“This slot,” said Holmes. “Describe it.”
Challenger looked affronted by the interruption. “It’s just a slot, about the size of a letterbox. One slides open the cover, drops the beef into a wire basket on the other side, then releases a catch to open the bottom of the basket so that the meat falls onto the floor of the cage. That’s all there is to it.”
“So then, Montclair did not carelessly allow his arm to be caught by the pterodactyl and suffer a fatal injury that way.”
“No, and if you will simply allow me to develop my narrative at my own pace, in my own fashion, Mr Holmes, you will learn all you need to about the situation.”
“I humbly apologise. Do go on.”
“I built the cage myself, with my own two hands, out of hardwood and thick steel mesh, and it’s as sturdy a structure as you could imagine. Even if there were a rhino in there, I would trust my life to it. I would even trust my dear wife Jessie’s life to it. Besides, the cage itself was not the problem. Rather, it was the cage door. To be precise, the fact that the cage door was not secured when Montclair entered the room.”
“Ah.” Holmes leaned forward slightly in his seat, resting his chin on the tips of his fingers. His old grey eyes glinted. He had caught the scent of a mystery he could sink his teeth into.
“I know this because the door was wide open when I entered the room,” Challenger said. “It had not been broken down by the pterodactyl. It had not come off its hinges. Two stout bolts fasten it in place when it is closed, and both of them had been drawn back.”
“It is possible that your assistant drew them himself.”
“Of course it’s possible!” the other man barked. “But why on earth would he do such a thing? He would have to be mad. The pterodactyl would not hesitate for one second if you opened the door. It would be upon you in a flash and tear you to pieces. Which is more or less what it did to Montclair. But perhaps I should relate the sequence of events as I experienced it.”
“Perhaps you should. It would be helpful.”
“Montclair entered the pterodactyl room shortly after eight a.m. This I know because Jessie and I were taking breakfast in the conservatory at the time, two doors down. We both heard Montclair approach the pterodactyl room from the direction of the kitchen, whence he had collected the slab of beef from the cold store, and we heard him unlock the door and go in.”
“Montclair had his own key to the pterodactyl room?”
“There are two keys in all. He had one, I the other.”
“And the door is always locked?”
“I insist upon it,” said Challenger, “and furthermore the door is reinforced with iron bands. The safety of my household, and of Jessie in particular, is of paramount importance to me. For the same reason, the windows of the pterodactyl room are fitted on the outside with solid iron bars. The cage alone is sufficient, but I nevertheless take added precautions.”
“Naturally you do not want this bird to escape, either, as its counterpart did.”
“I have had one pterodactyl slip through my grasp. I shall not let another.”
“How long was it after he entered the room that Montclair was attacked? Do you know?”
“It was almost instantaneous,” Challenger replied. “No sooner had he closed the door and locked it than the screaming started.” The explorer’s lips, which could just be glimpsed through that thicket of a beard, were pursed pensively. “A terrible sound it was, high-pitched, full of fear and agony. The pterodactyl itself was screeching, with the gloating triumph of a predator seizing upon its prey. I must admit I sat at the table frozen in shock for several seconds before leaping to my feet and rushing out of the conservatory, with an admonition to Jessie that she must stay put. By the time I arrived at the door to the pterodactyl room, Montclair was no longer screaming. All I could hear were the horrid wet noises of flesh being rent and torn and the scrabbling of the pterodactyl’s feet on the floorboards as it tried to gain better purchase while it feasted.”
“What did you do?” I asked, feeling a small chill of horror. For all that I have had many dealings with death in my capacities as soldier, doctor and Sherlock Holmes’s companion, I am pleased to say I have not become inured to it, least of all violent death. “Surely you did not just barge into the room straight away.”
