Bland Beginning (21 page)

“Not according to Ruth Cleverly, who saw him. Jebb thought, from its appearance, that it was a forgery, but as I told you he said it wasn’t from the same type fount as the others.”

“And it wasn’t included in the list that Cobb left.”

“No. That’s the extraordinary thing. If Cobb was the forger, the whole thing’s crazy, because the murders were obviously committed to preserve the forger’s secret. And if Cobb wasn’t the forger, then it’s even crazier.”

“Not necessarily. I think it makes sense of a sort. But let’s run over the course of events.” He took a piece of paper, wrote for five minutes in a neat hand, and passed the paper to Basingstoke, who read:

Chronology

Last week. Presentation copy of
Passion and Repentance
stolen from Rawlings.

Monday. Shelton buys copy (not presentation) at sale. Basingstoke suggests it is a forgery.

Tuesday. Jebb confirms Basingstoke’s view. Blackburn refutes it. Jacobs (bookseller) says that Cobb was the source of copies.

Wednesday. Jebb is found murdered. Leaves note about
Passion and Repentance
on his desk.

Thursday. Cobb is murdered. Leaves document revealing that Victorian bookseller Amberside was forger of many first editions (but does
not
mention
Passion and Repentance
).

“That leaves out the thefts of copies of the book that have been taking place over the past two years. Does it seem a fair statement otherwise?”

Still studying his friend’s handwriting with a frown, Basingstoke said, “Yes. But I don’t see that it’s any help.”

“There are two or three suggestive points, but one thing stands out like a sore thumb.”

“What’s that?”

“
Passion and Repentance
isn’t connected with the other forgeries.”

“My dear chap.” Basingstoke began to laugh, but was checked by his friend’s cherubic seriousness.

“I will go further, and say that the murders were probably committed, indirectly, to conceal that fact. Consider what Jebb said. All of the other forgeries were printed from the same type fount, a fount different from that of the forged edition of
Passion and Repentance.
Isn’t that suggestive? Isn’t it suggestive, too, that copies of this edition of
Passion and Repentance –
but not of the Amberside forgeries – have been stolen from libraries and private houses? And isn’t the simple and obvious explanation why Cobb left it off his list just that it didn’t belong there, and that he never thought of it as a forgery?”

“What about the bookseller? He said the copies he sold came from Cobb.”

“Perhaps they did – and their source is an entirely different one from that of the Amberside forgeries. Perhaps Cobb would have revealed that source, and that’s why he was killed. Or the bookseller may be lying. But it’s obviously a crucial point. Since your devouring curiosity has taken you this far, why not let it take you a bit further, and go and see the bookseller again tomorrow morning.”

“All right.” The scar in Basingstoke’s face was twitching. “But what could the motive possibly be?”

“That’s obvious, too, in general though not in particular. It must be something connected with the Rawlings family.”

“It could be, I suppose,” said Basingstoke slowly. “Yes, by God, it could.” Basingstoke’s young friend watched with some amusement his growing enthusiasm. “Look here. What about this? There’s an important secret hidden in just
one
copy of the book. That’s why all the copies are being stolen – because whoever’s after it doesn’t know which copy it is. Hence the thefts. It must be something really rich and romantic, like a secret code. Jebb and Cobb were killed because they knew the secret, or were just about to guess it. Doesn’t that seem plausible? But what can the secret be?” He got up and began to walk about the huge room, while the young man sat placidly at the table, turning a slightly ironical glance upon his excitable friend. “What about this? Old Martin got rich through an Australian cousin leaving him money. Until that happened he hadn’t much, had he? Supposing that Australian cousin had a nearer relative who should really have inherited?”

“He could have gone to law about it.”

“Perhaps it was an illegitimate son.”

“Then under English law he wouldn’t inherit, anyway. And I don’t see how you can tie all that up with the thefts of the book.”

“A secret code – a code making a will leaving someone else the money,” said Basingstoke hopefully, and laughed as he saw his friend’s face. “Don’t you think I’ve got something, though?”

“Perhaps. You realise that if what you say is anything like right, Rawlings may be in danger?”

