The Library Paradox

We were sitting in the front room, Arthur and I. I had not told him about the telegram. I rather thought that nothing might come of it, and in that case there wouldn’t have been any point. But when I perceived, through the window, a little group of gentlemen coming up the path, I felt it might have been better to have mentioned it before.

Arthur was reading the newspaper, and I was peacefully engaged in mending a tiny torn sleeve, while Cedric tried to climb upon my knees and Cecily dug through my work basket and flung out all the spools. We had come in but shortly before from our outing; the late afternoon sun was still gleaming through the crisp cold air, and the children’s cheeks were still flushed from their exertions of toddling, usually in opposite directions, and what with tumbling down rather frequently and trying to climb up on anything pointy or lumpy, we came home with a fair crop of scrapes, tears and dirty spots.

The cheerfully crackling fire was most welcome, and I had just put on the kettle and taken up my mending, when a shadow darkened the window and the three gentlemen
came up and stood hesitating outside. Arthur glanced up at my gesture of surprise, and saw them also. I hastily rescued the telegram from my work basket, where Cecily had only just discovered it, and handed it to him wordlessly.

‘I see,’ said Arthur with a very faint smile, looking from the telegram to the window to me.

I rose from my place, put down my sewing (or rather, put it up, in a place high enough for little hands not to pull it down and prick themselves on the needle), and arrived at the front door just as the bell rang, Cecily and Cedric frothing about my skirts in an effervescent mixture of shyness and curiosity. Three grave, somewhat embarrassed scholarly faces looked into mine and there was a short silence.

‘How do you do?’ I said politely.

‘Very well,’ said one of the gentlemen, a little shortly, I thought. ‘We would like to speak with Mrs Weatherburn, if you please.’

‘Oh! She is me, I mean I am she,’ I said, realising he must have taken me for a housekeeper. ‘Please do come in, of course.’ And I stood away from the door, shooing the twins a little distance off so that they should not be trodden upon. Cecily took one look at the gentleman who entered first and burst into tears, while her brother, apparently deciding
that the visit had already lasted sufficiently long, directed the word ‘Bye-bye’ to the newcomer in a firm, ringing tone, while waving his little hand in an unmistakable gesture of dismissal. The gentleman glanced at my upset work box, the scattered mess upon the floor and the weeping tot with frank dismay. I was just about to take some drastic measures, when the door from the kitchen opened, and Sarah entered, back early from her half-day out.

All three gentlemen brightened up considerably. How something so diminutive, so fresh, and so pretty can also be so efficient and so energetic, always delightful, always cheerful in spite of the endless round of cooking, cleaning and taking care of the children, is quite beyond me. And what is more, she does it all on vegetables alone! Sarah neither eats nor prepares meat, but at least she allows the mistress of the house to fiddle about in the kitchen (so many cooks do not) so that I can easily put on a roast or some chops to accompany her lovely spinach soufflés or rice-stuffed tomatoes. That such a thing should have found its way into my household is a blessing; surely it must have been a stroke of Divine Aid.

In less than no time, Cecily was gathered up and consoled, her tears dried, and the spools and cottons swept out of sight, while Cedric was momentarily controlled with a small cake. I pulled forward chairs for the visitors and tried to pretend that noise, chaos and disorder were phenomena perfectly unknown to me.

‘I’ll take them up to the nursery,’ said Sarah, sweeping Cecily under one arm and trundling her away in great contentment, followed by Cedric snugly wedged in his
father’s left arm. I sighed with relief and turned my full attention to my visitors. Three pairs of eyes were fixed upon me with doubtful expressions. I breathed again.

‘There,’ I said firmly, in the hopes of dispelling possible poor impressions. ‘Now I do hope you will tell me how I can be of help to you.’

There was some shuffling and looking at each other, and the most senior of the three gentlemen began to speak.

