The Final Solution: A Story of Detection

and pipe, several glossy prospec­tuses for the Chedbourne & Jones Lactrola R-5, and a well-thumbed copy of Treadley's Common Diseases of Milch Kine, 1926 edition, the old man went over the whole thing again. All the while, though he was unaware of it, he kept up a steady muttering, nodding his head from time to time, carrying on one half of a conversation, and showing a cer­tain impatience with his invisible interlocutor. This proce­dure required nearly forty minutes, but when he emerged from the car, feeling quite as if he ought to lie down, he was holding a live .45 caliber cartridge for that highly unlikely Webley, and an unsmoked Murat cigarette, an Egyptian brand whose choice by the victim, were it his, seemed to in­dicate still greater unsuspected depths of experience or ro­mance. Finally he dug around in the mulchy earth that lay beneath the hedgerows, finding in the process a piece of shattered cranium, stuck with bits of skin and hair, that the policemen, to their evident discomfiture, had missed.

He handled the grisly bit of evidence without hesitation or qualm. He had seen human beings in every state, phase, and attitude of death: a Cheapside drab tumbled, throat cut, headfirst down a stairway of the Thames Embankment, blood pooling in her mouth and eye sockets; a stolen child, green as a kelpie, stuffed into a storm drain; the papery pale husk of a pensioner, killed with arsenic over the course of a dozen years; a skeleton looted by kites and dogs and count­less insects, bleached and creaking in a wood, tattered gar­ments fluttering like flags; a pocketful of teeth and bone chips in a shovelful of pale incriminating ash. There was nothing remarkable, nothing at all, about the crooked X that death had scrawled in the dust of Hallows Lane.

At last he put the glass away and stood up as straight as he could manage. He gave a last look around at the situation of the hedgerows, the MG under its tarpaulin of dust, the behavior of the rooks, the direction taken by the coal smoke streaming from the chimney of the vicarage. Then he turned to the young inspector, studying him at some length without speaking.

'Anything wrong?' Sandy Bellows's grandson said. So far the old man had refrained from asking the inspector whether his grandfather was living or dead. He knew all too well what the answer would be.

'You have done a fine job,' the old man said. 'First rate.'

The inspector smiled, and his eyes traveled to the sullen Constable Quint, standing by the little green roadster. The constable pulled on one half of his mustache and glowered at the muddy purple puddle at his feet.

'Shane was approached and struck, with considerable force, from behind; you have that much right. Tell me, In­spector, how you square that with your idea that the de­ceased came upon and surprised young Mr. Panicker in the act of stealing the parrot?'

Bellows started to speak, then left off with a short, weary sigh, and shook his head. DC Quint tugged his mustache down now, in an attempt to conceal the smile that had formed on his lips.

'The pattern and frequency of footprints indicates,' the old man continued, 'that at the moment the blow fell Mr. Shane was moving in some haste, and carrying something in his left hand, something rather heavy, I should wager. Since your men found his valise and all of his personal effects by the garden door, as if waiting to be transferred to the boot of the car, and since the birdcage is nowhere to be found, I think it reasonable to infer that Shane was fleeing, when he was murdered, with the birdcage. Presumably the bird was in it, though I think a thorough search of neighborhood trees ought to be made, and soon.'

The young inspector turned to DC Quint and nodded once. DC Quint let go of his mustache. He looked aghast.

'You can't mean, sir, with all due respect, that you want me to waste valuable time staring up into trees looking for a-'

'Oh, you needn't worry, Detective Constable,' the old man said, with a wink. He did not care to divulge his hy­pothesis-naturally only one of several under considera­tion-that Bruno the African gray parrot might be clever enough to have engineered an escape from his captor. Men, policemen in particular, tended to discount the capacity of animals to enact, often with considerable panache, the foulest of crimes and the most daring stunts. 'You can't miss the tail.'

