The Final Solution: A Story of Detection

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 facil­ ity, 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 ances­ tors. 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