The Final Solution: A Story of Detection

'I am sorry to learn that our good English bees are in­sufficient to his purposes,' he had said.

Now she was sitting beside him, in a back room of the town hall. Through the lone window from the vacant lot be­yond there radiated as if drawn by the old man himself the murmur of bees, insistent as the stifling afternoon itself. The old man had been stoking and sipping at his pipe for the last fifteen minutes as they awaited the prisoner. The smoke of his tobacco was the foulest that she, a girl raised in a house with seven brothers and a widowed father, had ever been obliged to inhale. It hung in the room as thick as sheepshearing and made arabesques in the harsh slanting light from the window.

As she watched the vines of smoke twisting in the sun­light, she tried to picture her son as he went about the business of murdering that fine, vital man. Nothing that she saw in her imaginings wholly persuaded her. Mrs. Panicker, nee Ginny Stallard, had seen two men killed, on different occasions, dur­ing her girlhood. The first was Huey Blake, drowned by her brothers in Piltdown Pond during a semi-friendly bout of wrestling. The other was her father, the Reverend Oliver Stal­lard, shot at Sunday dinner by old Mr. Catley after he went off his head. Though all the world blamed her black husband for the unstable character of her one and only son, Mrs. Panicker suspected that the fault lay squarely with her. The Stallard men had always been blackguards or misfortunates. She was almost inclined to view the fact that it was taking Reggie so long to be brought up from the cells as yet one more example, though heaven knew none was needed, of her son's poor char­acter. She could not imagine what was keeping him.

The sudden touch of the old man's dry fingers on the back of her right hand made her heart leap in her chest.

'Please,' he said, with a glance at her fingers, and she saw that she had taken off her wedding ring and held it pinched tightly between the thumb and first. Clearly she had been tap-tapping the ring against the arm of her chair for quite some time, perhaps from the moment she sat down in the waiting room. The sound of it echoed dimly in her memory.

'I'm sorry,' she said. She looked down at the spotted hand on hers. He removed it.

'I know how difficult this must be,' he said, and smiled in a reassuring way that was, surprisingly, reassuring. 'Mustn't despair.'

'He didn't do it,' she said.

'That remains to be seen,' the old man said. 'But so far, I confess, I am inclined to agree with you.'

'I have no illusions about my son, sir.'

'The hallmark of a sensible parent, no doubt.'

'He took a disliking to Mr. Shane. It is true.' She was a truthful woman. 'But Reggie takes a disliking to everyone. He can't seem to help it.'

Then the door opened, and they brought poor Reggie in. There was a plaster on his cheek, and an oblong welt across his left temple, and his nose looked too big, somehow, and all purple across the bridge. She experienced the false realization that these injuries had befallen him during his fatal struggle with Mr. Shane, and the fleeting hope of a claim of self-defense darted through her thoughts before she remembered having overheard Detective Constable Quint tell her husband that Shane was killed from behind, by a single blow to the head; there had been no struggle. A look at the faces of the po­licemen, eyes steady on the corners of the room as they han­ dled Reggie to the empty chair, and the true realization set in.

The old man rose and jabbed the air with the stem of his pipe in the direction of her son.

'Has this man been harmed?' he said, his voice thin even to her ears, petulant, as if there were a kind of moral obviousness to the beating her son had been given by the police that trumped any craven protest he or anyone might register. The horror of it vied in her thoughts with a low rough voice whispering Had it coming. Had it coming now a very long time. It took all of her powers of self-possession- a considerable resource, strengthened through a lifetime of nearly continuous exercise-to refrain from crossing the room and taking his battered dark head in her arms, if only to smooth the disorder of his thick black mat of hair.

The two policemen, communicants of Mr. Panicker, Noakes and Woollett as she at last succeeded in putting names to them, stood blinking at the old man as if there were a bit of breakfast clinging to his lip.

'Had a fall,' said the one she believed to be Noakes.

Woollett nodded. 'Bad luck, that,' he said.

'Indeed,' the old man said. The expression drained from his face as he made another of his long, deep examinations, this time of the outraged face of her son, who stared back at the old man with a look of hatred that failed to astonish her, any more than she was surprised when in the end Reggie's gaze faltered, and he stared down, looking much younger than his twenty-two years, at his skinny brown wrists crossed in his lap.

'What's she doing here?' he said at last.

'Your mother has brought a few personal articles,' the old man said. 'I'm sure they will be welcome. But if you like, I will ask her to wait outside.'

Reggie looked up, at her, and in his pout there was some­thing that resembled thanks, a sardonic gratitude as if per­haps she were not quite as horrid a mother as he had always believed. Though in her own accounting-and she was not generous with herself-she had never failed him, every time she stood by him he seemed to view it with the same skep­tical surprise.

'I don't give a damn what she does,' he said.

'No,' the old man said dryly. 'No, I don't suppose you do. Now. Hah. Hmm. Yes. All right. Tell me, why don't you, about your friend Mr. Black, of Club Row.'

'There's nothing to tell,' Reggie said. 'Don't know the bloke.'

'Mr. Panicker,' the old man said. 'I am eighty-nine years old. The little life that remains to me I would much prefer to spend in the company of creatures far more intelligent and mysterious than you. Therefore, in the interest of conserving the scant time I have, allow me to tell you about Mr. Black of Club Row. Word has lately reached his ear, I imagine, of a re­markable parrot, mature and in good health, with a gift for mimicry and a retentive mind far beyond the norm for its species. Were it his, our Mr. Black might sell this bird to a British or Continental fancier for a handsome sum. You had made up your mind, therefore, and got everything in readi­ness, to steal the bird and sell it to him, in the hopes of raising a large sum of cash. Which cash, if I am not mistaken, you re­quire to repay the debt you have incurred to Fatty Hodges.'

The words were spoken and left behind before her thoughts could catch up to them or to the instantaneous jolt they had sent straight through her. Fatty Hodges was by every reckoning and general acclaim the worst man on the South Downs. There was no telling what kind of mischief he had got Reggie up to.

Noakes and Woollet stared; Reggie stared; they all stared. How could he possibly have known?

'My bees fly everywhere,' the old man said. He flexed his neck and rubbed his hands together with a dry rasp. A conjuror with cards, after the ace has been produced. 'And they see everyone.'

His conclusion, that his bees told him everything, he left unspoken. She supposed he feared it would have sounded mad; he was widely held to be quite batty.

'Alas, before you could steal the beloved pet and sole friend of a lonely refugee orphan, you were beaten to the punch by Mr. Shane, the lodger. But as he was about to make off with the bird, Shane was attacked and killed. Now we arrive at the place, or I should say at one place, where the police and I differ. For clearly we also differ as to the advis­ability of beating the Crown's prisoners, in particular those who have not yet been convicted.'

Oh, she thought, what a fine old man this is! Over his bearing, his speech, the tweed suit and tatterdemalion In­verness there hung, like the odor of Turkish shag, all the vanished vigor and rectitude of the Empire.

'Now, sir-' Noakes put in, reproachful; or was it Woollet?

'The police, I say,' the old man said, innocent and serene, 'seem fairly certain that it was you who surprised Mr. Shane as he was carrying Bruno off, and murdered him. Whereas I believe that it was another, a man-'

The old man's avid gaze now found its way to Reggie's black brogues, bright with the shine she had given them that morning, when the day had promised nothing out of the or­dinary.

'-with feet a good deal smaller than your own.'

Reggie's face slipped-that disappointed face, smooth as a kneecap. Motionless except where it twisted up at