Murder, My Dear Watson

by John Lellenberg

  “But to whom does it rightfully belong?” The more I gazed upon the remarkable bird, the more I hated the thought of delivering it into unworthy hands. The thing was a work of art and I began to feel quite strongly that it deserved to be kept in a place where all could see its dazzling glory.

  “A case could be made that it ought to be given to the present king of Spain,” the professor said. “It was his ancestor, after all, who was its intended recipient.”

  “Or perhaps,” Holmes suggested, “the Knights of Malta should be informed that their gift has been recovered. They undoubtedly paid their falcon rent in less valuable currency and owe the king nothing but one live falcon per annum, as agreed.”

  “What of the landowner upon whose land the bird was found?” I inquired. “Does the Verney family still own the property, and if so, have they no rights?”

  “All very sound legal questions, gentlemen,” Professor Gutman observed, “but quite outside my purview. I shall take my leave of you and spend the rest of the day consulting references to the Rara Avis in my scholarly books. It is an amazing thing to have seen the bird at last, after so many disappointments.” I couldn’t help but think he lingered a bit too long beside the jeweled avian; the gleam in his small black eyes seemed to me covetous and grasping.

  “I SHOULD LIKE to see the barrow,” Holmes said in a patient tone. It seemed a logical request, yet it threw the little professor into a state of stubborn incoherence.

  “Oh, but Sir Everard was so very particular about—indeed, he said as much the very first time I made inquiry about opening the site.” Professor Patchford’s crooked, white fingers twitched in his lap. “He told me no one else was to have access to his land, and he most expressly enjoined me against inviting fellow archeologists. In particular,” the little man said, lowering his head and his voice, “he seems to have formed a fixed dislike of General Pitt-Rivers. He made it quite clear that under no circumstances was he to see the burial site, which is quite odd, for, as you are most certainly aware, the general has been appointed as inspector of ancient monuments and is a most meticulous record-keeper.”

  Holmes steepled his fingers and gazed into the fire blazing in the hearth of the Stranger’s Room. “Remarkable,” he replied. “The foremost authority on Saxon burial sites not permitted to see a common barrow. Why on earth should Sir Everard Addleton bar a noted expert from his land unless he has something to conceal?”

  “What else did you find in the barrow?” I asked.

  The little man’s face lit up, as if to say that at last someone cared about the truly valuable objects inside the tumulus. “Four marvelous stone jugs, decorated with the geometrical patterns one expects from the Neolithic period, some silver jewelry, an amber necklace, the enamel crowns of the deceased Sir Cadogan—the skeleton was of course quite decayed—five Roman coins—the usual grave goods, but quite informative as to the—”

  Holmes cut through the antiquarian’s monologue. “Have you informed Sir Everard of your find?”

  “I thought it best to wait until I had determined exactly what it was that I found,” Professor Patchford said, his watery blue eyes wide with innocence. “I have not been in contact with Sir Everard since he gave me permission to excavate the barrow.”

  “Have you told anyone else about the black bird?” Holmes asked. He had decided, for reasons of his own, to keep from Professor Patch-ford the truth about the anomalous object he’d recovered from the burial site. As far as the old man was concerned, he had unearthed an Egyptian funerary statue and nothing more.

  “No, indeed not,” the antiquarian replied. “I would be very much obliged if you would intercede with Sir Everard on my behalf. I found him rather frightening, I must admit, and I wouldn’t like him to think I’d taken liberties.”

  When Patchford had been ushered out of the Strangers’ Room, Holmes said, “Let us send a telegram to Sir Everard and request an audience. Perhaps he can shed some light upon the discovery.”

  “I wonder why he allowed Patchford to open up his barrow,” I remarked as we strode out onto the street in search of a cab, “if he is so adamantly opposed to strangers on his land.”

  “Ah, Watson, you never fail to stimulate me,” my friend replied. As usual, he ignored the first cab in line and made for the second.

  My blush of pleasure was hidden, I think, by the thickening dusk.

