Drury Lane’s Last Case (15 page)

And that was all. No intelligible message, no signature, no other pen or pencil mark of any kind.

A fierce suppressed paroxysm seized the aged body of Lane. He crouched in his chair, engulfing the cryptogram with his staring eyes. The Inspector's fingers suddenly were stricken with palsy; the paper shook as his hand rested upon its lower corner. Patience did not stir. For a long moment none of them stirred. Then the old man tore his eyes slowly from the outspread sheet and looked up at Thumm. There was a queer triumph, almost exultation, in the crystal depths. He opened his mouth to speak.

But the Inspector mumbled: “3HS wM,” in wondering tones, rolling the syllables on his tongue as if to extract their hidden meaning from the mere sounds.

A faint perplexity came over Lane's face. He glanced swiftly at Patience.

And she said: “3HS wM,” like a child repeating the words of a foreign language.

The old man buried his face in his hands, and sat that way without moving.

“Well!” said the Inspector at last with a long sigh, “I give up. Damn it, I give up. When a guy walks in dressed up like Paddy at the Grand Street Masquerade and leaves a string of crazy damn-fool nonsense after his yarn about a ‘secret worth millions'—I tell you I give up. It's a joke. Somebody's idea of a joke.” And he threw up his hands and snorted in disgust.

Patience came swiftly around her father's chair and seized the piece of stationery. She concentrated upon the hieroglyphics with fiercely drawn brows. The Inspector scraped his chair back and went to the window, where he brooded out upon Times Square.

Drury Lane suddenly raised his head. “May I see that a moment, Patience?” he asked quietly.

Patience sat back, baffled, and the old man took the sheet from her fingers and studied its enigmatic inscription.

The symbol had been hastily set down with the heavy nib of a pen in almost brush-like strokes, and in the blackest of black inks. The swiftness and sureness of the strokes indicated a complete lack of hesitation. The writer had apparently known exactly what he wanted to write, and had written it with no faltering of his hand.

Lane set down the sheet and picked up the square neutral-grey envelope. He examined it, back and front, for a moment; the inscription T
HE
S
AXON
L
IBRARY
on the flap seemed to fascinate him. He fingered the flap; the engraved characters of the three words, a shining black, titillated the tactile nerves of his finger-tips.

He laid the envelope down, closing his eyes and leaning back. “No, Inspector,” he murmured, “not a joke.” And he opened his eyes.

Thumm wheeled. “Then what the devil does it mean? If it's on the level, it must mean
something
.… Cripes, he said it was just a ‘clue,' and he was right. Muddiest clue
I
ever saw. Purposely made it tough, hey? Hmph!” and he turned back to the window.

Patience frowned. “It can't be so difficult. Cryptic as he might have desired to make it, he would still make it essentially simple enough to be grasped after a reasonable amount of study. Let's see, now.… Of course it might be an original kind of shorthand, mightn't it? Concealing a message of some sort.”

The Inspector grunted without turning around.

“Or,” continued Patience thoughtfully, “it might be a chemical symbol.
H
is the symbol of hydrogen, isn't it?—and
S
of sulphur. Hydrogen—hydrogen sulphide. That's it!”

“No,” said Lane in a low tone. “That would be H
₂
S, I believe. I don't think HS is chemically possible. No, not chemistry, Patience.”

“And then, too,” said Patience in despair, “the small
w
and the capital
M
.… Oh Lord! it's hopeless. I wish Gordon were here. He knows so many
useless
things.”

The Inspector swung about slowly. “Hopeless it is,” he said in a strange tone. “For us, Patty. And for your frisky Mr. Rowe, too. But don't forget this mysterious bird said he wanted Lane in on it. So maybe he figured Lane would know what it meant … hey, Lane?”

Lane in the face of this palpable challenge sat very still. Then the wrinkles appeared at the corners of his eyes. “Suspicions?” he said. “Yet perhaps I do, old Roman, perhaps I do.”

“Well, what the devil does it mean, then?” asked the Inspector flatly, coming forward.

Lane waved a limp white hand. He kept staring at the sheet before him. “The peculiar part of it is,” he murmured, “I believe he thought
you
would know what it meant, too.”

The Inspector flushed, straightened, and went to the door. “Miss Brodie! Come in here with your book.”

Miss Brodie came in quickly, pencil poised.

“Take a letter to Dr. Leo Schilling. Medical Examiner's office. ‘Dear Doc: Get busy on this right away. Under your hat. Does the following string of crazy pothooks mean anything to you, question mark.' Then put this down: ‘3 capital H capital S space small w capital M.' Got that?”