‘Let us introduce ourselves,’ he said gravely. ‘I am Professor Hudson and this is Professor Taylor, of King’s College in London. This young man is Mr Sachs, a student of mathematics. We have had a – a difficulty, a problem, at our university; you may have heard something of it. It is the kind of problem which …’ and his face took on a more doubtful expression than ever, ‘which apparently you have had some success in solving before, or so we have heard.’

‘From Emily Burke-Jones,’ timidly interjected the youthful Mr Sachs. ‘She’s a good friend of mine.’

It began to dawn on me that the problem about to be set before me might be more important than I had bargained for. Certainly, Emily is aware of the half-dozen or so little investigations I have undertaken since my marriage left me without any professional occupation, in most of which I succeeded in unearthing the truth by what always appeared to me to be a fortunate mixture of good luck and coincidence. Considering the lengthy miens in front of me, I felt sure that she must have exaggerated my accomplishments to the point at which they had expected to encounter someone quite different from myself. But I felt
curious. No, it was more than curiosity. Clearly something very serious had happened, and I felt an urgent desire to know more about it.

‘Please tell me about the problem,’ I said quietly.

There was some hemming and hawing and looking at each other. Then Professor Hudson cleared his throat.

‘The problem concerns the death of a colleague of ours, a professor at King’s,’ he said. ‘Ahem, it appears to be undoubtedly a case of murder.’

‘Murder!’ said Arthur, returning to the room exactly in time to catch this particular word. In spite of his best efforts to hide it, I cannot help being aware that Arthur suffers from a feeling of visceral horror and repulsion in respect of my work as a detective. Yet he has long since given up trying to dissuade me from it, and indeed I can count on his doing his utmost to help me if he can.

I did not speak, but the word
murder
awakened an echo of violence and terror inside me, which certainly mirrored his. This immediate reaction was, however, instantly overcome by an impulse to interfere quite as powerful as any I might have felt had I observed someone being murdered in front of my very eyes.

‘Ah, Weatherburn,’ said Professor Hudson with an air of relief at this sight of a familiar face, shaking Arthur’s hand cordially. ‘How do you do? Good work that last article of yours. Yes, yes indeed. You’ve heard about our problem down at King’s, I suppose? No? Well, it isn’t in the mathematics department. It’s a strange thing.’ The pleasant light went out of his eyes and a wrinkle appeared on his
forehead as he recalled himself to his task of information.

‘The circumstances of the murder are most mysterious; one might even call them paradoxical. And the police appear to be making no headway. The whole situation has created innumerable difficulties at the college; the atmosphere is heavy, students are withdrawing, trustees are making remarks. The case is in imminent danger of being drawn to the notice of the Queen, in which case I fear that the college may come in for serious sanctions.’ He coughed again, uncomfortably, and threw a glance into a corner where, my eyes following his, I perceived Cecily’s favourite rag doll lying with her legs tossed unconcernedly over her head.

‘Professor Taylor, here,’ he continued, ‘is the head of the history department and as such was one of the closest colleagues of Professor Gerard Ralston, the murdered man. The history department is of course the one most affected. My student Mr Sachs, however, was one of the three who discovered the body. Because he has been questioned by police and is directly concerned in the case, we decided to approach Professor Taylor about the possibility of consulting a private detective, someone who would be entirely discreet and devote his energy uniquely to the case in hand in the hopes of arriving at a satisfactory and rapid solution.’ He coughed once again. ‘As it happens, we were not acquainted with any such person, but Mr Sachs, as he said, had heard about your achievements in this line, Mrs Weatherburn, from a friend of his.’

‘People often have recourse to the famous detective of Baker Street in cases as important as this one, do they not?’ I
murmured, perceiving his discomfort with, as I supposed, my dissimilarity to his preconceived idea of a successful detective.

‘Holmes?’ Professor Taylor spoke up, an expression of disgust on his face. ‘The publicity, the publicity! I have no doubts of his capacities, and surely he is discretion itself during a case, but when all is over – why, his associate publishes detailed descriptions of all the most interesting cases in the
Strand Magazine
! Which, by the by, explains his immense renown at least as much as his successes do. No, no, we cannot consider such a thing. Much better to remain closer to home. My being acquainted with your husband keeps it all in the family, as it were.’