  The news that Professor Hans-Josef Gutman, graduate of Heidelberg University and Fellow of Oxford, had accidentally fallen onto the platform at King’s Cross Station and been crushed to death by the 5:14 to Oxford merited but a paragraph in the next morning’s Standard. Holmes said nothing as he passed me the newspaper, marking with a slender finger the brief notice, but his face was grim as we set forth from Baker Street in search of the truth about the black bird.

  SIR EVERARD ADDLETON was an imposing man of about sixty-five years of age, with snow white hair and a large mustache cut in military style. He stood in his library, one gold-headed cane in each hand, leaning heavily upon his sticks.

  “So that silly little man thinks he has found the Maltese Falcon in my barrow!” The voice was deep, the tone contemptuous, and the words uttered before any proper greeting had been made.

  “You are aware that such a bird exists?” Holmes deliberately kept his voice calm.

  “I ought to be,” the old man replied. He gestured with one cane toward seats by the fire; I sank gratefully into a leather chair. Sir Everard struggled toward the chair nearest the fire, walking with difficulty. “I was brought up on the story of Sir Francis Verney and the jeweled bird. It was a bedtime tale in my nursery, Mr. Holmes, for my father never ceased boasting about how his ancestor defeated the Barbary pirates at Tripoli and carried off the Rara Avis.”

  “If the bird that sits upon my mantel in Baker Street is not the Maltese Falcon,” Holmes said quietly, “then where is the authentic bird?”

  “Here, of course,” the old man answered, emphasizing his words with a thump of one gold-headed stick. I noticed for the first time that the gold handle was in the form of a falcon’s head. “Upstairs in the ballroom. I never ascend stairs, so I have not seen it for several years, but it is there, I assure you.”

  The situation seemed clear to me: the crippled Sir Everard unable to view his prized object, a venal servant spiriting it away and hiding it in the tomb until his confederate could remove it and sell it to the highest bidder. What a shock it would be for the poor man to realize his bird had flown—and what a welcome surprise it would then be to know it had been recovered.

  “May we—” Holmes began, gesturing toward the ceiling.

  “Of course,” Sir Everard interrupted. “Pray bring it down with you; I should be glad to see it again. It has been many years since I laid eyes upon it.” He pulled the bell and a tall butler with a long, cadaverous face appeared. “Barnes, take these gentlemen to the ballroom. They wish to see the Falcon.”

  “Very good, sir,” the servant replied with a bow. He ushered us out of the dimly lit library with a slow, reluctant tread. I fancied I knew the reason for that slowness; undoubtedly, the man was a knave whose thievery was about to be revealed to his indignant master.

  Holmes and I followed him up one set of stairs and then another. The ballroom occupied the entire third floor of the house. The huge room was dim, its only light entering through small windows set high on the walls. Unpolished brass sconces gave silent witness to the neglect of the servants; a thick layer of dust overlay the floor and mantel. Muslin coverings squatted over chairs and footstools, tables and ottomans.

  The mantel was empty. I was about to remark upon its singular lack of a jeweled avian when the butler, who, despite his large feet, walked as quietly as a cat, stepped over to the largest ottoman and lifted off the muslin cover, raising a cloud of dust that had me coughing. Resting on top of the ottoman’s central mound sat a golden bird, the exact same size and dimensions as the one in Baker Street. Even in the dull light of the ballroom, the ruby eyes
winked at me.

  “Impossible,” I gasped. “There cannot be two of them!”

  “Why not?” Holmes stepped toward the ottoman and picked up the statue. He turned it in his hands and I saw rainbows glint from its gem-encrusted body. “The creation of one such fowl is an incredible story —how much more fantastic is it to consider that the Knights might have fashioned a second bird? Or that one of these two might be a fake?”

  “Come to that,” I remarked, entering into the spirit of the thing, “they might both be fakes.”

  “Indeed, Watson, indeed.” He tucked the bird under his arm as if it were a loaf of bread and proceeded, with his long strides, toward the door leading to the stairway. “That is the pleasure and the pitfall of speculation,” he continued. “One can consider all possibilities without the necessity of proof. But I am in the proof business, so I shall cease speculating at this point.”

