janet. They spoke in low voices in the hallway, and every so often the thin man would look over in Toby’s direction, though he never spoke to Toby once. Under the table, by Toby’s ankles, the trouble shrieked with delight. “I’m very sorry,” Aunt Janet told Toby after the thin man had left, “but with Gabriel gone, there’s nothing more I can do. The Children’s Home can take you in on Monday.”
Over the past three years, Toby had been packed up and passed around more times than he could count. He’d never argued; he’d never complained; he’d never once tried to do anything about it. This time, though, was different. Maybe it was that boys of eleven were really nothing like boys of ten, or maybe it was that Toby was a detective now, but the more he thought about it, the more sure he felt. Uncle Gabriel wasn’t coming home—that much seemed almost certain—and Toby was no closer to winning ten thousand dollars than he had been a week ago, but there was still one more thing he could do to stay out of the orphanage, even if it wasn’t likely to work. He tried to ignore the sound of the trouble. “Excuse me, Aunt Janet,” he said. “I need to send a letter.”
The sun had just risen over the city rooftops when Toby turned into Detectives’ Row two days later. It hadn’t been easy sneaking out of Aunt Janet’s house that morning, and he still felt guilty about the coins he’d slipped from her purse to pay for the carriage driver, but he promised himself that he wouldn’t be gone long enough for anyone to miss him, and he’d pay Aunt Janet back as soon as he could. There, on the corner of the High Street, a girl was waiting for him. She wore a deep blue leotard and pink tights, and she was balanced on one leg, clutching a frilly parasol in one hand and holding her dog’s leash in the other. Every time the dog tugged on it, the girl hopped and wobbled. For the first time in days, Toby could feel a smile creeping across his face. “Hello,” he said to the girl. “Are you Mitzi, the world-famous trapeze artist and spy?”
“There you are!” Ivy put her foot down and folded up her parasol. “Thank goodness. I had to turn over three weeks’ pocket money to the most frightening carriage driver in order to get here, and if I hadn’t threatened to let Percival bite him, I think he would have asked for even more.” She shuddered. “Now that I’ve followed the instructions in your letter, Detective Montrose, I’d be grateful if you’d tell me what we’re doing here.”
For the first time since Toby had moved to Detectives’ Row, there was no long and winding line of clients outside the shiny black door to Mr. Abernathy’s house. A few floral bouquets and framed illustrations from the Sphinx lined the sidewalk, but a small sign on the front steps read NO VISITORS, PLEASE, and the detective’s loyal admirers seemed to be respecting its wishes.
Other things had changed, too. The last time Toby had been to this house, he’d been small and worried, with trouble at his heels, so nervous he’d barely remembered his own name. Hugh Abernathy had been the world’s greatest detective: a man who could answer any question, untangle any knot, and find a solution to any problem. Now, though, Toby knew there had been much more to the truth about Hugh Abernathy than he’d realized. He was beginning to suspect there was more to the truth about Toby, too. “We’re solving a mystery,” he told Ivy. “An important one.”
“I don’t see what we can do to solve Mr. Abernathy’s case now that the police have taken over,” Ivy said. “With that awful Trout person in charge, I don’t think anyone will ever find out who murdered him.”
“That’s not the mystery I mean,” said Toby. “Do you remember when you said we could ask Mr. Peartree to help us find the notes Mr. Abernathy took about my parents’ disappearance?”
Ivy nodded.
“Well, I’m being sent to the Colebridge Children’s Home tomorrow morning. Maybe my parents are still alive, and maybe they aren’t, but this is the last chance I’ll get to find out what happened to them.” Toby took a long breath. “If they are alive, I won’t have to go to the orphanage. And if they’re not—”
“Don’t even think it,” said Ivy. She looked deadly serious. “I’m glad you asked me to come with you, Detective. Webster and Montrose, Private Investigators are on the case.”
