Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine 11/01/12

Art by Allen Davis

 
Charles Dickens' 200th birthday is being celebrated with
fanfare in England and many other places this year. Born on February 7, 1812,
Dickens is often claimed as one of our own by the mystery community for his
creation of characters such as Fagin, "receiver of stolen goods," and books such
as
The Mystery of Edwin Drood.
Woodberry Forest School
teacher and writer W. Edward Blain will be taking eleven of his students to the
Dickens House Museum in July in honor of the Dickens
bicentenary.
 

Art by Allen Davis

 
When the police arrived at the Dickens House Museum in London, the
body of Ravi Vikram sprawled on the floor of the small bedroom, head against the
wall, eyes still open, rope marks still visible on his neck. Driscoll Henley
stood nearby, the purple velvet rope used for the strangulation now dropped by
his feet. Within minutes the police advised Henley of his rights and handcuffed
him, but before they could lead him downstairs to the waiting police car, he
protested.

"I'm telling you that I'm a teacher, not a killer," he said. "Call the head of my
boarding school in the United States. She'll vouch for me."

"Will she?" said the inspector, a tall man in a brown jacket. "Your hands were on
his throat."

"I was removing the rope," said Henley. "I was trying to resuscitate him."

"We can discuss it in good time," said the inspector. "For now, Mr. Henley, you
are under arrest for the murder of Ravi Vikram, actor."

"Give me five minutes," said Henley. "While everybody is still here in the
building. Five minutes."

"Why should I do that?" asked the inspector.

"Because I have one advantage over you," said Henley. "I can eliminate myself as
a suspect."

"You know who killed this man?"

"Five minutes," said Henley.

The inspector looked at his watch. "Starting now," he said, and Driscoll Henley
desperately began to think. He had no idea who had murdered Ravi Vikram, but he
needed to find out during the next four minutes and fifty-eight seconds.

Henley's ordeal began six months earlier, when Suzanne McClain, the head of
Foxborough Hall, summoned him to her paneled office. "How would you like to
spend a month in London?" she asked him. "All expenses paid by the school?"

He was delighted by the offer, but he didn't answer right away. School heads
don't make such offers without ulterior motives.

"There's a catch, of course," she said, reading his face, if not his mind. "You
have to solve a mystery." She smiled, and her green jacket set off her red hair
in a way that always reminded him of Maureen O'Hara in a John Wayne movie.

"The mystery of the coy headmistress?" he asked, smiling in turn.

"The mystery of Charles Dickens, the playwright."

Had he misunderstood her? "Dickens was a novelist, not a playwright."

She shook her head. "He loved the theater all his life. He performed in plays and
directed them throughout his career. He mounted four plays successfully in
London before he published a novel. Why didn't Charles Dickens become the great
Victorian playwright? That's what I want you to find out."

He realized that she was serious. "I'll do my best," he said eventually. "But
why?"

"Because a prominent alumnus with a passion for Dickens has offered to build a
new arts center if someone on the faculty can explain satisfactorily the great
writer's career switch."

"Wasn't it simply a matter of money? Playwrights don't earn much."

"Our donor doesn't find that explanation sufficient. You need to saturate
yourself in Dickens, come back here, meet with the man, and offer a plausible
narrative for why Dickens stopped writing plays. Do that, and I'll be
grateful."

It had sounded so manageable in January. Now, on a Wednesday in June, he was
suspected of murder. How could the day have gone so wrong? It had started
auspiciously enough. He had been full of confidence at nine-thirty a.m. as he
had tossed a solitary apple into his briefcase and walked from his flat in
Russell Square to Doughty Street, a sunny Bloomsbury thoroughfare. The Dickens
House Museum sat in a block of modest townhouses nearly indistinguishable from
one another: drab brick, unadorned rectangular windows, arched doorways.

Inside the museum a thin woman standing behind a glass counter smiled when he
introduced himself.

"I'm Mrs. Pierce," she said. "You'll be wanting the director, won't you?"

"Yes, Mr. Jarvis Dedlock," said Henley.

She shook her head. "I'm afraid you just missed Mr. Dedlock. He's been
sacked."

"What?" Henley had exchanged e-mails with Jarvis Dedlock for the past three
months in order to arrange on-site research.

She leaned forward to stage-whisper the rest. "Valuable items from the collection
have gone missing."

"And Mr. Dedlock is responsible?"

Mrs. Pierce, clearly enjoying her role as bearer of sordid tidings, shook her
head. "Mr. Dedlock assures me that the thief is still among us. Mark my words,
Mr. Henley. Jarvis Dedlock is as innocent as a lamb."

Henley was primarily concerned with whether the archives would still be available
to him. Mrs. Pierce reassured him that all would be well. "The new director is
Mr. Thatcher Finn. He's in conference at the moment, but I'll alert him that
you're here. Would you care to enjoy the exhibits while you wait?"

He retreated contentedly enough into what had been the Dickens family's dining
room. His rubber-soled walking shoes were silent on the hardwood floors. There
was little furniture. Locked glass cabinets held displays of
Dickensiana—letters, manuscripts, reviews, first editions. Henley
gravitated to an exhibit of a magazine called
Household Words.

"He published nearly everything in periodicals first, you know," said a voice
behind him. He turned to face the speaker and beheld, to his surprise, someone
who looked like a fifteen-year-old surfer: blond hair in a choppy mullet, white
T-shirt advertising Pimm's, pedal-pusher trousers that fell halfway between
kneecap and ankle, and flip-flops.

Behind this young man was an older gentleman wearing waistcoat, pince-nez, and
watch chain. His diaphanous white hair lifted off his head to form a halo in the
doorway, and he smiled politely at the assertiveness of the chatty young man.
Henley could not have conjured a more Dickensian director for the Dickens House
Museum than the man in the doorway, who had just enough of a belly to qualify as
generously proportioned but not quite enough for portly.