  Sir Everard radiated a bland calm as Holmes entered the overheated library. In spite of the warmth, the old man had a wool blanket over his knees and his hands were pale from the cold. I mentally diagnosed the slow circulation of an aging man who took little exercise, but I kept my observation to myself.

  “I told you it would be there, and there it was. Now,” Sir Everard continued, “I would be much obliged if you would tell that fool Patchford that I will brook no more disturbances on account of that amazingly annoying barrow. I allowed him to open it in return for a promise of complete privacy, and he has broken that promise by bringing you here.”

  If this ungraciousness bothered Holmes, he managed to conceal the fact. “How long has your family owned this estate, Sir Everard? Was it in your family’s possession before Verney fought the Barbary pirates?”

  A dry little snigger escaped the thin mouth. “You know better than that, Mr. Holmes. Men who fight pirates do not usually come from landed families. My ancestor purchased the estate with part of his booty from that remunerative battle.”

  “Then how would he know there was an ancient barrow on his land? He does not sound a scholarly sort of man, and the barrow, like most of its kind, was crafted to resemble a small hillock.” We had asked specially to be driven past the gravehill on our way from the railroad station, and it looked to the untrained eye like a slight rise in the countryside, nothing more.

  “My ancestor was a man who aspired to better the lot of his children, to send them to fine schools and frank good marriages for them. And if they were able to pass themselves off as landed gentry, so much the better. Landed gentry know every tree and rock on their land, and are only too happy to talk of its history. They preserve old ruins of abbeys and are forever boasting that battles took place on their greenswards and history was made in their great houses. My ancestor wanted that kind of past for his children, and he hired a scholar to research this house. The resulting volume covers Edward the Confessor to Verney himself, and contains maps setting forth all the burial sites and other features of the property.”

  “Very intelligent of him,” Holmes said, and the glint in his grey eyes told me he wanted very much to see this remarkable book. A bit more flattery and the old man gave his consent, ringing the bell once again for Barnes the butler and ordering the book to be brought from his bedchamber to the library.

  Sir Everard excused himself, pleading the need for a lie-down before supper. “Not as young as I was,” he confessed. Before leaving the library, he took one long last look at the Falcon. “Good to see you again, old friend,” he said as he stroked its diamond-studded beak.

  Holmes opened the Verney family history, a handsome but well-worn volume, its leather bindings beginning to give and several pages loose inside its covers. I soon tired of watching him peruse the pages, which were written in the old-fashioned script of the eighteenth century. I stood up and prowled the room, gazing at the titles on the shelves.

  “Here’s a first edition of Paradise Lost.” I turned the pages with reverence, then replaced the book next to a cheap copy of Vanity Fair. I caught a glimpse of a name that seemed somehow familiar, yet I couldn’t recall why.

  The book was a slender volume bound in blue cloth. The frontispiece read ON THE EXCAVATION OF PRIMEVAL SAXON SEPULCHRES: A PRACTICAL MANUAL FOR THE ANTIQUARIAN, BY GENERAL AUGUSTUS PITT-RIVERS.

  “Holmes,” I cried excitedly, “look at this! A book by the very expert Sir Everard barred from his land.”

  I turned toward my friend, flushed with excitement, only to see him wave me off. Stung, I took the book to the far corner of the library and perused it on my own. What I saw in its pages doubled my resolution to capture Holmes’s attention.

  At last, he looked up, his grey eyes glazed with faraway thoughts. “The writing is cryptic, Watson. Hints are given, puns involving birds are used, but nothing solid, nothing I can rely upon. The bird could have flown to Sicily, as the unfortunate Gutman believed, or it could have stood upstairs in that ballroom for one hundred years.”

  I showed the detective my own find—the pages of Pitt-Rivers’s manual demonstrating, stone by stone and layer by layer, how to excavate a Saxon tomb. “Our friend Patchford said few men in England could have restored that barrow. This book, I think, widens that circle considerably. Anyone taking reasonable care could use this as a blueprint for restoring a barrow to a state resembling virginity.”

