Drury Lane’s Last Case (27 page)

“Well, smarty,” snapped Patience, “for one thing the compartment as you saw was very cleverly hidden. Only the fact that Bolling knew a compartment was in precisely that spot by seeing the open door led him to find that rosette. With the door closed and the wall a blank, the chances would be a million to one that a searcher would pick the right panel, and then the right rosette, and then would know enough to twist the rosette completely around
twice
, as Bolling had to do to open the door. In other words, the aperture couldn't have been found by
accident
. Had the hacker known the secret of the rosette and the aperture there would have been no necessity for hacking. So I say it wasn't the hacker who twisted the rosette, opened the compartment, took out what was in it, and left the door open. If it wasn't the hacker it was some one else, and that makes two people, my man. Q.E.D.”

“A veritable lady-sleuth,” chuckled Rowe. “Pat, you're a jewel. That's excellent logic. And there's another conclusion, too. When did the other man—if it was a man—go to the compartment? That is, did he precede the hacker or follow him?”

“Must have followed, teacher. If the man who rifled the compartment had been first, then the hacker, coming second, would have seen the open door of the compartment and therefore would have known at once where the hiding-place was. Result: he wouldn't have chopped the house to little bits
looking
for the hiding-place.… Yes, Gordon, the hacker came first, which must mean he was the man who held up Maxwell and left him trussed in the garage. And then a second man came, and what happened then goodness only knows.”

They were silent for a long time. They both lay on the grass and stared up at the wool-flecked sky. Rowe's brown hand stirred and touched hers. It remained there, and she did not draw her hand away.

After an early dinner the three repaired to Lane's study, an old English-style room which smelled of leather and books and wood-sparks. Patience sat down in the old gentleman's armchair and, taking a piece of paper, idly began to scribble. Lane and Rowe seated themselves before the desk, relaxed in the half-light of the lamp on the desk.

“You know,” said Patience suddenly, “before dinner to-night I wrote down a few things that—well, bothered me. They might be called the specific mysteries. Some of them annoy me dreadfully.”

“Indeed?” murmured Lane. “My child, you possess a pertinacity positively amazing in a woman.”

“Sir! That's my chief virtue. Shall I read my little essay?” She slipped a long sheet of paper out of her bag and unfolded it. And began to read in a clear voice:

“(1) It was Dr. Ales who left the sealed envelope with the symbol in it with us—proof, the beard and glasses found in his closet; proof, he is a ‘missing bibliophile.' It was Dr. Ales who sent Villa to steal the 1599 Jaggard in the Saxon house. It was Dr. Ales who joined the bus party and rifled the Jaggard cabinet in the Britannic—Villa's confession brings this out, and it is confirmed by finding the blue hat and the false grey moustache in Ales's bedroom. B
UT
who
is
Dr. Ales? Is he Hamnet Sedlar, as Crabbe and Villa both claim, or some one else entirely? Is there somehow a confusion of identities?

“(2) Who is the man known as Hamnet Sedlar? That a Hamnet Sedlar exists we know from Scotland Yard and the fact that such a person was hired to be the Britannic's new curator. But is the man who presented himself at the Britannic as Hamnet Sedlar really Hamnet Sedlar, or some one masquerading as Hamnet Sedlar, as father thinks? He is definitely on the shady side; he lied about the true date of his arrival. Is the real Hamnet Sedlar dead? Did this man take his place and his name? What was his motive in lying about the arrival date? What was he really doing between the date of his real arrival and the date of his pretended arrival?”

“Phew!” said young Mr. Rowe. “What a tortuous mentality!” Patience glared at him and continued:

“(3) If Hamnet Sedlar is not Dr. Ales, what's happened to Dr. Ales? Why did he disappear?

“(4) What really happened to Donoghue?

“(5) Who held Gordon and me up and stole the envelope?

“(6) Who was the hacker? He was not Dr. Ales, but might have been anyone else.

