“I thought you were buddies,” Lynda said. She’s so cute when she’s being a hard ass.
“Indeed we were.” He held up the book in his hand, The Napoleon of Crime. “In fact, I was planning to lend him a book that I thought he might enjoy. I often did that. Our friendship was the very reason he didn’t want to give me an unfair journalistic advantage.”
What a load of crap, Faro. Lynda had a scoop on Peter Carstairs until you were invited to the party. My beloved held her tongue, but her gold-flecked eyes were on fire.
“But isn’t it true that Assistant Commissioner Madigan was your inside source at the Yard, sir?” Way to go, Heath, old bean!
Faro tried to look dignified, which is hard when the cuffs on your sport coat come down longer than they should. “I don’t reveal my sources, Inspector.”
“That’s as may be, sir, but I know that you’ve published a lot about the Phillimore case - too much, I’d say - that you didn’t get from me. The thought occurred to me that perhaps the Assistant Commissioner was killed for that very reason.”
That got a rise out of Faro. “I very much doubt that, Inspector. But in any case, I still can’t talk about my sources. It’s a matter of ethics.”
Lynda appeared just on the verge of lobbing a suitably acerbic rejoinder Faro’s way when the doorbell rang, startling all of us.
The cop who answered the door did a darned good imitation of Trout, or even Jeeves. “I’m sorry, sir, you can’t come in here; this is a crime scene.”
“Quite understandable,” came a familiar rumble in reply. “However, I am quite sure that Inspector Heath will be interested to know that Sebastian McCabe is at the door.”
“Let him in, Hawkins,” Heath yelled down the hallway. “What’s a circus without a ringmaster?” he added under his breath.
Mac bustled in, with Kate right behind him. She looked like she’d rather be at a Laundromat at midnight.
“Hello, Sebastian,” Heath greeted. “You’re just in time to hear my star witnesses tell me about their discovery of the body.”
Mac nodded wordlessly in acknowledgement.
“I arrived first,” Faro began. He told most of the story, with Lynda and me chiming in with a detail or two. It didn’t take long.
“Did the neighbors see or hear anything?” Mac asked.
“We’re still knocking on doors to ask about that,” Heath said. “Where were you during this time?”
“Kate and I were at the Oliver Cromwell Theatre, seeing Cloak and Dagger. It is a highly overrated melodrama, in my opinion.”
“I loved it,” my sister said.
Heath shook his head mournfully, looking uncannily like a Bassett hound who had just heard bad news. “Not much of an alibi, is it? Of course your wife would back you up, Sebastian. And even if she’s on the up and up you might have left her for a few minutes.”
“Hell and damnation,” Mac thundered, “you cannot possibly believe - ”
“And I don’t,” Heath said. “But someone wants me to. This morning I received what was alleged to be a series of e-mail exchanges between you and Phillimore in which you alternately attempted to threaten and cajole him into selling you that Conan Doyle notebook. He refused. Supposedly, the anonymous person who sent it to me was inspired to come forward by reading about that Colt business in The Daily Eye.” Heath glanced at Faro, who didn’t have the conscience to look embarrassed.
“Ingenious!” Mac said. He stuck an unlit Cuban cigar in his mouth.
“Too clever by half, I’d call it,” Heath said. “The two e-mail addresses that were supposed to be you and Phillimore looked plausible enough, but through only slightly illegal means I was able to establish that both were created on the same day - one Yahoo and one Gmail. Someone went to a great deal of trouble to write both ends of that e-mail thread.”
“This is dynamite!” Faro exclaimed.
Lynda rolled her eyes.
Heath held up his hands as if fending off an objection that no one had spoken. “I’ve read enough of your books, Sebastian, to know that in a novel that might be a double bluff. You could have framed yourself. But I don’t see you taking that chance. And I don’t see you killing Mr. Phillimore to get that notebook.”
“I quite agree, Neville,” Mac said heartily. He looked down at the body. “And Phillimore was only one of the victims. Madigan makes three.”
