“So then, Mr. BothPinners is a bona-fide criminal masterm—”
“No, he’s an idiot. Please! That feeble attempt to get a handwriting sample? That unnecessary complication of the letter to his fictional brother? No, no. Whoever Arthur/ Harry Pinner is, he’s perfectly awful as a conman. Only Hall Pycroft’s credulous simplicity allowed him to carry it off. And it was still a close-run thing; he let his story get so badly out of his control that he had no choice but to shave every single hair of his head, run up to Birmingham on the next train and rent out the first vacant room he could find. Even then he nearly ruined it. He badly underestimated Pycroft’s work ethic, thereby short-shrifting his confederate on the amount of time they had to carry off the crime.”
I wanted to say something smart, to prove I was keeping up, but it was hard to think of anything. Especially since more strange suspender noises were coming from behind the door. Still, I triumphantly declared, “Ah-ha! Just as I suspected! There is a c—”
“Of course there’s a bloody confederate!” Watson howled. He looked as if he were about to faint. Yet he also looked as if—even if he did—he was likely to go on yelling everything he’d figured out about this case. I guess that’s what I get for not letting Watson talk for five or six months. “Mawson and Williams’s expected somebody with the name Hall Pycroft to come walking in last Monday morning. And believe me, someone did. The man we know is only half of the plan. From what we’ve seen of his criminal ability, probably the lesser half. Still the confederate may not be the aptest hand either, for he seems to have messed things up badly enough to have wound up in the newspaper.”
“The newsp—”
“Yes! You saw Mr. Pinner just now! Did he look like a man for whom everything’s going swimmingly? No, he looked like a fellow at the very end of his rope! You cannot pretend that it was our brilliant intervention that caused the change—he was dazed before we even said hello. Yet he was whistling a happy tune when we first saw him on the street. What changed? What source of information caused this sudden reversal? The newspaper, Holmes!”
And he was correct. Halfway through his harangue I’d dived for the bin and pulled forth the crumpled pages.
“By the Twelve Gods! You’re right, Watson!” I cried. Oh, it was a refreshing change to get to finish a sentence. But that’s Watson for you: always a decent listener if you had anything he wanted to hear. “According to this, the notorious criminal Harold Pinner was taken as he fled the brokerage firm of Mawson and Williams’s. It seems he’d gone in Sunday night, using a set of cleverly duplicated keys, and stolen nearly a million pounds’ worth of securities. He might have made it, too, were it not for the timely intrusion of a night watchman named George Boyd.”
“Who apprehended Pinner?” Watson asked.
“No. Who got cut in half by Mr. Pinner.”
“In half?”
“Well, apparently Mr. Pinner is usually a smash-and-grab man and is more known for his ferocity than his intellect.”
“Apparently, yes.”
“Mr. Pinner tried to cover both of his crimes by emptying the contents of Mr. Boyd’s torso into an office rubbish bin, stuffing all the stolen securities into the hollow, tying the dead man’s shoelaces to his own, tucking the dead guard’s shirt into his pants real hard to hold his halves together, throwing Boyd’s arm over his shoulder like they were good friends and attempting to walk out of the place.”
“Only attempting, you say?” said Watson. He was very good at spotting meaningful words in stories.
I turned the page and looked for the details he craved, doing my best to ignore the sound of something tapping gently against the closet door. “Yes. It seems it was early morning by then and a few of the neighborhood lads were gathered on the steps of the building for a game of conkers. As he came down the stairs, Mr. Pinner nodded to them and explained his friend had had a bit too much to drink. Just as the boys were starting to wonder, ‘Eh? In an office building?’, Boyd’s bottom half fell out from under his top half, spilling blood-smeared financial papers all down the steps. The boys… you know… noticed. There seems to have been a great deal of screaming. This was overheard by the neighborhood constable, who cried a challenge. Mr. Pinner fled. But not very well, it seems, as the laces of his right shoe were quite well secured to half of Mr. Boyd. He made it less than a hundred yards. Once apprehended, he made no attempt to conceal his crimes. He only asked for help reclaiming his shoelaces and expressed regret that his idiot brother had talked him out of simple, direct burglary and into such a complex infiltration.”
“That’s all bad news for… I mean… I can only assume his name actually is Arthur Pinner,” Watson harrumphed. “Not only is his brother bound for the gallows, but he let himself be taken alive. That means he’ll have more than enough time to fill the authorities in on the entire plot. Arthur Pinner is going to find himself an accessory to robbery and to murder. That’s probably why he ran into the other room to hang himself.”
“To what?”
“Rather badly, from the sound of it. Can’t you hear him bumping around in there?”
I gave Watson an urgent—and I must admit, probably ungenerous—look.
“What are you glaring at me for? I’m the one who solved the case! I’m the one who…” but he trailed