Miss Brodie looked up dazedly. “Y—yes, sir.”

“Send the same letter to Lieutenant Rupert Schiff, Bureau of Intelligence, Cypher Department, Washington, D.C. Scoot.”

Miss Brodie scooted.

“That,” said the Inspector savagely, “ought to get results.”

He slipped into a chair, lighted a cigar, stretched his columnar legs, and puffed a thoughtful cloud at the ceiling.

“First tack, seems to me,” he said, “is the letterhead angle. This guy breezes in, gives us a cock-and-bull story, and leaves a note with this blarney in it. Didn't want us to know it had anything to do with the Saxons; that's why he stuck the small envelope into the manila, which didn't have an identifying inscription. But if anything happened to him, he wanted us to open the envelope. So he wanted us to read
The Saxon Library
and work on that angle. Seems clear enough so far.”

Lane nodded. “I thoroughly agree.”

“What he didn't figure on is that George Fisher would come in here and tell us about Donoghue, and that that would take us to the Britannic Museum and get us mixed up in that funny business of the stolen books. Where that comes in, I'm damned if I know. Maybe it's just coincidence, this Saxon stationery.”

“No, father,” said Patience wearily, “I'm sure that's not so. I'm convinced that the man with the false beard and the queer events in the Britannic are connected. And that this symbol written on the Saxon Library stationery is the connecting link. I wonder——”

“What?” asked Thumm with a shrewd squint at his daughter.

Patience laughed. “It's an inane thought. But then the whole thing's inane.… I'm wondering if this chap with the false beard mightn't—mightn't have been somebody of the Saxon household dressed in disguise!”

“Not so silly,” murmured the Inspector with exaggerated indifference. “I kind of had the same notion, Patty. Take, now, this Rowe feller——”

“Nonsense!” said Patience sharply, and both men looked at her quickly. “It—it couldn't have been Gordon.” She had the grace to blush.

“Why not?” demanded Thumm. “Seems to me he was almighty anxious to sit in on our confab that day when we left the museum.”

“I assure you,” said Patience stiffly, “that his—er—anxiety had nothing to do with the case. It—it—mightn't it have been personal? I'm not exactly an old crone, father.”

“Damn' sight rather it
wasn't
personal,” snapped Thumm.

“Father! Sometimes you exasperate me to tears. What on earth have you against poor Gordon? He's a very nice young man, and as frank and honest as a—as a child. And besides he has very strong wrists, and the man who came here May sixth hadn't.”

“Well, he's one of these here, now, bibliophiles, isn't he?” said Thumm belligerently.

Patience bit her lip. “Oh—shoot!”

“Lookin' it over,” continued the Inspector, rubbing the tip of his squashed nose, “it couldn't have been Mrs. Saxon, though I did have a crazy feeling at one time it might have been a woman. But Mrs. Saxon's a fat horse, and this bird was skinny. So maybe—mind you, I'm not eliminating Rowe, either!—maybe it was Crabbe.”

“That's different,” said Patience, tossing her head. “He certainly fits all the physical qualifications.”

Mr. Drury Lane, who had been a silent and amused listener to this colloquy, held up his hand. “If I may be permitted to interrupt this profound discussion,” he drawled, “may I point out a possible objection to this whole theory? Your visitor maintained, and I see no reason to doubt it, that if he did not telephone on a twentieth it would mean that something drastic had happened to him. If young Gordon Rowe—preposterous, Inspector!—or Crabbe had been your visitor on May sixth, why hasn't one of them disappeared, or turned up murdered, or in some other way incapacitated?”

“That's true, too,” said Patience eagerly. “Of course! There you are, father. I lunched with Gordon yesterday, and this morning I spoke to him on the telephone, and he—he didn't say a word about any such thing. I'm sure——”

“Listen, Patty,” said the Inspector in a thick, alarmed voice. “Listen to your old man for once. Patty, you got a shine on that young squirt? He been makin' love to you? Why, I'll wring his fool neck——”

Patience rose. “Father!” she said furiously.

“Come, come, Inspector,” murmured the old gentleman, “don't revert to the Middle Ages. Gordon Rowe's an excellent young man and quite Patience's intellectual equal, which is saying a good deal.”

“But I tell you I'm
not
in love with him!” cried Patience. “Father, you're being beastly. Can't I be nice to a man——”

The Inspector looked tragic.

