Nikki: Here’s Sergeant Velie! Well, Sergeant?
Inspector: Was old Jake telling the truth about the money?
Velie: (Entering) Yep. Lab report says most of the ashes in the burned tin are ashes of paper!
Ellery: The same kind of paper used in printing paper money?
Velie: Yeah. An’ what’s more, the amount of ashes, they say, is just about what it oughta be if twen’y one-thousand-buck bills’d been burned up in the tin.
Nikki: (Sighing) Jacob Tinker’s got such a bad reputation — I’d feel better if we’d found he was lying.
Inspector: (Fretfully) Yes, it would have given us something to start on — a lead, anything.
Velie: Looks like we gotta start all over again—
Ellery: Wait! That’s it! That’s it... (Ad libs.) Yes, I see it all now — the whole diabolical thing! (Chuckles.) Very clever. Very clever! (Grimly.) Dad, I know who the fire-bug is!
Ellery Queen, as you have just seen, now knows the identity of the fire-bug. Do you?
Millions who have listened to “The Adventures of Ellery Queen” on the air have joined what seems to be a spontaneous “armchair detectives’ society,” the sole bylaw of which is that the armchair detectives shall try to figure out both the identity of the criminal, and the clues and logical reasoning which pin the guilt on him, before Ellery Queen himself goes through the reasoning for them.
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And now, if you think you’ve figured out the correct answer... go ahead and read Ellery Queen’s own solution to The Adventure of the Fire-Bug.
The Solution
Scene 8: Same, Immediately After (They are besieging Ellery with questions.)
Ellery: (Laughing) All right, I’ll explain. In the fourth fire the heat was so intense, the Fire Chief told us, that aluminum pots on the shelf above the stove in Tinker’s backroom actually melted. But what else was on that shelf over the stove? The cracker tin in which old Jacob hid his twenty thousand dollars!
Velie: That’s a fact. Old Jake told us that himself!
Ellery: Everybody knows tin melts more easily than aluminum. In fact, aluminum needs almost three times more heat! Then why didn’t the tin of the cracker-tin on the shelf melt? The tin was merely twisted and blackened, as Dad remarked. If the tin didn’t melt, while the more fire-resistant aluminum did—
Nikki: Then it means the tin wasn’t on the shelf at all!
Inspector: Wasn’t in that inferno of a back-room at all!
Ellery: Precisely. Therefore someone spirited old Jacob’s cracker-tin full of money away before the fire started — and brought it back the next morning and buried it in the debris of the room, after fire-treating it by hand to make it look twisted and blackened!
Velie: Not realizin’ he was pullin’ a boner — that if the tin’d really gone through that fire, it woulda melted!
Ellery: Yes, Sergeant. Now who took the tin away? Could only be the person who later set fire to the premises. Why was it taken away in the first place? Obviously, for its contents — twenty thousand dollars in one-thousand-dollar bills. Then we shouldn’t be looking for a fire-bug at all — our man is really a thief! And the ashes we found were not the ashes of Tinker’s treasure!
Nikki: But why didn’t the thief just take away the money and leave the empty tin behind?
Ellery: He wanted to conceal the fact that there’d been a theft, Nikki — to make it look as if the money’d been burned up in the fire. What would he logically do? He’d take twenty one-dollar bills — a small investment in return for the same number of thousand-dollar bills! — and burn them in the tin.
Inspector: Then when old Jake’d report his loss, we’d look and find a fire-bent tin, with the proper amount of authentic currency paper-ashes inside, and we’d never suspect that theft had occurred!
Ellery: Exactly, Dad. But it takes time to burn bills in a tin, and fire-treat the tin so that it would look like part of the bigger fire to come. And the thief knew Jacob’s simple brother Simon might come in at any moment and spot him — Simon said he was in and out all day. So our too-clever thief elected to do the business at home and plant the tin in the debris after the fire the next day. We know he must have done that, because we know the tin wasn’t on the premises during the fire — if it had been, it would have melted.
Velie: I get it now! The whole series o’ fires was just a cover-up of that last fire — to make us think it was all the work of a fire-bug... prob’ly Simple Simon!
Nikki: Yes, and that last fire was designed to cover up the theft of Jacob Tinker’s twenty thousand dollars.
Ellery: Right. Now who was the thief? Who took the tin away and after the fire planted it in the ruins of Tinker’s back-room? Only two possible culprits.
Inspector: How do you figure that, son?
Ellery: Didn’t your own men guard the burned pawnshop all night, Dad? (Inspector ad lib) Sergeant, didn’t you tell us no one had been allowed to examine the ashes before we arrived this morning? (Velie ad lib) So the tin couldn’t have been returned and buried in the ruins until after we arrived this morning!
Nikki: After we arrived! But—
Ellery: Therefore the tin must have been planted in the ruins between the time we came and the time Jacob Tinker dug it out of the debris!
Velie: But nobody was there exceptin’ us and old Jake himself!
Nikki: You mean the pawnbroker smuggled the tin into the debris while he was pretending to be looking for it, and then dramatically dug it out to show it to us?
Inspector: Can’t be Tinker, Nikki. Old Jake couldn’t have had any motive to steal the tin and the money in the first place. It was his own money!
Nikki: That’s so!
Inspector: No, son, I see whom you mean — there was one other outsider there with us, Velie — so he’s the only one who could have planted the tin under our noses — probably while we were all poking around in the ashes! He’s the
smart lad who had the first fire — probably a pure accident — and the fire gave him the idea for a whole chain of fire-bug blazes to lead up to his theft of old fake’s money-box, so that he could recoup his own fire-losses.