The Mammoth Book of Best British Mysteries Page 32

  We went quickly though some literals and questions that I’d sent him in advance. Then I got to my feet. “Thanks, Peter. Your new book is very good. It will have to be finally decided by the money men and the marketing people but I would be amazed if there was any hitch about your next one going mass market. We will have the same artist. You said you were happy with the previous covers.”

  “I leave all that to you London laddies,” he said. “That’s what a publisher does, isn’t it?”

  “That’s what a publisher does if he’s lucky enough to have a sensible author,” I said. “Another beer?”

  He shook his head but he didn’t leave. He didn’t even put his coat on, he picked it up and held it awkwardly and said. “You’d better tell me about it. I might be able to help. The parcel. Why would anyone crack open a safe to get a manuscript? Is it valuable? Why?”

  I didn’t answer.

  “Come along, man. I won’t be telling any of your secrets to the sheep.”

  “I didn’t open it,” I admitted. “I thought it was a photocopy of a manuscript but perhaps it’s an autograph manuscript. If it’s written by a famous writer from the past, it could be valuable.”

  “How valuable?”

  “I’ve no idea. Anything up to a hundred thousand pounds.”

  “Glasgow’s full of gentry who would slit their mother’s throat for a crate of scotch. London’s worse. You’d better tell your local law, or someone might start thinking it’s an inside job.”

  “That I’ve stolen it?”

  “There’s no evidence of a break-in, is there?” he reasoned.

  I shivered. “I’ll give it another day or so. You’ll keep all this to yourself, won’t you?”

  He nodded but he didn’t say yes. Peter Cardiff was a decent chap but once a policeman always a policeman. I had a feeling he was wondering about me. Wondering if I was trying to use him to cover some ingenious theft. All the other times I’d seen him it was in the office; so why ask him to come here today? I could see that question written in his face as he shook hands and said goodbye.

  “I don’t have my cleaning lady’s address or phone number,” I said.

  He smiled and nodded and I went down to the street and said goodbye. By that time I believe he thought I was the same sort of accident-prone schlemiel that Percy thought I was.

  Percy’s office was almost directly below mine, so on the Tuesday morning I arrived early and then went down to tell him I was ready for the meeting. I was still wondering how I was going to tackle him and his uncle. I would have indulged myself in a stiff drink before leaving home but I didn’t want to make things worse by arriving with booze on my breath. “Percy not here yet?” I asked his secretary.

  “Has no one told you? He never arrived yesterday.” She was flustered.

  “What?”

  “Poor Percy. He was waiting for a bus yesterday morning and a little car came out of nowhere.” She seemed to welcome the chance to relate the story again. “The ambulance took ages apparently and you know how dreadful the rain was. They took him to the little cottage hospital near where he lives. It’s not life threatening or anything. But his leg is broken. And he has what they call ‘superficial injuries’ – bruises and grazes. It didn’t stop; the car didn’t stop. What brutes people are. They’re doing tests, of course, in case he has anything internal. But he sounded quite cheerful on the telephone this morning. I’ll give you the number. He has a private line. You can visit him any time they say. It’s only a little hospital. I sent him some nice things to eat. He’s not on any special diet or anything.” Finally she ran out of steam.

  “So, no meeting this morning?”

  “It could be days,” she said. “Next week perhaps. He’s got his laptop and a dozen books he wanted from the London Library.”

  The phone rang. When she answered it I could tell it was an author complaining about a late arriving royalty cheque. I waved goodbye and left.

  At first I thought, hooray, reprieved. But then I thought of Percy in the hospital and I put aside the bundle of sentimental scribble that Princess bloody Diana expected me to transform into her next best-seller. Percy lived in a rather verdant neighbourhood on the edge of the green belt. The hospital was just half a mile away, a private one, situated in many acres of countryside. It was almost possible to forget the thunder and filth of the heavy traffic grinding along the nearby North Circular.

