He was clearly upset with Manette Marley, who was distraught in turn. “She said she was looking at watermarks and had to see the originals.”
“I am looking at watermarks,” said the agitated woman. “I would have called your attention to the substitution immediately if I had seen it. I was just getting to that letter when—” She stopped talking and gestured at the woozy young man who had fainted.
Thatcher Finn closed the reading room until further notice. “We need to see if there are other such substitutions,” he said to Manette. “That means a systematic inventory of every letter in the collection.”
She nodded. There were hundreds of letters. It would take days.
“Meanwhile,” said Thatcher Finn, “I am going to ask all of you to leave your belongings here. I’m not an expert on secret compartments and the like. I want to get the police to examine your possessions properly. Please leave briefcases unlocked.”
They all consented.
Before Henley left the premises, Thatcher Finn pulled him aside. “Mr. Henley, I don’t believe you could have been involved in this incident, but I have to be sure.”
“Of course.”
“Why don’t you stop by tonight for your briefcase? I’ll give you a ticket to Ravi’s performance in apology for all the inconvenience.”
Henley was touched that the young director, in his first hectic day on the job, would be so thoughtful. That evening he returned for the show and was greeted by Thatcher Finn and Manette Marley at the door. “Mr. Henley,” said Finn, now dressed in black jeans and a black T-shirt, “I must apologize. Somehow your briefcase has disappeared.”
Henley tried to soften his annoyance. “Weren’t the police coming to examine it?”
Finn nodded. “They were coming round at seven o’clock. I left the case on my desk when we closed the house at five. When I returned to reopen at six forty-five, it was gone. I can’t find it anywhere.”
Henley resisted the temptation to berate him. Jarvis Dedlock, Finn’s predecessor as director of the museum, had been sacked because materials were missing. Obviously security here was as sloppy as Finn’s clothing. But the young director was embarrassed and bewildered by the disappearance of Henley’s property. Resignedly Henley joined the rest of the audience in the parlor to nibble bland cheese squares and sip cheap wine before the show. Of the three dozen people already present, the loudest contingent consisted of American college students traveling with their professor — a brash man with a ponytail.
“No, my wife couldn’t join us,” boomed the professor. He held a glass of red wine in one hand and pointed with the other. “She was too humiliated by the behavior she witnessed this afternoon.” He glared at his target, and Henley followed his gaze to the young man who had fainted that afternoon, now red with embarrassment but defiantly guzzling wine. Interesting, Henley thought. The scholarly young woman was married to this blow-hard professor, and the oaf was one of his students.
The show started promptly at eight with the ringing of a hand bell. The snug parlor somehow accommodated chairs for forty people. Henley realized that he was attending not a play but a reenactment of a reading by Dickens. Ravi Vikram, in a brown nineteenth-century pinstriped suit, squared goatee, and a curly pompadour wig, stood at a lectern and spoke of “his” early life of poverty, of the effect of having to work in a factory, of how those early memories crept into his fiction. Then he read passages from Oliver Twist and Nicholas Nickleby.
“I also had a lifelong interest in crime,” said Vikram in character as Dickens. “After the interval, I’ll read to you some of my most gruesome descriptions of violence, including the murder of Nancy by Bill Sykes. Let me warn you now: Sometimes members of the audience faint.”
He winked at Henley, who sat in the front row, then he exited through the crowd before the audience had come to its feet. Henley was the last member of the audience to file out. When he reached the door, Manette Marley stopped him.
“Ravi left a note for you,” she said, and she handed him a small piece of paper. Meet me upstairs at the interval, it said, and it was signed with an initial, R.
Henley was flattered by the invitation. He must have made quite an impression during their brief introduction this morning. Most actors had business to tend to at intermission — costume changes, touching up makeup, looking after props, and, most important, staying in character. While the rest of the audience milled about in the ground-floor dining room, Henley peeked into the office to make sure that Vikram wasn’t waiting there. The only inhabitant was Thatcher Finn, who talked on a cell phone, so Henley proceeded to the upper floors.
In the smaller upstairs bedroom, where young Mary Hogarth had died, he found Ravi Vikram. The actor, still in makeup and costume, lay on his back with his head propped against the wall. His eyes were open but stared at nothing. The velvet rope from the neighboring dressing room was wrapped tightly around his throat. One end of Vikram’s necktie was knotted to his left wrist, while the other end twisted around the handle of a black briefcase — Driscoll Henley’s briefcase, to be exact.
Henley rushed to the body and loosened the rope around Vikram’s neck. This attack could not have happened more than a moment before Henley’s arrival, and he hoped that CPR might yet revive the man. As he unwound the last of the rope, he heard footsteps on the stairs.
“Mr. Henley?” It was the horrified voice of Manette Marley. She was with Thatcher Finn, who was already dialing 999 on his cell phone.
In what seemed like no time at all, a dozen police officers converged on the house, cordoned it off, forbade anyone to leave the premises, and arrested Driscoll Henley.
“Give me five minutes,” Henley begged. But what could he prove in five minutes?
“You acknowledge that this is your briefcase,” said the inspector.
“Yes,” said Henley. “I left it this afternoon at the request of Mr. Finn. I was going to take it with me after the show.”
“What’s inside?”
“Only an apple,” said Henley. “See for yourself.”
But when the inspector opened the briefcase, out spilled three periodicals from 1863, a first-edition autographed copy of David Copperfield, and the missing letter from Charles Dickens to Ellen Ternan. Henley was dumbfounded.
“The book and magazines came from this very display case,” said Thatcher Finn, indicating the glass enclosure along the far wall.
“Do you have CCTV cameras?” asked the inspector.
Finn shook his head. “My first priority. But there’s no camera system at present.”
Henley felt sick. “I did not take those items,” he said.
“You were present when that letter disappeared today,” said Manette Marley.
“You saw the contents of the case,” said Henley. “Except for the apple, it was empty.” He looked at Thatcher Finn. “You told me this briefcase was missing. But you had it all along, and you packed it with these stolen materials.”
“I’d never do that,” said Finn. “I’m here to protect the collection, not to pillage it.”
“Didn’t your predecessor lose his job because bits of the collection were disappearing?” asked Henley. “He can’t be blamed for this latest episode, can he?”
Thatcher Finn reddened.
Encouraged, Henley continued. “You could have stashed these items in my case after you killed Ravi Vikram. As a diversion.”
Finn shook his head. “When would I have had time to do all that? You saw me on the telephone in my office at the interval. Ravi was only a few moments ahead of you.”