“Good Lord no, Doctor. That would have been suicide. Our housemaid Ida appeared in the hallway, drawn by the commotion, and I despatched her to fetch my shotgun from my study. I wasn’t going to enter that room unarmed, not with a pterodactyl on the loose on the other side of the door. Then, weapon in hand, I inserted my key into the keyhole and ventured in.”
“You are a braver man than I, sir,” said Holmes.
Challenger acknowledged the compliment with a shrug. “I was already certain that Montclair was beyond saving, yet I could not simply leave him there to the pterodactyl’s mercy. I had to do something. Sure enough, Montclair’s body lay on its back on the floor amidst a sea of blood, and the pterodactyl was perched beside it, beak crimsoned to the hilt, feeding on the viscera with gusto. The bird looked round at me and gave a menacing squawk, and I knew I had only a split second in which to act. I gave it both barrels in the head.” He grimaced. “Damn shame, but it had to be done. It was either the pterodactyl or me.”
“What happened next?”
“What happened next was that I reloaded the shotgun and went circumspectly to check the bird, to make sure it was dead. I nudged it with my toe. Not a breath of life remained to it. Then I heard a gasp behind me and turned to see Ida. She was standing in the doorway, staring ashen-faced at the carnage. I had exhorted her to stay outside but the silly girl hadn’t heeded me. She’s a headstrong lass, I have to say. Jessie has had cause to upbraid her on occasion for not doing what she is told or doing what she has been told not to. At any rate, she paid the penalty, for she fell into a swoon, collapsing to the floor. I knew she needed tending to and went to summon my wife, but not before fetching a rug from the hallway and draping it over Montclair’s mortal remains to mask them from sight.”
“You didn’t feel compelled to minister to the housemaid yourself?”
“Women’s business, Mr Holmes. Women’s business. By the time I returned with Jessie, Ida had already started to come round and was attempting to rise, clinging to the door handle for support. We escorted her to a chair in the hallway where Jessie applied smelling salts and brandy to aid her recovery. And that is the long and the short of the story.”
“Let me see if I have this right, Professor Challenger,” Holmes said. “Someone deliberately left the door to the pterodactyl’s cage unbolted, knowing there was a very strong likelihood that the creature might discover that it was not as securely confined as hitherto and would doubtless assault the person who next entered the room, with fatal consequences. Yet only two people have a key to the room: you and Montclair. It is quite beyond the realms of possibility that you would endanger your assistant’s life on purpose.”
“Utterly preposterous! The very thought of it!”
“You are rumoured to be reckless in your adventuring, Professor, but I do not have you down as a cold-blooded murderer. However, one cannot discount the possibility that the cage door was left unfastened by mistake.”
“You are accusing me of negligence?” Challenger cried, springing to his feet. A flicker of lightning outside was closely followed by a deafeningly loud thunderclap. At the same time, sheets of rain swept in from the sea and began assailing the windows of Holmes’s humble villa. “You dare?”
The explorer lurched towards my friend, his massive fists clenched.
“Kindly compose yourself, Professor,” Holmes said, evincing little intimidation. “I was merely airing an hypothesis.”
“But I have no reason ever to unbolt the door,” said Challenger, relenting somewhat in the face of my friend’s imperturbability. “Its sole purpose was to allow the pterodactyl to be put into the cage in the first instance, which was accomplished while the
creature was bound with rope and sedated with chloroform. Thereafter, since feeding is effected through the slot, there has been no need to reopen it.”
“Not even to clean the cage? I have seen how the bottom of a budgerigar’s cage becomes befouled, and a pterodactyl is a bird a hundred times bigger than a budgerigar.”
“Ah, there I have you, sir, for the cage’s construction is very cunning. Its base is wire mesh, like the sides and top, and the entire contraption is elevated several inches off the floor. I have installed a kind of large tray beneath. The tray rolls out on wheels, and one may then scrape up the droppings, which have passed through the mesh, and remove them for disposal elsewhere. That admittedly noisome chore was another of Montclair’s responsibilities.”
