Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine 11/01/12 (2 page)

Within ten minutes he heard loud footsteps clumping down the stairs. Then a young
man in cowboy boots entered the room. His face was puffy and glistened with
sweat. Henley guessed he was about twenty years old—a college student,
and apparently a hungover one.

Manette Marley asked if she could help him.

"Bring me the Forster biography. Chop chop." An American accent.

Henley was mortified by the kid's rudeness. The woman working opposite Henley
also glared at the newcomer until he finally responded.

"No breakfast," he said. While Manette went off to find the book he'd requested,
the young oaf stood, reeled for a moment, and then fainted. Collapsing onto the
table, he sent Henley's briefcase flying before he slid from tabletop to floor
in a shower of the documents being examined by the young woman, who shouted and
ran for Manette. By the time Henley could reach him, the kid had regained
consciousness. "No breakfast," he said again as he struggled to sit up. In a
moment Manette Marley arrived. She helped Henley get the young man seated while
the woman retrieved her belongings. Just when everything seemed to be returning
to normal, Manette gasped.

"Where's the Ternan letter?" she asked. Trembling, she held one of five paper
sleeves in her right hand. Only four of the sleeves now contained their original
contents. The fifth held a blank sheet of paper folded to duplicate the shape
and thickness of a letter. The original Dickens correspondence was missing.

The woman who had been studying the letters was both horrified and defensive. "If
that's what's in the sleeve now, then that's what you delivered to me. I haven't
taken anything."

"No one will leave this room," said Manette Marley. She glared at all three of
them and called for Thatcher Finn. "Clearly this entire scene was a ruse," she
said after Finn had arrived. "They were attempting a distraction. I don't know
whether all three are involved, or only these two." She gestured at the young
man, who was pale and perspiring, but she included Henley in her look.

"I beg your pardon," said Henley. "I had nothing to do with this episode. Please
search me immediately."

"And me," said the woman.

"Me too," said the young man. "I haven't got your letter."

All three did, in fact, submit to a search, and no letter surfaced.

"It could have been stolen months ago," said Henley.

"No," said Thatcher Finn. "The lot from the British Library were just here two
days ago to examine that letter. They want to do a special exhibit for the
Dickens bicentennial. It's the only surviving letter from Charles Dickens to
Ellen Ternan, his mistress. Extremely rare. It never should have come out of the
archives."

He was clearly upset with Manette Marley, who was distraught in turn. "She said
she was looking at watermarks and had to see the originals."

"I
am
looking at watermarks," said the agitated woman. "I would have
called your attention to the substitution immediately if I had seen it. I was
just getting to that letter when—" She stopped talking and gestured at
the woozy young man who had fainted.

Thatcher Finn closed the reading room until further notice. "We need to see if
there are other such substitutions," he said to Manette. "That means a
systematic inventory of every letter in the collection."

She nodded. There were hundreds of letters. It would take days.

"Meanwhile," said Thatcher Finn, "I am going to ask all of you to leave your
belongings here. I'm not an expert on secret compartments and the like. I want
to get the police to examine your possessions properly. Please leave briefcases
unlocked."

They all consented.

Before Henley left the premises, Thatcher Finn pulled him aside. "Mr. Henley, I
don't believe you could have been involved in this incident, but I have to be
sure."

"Of course."

"Why don't you stop by tonight for your briefcase? I'll give you a ticket to
Ravi's performance in apology for all the inconvenience."

Henley was touched that the young director, in his first hectic day on the job,
would be so thoughtful. That evening he returned for the show and was greeted by
Thatcher Finn and Manette Marley at the door. "Mr. Henley," said Finn, now
dressed in black jeans and a black T-shirt, "I must apologize. Somehow your
briefcase has disappeared."

Henley tried to soften his annoyance. "Weren't the police coming to examine
it?"

Finn nodded. "They were coming round at seven o'clock. I left the case on my desk
when we closed the house at five. When I returned to reopen at six forty-five,
it was gone. I can't find it anywhere."

