The Library Paradox (5 page)

We entered. The vast, square room with its enormous windows looking out in all directions was peopled only by two lonely figures. One, a young man with spectacles, sat at a desk just within the main door, a pile of books before him.

‘This is Edmund Bryant,’ said the professor, pausing briefly before the desk to introduce me to him. ‘Our department has hired him to watch the library by day, so that it may continue to be used by students and faculty.’ I greeted him quietly, observing with interest his pale face equipped with a rather long, very narrow nose, a high forehead and oddly light eyes which seemed to emerge with difficulty from a state of deep concentration.

‘You are studying?’ I asked him.

‘I am working on my dissertation,’ he replied, and something like a flash of resentment appeared briefly in his eyes and disappeared immediately as he turned to his books again.

The other occupant of the library, a student with disarranged clothes and tousled hair, stood on a ladder fetching down a book from a high shelf. Upon hearing us enter, he descended. At the sight of Professor Taylor, he turned somewhat pale.

‘Ah, Randall,’ said the professor with a vinegary smile. ‘I am indeed pleased to have encountered you. How fortuitous. I believe you have something for me, do you not? It is already somewhat late.’

‘Oh, um, ahem, yes, of course,’ mumbled the student in deep embarrassment. ‘It is … that is … it is at home, have not had time yet to …’

‘Please do give it to me at the first opportunity,’ said Professor Taylor. ‘I am beginning to correct them today.’ And he continued to stand fixing the student with his sharp eyes. Completely flustered, the poor young man murmured a hasty assent, and putting the book he had selected down on the nearest table, left the library as quickly as he could.

‘One of the students in my advanced Medieval Commerce class,’ said the professor with some annoyance. ‘Brilliant, but disorganised and permanently late. He has still not given me his draft on Early Apprenticeships in the Art of Metalworking, and has been avoiding me lately because of it. I expect he has not completed it yet. Well, he is gone now; to finish it, I hope. Now for the other one.’ He turned to the studious gentleman at the front desk.

‘I will be remaining here for some time, Bryant,’ he said. ‘You may leave for the afternoon. Leave me the keys to the front door and the main gate; I will lock up, and you can get them back tomorrow morning if you come to me before classes.’

‘Yes, sir,’ said Edmund respectfully but reluctantly, beginning to gather up his things. He looked put out, as though he had been perfectly happy where he was, and
did not particularly want to be sent away, and piled his books with distinct lack of energy. He seemed about to say something, but the professor forestalled him.

‘Oh, and will you be going to the main building? You couldn’t stop off and put this note into Professor Hudson’s letter box, could you? It would be most helpful.’ Taking up a notepad, he wrote something upon the first page, folded it carefully and handed it over. Edmund could not but take it, and I admired the professor’s dexterity.

‘I wrote out the dinner invitation for Sunday to Hudson,’ he confided to me when Edmund had disappeared down the path and out of the main gate. ‘Why not? This way it’s done, and Bryant is got rid of. Now let us deal with anyone else who might choose to appear.’

He wrote
THE LIBRARY IS CLOSED TODAY
in large letters on the notepad, tore off the page, and pinned it to the heavy wooden front door, then closed it and locked it from the inside with the key he had authoritatively removed from Edmund’s possession.

‘Here we are, then,’ he said.

It took him several minutes of patience, trying the keys on his ring in the keyhole of the locked door to Professor Ralston’s study in turn, but he eventually located the right one and the door swung open.

‘Ah, there we go,’ he said with satisfaction.