‘I see,’ I said thoughtfully. Certainly, I am neither experienced nor famous nor brilliant, and yet, there was a period, after I married and stopped teaching, where if some interesting problems had not come my way, I should have fallen into gloom out of sheer boredom – indeed, there is quite simply a part of my brain which is not fulfilled by the plain enjoyment of domestic pleasures and yearns to touch the rougher spots of life’s texture. And I have, after all, been able to untangle several rather complex situations. Still, most of those were not murders, but rather, less drastic if equally mysterious disappearances and robberies. I cannot feel certain of success when undertaking a case; yet there is no room for error in a situation like this, where lives may hang in the balance.

‘Before deciding anything at all,’ I said, firmly putting these considerations away for later, ‘I would be grateful to have as many details of the case as you can give me.’

‘Certainly,’ answered Professor Hudson. ‘I will give
you the circumstances as precisely as I know them, and you will see at once that it all appears to be quite inexplicable. To begin with, you must know that Professor Ralston, a professor of history, worked so extensively with texts that he had collected a considerable library of his own, consisting of thousands of historical volumes. Upon an agreement with the college dating back several years, he donated the whole of his library to the college on certain conditions; the new library was to be situated on the ground floor of a building belonging to the college, which had been used hitherto for the lodging of lecturers. This building lies a few hundred yards down the Victoria Embankment from the main building of King’s College, in a strip of grounds giving onto Adelphi Street, with a back gate to these grounds on John Street. Professor Ralston was lodged on the upper floor of the house, with a study on the ground floor giving directly onto the library. In this way, he was able to continue to treat the library as his own, while the whole of the body of students and professors was also able to take advantage of it during the day; Professor Ralston continued to add to the library as fast as he acquired new tomes, and the college added to it from its own funds as well.

‘The interior of the house was altered according to these arrangements. The front door now leads directly into the library, which occupies the whole ground floor of the building as a single vast space, except for the one room, which was preserved as Professor Ralston’s study. Shelves of books line the walls of the room from floor to ceiling all
the way around, and there are a few desks and lamps in the centre for readers. The stairs to the upper part of the house where Professor Ralston resided lead up from inside his study. The house itself is situated in the middle of a grassy quadrangle, which is some thirty yards wide, with buildings on either side of it. The length of the quadrangle stretching between the two parallel streets is longer, probably about eighty yards. It is entirely surrounded by a tall wrought-iron grille and one can enter only by the two gates. A path leads from the front gate directly up to the house, a distance of about thirty yards. This path then skirts the house to either side, and continues straight on to the back gate. The back gate is locked at five o’clock each evening, by a caretaker of the college on his rounds, whereas the front gate remains open in general unless Professor Ralston is away.’

Taking up a paper, the professor made a quick sketch of the grounds, the buildings and the adjacent streets, which I reproduce here.

‘Now,’ he continued, ‘although the official library hours were from nine to five o’clock, Professor Ralston was not strict about this rule, and had no particular objection to people remaining in the library for a little while after five o’clock; generally, he did not bother to lock the front door of the house until he went upstairs to get ready for the evening meal at seven. Knowing this, two students from his department, Matthew Mason and Edward Chapman, needing to consult some texts, headed to the library after their last class of the day: we are talking about the 6th of March, the Friday of the murder. It was already nearing five o’clock; indeed, the students arrived at the back gate at five o’clock precisely, exactly at the same time as the caretaker, who walked with them for the last part of the distance and allowed them to enter before locking the gate behind them.

‘The two young men walked down the back path and had just turned left along the house to go around to the front, so that they were passing under the window of Professor Ralston’s study, when they heard a tremendous noise of shouting and crashing of furniture coming from within. They stopped for what they describe as a few moments, listening and hesitating, and then they heard the sound of a shot followed by total silence. Immediately and together, the two students dashed around to the front of the house and rushed into the front door, which was closed but unlocked.