Ellery Queen - A Study in Terror

“Rachel was the one.”

“Oh, yes. At my request.”

“Miss Hager is related to you how, exactly?”

“My granddaughter. Shall we have tea?”

“Not just now, if you don’t mind, Mrs. Spain,” said Ellery. “I’m too chockful of questions. But first.” He sat on the edge of the chair, avoiding the lace antimacassar. “You saw him. You met them both. Holmes. Watson. How I envy you!”

Deborah Osbourne Spain’s eyes looked far into the past. “It was so very long ago. But of course I remember them. Mr. Holmes’s glance, sharp as a sword. And so reserved. When I put my hand in his, I’m sure it disconcerted him. But he was very sweet. They were both such gentlemen. That above all. In those days, Ellery, being a gentleman was important. Of course, I was a little girl, and I recall them as giants, towering to the sky. As I suppose they were, in a way.”

“May I ask how you came by the manuscript?”

“After Dr. Watson wrote it, the journal was turned over by Mr. Holmes to the Osbourne estate. It became the responsibility of the estate’s solicitor, bless him! He was so faithful to my interests. Then, after I was grown, and shortly before he died, he told me about the manuscript. I begged for it, and he sent it to me. His name was Dobbs, Alfred Dobbs. I think of him so often.”

“Why did you wait so long, Mrs. Spain, before doing what you did?”

“Please. Everyone calls me Grandma Deborah. Won’t you?”

“Grandma Deborah it shall be.”

“I don’t know why I waited so long,” the old lady said. “The idea of asking an expert to verify my conviction never crystallized in my mind, although I am sure it has been there for a long time. Lately, a feeling that there is a need to hurry has come over me. How much longer can I live? And I should like to die in peace.”

The implicit plea moved Ellery to her aid. “Your decision to send me the manuscript came from the manuscript itself, I take it?”

“Yes. Afterwards, Mr. Ames confided in Rachel about the hunt you sent him on.”

“Grant’s searching accomplished an end, though not the one I expected,” Ellery smiled.

“Bless him! Bless them both. I know he gave you no help, Ellery. I also knew you would find me, just as Mr. Holmes had no difficulty in tracing the owner of the surgeon’s kit. But I’m still curious as to how you did it.”

“It was elementary, Grandma Deborah. It was obvious from the first that the sender had some personal interest in the case. So I put a call through to a friend of mine, a genealogist. He had no trouble tracing you from Shires Castle, as a child, to the custody of the San Francisco branch of the family. I had the names of Grant’s four young ladies, and I was sure one of the names would pop up somewhere. From your marriage to Barney Spain in 1906 my expert got to the marriage of your daughter. And, lo and behold, the man your daughter married was named Hager. Q.E.D.” His smile became a look of concern. “You’re tired. We can put this off for another time.”

“Oh, no! I’m fine.” The young eyes pleaded. “He was a wonderful man, my father. Kind, gentle. He was not a monster. He was not!”

“You’re sure you don’t want to lie down?”

“No, no. Not until you’ve told me…”

“Then lie back in your chair, Grandma. Relax. And I’ll talk.”

Ellery took the withered old hand in his, and he talked against the ticking of the grandfather i clock in the corner., its pendulum, like a mechanical finger, wiping the seconds off the face of time.

The little frail hand in Ellery’s squeezed at irregular intervals. Then it stopped squeezing, and lay in Ellery’s hand like an autumn leaf.

After a while, there was a movement of the portieres at the archway to the parlor, and a middle-aged woman appeared, wearing a white housedress.

“She’s fallen asleep,” Ellery whispered.

He carefully laid the old hand on her breast and tiptoed from the room.

The woman accompanied him to the door. “I’m Susan Bates. I take care of her. She falls asleep like that more and more.”

Ellery nodded and left the cottage and got into his car and drove back to Manhattan, feeling very tired himself. Even old.

Holmes vexes me. I confess, because he was out of England for an extended period, that I took it upon myself, against his wish, to put my notes for the Jack the Ripper case into narrative form. Twenty years have now passed. For nine of these, a new heir, a distant relation, has borne the Shires title. One, I might add, who spends but a fraction of his time in England, and cares little for either the title or its illustrious history.

I had come to feel, however, that it was high time the world was informed of the truth about the Ripper case, which held an equally illustrious place―if that is the word!―in the history of crime, and about Holmes’s struggle to end the monster’s bloody reign in Whitechapel.

On Holmes’s return from abroad, I broached this to him, expressing myself in the most persuasive terms I could muster. But he is adamant in his refusal.

“No, no, Watson, let the bones lie mouldering. The world would be no richer from the publication of the story.”

“But, Holmes! All this work―”

“I am sorry, Watson. But that is my last word in the matter.”

“Then,” said I, with ill-concealed annoyance, “allow me to present you with the manuscript. Perhaps you will find use for the paper as pipe-lighters.”

“I am honoured, Watson, and touched,” said he, most cheerfully. “In return, allow me to present you with the details of a little matter I have just brought to a successful conclusion. You may apply to it your undeniable flair for melodrama, and submit it to your publishers without delay. It has to do with a South American sailing-man, who came very close to duping a European financial syndicate with a genuine roc’s-egg. Perhaps The Case of the Peruvian Sinbad will in some measure assuage your disappointment.”

And thus, matters now stand.

Ellery’s arrival was timely. Inspector Queen had just finished reading Dr. Watson’s Ripper manuscript, and he was staring at the journal with marked dissatisfaction. He turned his stare on Ellery.

“Just as well it wasn’t published. Holmes was right.”

“I thought so, too.” Ellery went to the bar. “Damn Grant! I forgot to order scotch.”

“How did it turn out?”

“Better than I expected.”

“Then you lied like a gentleman. Good for you.”

“I didn’t lie.”

“What?”

“I didn’t lie. I told her the truth.”

“Then,” said Inspector Queen coldly, “you’re a rat-fink. Deborah Osbourne loved and believed in her father. She also believes in you. Your mind is certainly crooked enough to have twisted the truth a little.”

“I didn’t have to twist the truth.”

“Why not? Tell me that! A little old lady―”

“Because, dad,” said Ellery, sinking into his swivel chair, “Lord Carfax wasn’t Jack the Ripper. A lie wasn’t necessary. Deborah’s father was no monster. She was right about him all along. She knew it, I knew it―”

“But―”

“And so did Sherlock Holmes.”

There was a silence of great length while pater tried to catch up with filius and failed.

“But it’s all down here, Ellery!” protested the Inspector.

“Yes, it is.”

“Richard Osbourne, this Lord Carfax, caught with the knife in his hand, butchering his last victim―why, Watson was an eyewitness!―wrote it all down!”

“Your point is, I take it, that Watson was an able reporter?”