The Final Solution: A Story of Detection (6 page)

"I'm sorry, sir," said the young soldier who sat behind a small metal desk in a small metal building at the end of the drive that led up to the house. It was a building of recent and cheap manufacture. One could hardly fail to notice that the soldier wore a Webley in a holster. "But you can't come in without the proper credentials."

The grandson of Sandy Bellows, that dour and tireless exposer of charlatans, displayed his identification card.

"I'm investigating a murder," he said, sounding less sure of himself than either his ancestor or the old man would have liked.

"I heard all about it," said the soldier. He looked, for a moment, truly pained by the thought of Shane's death, long enough for it to strike the old man as curious. Then his face resumed its placid smirk. "But a police badge ain't credentials enough, I'm afraid. National security."

"National-this is a
dairy,
is it not?" the old man cried.

"Milk and milk production are essential to the British war effort," the soldier said brightly.

The old man turned to Sandy Bellows's grandson and saw to his annoyance that the young man seemed to accept this egregious lie. The inspector took a calling card from his wallet and jotted a few words on the reverse.

"Might I ask you to carry this message to Mr. Parkins?" the inspector said. "Or arrange for that to be done?"

The soldier read the message on the back of the card, and considered it for a moment. Then he reached for a black handset and spoke into it softly.

"What did you write?" the old man asked.

The young inspector raised an eyebrow, and it was as if the face of Sandy Bellows were looking out at him across the decades, irritated and amused.

"Can't you guess?" he said.

"Don't be impertinent." And then, out of the side of his mouth, "You wrote,
Richard Shane is dead."

"I
am very much aggrieved to hear that," Francis Parkins declared. They sat in a large room at the back of the south wing, just below the library itself. At one time it had been the servants' dining room; the old man, seeking the poisoner, had conducted interviews with the household staff at this very table. Now the room was being used as a kind of canteen. Tumbled cities of tea tins. Biscuit wrappers. A gas ring for the kettle, and an acrid smell of scorched coffee. The ashtrays had not been emptied. "He was a fine fellow." "Undoubtedly," the old man said. "He was also a parrot thief."

This Parkins was a long, lean man, dressed like a don in a good tweed suit ill-treated. His head looked too large for his neck, his Adam's apple for his throat, and his hands for his frail white wrists. They were clever hands, supple and expressive. He wore little steel-rimmed spectacles and the lenses caught the light in a way that made it difficult to read his eyes. He gave every appearance of being a cool and settied fellow. There was nothing to be learned from the way Parkins reacted to news of the parrot's disappearance, unless it was something in his reply itself.

"Where is Bruno now?" he said.

He lit a cigarette and tossed the match onto the pile of fag ends in the nearest ashtray. Keeping his face with its illegible eyes on the inspector, he paid not the slightest attention to his companion, a squat, sunburned man who introduced himself, without explanation for his presence at the interview, as Mr. Sackett, managing director of the Research Dairy. Aside from giving his name and title Sackett said nothing. But he lit his cigarette like a soldier, hastily, and listened with an air of one accustomed to seeking flaws in strategies. It was doubtful, thought the old man, he had ever been near an actual cow.

"We had some hope that you might be able to tell us that," the old man said.

"I? You suspect me?"

"Not at all," the inspector said earnestly. "Not for a moment."

"No more," the old man said, "than we believe you to be conducting elaborate mathematical surveys of the height of the church tower in the fourteenth century."

Ah. That one found a chink. The light died in the lenses of his spectacles. Parkins glanced at Mr. Sackett, whose meaty face in its absolute expressionlessness was as eloquent as a fist.

"Gentlemen," Parkins said after a moment. "Inspector. I assure you that I had nothing to do with the death of Mr. Shane, nor with the disappearance of that admirable bird. I have either been in my bed or in the library here for the past two days, though I can offer no proof of that statement, I'm afraid. I can, however, prove to you that my researches are genuine. Let me just run back and fetch my notebook, and I'll show you-"

"What is the current height of the church tower?" the old man said.

"One hundred and thirty-two feet, six inches," said Parkins at once. He smiled. Mr. Sackett tapped the ash from his cigarette.