“Then if Montclair himself did not open the cage door…”
“He did not. He could not have. There wasn’t time between him entering the room and the pterodactyl attacking him.”
“Which brings us inexorably back to the notion that a third party left the door unbolted with the express intent of killing Montclair. But who? If only you and he had keys to the room, who could have done it?”
“And why?” I added. “Did Montclair have enemies? Had he lately offended someone?”
“Not that I know of,” said Challenger. “On the contrary, he was an amiable and charming lad, well liked by all. He had recently become engaged, what’s more.”
“Had he now?” said Holmes.
“Yes, to a girl from a very respectable local family, a Miss Araminta Ffolkes. Both his parents and hers approved of the match, as did I. The couple were to be wed in the autumn. I delivered the awful news to Miss Ffolkes in person at her home in Crowborough this morning, and she was quite distraught, as one might expect. Thence I journeyed hither, for I am well aware of your reputation, Mr Holmes, as is all of England, and I would wish you to investigate this dismal incident and get to the bottom of it. I understand you are supposed to have withdrawn from professional life, but I can, of course, recompense you handsomely for your time, and will, if that is any inducement. You know that I am not short of money.”
The storm was now raging around us, the house seeming to shake to its foundations under the pelting of the rain and the fusillades of thunderclaps.
“My interest is piqued,” Holmes said, “and I can see no reason not to render service to one so illustrious as yourself, Professor. I propose that we depart for Rotherfield as soon as the storm has abated.”
“Nonsense!” Challenger declared, leaping to his feet. “We leave now.”
“The driving conditions are quite treacherous.”
Challenger waved a dismissive hand, as though the storm were no more than a bothersome fly. “I have forged through far worse. When you have watched cumulonimbus clouds the size of mountains form over the Serengeti, as I have, or withstood a tornado on the plains of America, as I also have, then you know what a storm is. This? This is a mere shower by comparison.”
2
I recollect the twenty-five-mile journey to Rotherfield with little pleasure. The rain lashed the car’s windscreen, reducing visibility almost to nothing. Rivulets of water swept across the road surface, collecting in dips to form muddy, turbulent streams. The tyres skidded wildly and often.
Challenger, however, neither stopped nor even slowed down. He urged the car on at speed, cursing at the machine as though it were a horse that might respond to its rider’s verbal invective. There were times when I was quite certain we were going to veer off the road and crash, and only by dint of frantic manipulation of the steering wheel and a touch on the brakes, to the accompaniment of further swearing, did our driver keep us from harm. Challenger seemed to regard the storm as a personal insult and refused to be cowed or impeded by it.
The storm followed us inland, almost the entire way to Rotherfield. Only as we pulled into the gates of The Briars did it finally relent. We passed along a driveway lined with rhododendron bushes, their leaves all dripping wet and gleaming as the sun broke through the clouds, to arrive at a pretty-looking low brick house adorned with white woodwork. On the front doorstep we were greeted by Mrs Challenger, a dainty and demure woman, quite the opposite of her husband in physique and temperament. She looked wan, as well she might, given that morning’s tragedy; yet she summoned a smile at the sight of her spouse and rose up on tiptoe to give him a delicate peck on the cheek, which he accepted with a gracious inclination of the head.
At Holmes’s request, Challenger led us straight to the pterodactyl room. A man in butler’s livery was stationed outside.
“Eldon,” said Challenger. “No one has been in or out, as I stipulated?”
“Not a soul, sir. I have not left my post all day.”
“Good man. Off you go now.”
“Thank you, sir.” The butler glided away.
As we entered the room we were assailed by the stench of blood and offal, the abattoir reek familiar to me from the battlefield and the operating theatre. Before us stood the much-vaunted cage, occupying fully half of the floorspace and looking every bit as robust as advertised. One’s attention, however, could not help straying to the two corpses, the pterodactyl’s and Montclair’s.