  “I see our client is a publisher by the cruel look in his eyes. His well-nourished countenance reveals a convivial lifestyle, and the faint remains of a tan suggest either an army man lately returned from service in the orient, or a playboy who takes extended holidays in Provence. As for the casing on the lower leg, this reveals a propensity to cross the road without looking both ways.”

  “Hello, Carl,” He was sitting up in bed with a cast on his leg and extensive dressings on one arm. I’d always thought of Percy as somewhat effete. He was continuously getting colds and was likely to be found pausing breathless on the landing when the lift was out of order. He was only slightly younger, but I’d been in the army while he was getting his law degree and somehow that made a difference to our relationship.

  But today I saw a new side to Percy. Despite having had surgery, he was energetically researching the world of Sherlock Holmes. On the bedside table he had his shiny new Sony laptop open and lit up. Beside it there was a tower of books from which grew a torrent of yellow sticky markers.

  I decided that the best line of defence was attack. “Look, Percy, the Titanic sank in April 1912 – I looked it up – and Doyle didn’t become interested in spiritualism until long after that. Long after Sherlock Holmes was dead and buried.”

  “If the old man offers you non-fiction editing, old lad, be sure to say no.”

  “Then what?”

  “First of all, Doyle joined the Psychical Research Society in 1893. That was the same year the Strand magazine ran ‘The Final Problem’ with Holmes tipping over into the waterfall. Doyle didn’t stop writing about Holmes just because his hero had died. He wrote ‘The Hound of the Baskervilles’, perhaps his best and most famous, in 1902, and predated the events. He simply said that this story was something that had happened to Holmes before he wrestled with Professor Moriarty above the lethal torrent of the Reichenbach Falls.”

  “I see.” I put a bottle of Johnny Walker on the bed and Percy grabbed it and hid it under his pillow. “You’ve been working hard, Percy. What are you going to be like when the anaesthetic wears off?”

  He beamed. Percy was enjoying it all. Sherlock Holmes had got to him as it has done to many thousands of readers over the years. And, from my point of view this was splendid. Anything that kept Percy explaining the manuscript to me, instead of the other way around, was a relief. “Tell me what else you found out?”

  “This is the interesting stuff, Carl.” He tapped one of the books. “Can you believe it? A new Sherlock Holmes story was published in the August 1948 issue of Cosmopolitan magazine. August 1948. Doyle died in 1930, didn’t he?”

  “Maybe they got it from a Ouija board.”

  “Very good, Carl. A very good joke,” he said solemnly. I think he hated jokes. He once told me that jokes diverted and diluted serious thought and conversation. He was right and that’s what I liked about them. “And I went on the Internet and found some Titanic nutters. It seems that Holmes got that one right too. None of the remains: flotsam, jetsam, anything-elsesam, had the name Titanic on it. Nothing! Nothing so far retrieved can be positively identified as from the Titanic”

  “What are they saying then? That some other ship struck the iceberg?”

  “Yes. The Olympic. But let’s not get into that just yet, Carl. Corpus delicti, remember what I told you? Our concern is the story we are offered. Let me tell you about another situation that might – at law – be comparable with the one we find ourselves in.” Percy was really enjoying himself. “This one surfaced in 1948. This was a Sherlock Holmes story called ‘The Man Who was Want
ed’. It wasn’t written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle; it was the work of another Arthur; a hard-up English architect named Arthur Whitaker. He sent it to Doyle. Feeling sorry for him, Doyle sent Whitaker a check for ten pounds and a sarcastic note telling him to invent his own characters rather than using Sherlock Holmes and co. Doyle tossed the story into the waste paper basket and forgot it. But someone – Lady Conan Doyle probably, or perhaps Doyle’s secretary – rescued it and filed it away with Doyle’s other papers.”

  A woman in a white starched overall came in, bringing a tray bearing two cups of tea and four chocolate biscuits. She wanted to adjust his pillows but Percy waved her away so he could get on with his story.