The study presented a peculiar sight. The police had apparently left the furniture exactly as it had been when the murder took place. There was not much of it, in fact; apart from two large, solid oaken cabinets on either side
of the large window looking out over the grass at the back of the house, the study had been furnished only with an impressive, massive desk and two black wooden chairs, one with arms and one without. Probably the professor had one chair behind his desk and the other was for visitors, but it was not possible to tell immediately which chair had occupied which position, for they had apparently been flung about the room. The smaller of the two appeared to have crashed against the wall, smashing the glass of a picture, which still lay among the shards. The desk had been pushed over, but had not fallen entirely to the floor, having partially and crookedly come to rest upon the other chair, which lay flat on its back on the floor, rather miserably upholding the full weight of the desk on the edge of its upthrust seat. The desk was a handsome one; its burnished wooden surface was free since everything on it had slid to the ground. I spotted a little dent in its centre, as though it had received rather a sharp blow from a heavy object. I peered closely at this dent. It seemed to have been newly made; infinitesimal splinters of wood showed, clean and fresh, at its edges. The papers and pens which had been lying on the desk lay scattered on the floor, as did a nearly empty inkpot and an elegant brass lamp, its shade awry. A thick carpet covered the central section of the floor. Before the tragedy, the study must have been quite a pleasant place to be.

‘You see how the floor is raised above garden level,’ observed Professor Taylor. ‘One goes up several steps from the path to the front door; the higher level keeps out the damp. It means that the windows are quite high; they are
at waist level in here, as you see, and thus above head level outside. That is why the students who heard the sounds of the struggle which produced all this’ – he indicated the mess with a wave of his hand – ‘could not simply peer within to ascertain what was going on.’

‘It is a pity,’ I said thoughtfully, ‘that they did not think of climbing on each other’s shoulders.’

‘Peering in windows goes against the grain, instinctively, doesn’t it?’ he replied. ‘It probably did not even occur to them. I think that in their place I should have done exactly the same as they did.’

I walked rather tentatively around the fallen desk and looked at the spot where Professor Ralston had presumably been wont to sit.

‘This is where his body was found,’ said the professor. ‘He was apparently shot at very close range while standing behind his desk. There was not much blood. The police took away samples, I expect, to do whatever they do with them in their chemical laboratories, but I don’t believe it yielded anything unexpected. The gun was over there,’ he added, indicating a position one or two yards in front of the fallen desk, rather near the door. He then turned to the cabinets, and tried a drawer. ‘Perhaps we should begin by having a look at these?’

It had not occurred to me that he might actually intend to offer me his collaboration. I would much have preferred to work alone. It was my habit; after all, one could never tell who might be involved in the events one was trying to uncover, or at least have a secret interest in them. But he was
already opening some drawers and peering inside them, and for the life of me I could not see how to send him away.

‘This one holds drafts of his own papers and articles, and copies of newspapers and magazines containing things that interested him,’ he remarked, lifting out some of the contents.

‘I think I will begin by inspecting the desk,’ I said, and leaning down, I began to look at the papers that lay upon the floor. ‘I don’t suppose we had better disarrange things too much, had we? I mean, the police will be expecting to find this room as they left it.’

‘True, true,’ he said, quickly putting the papers he had spread out on the floor in front of the window back into a neat pile. Then he changed his mind. ‘Well, it’s not likely they’ll have memorised the exact order of every paper, is it? I don’t suppose it matters much. I’ll look at them drawer by drawer. Dear me, look at this – most interesting! Quite a collection of copies of original documents from the Spanish Inquisition! Notes from a trial, here. Not surprising, I suppose,’ he added, leafing through an article he had discovered, and looking as pleased as a cat with a saucer of cream. ‘Yes, I suppose that makes sense, with his interests, doesn’t it? Most interesting, this,’ and he continued reading busily. Within a few minutes he was utterly absorbed. It did not seem that he was going to be much of a disturbance to me after all.

Quietly, I picked up the few sheets from the floor and began to peruse them. One contained a careful outline of a lecture, and a couple of others contained a list of what looked like possible topics for dissertations. Besides this, there was
a letter in French addressed to Professor Ralston, and a final sheet, which appeared to be the beginning of an answer to this letter. I picked it up quickly, my heart beating. It seemed likely that this was the very last thing he ever wrote.

I could not help imagining the professor seated at his desk, writing these lines with a pinched expression on his face, pausing for a moment to consider his next words … and hearing a knock at the door.