"And in 1312?"

"I should say seventeen feet shorter, though that remains to be proven."

"A difficult question to settle?"

"Frightfully," Parkins said.

"And doubtless an important one."

"Only to Dryasdusts like me, I'm afraid."

"Bruno, I gather, has provided you with some key insights."

"I don't understand."

"The numbers," Inspector Bellows said. "You keep track of them. Write them down."

The hesitation was brief, but the old man had been lied to by some of the greatest liars of his generation, among whom modesty did not prevent him from including himself. His nearly thirty years spent almost solely in the company of creatures whose honesty could not be impeached seemed to have had no ill effects on the sensitivity of his instrument. Parkins was lying his head off.

"Merely for my own amusement," Parkins said. "There's nothing in them. Just a lot of nonsense."

A delicate, inexorable lattice of inferences began to assemble themselves, like a crystal, in the old man's mind, shivering, catching the light in glints and surmises. It was the deepest pleasure life could afford, this deductive crystallization, this paroxysm of guesswork, and one that he had lived without for a terribly long time.

"What does Bruno know?" he said. "Whose numbers was he taught to repeat?"

"I'm afraid we don't concern ourselves with such questions here," Mr. Sackett said quietly.

"Am I to understand," the old man said, "that Mr. Parkins is an employee, or as it were a fellow, of your facility, Mr. Sackett? Is there some vital connection between Norman church architecture and the milking of beef cattle of which I am unaware?"

The inspector sought valiantly to cover his laughter with a cough. Mr. Sackett frowned.

"Detective Inspector Bellows," Sackett said, his voice softer than ever. "I wonder if I might have a word with you."

Bellows nodded and they stood up and went out into the hall. Just before he left the room, Mr. Sackett turned and aimed a warning look at Mr. Parkins, whose cheeks colored.

"I take it I am about to be warned off," the old man said.

But the rime of light had returned to the lenses of Mr. Parkins's spectacles. He smiled thinly. The tap dripped into the basin; a cigarette in one of the choked ashtrays burned to the filter and filled the room with an acrid smell of hair. A moment later the inspector came back into the room, alone.

"Thank you, Mr. Parkins. You may go," he said, then turned to the old man, an apology in his expression, his voice imprinted, as it were, with an echo of Mr. Sackett's hard-edged whisper of command. "We're all finished here."

An hour later, Reggie Panicker was released, with all charges against him dropped, and the next day, at the inquest, the death of Richard Woolsey Shane was officially ruled to have been the result of an accident whose nature was not then or afterward specified.

7

The bees did speak to him, after a fashion. The featureless drone, the sonic blank that others heard was to him a shifting narrative, rich, inflected, variable, and distinct as the separate stones of a featureless gray shingle, and he moved along the sound, tending to his hives like a beachcomber, stooped and marveling. It meant nothing, of course-he wasn't as batty as all that-but this did not imply, not at all, that the song had no meaning. It was the song of a city, a city as far from London as London was from heaven or Rangoon, a city in which all did precisely what they were supposed to do, in the way that had been prescribed by their most remote and venerable ancestors. A city in which gems, gold ingots, letters of credit, or secret naval plans were never stolen, in which long-lost second sons and ne'er-do-well first husbands did not turn up from the Wawoora Valley or the Rand with some clever backwoods trick for scaring an old moneybags out of his wits. No stabbings, garrotings, beatings, shootings; almost no violence at all, apart from the occasional regicide. All of the death in the city of the bees had been scheduled, provided for, tens of millions of years ago; each death as it occurred was translated, efficiently and immediately, into more life for the hive.

It was the sort of city in which a man who had earned his keep among murderers and ruffians might choose to pass the remainder of his days, listening to its song, as a young man fresh to Paris or New York or Rome (or even, as he still dimly recalled, London) stood on a balcony, at the window of a bedsit, on the roof of a tenement house, listening to the rumble of traffic and the fanfare of horns, and feeling that he was hearing the music of his own mysterious destiny.