  “Ten years after both Doyles are dead, someone finds ‘The Man Who was Wanted’ tucked away in the Doyle archives. It’s unpublished and the law says that trustees are obliged to maximize the income of the estate. In good faith, they sell it to Hearst Newspapers. In England the Sunday Dispatch published this ‘new unpublished story’. January 2nd, January 9th and January 16th, 1949. It’s a big circulation booster for all concerned.”

  “But your story hasn’t come from the Doyle estate,” I pointed out to him.

  “I wish you would stop being such a damned wet blanket.”

  “I’m trying to stop you setting yourself ablaze.”

  “In fact, Carl, old bean, you are the one who struck the match. What you said about controversy, about a lot of people who will care less about authenticity than about wallowing in the financial benefits that widespread controversy will bring . . . well, that’s it.”

  I held up my finger in tacit protest. “It’s all very well to say that to me, Percy. But you must be very careful in expressing such ideas to other people. You’re a lawyer; I don’t have to tell you the implications. Conspiracy and so on.”

  He vigorously waved away my objections with his bandaged arm. “Just tell me one thing, Carl. Did you like the story?”

  “It’s all right,” I said cautiously.

  “It’s not just all right; it’s marvellous, isn’t it? It would make an exciting film with all the exteriors that film people call production values. It’s not just two old Victorian dinosaurs chatting by the fireplace in a Baker Street sitting room. You have the shipyards, the squalid Liverpool back streets and signing the contract in the fabulous Belgravia home of the White Star chairman. New York, too. It has enough to expand the American end of the story.”

  “Well, that would need a lot of extra writing and dialogue. A lot.”

  “Film people don’t mind that, Carl. They love extra writing. It gives them a chance to make the sort of film they prefer to make. Is that tea all right?”

  “Yes, the tea is fine,” I took a biscuit and bit into it. “The film end is a long shot,” I cautioned him.

  “Ah. That’s what you think. One advantage to having this private room is I can talk to New York and Hollywood while they are still awake out there.”

  “Hollywood?”

  “Yes, Hollywood, you damned Jeremiah. A film production company has been phoning everyone they can think of to ask about the new Sherlock Holmes story.”

  “A big company? How did they find out?”

  “Big enough to be talking about half a million dollars. And a share of the profits. What do I care about how they found out?”

  “But why?”

  “They need to schedule it. They need time to get the stars they want. They don’t want to wait around while we stage some prolonged kind of auction. Cash: up front.”

  “You talked to them?”

  “It’s better than that, Carl. These film company idiots in California have made enough phone calls to stir up our cousins in New York. I now have two publishers – one quite small, I admit – who want to do a deal. The word will soon get out. World volume rights; film and TV rights. There are all these disks and things nowadays. It could add up to a fortune.”

  “I’ve never been a party to that sort of thing, Percy. I just edit the books.”

  “And if the manuscript is in Doyle’s hand, it could bring an immense price at auction. It’s only in the last few hours, on the Internet, that I have learned how many rich collectors of Sherlock Holmes material are still active. There’s money in every aspect of this deal.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes, really, you old misery. And don’t tell me that the whole manuscript is a forgery, because I think it’s kosher.”

  “Well, I don’t know.”

  “Let me put it another way. Is there anything at all to suggest it’s a fake?”

  I pulled a face, not knowing how to proceed. “I’m not an expert.”

  “It’s real, isn’t it? It’s exactly like Doyle’s handwriting even to the sloping words on the title page . . . I was able to compare the writing with pages and pages of Doyle’s. I went carefully through every line of that facsimile edition of a Doyle manuscript that was published in Santa Barbara in 1985.”

  I nodded.

  “Yes, you know the one I mean: ‘The Adventure of the Priory School’.” Percy gave a triumphal grin. “You remember, do you? I’ve got it here now. My secretary found it. And do you know where my secretary found it? On the floor in your office.”

  “I was sorting through my books to throw some out. I need shelf space.”

  “On the floor in your office, Carl. On the top of a pile near the door. That’s where she found it.” He laughed indulgently. “You need shelf space, do you? You probably didn’t even look at it.”

