Denis Smith - The Mammoth Book of the New Chronicles of Sherlock Holmes

Gregson shook his head ruefully. ‘You have me there with that last point, Mr Holmes,’ he said. ‘I should have noticed that. People often give themselves away not by what they say, but by what they don’t say because of what is in the back of their minds.’

‘But what of the evidence of the porter at the Belvedere Hotel?’ I asked. ‘He stated quite clearly that Dr Zyss had returned to the hotel in the evening, before subsequently disappearing again.’

‘It seems a certainty that the callers at the Belvedere Hotel on Wednesday evening were in fact Professor Arbuthnot and his sister.’

‘But surely the porter would have realised that the man before him was not Dr Zyss?’

‘Not necessarily, Watson. You must remember that the porter in question was the night porter, and as Dr Zyss had previously left and returned to the hotel only during the daytime, this particular porter had probably never seen him before at close quarters. Professor Arbuthnot would have been wearing Dr Zyss’s spectacles, hat and overcoat, to improve the likeness. You will recall also from the porter’s account that the man did not approach the desk, but sent his companion to ask for his room-key. After the two of them had ascended to Dr Zyss’s room, if you remember, the lady returned to the entrance hall of the hotel, where she remained seated for some time, as if waiting for someone. After a while, the porter was called away from his desk for a few moments and when he returned the lady had gone. What I suggest is that all she was in fact waiting for was the porter’s absence, so that Professor Arbuthnot, who was no doubt loitering on the stairs, could take the opportunity to pass through the hall unseen, and thus leave the hotel without being observed to do so.’

‘But why did they go there at all?’ I asked in puzzlement. ‘Why risk discovery in that way?’

‘Evidently there was something in Dr Zyss’s room that the professor wished to get his hands on, no doubt papers of some kind, and probably something that Dr Zyss had mentioned in the course of their quarrel. If that is so, then that brief period of the evening, between the death of Dr Zyss and the murder becoming general knowledge, was the only opportunity there would be. But, yes, it was a dangerous course of action and we can only assume that the professor’s desire to acquire whatever it was he sought was a strong one. More than that we cannot say at present. It may be that Mrs Routledge will be able to cast some light on that aspect of the case, as she had spoken to Dr Zyss at some length earlier in the day.’

Holmes’s supposition proved correct. Mrs Routledge was startled to see us back so soon after our previous visit, and there was a look of fear in her eye; but once my friend had told her of the arrest of Professor Arbuthnot, and had explained what we had learnt, she recovered her composure.

‘Although I cannot say that I expected such an outcome,’ said she in a sombre tone, ‘I am not altogether surprised. Professor Arbuthnot was always such a dogmatic, fanatical man. Indeed, I have often thought recently that that was the fundamental cause of the trouble between us. There was something in his nature which prevented him from ever admitting that he might be wrong about anything, or that he had ever made a mistake in his life. You are certain that your account of this dreadful crime is the true one?’ she asked abruptly.

‘We are,’ replied Gregson. ‘Professor Arbuthnot has been arrested and charged with the crime. All that remains for us now is to secure a positive identification of the deceased, in which melancholy task I shall have to ask for your assistance, madam. Of course,’ he continued, as Mrs Routledge nodded her head, ‘we did not seek any corroboration of the identification before. As Mrs Arbuthnot had stated that it was her husband that had been murdered, we naturally assumed that that was true and no further thought was given to the question of his identity.’

‘We should be obliged now, madam,’ said Holmes, ‘if you could provide us with a little more detail as to your discussion with Dr Zyss on Wednesday morning and also tell us what you know concerning the black owl we showed you earlier.’

‘The two things are intimately connected,’ responded Mrs Routledge after a moment. ‘I had read in the newspaper that Dr Zyss was visiting England and staying at the Belvedere Hotel, and I ventured to write to him there, in the hope that I might be able to discuss with him for a few minutes the case of my son, Nicholas. My attempts to discuss the matter with Professor Arbuthnot had ended only in failure, as he had simply rebuffed all my overtures, sometimes in the rudest, most insulting terms imaginable; but I thought that I might get a little further with Dr Zyss, who had always been the more reasonable and pleasant of the two men.

‘To my great delight, Dr Zyss replied by return, inviting me to come to the hotel on Wednesday morning. And nor was his courtesy merely a superficial one. He listened patiently to everything I had to say, never interrupting, save only to clarify some point or other. When I had finished, he shook his head.

‘“I wish we had had this talk ten years ago,” said he, in a voice tinged with regret.

‘“What do you mean?” I asked.

‘“The view of your poor son’s case that you have just expounded is very close to my own view,” he explained. “Indeed, this meeting seems to me a remarkable chance. I am delivering a paper to the British Psychiatric Association at the end of the week on the diagnosis and treatment of certain unusual mental conditions, including that from which, I believe, your son suffered. I may tell you, my dear madam, that your son’s case was an epoch-making event in my own professional career.”

‘“Whatever do you mean?”

‘“It was over your son’s case that Professor Arbuthnot and I first fell out very seriously. Our views had been diverging for some considerable time, but we had continued to work together. Looking back on that period now, it seems to me that I was the one who compromised his beliefs and intuitions; Arbuthnot never once admitted the slightest doubt or reservation concerning his own views. In the case of your son, Arbuthnot’s opinion was that Nicholas was motivated in his irrational moods by a deep-seated resentment of you and his father.”

‘I nodded my agreement, for Professor Arbuthnot had often expressed this opinion to me very forcibly.

‘“I, however, was of quite a different opinion,” Dr Zyss continued. “My interviews with your son had convinced me that, on the whole, he had nothing but a normal affection for his parents. His problems, as I saw it, stemmed from certain irrational urges to which he was subject, and which, in his more rational moments, he regretted bitterly. The most notable of these was what has been termed ‘kleptomania’ – an urge to steal things. I cannot pretend to fully understand or explain this, but in the course of my conversations with Nicholas, I became convinced that this strange, aberrant urge arose from some innate cause within him, and bore no relation whatever to anything you or your husband had ever said or done. The bouts of kleptomania would always be followed, sooner or later, by periods of the very deepest remorse, when, as I knew from what Nicholas had told me, he would become bitterly unhappy and frequently almost suicidal. On one occasion that I recall, he confessed to me that he had attempted to steal some trifling bauble from a shop in Holborn. He had been discovered in the act, the manager had been called and there might well have been an unpleasant scene. But fortunately, Nicholas apologised, the manager took a lenient view – I dare say he saw that your son was not well – and the matter blew over. When Nicholas recounted this to me, he was deeply ashamed and begged me not to mention it to you.”