The former, a fearsome-looking proposition even in death, lay with its leathery wings outstretched and its bony torso twisted. Its head was almost entirely missing, just beak and a few fragments of shattered skull remaining. Of Richard Montclair one could see nothing save a booted foot protruding from beneath a woollen rug, but the rug itself was hideously blood-sodden, its pattern lost amid the many blotches of red. A lump of marbled beef sat close by, untouched by the pterodactyl since larger, fresher sustenance had been available.
Holmes immediately set to examining each body in turn, then conducted a lengthy study of the cage, inspecting it from every possible angle. After that he prowled the room, checking floor, walls, ceiling and windows, before finally turning to the door.
“This is the only point of ingress or egress,” he observed. “Access via the windows is impossible. I see no sign of any trapdoor or secret passage. And Montclair’s key is still in the lock.”
“One of the conditions I have set, on grounds of security, is that whoever enters the room should always lock the door straight away,” said Challenger.
“And so he did. Possibly the pterodactyl was still in its cage when Montclair came in and he did not notice that the cage door was unbolted. The pterodactyl, perhaps agitated by the smell of meat, chanced to butt the cage door with a wing, discovered that it opened, and lunged out at Montclair. That sequence of events seems plausible. Yet the presence of the key in the lock is singular.”
“Is it?”
“Yes. Moreover, you will surely have noted this tiny length of thread affixed to the bow of the key.”
Challenger bent and peered. “It’s just an ordinary scrap of cotton.”
“It is tied to the bow, and two loose ends dangle from it, frayed at the tips. What does that suggest to you? To me it suggests that the thread was used to attach some small object to the key, some keepsake perhaps, and that said object has lately been removed, by force. I would go further and aver that—”
Holmes was interrupted mid-sentence by the sound of voices nearby in the house. One of them I recognised as belonging to Mrs Challenger, and it was raised in imprecation.
“Please turn back, Araminta,” she said. “You don’t want to go in there. It is not a fit sight for you or anyone.”
“I wish to view the body for myself, Mrs Challenger, and I shall,” came the somewhat haughty reply. “I have journeyed all this way, and I am not leaving until I have absolute confirmation of Richard’s fate.”
Moments later a comely young woman – who could only be Miss Araminta Ffolkes, Montclair’s betrothed – thrust her way into the pterodactyl room. Challenger moved to hinder her, interposing his bulk between her and what lay within, but she pushed him aside. It wasn’t that her strength exceeded his, far from it; it was simply that Professor
Challenger was too respectful of the fairer sex to manhandle her.
Miss Ffolkes beheld the decapitated pterodactyl and the bloody rug that hid her fiancé from view. I expected she might faint, but she was made of sterner stuff, it transpired. Her hand flew to her mouth and tears sprang to her eyes, but she controlled herself admirably.
“That’s really him under there?” she said, only the merest tremor in her voice.
“I’m afraid so, my dear,” said Challenger. His tone was surprisingly tender. With men he was all bluster and bluffness. In the company of women he was quite a different person. “For what it’s worth, his death was swift.”
“From the looks of things, it was anything but. And that – that creature was responsible?”
“Not wholly. These two gentlemen here have come to determine the truth and, we hope, identify the human culprit.”
Introductions were made, and Holmes invited Miss Ffolkes to step out into the hallway where he could conduct a brief interview with her “in a more congenial environment”. He established that she and Montclair had been engaged for a little over three months and that the arrangements for their wedding had been well in hand. They had made plans to purchase a small country cottage equidistant between Rotherfield and Crowborough so that he could be close to his place of work and she to her parents. There had been, by the sound of it, not a cloud blotting the horizon of their happiness, until today.
“You have my sincerest condolences, Miss Ffolkes,” Holmes said.
“I am grateful, sir,” said she. “I would be more grateful still if you were able to bring the perpetrator of this atrocity to justice.”
With that, she strode off.
The Manifestations of Sherlock Holmes Page 17