Picking up the letter in French, I read it carefully. It was extremely short, and from what I could judge, the tone seemed to be aggressive, almost accusatory. However, it was too telegraphic in style for me to be able to understand what it referred to.

‘Do you know what this is all about?’ I asked Professor Taylor, carrying the letters over to where he knelt upon the parquet.

‘Eh? What’s that?’ he said, emerging with difficulty from the profound concentration inspired in him by the yellowed articles into which he was plunged.

‘Look at this,’ I said, pushing the documents under his nose. ‘Do you have any idea what it is all about?’

‘I’ve often wondered how a detective works,’ mused the professor unexpectedly, paying no attention to the papers I was holding out to him. ‘I mean, there must be such a wealth of information; far too much, one would think. Just look at all the papers in this room. Looking for a clue is like looking for a needle in a haystack, isn’t it? And the talking with people – why, what can one hope to discover by talking with my colleagues, for instance? I mean, I know them all very well, and can already imagine everything they will probably say. And I must say I can’t see what use any of it could possibly be in elucidating Professor Ralston’s death.’

His words distracted me momentarily from Lazare’s letter.

‘It is hard to explain exactly how I proceed,’ I admitted, quelling the slight feeling of worry that his words aroused in me. ‘I really don’t know just what I am trying to do. Maybe the best description would be that I form a picture in my mind of what constituted the normality of the situation I am investigating, and once I have developed a clear enough picture, I notice anything that stands out, and restrict myself
to investigating that. Now, of course, it is still too early for me to have formed a picture. Examining the papers in this room will help me to start. These particular letters strike me as very interesting. Please do have a look.’ And I thrust them towards him once again. The professor pushed his glasses up on his nose.

‘Most embarrassing, this looking at other people’s letters,’ he murmured uncomfortably, taking them and squinting at the Frenchman’s rather difficult handwriting. ‘This letter must be about the Dreyfus affair,’ he added after a moment, brightening visibly. ‘It simply has to be the very one he mentioned to me.’ This thought, or the exciting nature of the documents, appeared to relieve him of some of his scruples. ‘By that journalist I told you about, whose name I couldn’t remember. Lazare – yes, that’s it, Bernard Lazare, a French journalist much in the public eye. It is certainly he, and he does seem to assert that a new document has appeared, which apparently indicates another person as the guilty party. Dear me, this is exciting – I simply must find out more about it! Do you know, I must show you my dossier on the Dreyfus case when you come to the house for dinner. It’s a shocking business, you cannot imagine. I’ve been in contact with the family; they’re grateful to anyone who will show a bit of support. They’d give their right arms to make some progress in finding the true culprit. Perhaps this will finally turn out to be a break in the case, though it’s all rather cryptic. What exactly is a “
petit bleu
”?’

‘It’s a handwritten telegram on a standard blue postal form,’ I told him. ‘But he doesn’t say from whom to whom.
It sounds exciting to me, too, but apparently this letter didn’t have that effect on Professor Ralston. He appears to have decided to dismiss the whole thing out of hand.’

‘Well, that would be typical, I should say. Once he had got his opinion on something fixed, it was virtually impossible to make him change it. A pity. Such rigidity is not a professional advantage. Here, for instance,’ he added, taking up one of the papers he had been inspecting, ‘in this text, he absolutely insists on defending what is really now considered an outdated interpretation of some remarks by Torquemada …’

I left him to his studies, and after taking a few moments to copy down the contents of the two letters in my notebook, I replaced them more or less where I had found them and turned my attention to the drawers of the overturned desk. They yielded nothing of interest, however. There were only four of them, and two of those contained writing implements and blank sheets. The other two contained only work related to his teaching: carefully organised folders contained outlines of lectures and courses, and also lists of undergraduates and doctoral students, accompanied by personal commentaries, generally of a sour nature, such as: ‘no insight, destined to fail’ or ‘unpleasantly obsequious although hard-working’. My eye caught a familiar name: ‘Edmund Bryant: persists in stubbornly developing wrong ideas.’ I felt a brief flash of sympathy for the pale-eyed youth.