by George Sims
The End of the Web
George Sims
With an Introduction by Martin Edwards
Poisoned Pen Press
Copyright
Originally published in 1976 by Gollancz
Copyright © 2017 Estate of George Sims
Introduction copyright © 2017 Martin Edwards
Published by Poisoned Pen Press in association with the British Library
First E-book Edition 2017
ISBN: 9781464208997 ebook
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in, or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.
The historical characters and events portrayed in this book are inventions of the author or used fictitiously.
Poisoned Pen Press
4014 N. Goldwater Boulevard, #201
Scottsdale, Arizona 85251
www.poisonedpenpress.com
[email protected]
Contents
The End of the Web
Copyright
Contents
Epigraph
Introduction
Chapter I
Chapter II
Chapter III
Chapter IV
Chapter V
Chapter VI
Chapter VII
Chapter VIII
Chapter IX
Chapter X
Chapter XI
Chapter XII
Chapter XIII
Chapter XIV
Chapter XV
Chapter XVI
Chapter XVII
Chapter XVIII
Chapter XIX
Chapter XX
Chapter XXI
Chapter XXII
More from this Author
Contact Us
Epigraph
For a moment Raskolnikoff had carefully watched his interlocutor’s face, a face which continually caused him new astonishment. Although beautiful, it had points that were exceedingly unattractive. It might almost have been taken for a mask; the complexion was too bright, the lips too red, the beard too fair, the hair too thick, the eyes too blue, the gaze too rigid.
Dostoyevsky
Introduction
The End of the Web is an enjoyable thriller with a striking twist that comes, not in the final chapter, but a mere one-third of the way through. This unusual feature typifies the unorthodox nature of George Sims’ writing. His stories are as unpredictable in structure as they are in plot.
Leo Selver is a middle-aged man with a weakness for attractive women, and at the start of the novel he is hoping to embark on an affair with the glamorous Judy Latimer, with whom he’s recently struck up an acquaintance. Judy offers escapism, and Leo is in need of that. His marriage has never quite recovered following the death of his young son, and his professional life as a dealer in antiques has been complicated by his participation in a mysterious recent deal involving his friend Sidney Chard.
File notes reproduced in the text make clear that somebody is keeping tabs on both Chard and Selver, and Chard soon meets an unpleasant fate. Before long, two more deaths occur, and a young drifter called Ed Buchanan, whose CV includes spells as a policeman, racing driver, and labourer on a Greek island comes into the story. Ed has known the Selver family since he was a child, and his long association with, and liking for, Leo is the driving force behind the main events of the story. Ed has two puzzles to solve. One concerns Leo’s business dealings, the other is about his own destiny: what will give his life a sense of purpose?
George Frederick Sims (1923–99) was born in Hammersmith, the grandson of a London policeman. He met his future wife, Beryl Simcock, while he was still at school in Harrow; the couple married in 1943, and had three children. In the latter stages of the Second World War, Sims served in the Intelligence Corps; according to the interesting obituary which his friend and fellow bookseller Anthony Rota contributed to The Independent, ‘even 50 years after, he scrupulously observed the provisions of the Official Secrets Act and revealed scarcely a thing about what he did at Bletchley Park, though it was known that he was liaising with a Phantom Signals unit which was behind enemy lines.’ Quite a number of crime writers, and future crime writers, worked at Bletchley Park, although we are unlikely ever to find out whether they ever took a break from code-breaking to discuss how to construct and solve fictional mysteries.
After the war, Sims worked in an antiquarian bookshop before setting up as a bookseller on his own account, operating for the most part by mail-order from a cottage called ‘Peacocks’ in the village of Hurst in Berkshire, where he and Beryl moved in the early Fifties. Sims bought the papers of A.J.A. Symons, the bibliographer and author of The Quest for Corvo from Symons’ brother Julian, who was becoming recognized as one of the leading British crime writers of his generation, and the two men became firm friends. His first thriller, The Terrible Door, appeared in 1964: Rota described the book as ‘virtually a roman-à-clef, various characters being based on adaptations or amalgams of well-known book-trade figures of the day’.
