Cardew let him go. He just didn’t know what to make of the Colonel. Although the whole thing seemed clearly an accident, he was beginning to have a familiar nagging of doubt. But for the life of him he couldn’t think why.
He went down to the bedroom where Miss Thornton lay and was met by the constable talking to the housemaid outside.
“Says she’d like a word with you, sir.”
“Please, if I may, sir. Could we go — go inside. It’s not something I want anyone else to hear.”
Cardew opened the door and they went in. The maid stood with her back to the bed.
“Well, what is it?”
“Well, Inspector, you know Miss Thornton was a little — well, odd. Well, sir, she gave me strict instructions years ago where to look for her will if she died. I wasn’t to tell the master where because he didn’t know about her wig. Anyone but the master, she said. And then it was to be kept quiet. She was touchy about the wig.”
“Where is the will then?”
“Under the best wig, sir — the one she’s wearing. Sewn up in the lining.”
“Thank you,” said Cardew.
He opened the door and she went out. He moved to the bed and eased the old lady’s wig off. Part of the center seam of the underside of the wig had been unpicked at some time and carefully resewn. Cardew slit the stitches.
He pulled out a folded and crumpled envelope which was sealed and addressed to a local solicitor. He put it in his pocket and then bent to put the wig back. The curtains of the room had been drawn badly and a shaft of sunlight fell across the woman’s head. The top of her head was bald, the skin a yellow-gray color.
In the strong light Cardew noticed four or five white marks on the top of the old lady’s skull. He lifted the head gently and examined them. They were made by white paint and from their size he guessed were the finger-marks of a man.
He left the room and went slowly down the stairs. He wasn’t feeling so helpless now. Almost at the bottom, at a turn of the stairs, he found what he wanted: a length of the bannister had been freshly repainted white. It was at a corner where, if a man had been carrying a woman down in a fireman’s lift, he would have put his free hand for support. And if the women’s wig had fallen off, a man would have lowered her to the stairs and held her head up with his hand while he put the wig back on — a man who could have shot his sister in his bedroom while they took breakfast and who then had time to carry her out into the shrubbery before maid or gardener appeared for work.
He found the Colonel in his workshop above the garage.
Cardew said, “Colonel, how long have you known that your sister wore a wig?”
The Colonel straightened up from his bench and said calmly, “For years, Inspector. Never let on, though. Woman’s vanity, what? Shall have her buried in it, of course. She’d like that. Mary Queen of Scots wore one, you know. Great secret. But when her head rolled it fell off.”
“Just as your sister’s did this morning when you carried her downstairs after shooting her. Didn’t you notice that your hand had white paint on it from the bannister she had painted before bringing your breakfast up? You made a nice set of white paint marks on her head.”
The Colonel stared at him impassively for a long time. Then slowly he began to chuckle. “Well, I’m damned,” he said. “That was when I got it. I thought it was afterwards when I came back and went upstairs. Saw it then on my hands and washed it off.”. He frowned suddenly. “Bit of a bad show, isn’t it, your taking wigs off the dead?”
“I had to, Colonel, to get her will — a will, I imagine, which leaves everything to you but which I’m afraid won’t ever benefit you now.” The Colonel shrugged. “Rem acu tetigisti,” he said.
“My Latin is non-existent, I’m afraid, Colonel. But I must ask you to come with me.”
“Certainly, Inspector. And a rough translation would be — very rough, mind you — you have hit the matter exactly on the head.”
The Adventure of the Twelve Toucans
by Charles Green
Only the precocious Bernie Halper of Greenwich Village, New York, could get enmeshed in so remarkable a case — but he needed, in a curious way, the help of a certain tall, spare, stooped old gentleman.
Dear Reader: here’s an opportunity for you to practice “suspension of disbelief.” We promise you’ll have a good time doing it!
I may be losing my mind. But let the facts speak for themselves as I relate this extraordinary series of events.
It began in Washington Square. I was lolling on a bench there, a peaceful character in benign communion with his environment. A fine sunny afternoon. Pigeons free-loading from an old lady wearing a scarlet Robin Hood hat. A Good Humor man peddling his wares. A mechanized cowboy on a tricycle wheeling in to pump some lead into me. In short, the usual mildly hectic park activity that I always found so relaxing.
Part of my mind was also having a bit of a fling as an inventor, implementing an idea suggested by the cane between the knees of an old, old gentleman dozing at the other end of the bench.
Grandpa’s cane had a bulbous silver top, and it somehow made me think of a sword cane — a weapon no longer in vogue because few people carried canes nowadays. But, of course, people still carry umbrellas. Women, especially. And there shouldn’t be any great technical difficulty in designing a sword umbrella with, perhaps, a police whistle built into the handle.
Hence the next logical thought: thousands of women are forced, for one reason or another, to traverse dark streets. Helpless prey to depraved creatures lurking in doorways. A scream, some futile swipes with a handbag, and another vicious crime is on record.
Ah, but suppose the would-be victim has the protection of the Patented Bernie Halper Sword-Whistle Umbrella? A twist of the handle, and the astonished attacker backs away from thin lethal steel. Next, shrill toot-toot of the police whistle and demoralized attacker takes to his heels.
There was an exhilarated period when I saw my maiden effort as an inventor, at the age of sixteen, make history as the crime-deterrent of the century. Then I remembered there happen to be laws against carrying concealed weapons. And how could anyone reliably predict that some babe, supposedly toting my sword-umbrella for her own protection, wasn’t actually en route to skewer a two-timing husband?
So I was trying to figure out how I might get over this legal hurdle when someone yelped, “Boo!” I jerked up, and who should be facing me but Joanie — Joanie Webster, a cute chick with whom I was involved in a moderately active romance.
A chance meeting, this. I made an affable gesture. Joanie settled down between me and dozing Grandpa, and said in her blithe manner, “What dark unhappy thoughts are troubling the genius?”
Evidently my beloved had mistaken creative concentration for mental anguish. “No, it’s just that I had this terrific idea for an invention,” I explained. “Fame and fortune practically in the palm of my hand. But then a legal point came along to louse it up.”
“Dear me,” said Joanie. “Fame and fortune, eh? Bernie, if you had a magic lamp that could make you any famous person who ever lived, who would be your first choice?”
Irrelevance typical of Joanie. But just for the heck of it I complied by giving the old gray cells a nudge. In the next moment the answer sort of roared into me. And I said, somewhat shaken by the spectacular concept of it all, “Dr. Watson, co-occupant of a flat at 221B Baker Street, London, England.”
“Oh, that Dr. Watson,” Joanie said. “No, you can’t include fictional characters.”