Between the epic of the bees and the rasp of his own respiration within the tent of his protective netting, he failed to hear, as he had failed to anticipate, the long black saloon car that turned up the day after his interview with Parkins. It was not until the man from London was ten feet behind him that the old man turned. Easy prey, he thought, disgusted with himself. Fortunate, really, that all one's enemies are dead.

The man from London was dressed like a cabinet minister but he moved like a cashiered soldier. Broad-chested, fair-haired, squinting as against a hostile sun, a curious shuffling motion in his left foot, in its good Cleverley brogue, as he came toward the hives. Old enough to have accumulated a score of enemies, certainly, but not yet old enough to have outlived them all. His driver waited by the car with its London plates and its slitted blackout headlights that echoed the sun-blasted squint of its passenger.

"Do they ever sting you?" the man from London said.

"Constantly."

"Does it hurt?"

The old man raised the netting, so that he would not have to waste a perfectly good yes on such a fatuous question. The man from London concealed the traces of a smile in his graying blond mustache.

"Suppose it would," he said. "Like honey, do you?"

"Not particularly, no," said the old man.

The man from London appeared to be a little surprised by this reply, then nodded and confessed that he was not terribly fond of honey himself.

"Know who I am?" he said, after a moment.

"Genus and species," the old man said. He lifted a hand to the veil of net as if to lower it again. Then he pulled off the hat entirely, and tucked it under his arm. "You'd better come inside."

The man from London took the chair by the window, and made a discreet attempt to crank an inch or two of fresh air into the room. It was the least comfortable chair in the cottage, combining all the worst qualities of a sawhorse and a church pew, but the old man was under no illusion about the odor in the room. Not that he could smell it himself, any more than a bear, or for that matter an ogre, noticed or minded the stench of his own dark den.

"I can offer you a cup of tea," he said, though in fact he was not entirely certain that he could. "I believe my supply dates from the early nineteen thirties. I don't know, Colonel, whether tea leaves turn bitter with time or lose their flavor entirely but I feel reasonably certain that mine have met their fate. Am I right? It is Colonel?"

"Threadneedle."

"Colonel Threadneedle. Cavalryman?"

"Mounted infantry. Lennox Highlanders."

"Ah. Whisky, then."

The proposal was offered and accepted in the spirit of hostile good humor that had so far characterized his dealings with the intelligence officer, but at once he was racked with anxiety as to whether the whisky he had suggested in such a cavalier fashion had been drunk years before, in other lodgings, had perhaps evaporated or turned to a tarry paste, was not whisky to begin with, had ever existed at all. Five minutes' speleology in the nether regions of the corner cabinet produced a bottle of Glenmorangie, buried in a layer of dust that might have repelled a Schliemann. He stood, trembling with relief, and brushed the sweat from his brow with the back of a cardiganned arm. As a young man, to be warned off from pursuing an investigation had been a positive development, a landmark on the road to solution, and more than this, a thrill.

"Found it!" he cried.

He spilled a generous amount into a reasonably clean glass and handed it to the man from London, then lowered himself into his armchair. The memory of the taste of scotch was in his mouth like the smell of burning leaves lingering on a woolen scarf. But the cords that held him together were so few and threadbare that he feared to loosen them.

"This country," the colonel began. "Too quick to forgive its enemies and too hasty to forget its old friends." He took a deep whiff of the two inches of scotch in his glass, as if to scour his nostrils, then drained half. He grunted, in a way that was perhaps involuntary, and gave a wistful sigh of contentment: the passing years were, in every other respect, so cruel. "That at least is my view."

"I hope that I was of some little service, here and there, over the years."

"It was felt," the colonel began, "that you were entitled to an explanation."

"That's very kind."

"The boy is the son of a Dr. Julius Steinman, Berlin physician. Name means nothing to me, but in psychiatric circles ..." He made a face to indicate his judgment of psychiatrists and their opinions. The old man appreciated but did not share the prejudice; as doctors, no doubt, psychiatrists left something to be desired, but they often made fine detectives. "Apparently the man had some success treating certain forms of sleep disorders. God knows how. Drugs, I'd wager. At any rate, the boy and his parents were spared deportation in 1938. Taken off the train at the last moment, I gather."