Heath raised his eyebrow. He only had one, all the way across. “Three?”
“Surely that is self-evident? No doubt a Scotland Yard official might accumulate many enemies in the course of a career, even murderous ones. However, following so closely the murder of Arthur James Phillimore, a man that Madigan knew on a social level, it is hard to believe that this death is not related to his.”
Heath ostentatiously held up his index finger and then his middle finger. “Phillimore, now Madigan, and I presume the third, or really the first, was this Peter Carstairs that Ms. Teal was telling me about.”
“Precisely - Carstairs, Phillimore, Madigan.” Mac stopped dead, stoking his beard. “Unless the second dead man wasn’t Phillimore!”
“What do you mean by that?” Faro demanded. I’m pretty sure he was only a half-step ahead of Lynda with that question.
“I’m thinking back to ‘The Adventure of the Magic Umbrella’ and its reference to the Sherlock Holmes stories with hidden rooms,” Mac explains. “In both of those stories, ‘The Adventure of the Norwood Builder’ and The Valley of Fear, the supposed murder victim is actually still alive. Suppose that Phillimore faked his own death and then killed Madigan out of revenge for his role in bringing down Phillimore Investments!”
“But you said Phillimore didn’t write the short story,” Lynda pointed out.
So there!
Mac frowned.
“Ms. O’Toole did give a positive identification of Phillimore’s body, Sebastian,” Heath pointed out.
The best Mac could come up with by way of a comeback was, “Hmmm. Perhaps you had better run a fingerprint comparison anyway, Neville. I assume that no one thought that was necessary until now.”
“I still don’t think it is,” said Heath amiably, “but I’ll do it.” He looked down at the corpse. “At least there’s no question about who he is. I don’t look forward to informing Mrs. Madigan. I’ve met her.” He gave a theatrical shiver.
One of Heath’s troops stuck his head in the doorway. “Excuse me, Inspector.”
“What is it, Weedly?”
“I finally found a neighbor, a retired schoolteacher across the street who was out in his yard. He heard what must have been the fatal shot a little more than an hour ago. He said he didn’t think much of it because he heard a whole string of similar pops not long before. He thought it was some kids with fireworks.”
“Didn’t see anything suspicious beforehand?”
“No, but he said he wasn’t looking. He said he’s not, quote, ‘one of those old people who becomes a nosy-parker.’”
Heath snorted. His snort wasn’t nearly as cute as my beauteous bride’s.
“Thanks, Weedly. Keep at it.”
While they were talking, Mac had walked over to Madigan’s desk. “This is interesting,” he muttered, without looking up. “In Poe’s best detective story, ‘The Purloined Letter,’ an important letter is ‘hiding in plain sight,’ as Sir Stephen Fresch and many others have put it. It’s in a card rack, perhaps something like this.” Mac reached into what I would have called a letter rack and pulled out an envelope. “I couldn’t help but notice the Langham Hotel return address. It’s postmarked on Monday.”
He handed it to Heath.
I don’t know what UK law says about opening the mail of a dead man, but if any solicitors are reading this I ask you to close your eyes.
Actually, the envelope had already been s
lit up at the top. Heath just pulled out the contents.
Not surprisingly, the piece of paper inside was a sheet of Langham Hotel stationery. A series of numbers were written on it in ink:
254-16-1
197-6-15
531-10-9
770-7-10
“What the hell?” Lynda said. My thoughts exactly, my love. We were both being obtuse, of course. Mac tried to act like he wasn’t talking to half-witted children, but failed utterly, as he said, “It’s a cipher, of course, right out of Sherlock Holmes.”
“The Valley of Fear,” Faro said, almost automatically.
“I’ve read it,” Heath said, “but it’s been years. I’m afraid I’m a little rusty on my Holmes.” He looked at Faro in silent appeal.