“(7) Who was the person who followed the hacker and actually rifled the secret compartment? It might have been Dr. Ales himself—he knew the secret of his own hiding-place, naturally.”

“One moment, Patience,” said Lane. “How do you know the wielder of the axe was not Dr. Ales, or that there were two persons in the Ales house last night?” Patience explained. Lane eyed her lips fixedly, nodding. “Yes, yes,” he murmured when she had finished. “Extraordinary. Eh, Gordon? And perfectly true.… Is that all?”

“No. There's one more,” said Patience, frowning, “and it's the most important and puzzling of all.” She continued:

“(8) What are all these confused mysteries revolving about? Undoubtedly the ‘secret worth millions' Dr. Ales mentioned. But the secret worth millions is tied up with the symbol Ales left in father's keeping. So everything depends on this last question:
What does the symbol mean
?”

And she put down the paper and resumed her idle scribbling at the desk. Neither man spoke for some time. Then Rowe, who had been watching absently the gyrations of Patience's pencil, stiffened and half-rose from his chair. Patience and Lane looked at him curiously.

“What are you writing there?” demanded the young man sharply.

“What?” Patience blinked. “That blankety-blank symbol. 3HS wM.”

“Eureka!” shouted Rowe. He sprang to his feet, eyes shining. “I've got it, I've got it! How perfectly, childishly simple it is after all!”

Mr. Drury Lane rose and went to the desk. His face leaped out of shadow, and every line was etched in fine black. “So you've seen it at last,” he murmured. “I saw it, knew it, the day we sat in your father's office, Patience, and he unfolded the original sheet of Saxon stationery to disclose what was written on it. Tell her, Gordon.”

“I don't understand you two,” complained Patience.

“How was I sitting when you just jotted the symbol down?” said Rowe.

“In front of the desk, facing me.”

“Exactly! In other words, I saw the characters of the symbol just as Mr. Lane must have seen them at the time he faced your father across the desk when the Inspector unfolded the original sheet. I saw them
upside down
.”

Patience uttered a faint cry. She snatched up the sheet and turned it around. The symbol now read:

She repeated slowly: “Wm SHe,” the individual characters, mouthing them as if to extract their essential flavour. “That looks—that looks like a signature of some sort. “W—m.… William——” Both men watched her keenly. “
William Shakespeare
!” she cried, springing to her feet. “
William Shakespeare
!”

A little later Patience seated herself on the rug at the feet of the old gentleman; his long, white fingers played with her hair. Rowe sat slumped opposite them.

“I've gone through that mentally many times since that day,” Lane wearily explained. “It seems clear enough from the analytical standpoint. Dr. Ales was not copying a facsimile of a Shakespearian autograph; a facsimile would have been Elizabethan script with some fantastic notion of making it clearer—the
capital letters
of this unusual Shakespearian signature. What makes it unusual is the small-sized
m
and the script
e
. But why the capital
H
? Probably a vagary of Ales's mind. It isn't important.”

“What is important,” muttered Rowe, “is that this
is
one variation of the Shakespeare autograph. Queer!”

Lane sighed. “As you know even better than I, Gordon, there are only six fully authenticated signatures of Shakespeare extant.”

“Talk about queer,” remarked the young man. “One of them is written
Willm Shak'p'
.”

“Yes. But there are a number of the so-called ‘doubtful' autographs, and among these is one spelled like the Ales symbol—a capital
W
, a small
m
aligned with the top of the
W
, space, then a capital
S
, capital
H
, and a small script
e
also aligned with the top.”

“Like the old English style of writing ‘ye'?” asked Patience.

“Exactly. This doubtful autograph appears in the Aldine edition of
Ovid's Metamorphoses
, now at the Bodleian Library in Oxford.”

“Saw it when I was in England,” snapped the young man.