Henley resisted the temptation to berate him. Jarvis Dedlock, Finn's predecessor
as director of the museum, had been sacked because materials were missing.
Obviously security here was as sloppy as Finn's clothing. But the young director
was embarrassed and bewildered by the disappearance of Henley's property.
Resignedly Henley joined the rest of the audience in the parlor to nibble bland
cheese squares and sip cheap wine before the show. Of the three dozen people
already present, the loudest contingent consisted of American college students
traveling with their professor—a brash man with a ponytail.

"No, my wife couldn't join us," boomed the professor. He held a glass of red wine
in one hand and pointed with the other. "She was too humiliated by the behavior
she witnessed this afternoon." He glared at his target, and Henley followed his
gaze to the young man who had fainted that afternoon, now red with embarrassment
but defiantly guzzling wine. Interesting, Henley thought. The scholarly young
woman was married to this blow-hard professor, and the oaf was one of his
students.

The show started promptly at eight with the ringing of a hand bell. The snug
parlor somehow accommodated chairs for forty people. Henley realized that he was
attending not a play but a reenactment of a reading by Dickens. Ravi Vikram, in
a brown nineteenth-century pinstriped suit, squared goatee, and a curly
pompadour wig, stood at a lectern and spoke of "his" early life of poverty, of
the effect of having to work in a factory, of how those early memories crept
into his fiction. Then he read passages from
Oliver Twist
and
Nicholas Nickleby.

"I also had a lifelong interest in crime," said Vikram in character as Dickens.
"After the interval, I'll read to you some of my most gruesome descriptions of
violence, including the murder of Nancy by Bill Sykes. Let me warn you now:
Sometimes members of the audience faint."

He winked at Henley, who sat in the front row, then he exited through the crowd
before the audience had come to its feet. Henley was the last member of the
audience to file out. When he reached the door, Manette Marley stopped him.

"Ravi left a note for you," she said, and she handed him a small piece of paper.
Meet me upstairs at the interval,
it said, and it was signed with
an initial,
R.

Henley was flattered by the invitation. He must have made quite an impression
during their brief introduction this morning. Most actors had business to tend
to at intermission—costume changes, touching up makeup, looking after
props, and, most important, staying in character. While the rest of the audience
milled about in the ground-floor dining room, Henley peeked into the office to
make sure that Vikram wasn't waiting there. The only inhabitant was Thatcher
Finn, who talked on a cell phone, so Henley proceeded to the upper floors.

In the smaller upstairs bedroom, where young Mary Hogarth had died, he found Ravi
Vikram. The actor, still in makeup and costume, lay on his back with his head
propped against the wall. His eyes were open but stared at nothing. The velvet
rope from the neighboring dressing room was wrapped tightly around his throat.
One end of Vikram's necktie was knotted to his left wrist, while the other end
twisted around the handle of a black briefcase—Driscoll Henley's
briefcase, to be exact.

Henley rushed to the body and loosened the rope around Vikram's neck. This attack
could not have happened more than a moment before Henley's arrival, and he hoped
that CPR might yet revive the man. As he unwound the last of the rope, he heard
footsteps on the stairs.

"Mr. Henley?" It was the horrified voice of Manette Marley. She was with Thatcher
Finn, who was already dialing 999 on his cell phone.

In what seemed like no time at all, a dozen police officers converged on the
house, cordoned it off, forbade anyone to leave the premises, and arrested
Driscoll Henley.

"Give me five minutes," Henley begged. But what could he prove in five
minutes?

"You acknowledge that this is your briefcase," said the inspector.

"Yes," said Henley. "I left it this afternoon at the request of Mr. Finn. I was
going to take it with me after the show."

"What's inside?"

"Only an apple," said Henley. "See for yourself."

But when the inspector opened the briefcase, out spilled three periodicals from
1863, a first-edition autographed copy of
David Copperfield,
and the
missing letter from Charles Dickens to Ellen Ternan. Henley was dumbfounded.

"The book and magazines came from this very display case," said Thatcher Finn,
indicating the glass enclosure along the far wall.