“It’s in the first chapter, Inspector,” Faro said. “Holmes gets a cipher message from one Fred Porlock, his informant inside Professor Moriarty’s gang. Porlock has sent the message, but then, in a panic because he knows that Moriarty suspects him, decided not to send the key to the cipher. In a piece of brilliant logic, Holmes deduces that the numbers in the cipher refer to the page numbers, columns and words of a particular book - Whitaker’s Almanack for the year in which the adventure took place.”
As Faro spoke, Mac scanned the titles in the modest built-in bookcase opposite Madigan’s desk.
“No Whitaker’s here,” he commented.
“Did you really expect there would be?” Lynda asked.
“I own a Whitaker’s Almanac of 1888” - I am shocked, SHOCKED! - “and I suspect that I am far from alone. Assistant Commissioner Madigan, however, apparently owned only one Sherlock Holmes book. That strikes me as quite extraordinary. Even non-collecting Sherlockians and Holmesians inevitably acquire several different editions and a few related books. Fortunately, Madigan’s one book is all we need.”
He pulled a fat paperback off the shelves, The Penguin Complete Sherlock Holmes. I’d seen one just like it a few days ago at Scotland Yard.
“Phillimore had a copy of that same edition with him at the Langham!” Heath said with some excitement.
“Quite so,” Mac said. “That is why this book is all we need. “May I see that sheet of paper?”
“That’s probably the most commonly owned edition of the Canon in the UK,” Faro said as Heath handed the paper to Mac. “This has to be a setup of some kind. It’s too pat. The killer planted that message.”
“If that is so,” Mac said, “it would be ungrateful indeed for us not to unwrap the gift. With the key in hand, that should be simplicity itself. Since the only large numbers are at the beginning of the groups of three, I hypothesize that the first number is the page, the second is the line, and the third is the word in that line. What do we get when we try that?”
Mac looked at the numbers, memorized them, and started looking them up.
“Page two hundred fifty-four, line sixteen, the first word is ‘don’t.’ That sounds promising! This could be a warning.” He paged quickly to the next set of numbers. “‘Trust’! The warning tone continues.” Mac flipped more pages. “‘The.’ What a disappointment! I was hoping for a name. Instead we get ‘Don’t trust the - ’ He found the last word, held his finger on it and looked up. “‘Professor.’ The message is: ‘Don’t trust the professor.’”
“Maybe he should have taken that advice more seriously,” Lynda said.
Chapter Twenty-Six
The Professor
“Did you notice how Faro lost no time in pointing out that Mac’s a professor?” Lynda said during dinner that night at a pub around the corner from our hotel. “I can’t wait to see how he uses that in his column. What a sleazebag.” The love fest continues. Lynda had already written and filed her story.
“You don’t think that Inspector Heath took that seriously, do you?” said Kate, in a tone that suggested she feared exactly that.
“Neville is a canny one, a bit hard to read,” Mac said. “In our dealings with him, however, he has amply demonstrated that he is hardly the dullard that Scotland Yard inspectors are portrayed in the Canon and in other mysteries. And surely only a dullard could believe that Phillimore would write a coded message to Madigan - a man I barely knew - telling him not to trust me. What would he have to trust me or not trust me about? Besides, I am not commonly known as ‘the Professor.’” I’m going to capitalize it like that whenever the title refers to a specific person, identity unknown.
Mac went back to shoveling in the bangers and mash.
“So, do you think the cipher was another false clue, part of a ham-handed effort to frame you?” I asked, looking up from my fish cakes.
“It is certainly possible. The killer could have planted the books at both murder scenes. However, if the wording of the message were designed to implicate me, would it not have been far more direct? For example, there is a reference to ‘Mr. Mac’ in The Valley of Fear that could have been used, perhaps coupled with the ‘Sebastian’ of Sebastian Moran in ‘The Adventure of the Empty House.’”
Mac paused. “I still find it more than passing strange, by the way, that Madigan apparently owned only one Sherlock Holmes book and yet he belonged to the most elite group of Holmesians in London.”