  “I was working at home yesterday.”

  “With that policeman, Peter Cardiff. Yes, I know. Well, now you can drop everything like that until we get this story contract in the bag. I’ll want you with me when we face the board.”

  “You’ll buy it?”

  “We don’t want the Americans to share the purchase. If we can get it for half a million sterling, perhaps even more, we can’t lose. It’s better that we have it to ourselves, and then sell it piecemeal according to the best offers. The film people are in contact with New York and desperate to conclude. We have to move fast, Carl. And, let’s face it, you are not renowned as a fast mover.”

  “I’ve always been a cautious animal.”

  “That’s why you are still an editor. I do believe that if it was up to you, you wouldn’t buy this story.”

  “It’s a lot of money, Percy.”

  “Uncle agrees with me. It’s a business opportunity. You don’t have to have a degree in English Literature to see that.”

  “What about provenance?”

  “You are not to be swayed, are you? Personally I think this is a genuine story written, and hand-written too, by the master himself. But let’s suppose it’s not. You don’t imagine that this fellow Whitaker was the only one ever to have sent Doyle a Sherlock Holmes story, do you?”

  “I see what you mean.”

  “Yes, now at last, you are getting to see what I am driving at. I contend that, at the worst, this is a story that Doyle read and grudgingly approved. A story that perhaps Lady Doyle rescued and that people in his office filed away in his archive.”

  “Umm.”

  “And that’s at the worst.”

  “We’d better keep this conversation to ourselves, Percy.”

  “Everyone will make money.”

  “And the Doyle Estate?”

  “I will provoke them into denying that it’s genuine, or that they have ever seen it, or handled it.”

  “I’m glad I’m not a lawyer, Percy.”

  “That’s not nice. That’s the sort of joke I resent.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “Having a wife in Australia is not very good for the morale.”

  “A bonus and a long weekend will restore your morale. That new advertising girl is rather sweet on you, Carl. The one with the long blonde hair who wears those white sweaters. Did you notice that?”

  “I hadn’t even noticed there were girls in the advertising department.”

  “Exactly,” he said with t
he triumph of a diagnosis proved correct. “It’s no good sitting at home moping, Carl.”

  “I might go to Australia, Percy.”

  “That would be a blow, Carl.”

  “It’s my marriage, Percy. She has her family there and her parents are getting old. And my son doesn’t want to come back here.”

  “What work will you do?”

  “There’s an ad agency there. They would probably like the idea that I’d worked for a big London agency.”

  “You haven’t been negotiating all this on the sly, have you?”

  I shook my head and he smiled. I think he would have thought more of me if I’d said yes, I had.

  When I phoned my wife, I did it on a public phone from a railway terminal. It was better done that way. It was evening in London but noon in Los Angeles where she had a temporary secretarial job in a big movie production company. At noon Irene’s boss was always at lunch.

  “I sold our lovely Volvo. I didn’t have many offers. It went for a song but I’m using it for another few days and we did rather well on the lease of the flat. The new tenant moves in next week.”

  “Are you managing all right, darling?”

  “It’s not much fun without a cleaning lady – the dishes pile up – but it was better to let her go well in advance. She’s gone home for a few weeks. I gave her half towards her plane ticket and told her it was time she visited her mother.”

  “Well, in that case I shall give notice this afternoon.”

  “You should have seen Percy,” I said. “He was like a small child.”

  “We are going to ask for six. My brother is sure they’ll pay another hundred grand. They are very keen indeed. You are so clever, darling. A regular Sherlock.”

  I was silent for a minute or so.

  “Are you there, darling?” she asked.

  “It was just a goodbye joke,” I said. “You remember what we agreed.”

  “Why are you always such a wimp, darling? This is six hundred thousand pounds. This is a new life of high-living in a new land. We start again.”

  “Just a goodbye joke,” I said. “Taking the money would be . . .” I trailed to a halt.