Mr. Drury Lane rose. “Stop squabbling. Inspector, you're an infant. Put this sheet of paper and the envelopes very carefully away into your safe. We must visit the Saxon house at once.”

12

Hands Across

Traffic was heavy, and Dromio chafed under the necessity of crawling the Lincoln up Fifth Avenue. But Mr. Drury Lane seemed in no hurry. He glanced quietly from Thumm to Patience. Once he chuckled.

“You're a pair of pettish children. Smile!” They smiled feebly. “A remarkable case,” he continued. “I don't believe either of you realizes quite how remarkable it is.”

“I've got a headache,” grumbled the Inspector.

“And you, Patience?”

“I think,” said Patience, gazing steadily at the nape of Dromio's neck, “that the symbol means more to you than it does to us.”

The old gentleman actually was startled. He sat forward abruptly, studying her smooth young face with penetration. “Perhaps,” he said. “All in good time. Inspector, have there been any developments? So much has happened this morning that I haven't had a chance to ask.”

“A lot's happened,” said the Inspector wearily. “Brodie took it all down this morning. I knew you'd want to know.” He handed Lane a typewritten report.

D
ONOGHUE
: Still missing. No trace.

17 S
CHOOL-TEACHERS
: Gone back to Indiana. All identities checked, and correct. Careful investigation. Photographs, descriptions, addresses, names—all in order.

$100 B
ILL
: From returned 1599 Jaggard. No success in attempt to trace serial number.

M
AN IN
B
LUE
H
AT
: Still unaccounted for.

19TH
M
AN IN
B
US
: Still unaccounted for.

“Is this all, Inspector?” said Lane, returning the sheet; he seemed disappointed. “I thought you had cabled Scotland Yard.”

“Never forget, do you, you old fox?” grinned Thumm. “No, that's more like an elephant, isn't it? Yes, I got an answer from Trench at the Yard, and it's a honey. Came late yesterday. Get an eyeful of this.”

He handed Lane several sheets of cablegram paper, and these the old man clutched to his breast with avidity. They watched his face. It grew sterner as he read.

The cablegram was addressed to the Inspector, and ran:

REFERENCE HAMNET SEDLAR DESCENDED FROM OLD ENGLISH STOCK DATING TO SECOND CRUSADE ONE HAMNET SEDLAR FAMOUS FOR FRIENDSHIP WITH W SHAKESPEARE PRESENT H S FIVE FEET ELEVEN INCHES TALL ELEVEN STONE THIN WIRY SHARP FEATURES BLUE EYES SANDY HAIR NO IDENTIFYING MARKS KNOWN AGE FIFTY
-
ONE LITTLE KNOWN OF HIS PERSONAL LIFE HAS LED LIFE OF RECLUSE IN LONDON FOR AT LEAST TWELVE YEARS COMING FROM TEWKESBURY GLOUCESTERSHIRE NOT FAR FROM STRATFORD ON AVON IS BY PROFESSION ANTIQUARIAN CHIEFLY BIBLIOPHILIC WELL
-
ESTABLISHED REPUTATION IN BIBLIOLOGY PAST TWELVE YEARS CURATOR OF KENSINGTON MUSEUM LONDON RECENTLY ACCEPTED OFFER OF JAMES WYETH AMERICAN FINANCIER AND COLLECTOR TO ASSUME CURATORSHIP OF BRITANNIC MUSEUM NEW YORK ACCEPTANCE CAME AS SURPRISE TO ASSOCIATES FOR SEDLAR HAS OFTEN EXPRESSED HIMSELF AS ANTI
-
AMERICAN FORMALLY RESIGNED FROM ACTIVE CHARGE OF KENSINGTON MUSEUM ON MAY SEVENTH AT BANQUET IN HIS HONOUR IN LONDON GIVEN BY DIRECTORS HAMNET S HAS NO KIN EXCEPT A BROTHER WILLIAM WHOSE WHEREABOUTS ARE UNKNOWN WILLIAM HAS NOT BEEN IN ENGLAND FOR SEVERAL YEARS NOTHING SHADY IN BACKGROUND OF SEDLARS THEY HAVE APPARENTLY LED UPRIGHT AUSTERE SCHOLARLY LIVES HAMNET S LEFT ENGLAND ON S S CARINTHIA FRIDAY MAY SEVENTEENTH DOCKING NEW YORK ON WEDNESDAY MAY TWENTY-SECOND DEFINITE PROOF H S ON THIS SHIP FROM PURSER'S RECORDS AT YOUR SERVICE IF FURTHER REQUIRED WARMEST PERSONAL REGARDS