"Mr. Finn, I presume," said Henley, artfully dodging the young man, crossing to
the chap in the doorway, and extending his hand. But the plump gentleman
blushed.

"Right here, Mr. Henley," said the young man. He stood with hands in his pockets
and one foot crossed over the other. "But please meet Mr. Ravi Vikram. He works
for us."

Henley required a few moments to recalibrate his assumptions. Thatcher Finn, the
director of the Dickens House, was this . . . this slacker? And the gentleman
who looked exactly like Pickwick had an Indian name?

Ravi Vikram, who appeared to be in his mid fifties, extended a hand for Henley to
shake. "Hope to see you at the show," he said, and when Henley looked puzzled,
he added, "In the parlor. This evening."

"Mr. Vikram plays Dickens in a weekly performance," explained Thatcher Finn.
"Every Wednesday night in the parlor. Including tonight."

Henley was still trying to sort out the cast of characters. "Mr. Finn," he said
finally to the young man. "Forgive me for saying so, but you look so young."

"He is young," said Ravi Vikram, who spoke with an elegant Oxbridge accent. "How
old are you, Thatch?"

"Twenty-eight." Finn was clearly accustomed to the question. "Before you ask, I
read literature at Durham and got the master's at Trinity, Cambridge."

"So all my arrangements with Jarvis Dedlock—?"

"Terribly sorry about the confusion," said Thatcher Finn. "One of those rather
unexpected departures. He dropped by this morning to turn in his keys. You just
missed him, in fact."

"That's what Mrs. Pierce said at reception," said Henley.

Thatcher Finn lofted several sheets of paper. "I have printouts of your e-mail
messages here, Mr. Henley. You're interested in the plays, are you? Shall I show
you the reading room? Ravi, might you pardon us?"

Ravi Vikram waved them away as Thatcher Finn led Henley back to the reception
area and through a door into a large, well-equipped modern office.

"For security purposes, the only access to the reading room is through my
workplace," said Finn. He guided Henley to a door on the opposite wall.

They descended a steep staircase into a small room with a single table offering
comfortable seating for four. Abutting the table was an old-fashioned card
catalogue, and except for a desktop computer tucked away in a cubbyhole, the
rest of the room was filled with bookshelves.

"If you can't find what you need on your own," said Finn, "Manette Marley will be
happy to assist you."

"Manette Marley?"

"Our curator. Here she comes now."

They could hear footsteps on the stairway. A moment later she entered. Manette
Marley had ebony skin, dreadlocks, and three small rings in each ear. She smiled
and offered a firm handshake.

"Nigerian," she said in a flawless British accent. "Everyone always asks
eventually, so there you are. Lovely to have you here, Mr. Henley. You're
showing him round, Thatch?"

Her work station was the small cubbyhole attached to the reading room, and she
tapped computer keys during Henley's brief tour.

"We keep some of the collection upstairs," Finn explained. "This catalogue will
tell us where a particular item might be, including in the display cases.
Manette or I can bring you manuscripts for anything that's not published, but I
have to ask you to use these when you handle primary materials." He indicated a
box of white cotton gloves, similar to what Henley had to wear when he was
attending cotillion as a boy. "Even the oil from clean fingers can accelerate
the deterioration of paper." Henley began to gather that Thatcher Finn belonged
in this job after all.

"I'm trying to learn why Dickens never became a major Victorian playwright. Do
you have any ideas?"

"Easy," said Thatcher Finn. "He wasn't very good at drama, was he?"

"Yes, he was," came the voice of the invisible Manette Marley. "He put on plays
in his Tavistock Square house for years. And he acted."

Thatcher Finn grinned. "There you are. The cutthroat world of Dickens
scholarship, where the discovery of even a greengrocer's bill can generate envy,
acrimony, and knives in backs."

Henley soon settled into a comfortable routine. He would read for an hour, then
take a break by visiting one of the rooms in the museum overhead. The Dickens
House was vertical, with only a couple of rooms on each of the four floors, and
by two p.m. Henley had explored his way up to the two bedrooms at the top of the
house. The larger one had belonged to Dickens and his wife, Catherine. The
smaller bedroom, however, offered a more macabre history: Here young Mary
Hogarth, Dickens' sister-in-law, died at age seventeen. A half-dozen other
visitors reverently milled about the cozy space, which, like all the other
rooms, displayed Dickens artifacts under glass.

Between the bedrooms was a narrow dressing room where Henley suffered a scare.
Behind a velvet rope was a square table covered with photographs of the Dickens
family, a special exhibit in honor of the bicentennial of Dickens' birth. The
red satin tablecloth fell all the way to the floor, and as Henley leaned over
the restraining rope to get a closer look at Mary Hogarth's portrait, a hand
came out from beneath the table and grabbed his ankle. He yelped. Then a small
boy, surely no more than four years old, shouted, "Boo," and poked his head from
beneath the tablecloth. In a moment the child's embarrassed mother had forcibly
retrieved him and apologized, but it was enough to send Henley back to the quiet
of the reading room, where he was working his way through a silly Dickens farce
called
Is She His Wife?

In his absence a petite woman in her early twenties had arrived. She wore slacks
and a T-shirt and tiny reading glasses, and she quietly conferred with Manette
before putting on a pair of white gloves and receiving from the archives five
letters, still in their envelopes, each stored in a brown paper sleeve. She sat
opposite Henley at the only table, and she nodded politely at him before she
began her examination of the first document. In embarrassment he closed his open
briefcase. The entire contents consisted of one red apple for snacking. Though
Henley fully expected to accumulate abundant notes and papers by the end of the
month, his briefcase for now served merely as a prop to distinguish him as a
scholar, not a tourist.