“I have checked with the Bodleian Library,” continued the old man quietly, “and the
Ovid
is still there. I had thought, you see, that this entire affair was mixed up perhaps with a theft of that volume. It was ridiculous, of course.” Patience felt his fingers stir on her head. “Let me go into this more deeply. Dr. Ales said the ‘secret' was worth millions; he left this copy of the autograph of William Shakespeare as the key to the secret; so we must begin from there. Do you see now what the secret must be?”

“Do you mean to say,” asked Patience in an awed voice, “that all this stealing and mystery and everything revolve about the discovery of a
seventh genuine Shakespeare signature
?”

“Looks like it, doesn't it?” Rowe laughed bitterly. “Here I've squandered my youth—ha, ha!—messing about old Elizabethan records, and I've never even run across a hint of such an extraordinary thing.”

“What else?” murmured Lane. “If the secret is indeed worth millions, then Dr. Ales had reason to believe the signature was authentic. How would it be worth millions? Ah, there's a fascinating question.”

“In itself,” said the young man softly, “it would be priceless. It would have incalculable historic and literary value.”

“Yes, a newly discovered and fully authenticated seventh Shakespearian autograph would bring even in auction, as I've read somewhere, a cool million or more. And I don't know whether my authority meant dollars or pounds sterling! But no signature exists without purpose. Signatures are generally affixed to some type of
document
.”

“The paper in the book!” cried Patience.

“Hush, Pat. That's true, although not always,” said Rowe reflectively. “The six authentic signatures are documented, of course: one is on a legal deposition in a suit in which the old boy was involved; one on the purchase deed of a house he bought about 1612; another on a mortgage deed involving the same house; and the last three on the three sheets of his will. But it might be on the flyleaf of a book, you know.”

“I think not, as Patience has already seen,” said Lane. “Would this seventh signature appear on a document—a deed, a lease—in which event the document itself would have comparatively small historic value? Well, perhaps——”

“Not small,” said Rowe defensively. “If it were a deed or a lease it might have tremendous importance. It might show where Shakespeare was at a certain date—clarify all sorts of issues.”

“Yes, yes. I meant small from the human side. But suppose it is on a
letter
?” Lane leaned forward, and his fingers gripped Patience's curls so tightly she almost cried out. “Think of the possibilities! A letter signed, written by the immortal Shakespeare!”

“I'm thinking,” muttered Rowe. “It's almost too much. To whom might it have been addressed? What did it say? Autobiographical data. A genuine Shakespearian holograph——”

“Certainly it's within the realm of possibility,” continued the old gentleman in a queerly choked voice. “If it appears at the bottom of a letter, the letter would be worth almost more than the signature! No wonder respectable old scholars are apparently at each other's throats. It would be like—like finding, by heaven, one of the original epistles of Paul!”

“That document was in the 1599 Jaggard,” whispered Patience fiercely. “Dr. Ales evidently searched the first two existing copies of the 1599 Jaggard and, finding nothing, made every effort to get hold of the third, which was in the Saxon collection. And he did! Is it—could it be possible …?”

“It looks that way,” grinned Rowe. “He's found it, lucky dog!”

“And now somebody's stolen it. Oh, dear! I'll bet it was in that compartment in Dr. Ales's study.”

“That's very probably so,” said Lane. “There's another thing. I have discovered that this third copy, stolen and then returned, was originally bought by Samuel Saxon from Sir John Humphrey-Bond, the British collector.”

“The man who recommended Hamnet Sedlar to Mr. Wyeth?” cried Patience, aghast.

“The same.” Lane shrugged. “Humphrey-Bond is dead; he died only a few weeks ago. No, no,” he said with a smile as they both started, “don't be alarmed. It was a perfectly natural death, in the sense that it was caused by no human agency. He was eighty-nine and died of pleuro-pneumonia. But my correspondent on the other side cabled me also that the Jaggard, bought by Saxon from Humphrey-Bond, the one that's been causing all this trouble, had been in possession of the Humphrey-Bond family since Elizabethan times. Sir John was the last of his family; had no heir.”