"The Case of the Vanishing Violin"

As recorded by Dr. Everett Thorne, Companion to Mr. Aldous Finch, Consulting Investigator of Pembrick Street

It was a drab, mist-strewn afternoon in early October when I found Mr. Aldous Finch, my esteemed companion, deep in contemplation over a peculiar note that had arrived by post only minutes earlier. He stood by the tall window of our modest yet comfortably cluttered flat on Pembrick Street, the fire behind him crackling as if agitated by the presence of mystery.

“A riddle has arrived, Dr. Thorne,” said he, holding the letter up to the weak daylight as though the fog itself might yield answers. “One most curious indeed.”

He handed me the note. The paper was thick, of a creamy quality, yet smudged by what appeared to be rosin dust. In a flowing but urgent script, it read:

"Mr. Finch—My Stradivarius has vanished from a locked room without trace, though I swear no man has crossed its threshold. I implore you to come at once. Time is of the essence. —H.V."

I raised an eyebrow. “Stradivarius? That would be—”

“Harold Vellum,” Finch interrupted, “first chair violinist of the Westminster Quartet. An odd man with a genius’s temperament, and a fondness for brandy and obscure composers. Come, Thorne. This sounds more invigorating than a week of the police gazing at footprints.”

We arrived at Mr. Vellum’s townhome in South Kensington within the hour. The housekeeper, a tremulous woman named Mrs. Deeks, led us up to the music room—still locked, just as the musician had left it.

Finch examined the lock before allowing Vellum to open it. “No scratches, no signs of tampering,” he murmured. “Very good.”

Inside, the music room was a study in precision. Manuscripts neatly stacked, a metronome ticking away in cold defiance, and an empty stand where, presumably, the Stradivarius had rested.

“The window?” Finch asked, gesturing.

“Latched from within, always,” Vellum said, wringing his hands. “I was gone less than half an hour—just down to the grocer. No one else has the key.”

“And yet,” Finch muttered, approaching the violin stand with his long frame stooped and thoughtful, “your prize has danced off without a partner.”

Finch asked to see the rest of the house. We passed through the kitchen, the parlour, and into the narrow back corridor where the servants once worked. There, Finch stopped abruptly and sniffed.

“Turpentine.”

“Yes,” Vellum nodded. “I use it to clean varnish from the violin—”

“Not fresh turpentine, my dear man. Recent. And not from your hands.”

He pointed to the baseboard near a small dumbwaiter shaft. A faint smear of the oily substance traced toward it.

With deft hands, Finch opened the shaft’s panel. It was narrow, but passable. “The perfect route for one familiar with the house,” he said. “Thorne, remember the housekeeper’s boots?”

I blinked. “You mean—?”

“She walks softly, yet the soles bore traces of resin—only found here. And I noted her hands: thin as Vellum’s bow and callused at the thumb and middle finger. A fiddler’s hands. Or once, perhaps.”

Moments later, Mrs. Deeks, confronted, collapsed into confession. She had been a prodigious violinist in her youth, until Vellum supplanted her in an orchestra decades prior. Revenge, tinged with old longing, had led her to steal the violin and hide it in the dumbwaiter compartment in the cellar.

The case was over before sundown, though Finch spent the evening replaying a record of Vellum’s final quartet performance, noting each missed note with mild contempt.

“You know,” he said, reclining, “for all his brilliance, the man has a weak trill.”

Source: Some or all of the content was generated using an AI language model