“So does that politician, Kingsley, and he didn’t respond to the quote you threw at him as we were leaving Nettie Phillimore’s house,” Lynda pointed out, munching on an unhealthful, trans-fat-laced potato crisp. “Maybe it’s mostly a snooty social club. But I think you’re being a little ADD here, Mac. Getting back to the coded message - ”
“Yes, let us get back to that,” Mac said. “Let us assume for the moment that it did come from Phillimore, meaning that the warning was genuine. To whom does it refer?”
“I vote for the Silver Fox,” Lynda said without hesitation.
Mac raised an eyebrow.
“I mean Professor Ralston,” my bride clarified. “She was full of praise for The Valley of Fear at Simpson’s the night of the debate, and look at how many ways that book fits into this case.”
“That’s it?” I said. “That’s all you’ve got?”
“Not by a long shot, darling. I’ve been thinking about this. Suppose that Carstairs really did kill himself, despite that business of calling his wife by her formal first name on his way out. Professor Ralston remembered the case because Carstairs worked for Phillimore - maybe she even knew him. Anyway, when she decided for some reason to kill Phillimore, she based his murder on his employee’s suicide, right down to the suicide note by text.
“And here’s the beauty part: She tried to convince us that the suicide of Carstairs was a murder, and the murder of Phillimore was a suicide!”
“That sounds like a mystery novel,” I objected.
“Exactly!” Lynda said. “Isn’t that just what you’d expect from the author of a book about mystery novels?”
She had me there, but I wasn’t giving up.
“Why even bring up Carstairs?” I said. “We wouldn’t have even known about him if it hadn’t been for her.”
“Because in that fairy tale she spun, Carstairs’s murder provides the reason for Phillimore killing himself.”
“And I presume that she killed Madigan because he had somehow ferreted out her guilt,” Mac said. “That is the most common reason for the second or third murder in mystery stories.”
Lynda nodded vigorously, sending her honey-colored curls flying. “Sure, it all fits.” She smiled with satisfaction as she hoisted a pint of ale.
Mac stroked his facial forest. “Your theory is most intriguing and equally ingenious, Lynda. So why did she kill Phillimore?”
“Who knows? The motive could be financial or romantic - take your pick.”
“Do we know that Ralston even knew Phillimore?” Good question, Kate.
“We can check it out, but I bet she did.”
“Well enough to help him stage his disappearance?” I said. “We’ve been assuming that the killer did that. And why would Phillimore tell Madigan not to trust the Professor if it was Ralston? And why would she spell ‘honor’ in the American way if she was trying to make his death look like a suicide?”
“Maybe she did help him disappear, but then he realized she was up to something and warned Madigan. There had to be some kind of connection among Phillimore, Madigan, and the killer, whoever the killer was. Maybe the three of them were up to something together.”
This was heading into Fantasyland, as far as I was concerned, and I tried to pull the conversation back to the real world.
“None of that explains why the veddy, veddy English professor would spell ‘honor’ in the American way.”
Lynda opened her pretty mouth. Mac, Kate, and I looked at her expectantly. She paused. “Okay, I haven’t figured that out yet,” she said finally. “But maybe she’s just a lousy speller. Do I have to do all the work for you guys?”
Excerpt from the Professor’s Journal
June 13, 2012
The elimination of Madigan, by far the riskiest of several risky features of my plan, went off without a hitch. Still, I have to admit that not all has gone according to schedule. I had hoped that popinjay McCabe would be behind bars by now. My effort to set him up has fallen woefully short. With his admittedly formidable intellect free to focus on finding the killer, I fear that I shall have to leave this scepter’d isle sooner than I had anticipated. Perhaps I miscalculated in involving him. Fortunately, everything is ready. I can spring the escape hatch on a few hours’ notice.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
A Sea of Suspects
By the next morning, Lynda hadn’t come up with anything better. And she didn’t seem to appreciate me noting that.
“Well, who do you think the killer is?” she demanded, sitting crossed legged on our bed.
The Disappearance of Mr James Phillimore Page 16