Sims’ experience of intelligence work suited him, many thought, to writing spy fiction, but he preferred to build stories around ordinary men and women whose lives are disrupted by violence. In 1988, he was elected to membership of the prestigious Detection Club, no doubt with the support of Symons and his successor as President of the Club, Harry Keating, who ranked Sims’ The Last Best Friend (also published as a British Library Classic Thriller) as one of the ‘best 100 crime and mystery books’. Sims’ enthusiasms included pop song lyrics (Joni Mitchell is among those quoted in The End of the Web) and films; references to both cropped up regularly in his fiction.
Sims took his writing seriously, and Rota’s obituary noted the lengths he went to in researching locales for his stories. His outlook on life was rather downbeat: ‘That’s why all my characters are grey, and my villains are a darker shade of grey. There are no heroes in white hats.’ Yet the grimness is leavened with occasional touches of wit, and Sims’ people are by no means as unattractive as his modest words might suggest. Ed Buchanan, for instance, is an appealing individual, and the reader can believe that he is a good man to have on one’s side in a fight, partly because Sims was able to draw on his own past as a boxer, partly because he had the gift of conveying his experiences with authenticity.
Rota said that although Sims had many friends, ‘he was essentially a private and reclusive man. He had an offbeat sense of humour and could be a devastating mimic of mutual acquaintances. He did not suffer fools gladly; indeed it has been said of him that he refused to suffer them at all.’ He published collections of poetry, and four volumes of memoirs, culminating in A Life in Catalogues (1994). Rota suggested that sales of his thrillers suffered ‘because the books were not easy to categorise’, and this seems plausible.
Sims once said, again with his customary modesty, ‘My talent is a small one. But even people with small talents can do something with them.’ He was convinced that a plot in real life corresponded to the secret of the past at the heart of this story, although whether this conviction was based on a hunch or on some form of inside knowledge (perhaps gleaned from his intelligence work) is unknown. What can safely be said is that George Sims was adept at avoiding the formulaic, and at writing in such a way that his readers never knew in which direction the story was heading. The End of the Web is truly a tale of the unexpected.
; Martin Edwards
www.martinedwardsbooks.com
Chapter I
Women! Everything about them fascinates me! The thought came into Leo Selver’s mind so vividly that for a moment he felt that he had said it out loud. It was a naïve confession and not the kind of thing he wanted to admit. It was quickly pursued by a cynical comment from his other self: Seriously, though, there have to be worse ways of spending an afternoon.
Dichotomy: division or distribution into two parts; hence, a cutting into two; a division. He did contain two selves, dissimilar but complementary characters. There was the more obvious extrovert one, call him Leo for short, a typical Sun subject, born in August, romantic, impulsive, generous, greedy, vain, a man who made money quickly and lost it, philandered, played the fool, got into trouble. Then there was the subtler character, sober old Selver who had the second thoughts, watched everything and everybody including Leo, made sly comments and criticized, saw the absurdity of Leo’s behaviour, tried to take evasive action whenever possible.
Judy Latimer was making a graceful exploration of Leo Selver’s small sitting-room like a cat taken to a new home, at once inquisitive and wary. His flat was at the end of Welbeck Street Mews, a convenient situation that made it quiet and not overlooked. The sitting-room and kitchen faced the entrance of the mews; the bedroom and bathroom were at the back, and the only windows in those rooms were skylights.
Judy touched two paper-weights on the desk then turned towards Leo, using her greenish-blue eyes in an expressive way to show that she was enjoying herself.
‘Fantastically quiet here! Why should it be so quiet?’
‘It’s a backwater of a backwater. There’s not much traffic in Welbeck Way, and then being tucked away from that.’
