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

prerationing box of the sultanas he liked. The lot barely filled a small grip. She put on her good blue dress with the mandarin collar and then went downstairs to find the boy. Even before the theft of Bruno, Linus had been prone to disappearance. He seemed less a boy to her than the shadow of a boy, stealing through the house, the village, the world. He had mouseholes everywhere, in shaded corners of the churchyard, under the eaves of the vicarage, in the belfry of the church tower itself. He wandered off into the countryside with the bird on his shoulder, and though she disapproved strongly of this, she had given up trying to stop him, because she could never bring herself to punish the poor child. She didn't have the heart. At any rate she had treated her Reggie with a strictness that did not come at all naturally to her, and look how he had turned out in the end.
    She found him down by the stream at the foot of the churchyard. There was a mossy stone bench there on which six or seven hundred years of villagers, no doubt, had come to sit under the spreading yew tree, thinking mournful thoughts. Martin Kalb sat beside him. Linus had taken off his shoes and socks. And Mr. Kalb went barefoot too. For some reason the sight of his pale feet poking naked from the turn-ups of his fine gray pinstripe trousers shocked Mrs. Panicker.
    "I am going out," she said, too loudly. She knew it was awful of her but she could not help shouting at the boy as if he were deaf. "I must pay a visit to Reggie. Mr. Kalb, I hope you will stay the night with us."
    Mr. Kalb nodded. He had a long, sweet face, plain and studious. He reminded her of Mr. Panicker at the age of twenty-six. "Naturally."
    "You can stay in Linus's room. There are two beds."
    Mr. Kalb looked at the boy, raising an eyebrow. As if out of respect for the boy's muteness he spoke to the boy very little. The boy nodded. Mr. Kalb nodded. Mrs. Panicker felt a rush of gratitude.
    The boy took his pad from his jacket, and his bit of green pencil. He painstakingly scrawled something on one page; he wrote only with great difficulty, chewing on his lower lip. For a moment he studied what he had written.
    Then he showed the page to Mr. Kalb. She could never make head or tail of the things he wrote down.
    "He asks if Mr. Shane is really dead," said Mr. Kalb.
    "Yes," she fairly shouted, and then, more softly, "he is."
    Linus stared up at her with his enormous brown eyes, and nodded, once, almost to himself. It was impossible to say what he was thinking. It nearly always was. Though she pitied him, and remembered him in her prayers, and in some strange way felt also that she loved him, there was something more deeply alien to her about Linus than his nationality or race could explain. Though he was a good-looking boy and the bird a handsome animal-and both of them surprisingly clean in their habits-there was an intensity in their attachment to each other that Mrs. Panicker found eerier than the bird's numerical tirades or its singing with a sweetness that froze the heart.
    The boy wrestled a few more words out of his pencil stub. Mr. Kalb scanned, then, with a sigh, translated them.
    " 'He was kind to me,' " he said.
    Mrs. Panicker tried to reply, but she seemed to have lost her voice. Something elbowed its way up into her rib cage. Then to her shame and dismay she burst lavishly into tears. It was the first time that she had cried since sometime in the late twenties, though the Lord knew that she had reason enough to cry. She cried because this boy, this somehow bruised or dented boy, had lost his parrot. She cried because her son was sitting in a cell under the town hall, a prisoner of the Crown. And she cried because at the age of forty-seven, after twenty-five years of piety, disappointment, and restraint, she had taken a deeply foolish interest in the new lodger Mr. Richard Shane, like someone out of a coarse novel.
    She went to the boy and stood before him. She had washed his bottom and