Free And Then There Was No One by Gilbert Adair Page B

personable young lad whose expression of naked terror appeared to pursue me wherever I moved. The door, as Holmes ascertained, had indeed been forcibly burst open, and its key was still in the lock – on the inside. That key impressed me as being, so to speak, the key to the whole affair, for I could not conceive how either a human being or a rodent had entered and subsequently quit the room without in some fashion causing it to be disturbed. And it was then it occurred to me that, if the cot on which James was lying sat too low on the floor to conceal a man, there was certainly space enough for a rat still to be lurking …
    At that moment Holmes, with a negligent disregard for his trouser knees, clambered atop the chest-of-drawers and peered out of the barred window.
    ‘Interesting, by Jove,’ said he, as, with remarkable agility even for him, he leapt back down on the floor.
    ‘What is?’ I asked, one eye warily on the cot.
    ‘Running underneath the wall there appears to be astream, which doubtless serves as a drainage conduit for the house. Watson, have you something the matter with your eye?’
    ‘Not at all,’ I answered impatiently; then, mutely signalling my suspicion as to what might still be cowering under the bed, I said, ‘There is, I suppose, absolutely nothing to this queer story of a rat?’
    Holmes looked up at me interrogatively and managed the closest to a true smile that I had seen on his features since we had ventured into this tragic house.
    ‘Your conjecture is,’ he said, ‘that the Sumatran rat is even now preparing to ambush us from beneath the bed?’
    ‘No, no, of course not,’ I muttered, none too convincingly, I fear. ‘However, as I see it, no man could have left this room, but a small animal might have climbed on to the chest-of-drawers, crept out of the window and plunged into the stream below.’
    ‘Precisely!’ said Holmes in triumph. ‘A
small
animal. Logic, man, logic! Oh, I grant you a giant rat might just have slain the boy – but then, it could no more have squeezed itself under the bed nor escaped by the window than I could. And no normal rodent capable of taking flight in the way you have just conjectured could ever have inflicted those teeth marks. No, Watson, instead of searching for major monstrosities, you should confine yourself, as I do, to minor oddities – such as this,’ and he drew his forefinger along one of the floorboards and held up its tip for my inspection.
    ‘Why,’ I said upon examining it, ‘I see nothing there.’
    ‘That,’ said Holmes, ‘is the minor oddity.’
    *
    Nearly two hours elapsed before the police arrived from Aylesbury, in the person of an Inspector Cushing, who turned out to be a genial red-haired man in his middle forties with a tendency to stoutness, and who came accompanied by two uniformed constables. Just a few minutes after that, we were all discreetly conversing in the library, Holmes, Cushing and myself standing some way apart from the members of the household staff, most of whom were gathered about the pathetic figure of Dr. Gable. The poor man, he sat still and hunched in an armchair, his head lolling limply forward over his chest like that of an unstrung marionette.
    This library was a dark, splendidly-proportioned room, three of whose walls were lined with tall bookcases and the fourth dominated by a superb Adam fireplace above which had been mounted the stuffed heads of a trio of magnificently antlered Highland stags. Sprawled in front of the blazing fire, a pair of cocker-spaniel dogs, so alike one to the other as to be surely twins, mournfully contemplated their master’s distress.
    Cushing, already conversant with Holmes’s exploits, was more than amenable to the prospect of my friend assisting him in his inquiries. He had heard, too, of the story of the rat as, before he decided to seek help from farther afield, itwas the Aylesbury police that Dr. Gable had originally approached with his strange