Judy opened her eyes very wide in a bold expression that Leo found rather sexy though he knew it usually accompanied some criticism. ‘But you don’t live here most of the time, do you? Someone in The Olive Branch said you lived in a country cottage.’
Selver thought: So! You’ve been asking about me in my local. What do you want?—the whole picture?—that I’ve been married for twenty-six years, that we had a son who died when he was seven leaving us an inconsolable couple, that my wife had a hysterectomy a year later, that the operation which wasn’t supposed to affect her sex life left her indifferent to it, that I’ve become a girl-chaser? He said, ‘That’s right. A small cottage near Alton in Hampshire. Not all that distance from London but sometimes I work late at the shop and feel too tired to tackle the trip home.’
‘And your wife, doesn’t she stay here?’
‘Occasionally, when she comes to London to do some shopping, that kind of thing. She’s having a few days by the sea at the moment.’
Judy nodded significantly, conveying the thought: Aha! So that’s why the mice can play. She turned away to continue her exploration, or was it a valuation survey?
Selver watched closely as she picked up an enamelled Arita jar then replaced it after a hasty glance and clambered on to the large leather couch to examine a small painting he had craftily hung above it.
Surely there could be few men who after consuming a good lunch and just too much wine would not experience some sexual stirring as Judy disclosed more and more leg. Leo was aware of only one handicap that prevented the situation being perfect: August 1973 was presenting another stifling hot day and a sexual wrestle would be less pleasant in such heat.
Leo was drawn to the couch nevertheless and sat down at the point furthest from her, closing his eyes for an instant listening to the Nat Cole disc spinning round in the bedroom. It was an old favourite, ‘Cherchez La Femme’:
Look for the girl, monsieur,
You’re sure to find
Clouds silver-lined
Such is amour…
Intoxication, the music, Judy’s jonquil perfume, her visible charms and hints of those that were hidden, together with a faint sense of mystery about the girl, all contributed to Leo’s sensual mood. Her skin looked as if it had been dusted with talcum powder then rubbed to achieve a silky smooth effect. He could imagine just how her long blonde hair would look falling over bare, satiny shoulders.
Leo steepled his fingers, looking as though he might be brooding on the world’s problems, trying to dissemble his obsessional thoughts. The desire to touch Judy’s skin was working in him like a fever, particularly now that he had only to reach out a few inches to fondle the back of her thigh, but he felt this was a game he had to play with skill. Disconcertingly Judy also seemed to contain two selves. He had thought so the first time he had seen her, only two weeks before this pleasant rendezvous, while having a lunch-time Guinness and sandwich in The Olive Branch, the nearest pub to his antique shop in Crawford Street. On that occasion she had been talking animatedly to a striking-looking Chinese girl. Watching them covertly, he had thought: If the Devil came in now I’d gladly strike up some kind of bargain with him, swapping a few of the fag-end years for the chance of an affair with either of those two beauties. A moment later, as if in quick response to his imaginary arrangement with Mephistopheles, Judy had smiled faintly in his direction, a gambit which had so surprised him that he had looked around to see if it had been intended for a younger or a better-looking man.
That meeting and two more in the same pub had shown her to be moody, at times appearing uninterested in him and then suddenly switching back on, using her eyes to beckon with, holding the back of his wrist whenever she wanted to see the time. But now that another lunch-time meeting in The Olive Branch had led to her accepting his invitation to eat with him at the Hellenic in Thayer Street, now that she had been plied with good Greek food and wine, he felt quite uncertain as to the outcome of further proceedings.
‘This I like. I mean very much. Really beautiful.’ Judy turned round with an awkward, rather tantalizing movement showing even more leg. There had been a flash of white briefs and Leo’s impulse was to kneel down and worship at the shrine of sex, kissing that delicious-looking bent knee.
But Selver noted the momentary business-like look in her eyes, just as if she was trying to get his weight in some deal. Without animated eyes and flashing teeth she looked rather cold and calculating. Perhaps she was the kind of girl with whom everything she touched turned to ‘sold’.