Constable Quint seemed unable for a moment to gain control of the musculature of his jaw. Then he turned and stomped off down the lane, toward the trellised doorway that led into the garden of the vicarage.

'As for you.' The old man turned to the inspector. 'You must seek to inform yourself about our victim. I will want to see the body, of course. I suspect we may discover-'

A woman screamed, grandly at first, almost one would have said with a hint of melody. Then her cry disintegrated into a series of little gasping barks:

Oh oh oh oh oh-

The inspector took off at a run, leaving the old man to follow scraping and hobbling along behind. When he came into the garden he saw a number of familiar objects and en­tities set about on an expanse of green as if arranged to a desired effect or inferable purpose, like counters or chessmen, in some kingly recreation. Regarding them the old man ex­perienced a moment of vertiginous horror during which he could neither reckon their number nor recall their names or purposes. He felt-with all his body, as one felt the force of gravity or inertia-the inevitability of his failure. The con­quest of his mind by age was not a mere blunting or slow­ing down but an erasure, as of a desert capital by a drifting millennium of sand. Time had bleached away the ornate pattern of his intellect, leaving a blank white scrap. He feared then that he was going to be sick, and raised the head of his stick to his mouth. It was cold against his lips. The horror seemed to subside at once; consciousness rallied itself around the brutal taste of metal, and all at once he found himself looking, with inexpressible relief, merely at the two policemen, Bellows and Quint; at Mr. and Mrs. Panicker, standing on either side of a birdbath; at a handsome Jew in a black suit; a sundial; a wooden chair; a hawthorn bush in lavish flower. They were all gazing upward to the peak of the vicarage's thatched roof at the remaining token in the game.

'Young man, you will come down from there at once!' The voice was that of Mr. Panicker-who was rather more intelligent than the average country parson, in the old man's view, and rather less competent to minister to the souls of his parishioners. He backed a step or two away from the house as if to find a better spot from which to fix the boy on the roof of the house with a baleful stare. But the vicar's eyes were far too large and sorrowful, the old man thought, ever to do the trick.

'Sonny boy,' Constable Quint called up. 'You're going to break your neck!'

The boy stood, upright, hands dangling by his sides, feet together, teetering on the fulcrum of his heels. He looked neither distressed nor playful, merely gazed down at his shoes or at the ground far below him. The old man won­dered if he could have gone up there to search for his par­rot. Perhaps in the past the bird had been known to take refuge on housetops.

'Fetch a ladder,' the inspector said.

The boy slipped, and went sliding on his bottom down the long thatch slope of the roof toward the edge. Mrs. Pan-icker let out another scream. At the last moment the boy gripped two fistfuls of thatch and held on to them. His progress was arrested with a jerk, and then the handfuls ripped free of the roof and he sailed out into the void and plummeted to earth, landing on top of the good-looking young Jewish man, a Londoner by the cut of his suit, with a startling crunch like a barrel shattering against rocks. Af­ter a dazed moment the boy stood up, and shook his hands as if they stung him. Then he offered one to the man on his belly on the ground.

'Mr. Kalb,' cried Mrs. Panicker, scurrying over, a hand pressed to the necklace at her bosom, to the side of the dap­per Londoner. 'Good heavens, are you hurt?'

Mr. Kalb accepted the hand the child offered him, and pre­tended to let the boy drag him to his feet. Though he winced and groaned, the grin did not leave his face for a moment.

'Not terribly. A bruised rib perhaps. It's nothing at all.'

He held out his hands to the boy, and the boy stepped between them. Mr. Kalb, with a visible wince, lifted him into the air. Only once he was safely in the arms of the vis­itor from London, for reasons that the old man felt a pow­erful desire to understand, did the boy relax his grip over his emotions, and mourn, wildly and uncontrollably, the loss of his friend, burying his face in Mr. Kalb's shoulder.

The old man made his way across the garden.

'Boy,' he said. 'Do you remember me?'

The boy looked up, his face flushed and swollen. A del­icate span of mucus connected the tip of his nose to