“Caesar Rawlings? Uncle Jack?” Basingstoke said.

“If there’s someone who is the rightful heir to the Rawlings estate – or who believes he is, which for our purposes comes to the same thing – he’ll presumably be concerned to dispossess the present incumbent, by any means.” He paused, and added thoughtfully: “Short of murder.”

“Why short of murder? I should have thought murder –”

The young man’s rosy face showed a trace of impatience. “No, no. A fine thing it would be to have the man in possession murdered and then, in a couple of weeks’ time, Mr Y turning up, saying, ‘I am the heir.’ It would arouse suspicion at once. How much is the estate worth, by the way?”

“Vicky – Victoria Rawlings – says something near a hundred thousand pounds.”

The young man’s lips puckered in a noiseless whistle. “And who’s the heir to it all?”

“Nothing there, I’m afraid. Uncle Jack has a son named Philip, who’ll inherit.”

The young man seemed gravely to contemplate the possibility of Philip Rawlings’ involvement. Then he cleared away the supper plates from the table and rinsed them under a tap in a little kitchenette. “We may be altogether wrong. I should like to know the meaning of that drawing Jebb made on his blotter.” His voice trailed away, and when he spoke again it was on an apparently unrelated subject. “Has anybody studied the text of
Passion and Repentance
?”

With his face distorted in laughter, Basingstoke slapped his knee. “I wondered when you’d think of that. I’ve been doing that very thing, at odd times, for the past day and a half. I can’t help feeling there must be a secret in those damned poems or somebody wouldn’t be so keen to get hold of them. I must have read those forty sonnets a dozen times, and I’ve compared the text in the British Museum copy, which is the 1860 edition, with the standard one which appeared in 1868. They’re identical. And all anybody can get out of the poems themselves, it seems to me, is that the first twenty are full of blood and lust concealed in decent Victorian metaphor, and the last twenty are rather sickly and repentant. Of course, if there’s a secret hidden in one single copy it wouldn’t be revealed in the text.”

The two men sat silent, one untidy, dark and eager, the other neat, blond and placid. A moth whirred round the naked electric lamp high above the table. Outside in the street they could hear the tread of passing feet, and the indistinct sound of voices. “What did that drawing look like?” the young man asked, and Basingstoke sketched roughly on a piece of paper the man’s profile, enclosed in a kind of medallion. The young man studied it.

“It
doesn’t
look like anyone involved in the case?”

Basingstoke shook his head, and said facetiously, “Perhaps it’s the missing heir.”

“Perhaps.”

“I seem to have set you thinking.” Basingstoke got up to go.

The young man smiled a little apologetically. “I’ve never seen crime at such close quarters before. It fascinates me. Do let me know any further developments. I really have got some ideas, if I can sort them out.”

“You’ve put some into my head too. I’ll see that bookseller again in the morning, and let you know what happens.”

The last thing Basingstoke saw before he closed the door of the basement dungeon and ran up the area steps was his friend’s young blond head bent over the sketch he had made of the drawing left on Jebb’s blotter.

With the marks of tears dried on her face, Vicky Rawlings sat at her writing desk that Thursday evening, writing in her big red book.

“The misery I’ve suffered, dear diary, these past twenty-four hours, is something that can’t be put down but only experienced. I read somewhere, not long ago, that the degrees of misery and happiness are the same for everybody – that one person gets the same feeling out of listening to vulgar Mendelssohn that I do out of hearing exquisite Beethoven, and that a shop-girl who has a row with her young man suffers just as much as George Sand in her love for Chopin. Well,
I just don’t believe that’s true.
It simply can’t be true. I
can’t express
how miserable I’ve been since I had that row with Anthony.

“Of course, one doesn’t
show
these things as a shop-girl would, no doubt. Outside I’ve been as cold as ice – or I hope I have – but inside, what a raging fire! Don’t tell me that any shop-girl could have felt the same thing. And
he
, at the conference called by that beastly Inspector, he was really like a dummy in the chair, with his silly head all swathed in bandages. I don’t believe there are any feelings under that hard head. Oh, I could have
wept!
In fact I simply ignored him, but it was humiliating that he should ignore
me.
I thought when it all ended he would be certain to talk to me, but instead he was buttonholed by Uncle Jack and talked to him in a nasty, sly way. I don’t know what it was all about, but they both seemed very pleased with themselves. I just left, without looking back. When I see Uncle Jack, I shall give him a piece of my mind.