Judy had removed the tiny Lucien Pissarro painting from the wall and seemed entranced by its jewel-like colours; her hands now formed an additional, possessive frame. Impulsively Leo, who placed little value on material possessions, having attended a thousand house-sales where all the hoarding of a lifetime was dispersed in a day, felt like offering it to her as a gift, but Selver was in control, as he was when it came to business, censoring the offer, saying nothing but nodding sagely.
Judy smiled mischievously and replaced the painting quickly, saying, ‘I feel rather guilty. I mean…I must be holding you up, keeping you away from the shop. Expect you’re busy.’
‘Dear girl, business deals for me are just necessary to bring about delightful moments like this. You see I’ve got my priorities right. Pleasure before business always.’
It was Leo speaking and Selver thought: Listen to him. Another glimpse of underwear and he’ll be singing ‘Love is my reason for living’. But even Selver had to acknowledge that the girl had a beautiful mouth, like that of the Michelangelo statue Pietà, her yellow hair shone and bounced with health, and her breasts looked high and perky.
Judy slid down on to the couch, turning round and lying back in one lithe movement. She said nothing but smiled enigmatically. She looked very relaxed and definitely seducible. Now was the time to cut out words and make some direct physical approach. Years ago he would not have hesitated but some vital confidence had ebbed away, leaving him at times in the unhappy position of a tyro in the arts of love.
Judy sighed, and even that slight movement of her breasts had a voluptuous appeal for Leo. She lifted her head, making
a point that she was trying to catch the lyrics as Nat Cole sang ‘Let There Be Love’.
‘That’s nice too. A golden oldie all right, but it’s still good. And the piano.’
‘The pianist is George Shearing…’ Leo hesitated, realizing that the name would probably mean nothing to her, wondering whether to add a few words about the brilliance of the blind pianist. Leo was so intent on gaining access to the girl’s pearly belly and the secret mouth between her legs that his anxiety prevented him from thinking straight, and that would probably sabotage the operation. One part of his mind was foolishly acting like an advance scout, running on ahead of the present proceedings, warning him to remove his socks at the earliest opportunity, reminding him there were few less romantic images than a middle-aged man in pants and socks. All this elaboration and he had not yet touched the girl apart from putting his hand on her back as they left the restaurant.
‘Oh dear—I just can’t concentrate on the words. You gave me much too much wine. That was naughty! Now I’m feeling very vague. Everything is a bit unreal.’
‘Would you like to lie down in the bedroom for a while? It’s cooler in there. Just a quiet lie-down and little cuddle perhaps. Nothing more than that.’
‘Next thing you’ll be suggesting I take off my dress so it won’t get creased.’ Judy smoothed the hem of her short blue shantung frock over her knees in a demonstration of modesty that was not really convincing.
‘Well I’ll have a bet with you that I shan’t ask you to take off anything else. I just thought it would be nice to have a little lie-down in the cool, hold you in my arms for a while…’
‘I don’t know…Once I get horizontal…’
‘Don’t be silly. You’ve got a will of iron.’
‘And you’re a tricky character, that’s for sure. Well, what’s the bet?’
Again Selver was put off by her business-like expression, as if the bedroom decision depended solely on the size of the wager. For a moment he felt sure that this was not the first time she had put herself up for sale. She said she was a model but was vague about where she worked. Leo disliked the idea of paying directly for sex although quite willing to be generous about gifts. And the conversation was going on too long, practically turning into a debate. Obviously he should pull her off the couch and carry her into the bedroom, wrestle with her or smack her bottom, anything to make physical contact and achieve that happy position where words became superfluous. But the effect of the wine was passing off and his sexy mood was being replaced by one of tiredness. If the chat continued much longer his tone might become querulous. Selver mentally counselled himself to accept defeat: Ah well, it’s all part of life’s going-grey pattern. Give up, you fool, and let the girl go. Face the fact that she’s not at all keen on this lying-down lark and pass off the situation with a joke.