The Final Solution: A Story of Detection Read Online Free PDF Page A

two policemen, Bellows and Quint; at Mr. and Mrs. Panicker, standing on either side of a birdbath; at a handsome Jew in a black suit; a sundial; a wooden chair; a hawthorn bush in lavish flower. They were all gazing upward to the peak of the vicarage's thatched roof at the remaining token in the game.
    "Young man, you will come down from there at once!" The voice was that of Mr. Panicker-who was rather more intelligent than the average country parson, in the old man's view, and rather less competent to minister to the souls of his parishioners. He backed a step or two away from the house as if to find a better spot from which to fix the boy on the roof of the house with a baleful stare. But the vicar's eyes were far too large and sorrowful, the old man thought, ever to do the trick.
    "Sonny boy," Constable Quint called up. "You're going to break your neck!"
    The boy stood, upright, hands dangling by his sides, feet together, teetering on the fulcrum of his heels. He looked neither distressed nor playful, merely gazed down at his shoes or at the ground far below him. The old man wondered if he could have gone up there to search for his parrot. Perhaps in the past the bird had been known to take refuge on housetops.
    "Fetch a ladder," the inspector said.
    The boy slipped, and went sliding on his bottom down the long thatch slope of the roof toward the edge. Mrs. Pan-icker let out another scream. At the last moment the boy gripped two fistfuls of thatch and held on to them. His progress was arrested with a jerk, and then the handfuls ripped free of the roof and he sailed out into the void and plummeted to earth, landing on top of the good-looking young Jewish man, a Londoner by the cut of his suit, with a startling crunch like a barrel shattering against rocks. After a dazed moment the boy stood up, and shook his hands as if they stung him. Then he offered one to the man on his belly on the ground.
    "Mr. Kalb," cried Mrs. Panicker, scurrying over, a hand pressed to the necklace at her bosom, to the side of the dapper Londoner. "Good heavens, are you hurt?"
    Mr. Kalb accepted the hand the child offered him, and pretended to let the boy drag him to his feet. Though he winced and groaned, the grin did not leave his face for a moment.
    "Not terribly. A bruised rib perhaps. It's nothing at all."
    He held out his hands to the boy, and the boy stepped between them. Mr. Kalb, with a visible wince, lifted him into the air. Only once he was safely in the arms of the visitor from London, for reasons that the old man felt a powerful desire to understand, did the boy relax his grip over his emotions, and mourn, wildly and uncontrollably, the loss of his friend, burying his face in Mr. Kalb's shoulder.
    The old man made his way across the garden.
    "Boy," he said. "Do you remember me?"
    The boy looked up, his face flushed and swollen. A delicate span of mucus connected the tip of his nose to the lapel of Mr. Kalb's jacket.
    The inspector introduced the old man to the mournful--eyed man from the Aid Committee, Mr. Martin Kalb. Mrs. Panicker had sent for him as soon as Bruno went missing that morning. When he heard the old man's name, something flickered, a dim memory, in the eyes of Mr. Kalb. He smiled, and turned to the boy.
    "Well," he said, in German that the old man understood a few moments after the words were spoken, giving the boy's shoulder an encouraging squeeze. "Here is the man to find your bird. Now you have nothing to worry about."
    "Mrs. Panicker," the old man said, over his shoulder. The blood drained from the woman's face-every bit, though he did not suspect her for a moment, as if he had caught her without an alibi. "I shall want to speak to your son. I am sure that the police will have no objection to your coming along with a clean shirt and a packet of biscuits."
    5
    She packed a pair of shirts, two pairs of socks, two pairs of neatly pressed underpants. A brand-new toothbrush. A cheese, a packet of crackers, and an ancient,