“To think that all this can happen over such a thing as
cricket
– that cricket can ruin two people’s lives. It does really seem wicked that such a thing can be – and shall I confess to you, dear diary, what I would never admit to anyone – that I have never
seen
a big cricket match – though, of course, I played the wretched game at school. I simply feel that it is a wretched, common game, and my feelings are never wrong. Sensitiveness in such matters, and true refinement, is everything.

“So I left Anthony talking to Uncle Jack, and that nice Basingstoke (he is really
not
repulsive, I find, but I will tell you, diary, in a moment what I do think about him) talking to the sluttish Cleverly girl, and came home alone by train. I was on my own in the carriage, and I began to
think.
The Inspector had been beastly to me when, after he read the wonderful statement by that man Cobb (a voice from the dead, as you might say) I said that Leon Amberside might be in the room with us – but afterwards they all looked surprised and foolish when I asked him if
Passion and Repentance
was on that list of Cobb’s, and he said it wasn’t. So I was right over
that.
Now, the thing that struck me in the train was this – Leon Amberside the father is dead, but what about Leon Amberside, the son? The boy who went to the war and was presumed to be killed. Supposing he
wasn’t
killed. Supposing he’d come back – to take revenge on Cobb? Cobb had as good as stolen money from young Leon Amberside, and he might have kept much more money than he admitted in the statement.

“I hadn’t got all this straightened out in my mind properly, and I didn’t quite see how Anthony’s book came into it, but I did see a kind of figure – fighting in the war and wounded perhaps, ‘presumed killed’ – coming back unknown to anybody to take a terrible revenge. And when I thought of that there suddenly came into my mind’s eye a picture of
that scar.
That terrible scar of John Basingstoke’s and that explanation he’d given me about his father being a boxer which I’d believed at the time. But, thinking of his queer sense of humour – look how oddly he behaved to me when I first met him – I wondered if perhaps that story was another of his jokes. After all, nobody could really have a name like Basingstoke. Or could they?

“Well, I was thinking these thoughts all the way back home, and I wasn’t at all prepared to find the house turned upside down because brother Edward had lost some drug or other, or thought he had. It was something called adrenaline, or some such name, and he was very mysterious about it, said it could be dangerous in the wrong hands and all that sort of thing. There was mother fluttering about like an old hen, looking in all sorts of ridiculous places, among the boot brushes and in the kitchen of all places, so that the new cook gave notice – and there was Edward watching everything gloomily and not trying to do anything himself, but saying over and over again that he knew the adrenaline was in a certain place in his poisons cupboard, and it wasn’t there now. And he kept looking at me queerly too, so that finally I asked right out if he suspected
me
of taking it and he said hurriedly no, of course not, and it turned out that he had in mind – John Basingstoke, when he was here to help me look through those papers. I didn’t see how he could possibly have got at Edward’s poison cupboard, and said so, but when I told him the stuff would no doubt turn up, and was probably just mislaid, he was more annoyed than ever. He had the last word by saying again that my connection with crime was being talked about in Barnsfield, and was – bad for the practice.”

Vicky felt suddenly extremely weary, and depressed. She put away the red-bound book with her usual care, and got into bed. A vision of Anthony with his head swathed in bandages was painfully before her, and her reaction to it was somehow not at all that of a grand lady. It was some time before she fell asleep, and as she lay in an uneasy doze two syllables formed themselves on her lips, and were repeated over and over. “Crick-et,” she repeated. “Crick-et, crick-et.”

“I was much delighted,” Mr Shelton said with a brown smile, “by your present.”

“Present?” Anthony thought for a moment that his father was joking, and then saw that the book held out to him had on its spine the words
Henry James.
“Oh. Very glad you liked it, Father.”