  “Watson, you are invaluable. Thanks to you, our time here has been fruitful indeed. Yes,” he muttered, “this is suggestive, very suggestive.”

  By the time Holmes and I rose from the long library table, our legs stiff with sitting, our hands cold, the sun was gone and the evening mists were rising on the river. We thanked our host, refreshed from his nap, and made our way to the nearest public house, where we ate a tolerable dinner and spent the night, planning to return to London the next morning.

  Notwithstanding my friend’s capricious insistence that two Maltese Falcons were not impossible, the more likely truth emerged upon consultation with experts. The bird Mr. Patchford had unearthed was genuine, insofar as its gems were real and its make of the requisite period. When Holmes informed Sir Everard of this fact, the old soldier commissioned his own test of the bird in his possession and indignantly informed us by telegram that it was a glass-eyed forgery.

  Sir Everard, not unnaturally, claimed that he’d been robbed and demanded the return of the authentic jeweled bird. He argued, first, that the statue had been stolen from him and replaced by a fake, and second, that the bird Patchford found belonged to him as the rightful owner of the land on which the barrow lay.

  With these points I could find no argument, but Holmes refused to relinquish the falcon until he was satisfied that the actual owner would be the beneficiary of its restoration.

  “WATSON HERE IS convinced that someone removed the actual bird from Sir Everard’s house and hid it in the barrow,” Holmes said as we took our ease yet again in the Strangers’ Room at the Diogenes Club.

  Mycroft Holmes raised a single eyebrow. “It is the most likely explanation,” he remarked as he lifted a heavily laden scone to his thick lips.

  “But it is not the only one,” my friend replied, contenting himself with a cup of sugarless tea. “I can think of a dozen explanations for the bird’s presence in the tomb, and I daresay you, brother, can think of a dozen more.”

  “I thought you were in the business of proof and not speculation,” I remarked with an air of innocence. “Where can proof be obtained that will settle this matter once and for all?”

  Another thought struck me as I reached for a scone. “You once said you suspected why Sir Everard granted Patchford permission to excavate the barrow. Did you mean to imply that he knew the falcon was there and wanted it found?”

  “I did. I always suspect people who behave differently from their usual patterns, and Sir Everard is known as a man who guards his privacy. Why would such a man, who had never expressed the slightest interest in the ancient burial sites on his land, suddenly allow an untrained amateur to go pot hunting? And why did he exp
ressly refuse access to a noted expert like General Pitt-Rivers unless he feared that the general would realize the tomb had already been opened?”

  “But why would he steal his own bird?”

  “If it was his own bird,” Mycroft Holmes replied, “then I can think of several reasons why he might have had it stolen. Perhaps he wished to have someone blamed for the theft.”

  “But as far as we know, he has taken no action in that regard,” I pointed out. “He has blamed no one, fired no servants, cut no one out of his will.”

  “These are deep waters,” Sherlock Holmes said. “I am on my second pipe, and I see no glimmer as yet. I am convinced utterly that Sir Everard deliberately permitted Patchford to open the barrow so as to find the falcon, and I see no reason for him to have behaved in that fashion if the falcon was his legitimately. Therefore, he set upon a course of action designed to bring the falcon to him, to cement his rightful ownership of it, but—where did the falcon come from? Where was it before it was placed in the barrow?”

  “When was it placed there, and by whom?” Mycroft Holmes spread jam on his cream-laden scone and took a bite.

  “If it was stolen from someone else,” I pointed out, “then why hasn’t there been a hue and cry?”

  “Who made the fake, and when?” Mycroft said, ignoring my observation. “How long has Sir Everard really known his bird was not genuine?”

  Holmes turned toward his brother. “I have taken a great liberty,” he said. “I know how much you dislike bestirring yourself, so I invited someone to join us, someone who may shed some light upon this dark matter.”

  “Of course, Sherlock,” the large man replied. He settled himself into the capacious leather chair. “I have already instructed the doorkeeper to admit him, although he is not the sort of person the Club usually cares to see within its doors.”

  “Then you anticipated me,” Holmes replied with a smile. “I should have expected as much.”