It took almost two minutes for Mr. Peartree to appear, but when he did, he was as crisp and precise as ever. He was almost as green as ever, too, except for his hands, which were missing their gloves. It was a good thing Aunt Janet wasn’t with them, Toby thought; she would have taken a scrubbing brush to the grime under Mr. Peartree’s fingernails.
“Mr. Montrose!” he said, reaching out to clasp Toby’s hand in his. “Miss Webster! What a nice surprise. Is there something I can do for you?”
“We’re here on official business,” said Ivy. “Toby hired Mr. Abernathy to find his parents, and he’s come to inquire about the status of the investigation.”
Mr. Peartree raised his eyebrows.
“I was hoping I could look at my parents’ case file,” Toby explained.
“Ah.” Mr. Peartree nodded. “Of course. Come in, both of you—but, please, Miss Webster, leave that wretched creature outside.” He looked pointedly at Percival.
Ivy bristled, but she tied Percival’s leash to the railing. They followed Mr. Peartree across the chessboard hallway, up the spiral staircase, past the door that said SKULLS, and through the tall double doors into Mr. Abernathy’s study. The shelves that had once been stuffed with books were half-empty now, and sturdy brown cartons were stacked along the walls.
“I apologize for the state of things,” Mr. Peartree said, pulling his gloves back on. “I’ve been packing up Mr. Abernathy’s belongings. The Colebridge City Museum has offered to purchase them, and I’ve got to send them along to the curator before I leave. The house goes up for sale next week, and I depart for sunny Gallis straight afterward.” He ran a wistful finger across the spines of half a dozen Sphinxes. “But you children didn’t come here to listen to me reminisce. May I get you something to drink? I’ve just poured a cup for myself.” On a table near Toby’s elbow stood a thin porcelain mug, filled to the brim with cream and coffee.
Toby and Ivy said they’d both like tea, if it wasn’t too much trouble, and Mr. Peartree clattered down to the kitchen to see what he could do about it. “What a strange place,” Ivy whispered once he was out of earshot. “Did you see that room full of bottles and vials? Julia Hartshorn would probably pay a fortune to get inside. Ooh, do you think Mr. Peartree would let me get a look at Hugh Abernathy’s collection of disguises? It’s got to be around here somewhere, and I bet it’s fantastic.”
Toby nodded, but he wasn’t really paying attention. Something sticky and brown had gotten smudged on his palm when he’d shaken hands with Mr. Peartree, and he couldn’t stand the idea of letting it stay there. “I hope Mr. Peartree won’t mind if I use the washroom,” he said. “I’ve got something on my hand.”
“Oh, you and your neatness!” cried Ivy. “Honestly, Toby Montrose, sometimes I’d like to toss you into a mud puddle just to see what you’d do about it.” She looked hard at Toby. “Something’s wrong—wronger than mud, I mean. What is it?”
“It’s this brown stuff,” said Toby. “It’s paint or something, I think, and it’s gotten on me before. It smells just the same as the stuff in that leaky bottle in the broom cupboard back at Coleford Manor. Do you remember? It got all over Lillie’s dress, and she had to wash it. Now Mr. Peartree’s got some on his hands.”
“Hair tonic!” said Ivy. “It leaked all over me, too, when I searched the manor. That’s funny, though; I didn’t know Mr. Peartree dyed his hair brown.”
“He doesn’t,” Toby said. “At least, I thought he didn’t. His hair was already brown to begin with, wasn’t it?”
“He probably wants to hide his age,” Ivy said knowledgeably. “Grown-ups are always trying to do that, you know. Mother says she started getting five gray hairs a minute after I was born.”
She kept chattering away, but the smudge on Toby’s hand still bothered him—and it wasn’t just the smudge. Other things were untidy, too, or strangely out of place: Mr. Peartree’s gloves, his fingernails, the cup of coffee. Outside on the front steps, Percival howled. What had Mr. Peartree called him? A wretched creature?
The World's Greatest Detective Page 21