And Then There Was No One полностью

‘I had, then, a strong conviction as to the perpetrator of the crime: the riddle was understanding how it had been committed. But, in that, I let myself be guided by one of my principal articles of faith, which is – as my poor friend Watson is doubtless tired of hearing – that when you have excluded the impossible, that which remains, however improbable, must be the truth. And at once that truth revealed itself to me: when Edward and the housekeeper burst into the attic, James Gable was alive. It was only after Mrs. Treadwell departed, and the two brothers were left alone together, that he was murdered.

‘Edward, I fear, had long been plotting how best he might rid himself of his half-brother. Despite being the elder son, he would not have inherited the family estate – as I learned this morning at Messrs. Hunter and Dove – because he is the offspring of the first Mrs. Gable, and the estate belonged, not to the doctor, but to his second wife, whose will specified that, in the event of her premature death, it should pass to James directly he attained his majority. You see, Watson, when Dr. Gable chanced to remark to us that his house was called The Gables “by a curious coincidence”, he was telling us that its name had nothing to do with his own: he meant simply that, like many another so-called, it was gabled.

‘Edward therefore waited for his opportunity, and it eventually presented itself in the guise of an implausibly large rodent that escaped from one of his father’s packing crates and is perhaps even now, a bewildered and maligned innocent, roaming the Buckinghamshire countryside. The two brothers were fond of playing practical jokes together, as we were told by both Dr. Gable and Mrs. Treadwell, and I imagine that they were oftentimes heedlessly cruel, as young people’s pranks will be. So, with the elder of the two taking upon himself the role of evil genius, they proceeded to foster the legend of a supernatural rat at large, with easily contrived scamperings under the floorboards and half-masticated chunks of meat in the pantry. As for the phantom creature which so terrified one of the maids, that, I speculate, was one of Dr. Gable’s cocker spaniels with its fore and hind legs roped together and its canine identity craftily concealed under some phosphorescent Hallowe’en mask.

‘At any rate, the events of last night were to constitute the pièce de résistance, as it were, of the whole charade, in which James would be found “dead” in the attic, gored by the Sumatran rat, before leaping up with a triumphant grin on his face to be scolded and, I should say, almost at once forgiven for having frightened the household out of its collective wits. A callous hoax, no doubt, but not untypical of youthful high spirits.

‘Alas for poor James, Edward had quite a different project in mind; and when, with the housekeeper’s departure, he was all alone with his brother, he smothered the younger boy with the very pillow his head rested upon and tore deep and hard into the veins of his neck’ – whereupon Holmes untied the bundle which the constable had brought in with him and which we saw to contain a large rock, a bloodstained pillow and the stuffed head of a wolf, its lower jaw snapped off so that just the vividly snarling upper teeth remained.

‘Take care how you handle that,’ Holmes warned the Inspector, ‘for these fangs are far sharper now than when the beast still had his employment of them. In a sense, the whole case hinged upon the incisions made in James’s neck, and it was only when, in the library, I found myself idly admiring the doctor’s collection of mounted animal heads that it dawned on me how they might have been effected. In Aylesbury I did the round of its curiosity shops and learned in the third that Edward had recently purchased just such a head. Its teeth, as you may observe, he honed down until they had become as sharp and vicious as jack-knives. And it was of course with this pillow that he stifled his victim, having first stained it with the blood – most likely that of some rabbit or squirrel – which he had also smeared on James’s neck to achieve the effect of a violent and sanguinary death. When the boy was murdered in earnest, he naturally shed more blood, as Mrs. Treadwell confirmed, real blood this time, his own.’

‘And the rock?’ I asked.

‘It acted as ballast,’ said Holmes. ‘After committing the deed, Edward hastily wrapped his accessories up in a bundle and shoved them through the window into the stream below, whence the constable and I extracted them on our return from Aylesbury. They too would have been got rid of in due time.

‘There you have the whole dreadful story,’ he concluded. ‘And now, Inspector, I fear it is my melancholy duty to advise my client as to the outcome of my investigation. Shall I leave you, then, to proceed with the arrest?’

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