"Do you have CCTV cameras?" asked the inspector.

Finn shook his head. "My first priority. But there's no camera system at
present."

Henley felt sick. "I did not take those items," he said.

"You were present when that letter disappeared today," said Manette Marley.

"You saw the contents of the case," said Henley. "Except for the apple, it was
empty." He looked at Thatcher Finn. "You told me this briefcase was missing. But
you had it all along, and you packed it with these stolen materials."

"I'd never do that," said Finn. "I'm here to protect the collection, not to
pillage it."

"Didn't your predecessor lose his job because bits of the collection were
disappearing?" asked Henley. "He can't be blamed for this latest episode, can
he?"

Thatcher Finn reddened.

Encouraged, Henley continued. "You could have stashed these items in my case
after you killed Ravi Vikram. As a diversion."

Finn shook his head. "When would I have had time to do all that? You saw me on
the telephone in my office at the interval. Ravi was only a few moments ahead of
you."

The police inspector interrupted. "There's what remains of your apple." He
pointed to the apple core under a window. "Didn't want to stain the valuables,
did you?"

Henley stared at the apple core and at the evidence in front of him. He
considered asking the police to check his briefcase for fingerprints, but anyone
wishing to conceal fingerprints would have easy access to the scholars' gloves
provided by the museum itself.

For a moment he wondered whether the dead man himself might have been stealing
the documents, but he immediately dismissed that idea. Anyone who caught Vikram
in the act of thievery would have raised the alarm, not killed him. And why put
these artifacts into Henley's briefcase? Were they planning for Henley to serve
as an unsuspecting mule, for him to carry the contraband off the premises and
then, what? A street crime, a quick grab-and-snatch? Henley would report being
mugged, and the thieves would escape with priceless Dickens materials. It would
work, he supposed, but it seemed awfully complicated as a way of stealing from
the collection.

He recalled the scene in the reading room that afternoon. "The man who collapsed
this afternoon. He was evidently faint from not eating breakfast. He could have
eaten my apple. Did anyone notice whether he left the performance before
intermission?"

"I sat at the door," said Manette. "No one left."

"If you were at the door, then you could have slipped out yourself," said Henley.

"To do what?" asked Manette. "Ravi was alive at the end of the first act. And
everyone in the audience exited the room before I did. You were the last to
leave, and that's when I gave you the note."

Yes, the note. Exactly why would Vikram invite Driscoll Henley, a virtual
stranger, to meet him upstairs between acts?

"He wrote a note to me but asked you to deliver it? That's awfully cumbersome.
Why put the invitation in writing? He could have spoken to me directly as he
walked past."

She shrugged. "Perhaps he didn't want to break character."

Henley thought about that. There was one logical conclusion.

"Tick tock, Mr. Henley," said the inspector.

He took a chance. "The note wasn't for me, was it, Manette?" When she didn't
answer, he knew that he'd guessed right. "It was you that he wanted to meet
upstairs, not me. You must have known what was going to happen to him, and you
wanted me to find the body."

Now all stared at him—and at her. Two fat tears slid down her cheeks.
"It's not like that," she said. "I'm sorry. Ravi wrote that note to me six weeks
ago. Tonight I used it to send Mr. Henley to find him." She looked at the
policemen. "I didn't know Ravi was going to be assaulted. I just wanted to
embarrass him. He had to stop."

"Stop what?" asked Henley.

She gestured at the display cases in the room. "Ravi would open the exhibits.
Handle the books, touch the miniatures. He said it helped him stay in character.
But of course it was entirely inappropriate."

"You had the keys to the display cabinets," Henley prompted her. "And you'd open
them up for him."

She nodded. "But after today, I couldn't. Not after Mr. Jarvis was sacked and we
had a letter missing."

Henley nodded. "In the process of opening up the display cases to connect
directly with Dickens, Vikram must have discovered that some original items had
been replaced with replicas. Tonight he came face-to-face with the thief, who
killed him and tied my briefcase to his hands after stashing these stolen items
inside. It was a literal means of tying me to the murder."