The Final Solution: A Story of Detection

one eyebrow and down at one corner of the mouth. Now, for an instant, it fell away, and he grinned, like a boy. He pulled his great big feet from under the table and stuck them straight out in front of him, marveling as if for the first time at their appalling size.

'That's what I've been telling these two!' he cried. 'Yes, all right, another day and I'd have had that bird sold and Fatty paid, and off my back. But the idea wasn't original with me. It's Parkins you should have in here. It was in his wallet that I found Black's card.'

'Parkins?' the old man looked to the policemen, who shrugged, and then at her.

'My oldest lodger,' she said. 'Two years last March.' She had never quite trusted Mr. Simon Parkins, she realized, though to all appearances there was nothing in the least ex­ceptionable or shady about him. He rose at the same late hour each morning, went off to study his rolls or rubbings or whatever it was he pored over in the library at Gabriel Park until long past nightfall, and then returned to his room, his lamp, and his supper, warmed over, under a dish.

'Are you in the habit of studyin' the contents of Mr. Parkins's wallet, then, Reg?' said Noakes or Woollett, affably though with a hint of trying too hard, as though he felt the chance to fix Reggie with a murder charge slipping away and hoped to fix him with something else before it was too late.

The old man's head turned toward the policemen with an audible snap.

'I beg you gentlemen also to consider that my days are numbered,' he said. 'Pray don't ask superfluous questions. Does Parkins take an interest in the bird?'

The question was directed at her.

'Everyone took an interest in Bruno,' she said, wonder­ing why she referred to the parrot in the past tense. 'Every­one except poor Mr. Shane. Isn't that strange?'

'Parkins takes an interest, all right,' Reggie said. The sullenness to which he had at first treated the old man was all gone. 'He was always jotting things in his little notebook. Every time the bird started in on those damned numbers.'

For the first time since their arrival at the police station, the old man looked truly interested in what was happening. He rose to his feet with none of the moaning and muttering that had attended this action hitherto.

'The numbers!' He laid his hands together palm to palm, arrested between prayer and applause. 'Yes! I like that! The bird was wont to repeat numbers.'

'All bloody day long.'

'Endless series of them,' she said, failing even to notice the expletive, though it made one of the policemen wince. She realized now that she had indeed many times seen Parkins pull out a small paper notebook and copy down the numeric arias that emerged from the uncanny clockwork snapping of Bruno's black bill. 'One to nine, over and over again, in no particular order.'

'And all in German,' Reggie said.

'And our Mr. Parkins. He is presently employed in what line of work? A commercial traveler, like Richard Shane?'

'He is an architectural historian,' she said, noticing that neither Noakes nor Woollett was bothering to write anything down. To look at them, those sweating hulks in their blue woolen coats, they might not even have been listening, let alone thinking. Perhaps they felt it was too hot to think. She felt sorry for that intense little inspector from London, Bel­lows. No wonder he had sent for the old man's help. 'He is preparing a monograph on our church.'

'And yet he's never there,' Reggie said. 'Least of all on Sunday.'

The detective looked at her for confirmation of this.

'He is presently making a survey of some very old vil­lage rolls they keep in the library at Gabriel Park,' she said. 'I'm afraid I don't really understand it. He's trying to make calculations about the height of the tower in the Middle Ages. It's all-he showed me once. It seemed as much math as architecture.'

The old man sank slowly back into his chair, but this time with an air of great abstraction. He was no longer look­ing at her or at Reggie, or, so far as she could see, at anything in the room. His pipe had long since gone out, and working through a series of automatic steps he relit it, without ap­pearing to notice that he did so. The four human beings sharing the room with him stood or sat, waiting with a re­markable unanimity for him to come to some conclusion. After a full minute of furious smoking, he said, 'Parkins,' clearly and distinctly, and then he gave a little mumbled speech whose words she couldn't catch. He appeared, she would have said, to be delivering a lecture to himself. Once more he made it up onto his feet, and then headed toward the door of the waiting room, without a backward glance. It was as if he had forgotten them entirely.

'What about me?' Reggie said. 'Tell them to let me out, you silly old geezer!'

'Reggie!' She was horrified. Thus far he had said noth­ing that even remotely resembled an expression of regret over what had happened to Mr. Shane. He had confessed without a jot of shame his plan to steal Bruno from an or­phaned little refugee Jew, and to going through the contents of Mr. Parkins's wallet. And now here he was, being rude to the only really worthwhile ally he had ever possessed, apart from her. 'For heaven's sake. If you can't see the mess you've got yourself into this time . . .'

The old man turned back from the door, wearing an an­noyed little smile.

'Your mother is right,' he said. 'At this point there is very little evidence to exonerate you, and a good deal of circum­stantial evidence that might seem to implicate you. These gentlemen'-he nodded toward Noakes and Woollett- 'would be in dereliction of duty if they were to free you. You appear, in short, to be quite guilty of murdering Mr. Shane.'

Then he pulled on his hunting cap and, with a last nod in her direction, went out.

6

The old man had visited Gabriel Park once before; sometime in the late nineties, that would have been. Then as now it was a question of murder, and there had also been an animal concerned, then-a Siamese cat, painstakingly trained to administer a rare Malay poison with a brush of its whisker against the lips.

The great old house's fortunes appeared in the interven­ing years to have declined. Before the last war a fire had de­stroyed the north wing, with its turreted observatory from whose slitted eyelid the Baroness di Sforza-that grand and hideous woman-had leapt to her death, with her precious Siam Queen clutched yowling to her breast. Here and there one still saw blackened timbers jutting from the tall grass like a row of snuffed wicks. The main hall, with all the sur­rounding pasturelands, had been taken over just before the present war by something called the National Research Dairy; its small, admirably healthy herd of Galloways was the subject of immense skepticism and amusement in the neighborhood.

Forty years ago, the old man recalled, it had needed a reg­iment of servants to tend the place. Now there was no one to clip the ivy or repaint the window frames, or to replace the lost tiles of the roof, which five years of occupation by the Research Dairy had transformed from a stately defile of chimneys to an upset knitting-basket of aerials and wires. The dairy researchers themselves were seldom seen in town, but it had been observed that a number of them appeared to speak with the accents of far-off Central European lands where, perhaps, the fact that Galloways were beef cattle un-suited to the production of milk was not appreciated. The south wing, severed from the hall by the ostensible milk needs of the nation, languished. One or two of the surviving Curlewes haunted its upper storey. And in its grand old li­brary-the very room in which the old man had, by means of a cleverly placed tin of sardines, unmasked the larcenous fe­line-Mr. Parkins, and a dozen or so other historians too old or unfit for war, pored over the estate's world-renowned and unparalleled store of tax rolls, account books, and judicial records, kept by the Curlewe family during the seven cen­turies they had ruled over this part of Sussex.

'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,