Fen Country

by Edmund Crispin

  “Almost certain, I’d say. The diamond had stored all that light because he was staring at it virtually up to the last possible moment. Either he’d forgotten that when Ben put their plan into operation the diamond would shine, or else—which seems more likely—he just thought that the interval, between the light going out and the Reine being grabbed, would be too short for anyone to notice.”

  “Well, I noticed,” said Humbleby. “The question is, did Savitt? Did Shirtcliff? If they both did”—and here an unhealthy revengeful gleam appeared in Humbleby’s eye—“Asa’s claim on Krafft Insurance isn’t going to look too good.”

  “If he disgracefully neglected a specified precaution, then the whole thing is void.”

  “Void.”

  “And did only Asa have access to that Pratt’s Bank safe-deposit? I mean, if he could just give the key to someone else, then he could say—”

  “No, it had to be him. Couldn’t be anyone else.”

  And here Fen considered Humbleby with a faint air of displeasure which, except between such old friends, might have seemed slightly ungracious. “I don’t altogether dislike the sound of your Asa,” he said. “Of course, it’s bad to try to defraud insurance companies, and if for all of you that diamond did in fact shine in the dark, then… Even so, there are some moods”—and here, Fen brought the sherry out again—“in which it’s possible to feel that the thing was worth a try.”

  “Asa withdrew his claim,” said Humbleby when six months later he and Fen met coincidentally at the Travelers’, “because Savitt and Shirtcliff had both, like me, glimpsed the Reine self-luminescing. So the claim wouldn’t wash—and now, I understand, Asa’s quite a poor man. He makes out, though, as poor men so often mysteriously do. Is your conscience at rest?”

  “Shirtcliff?”

  “Sacked from Safeguard for incompetence, and at once taken on by the Metropolitan Police.”

  “Savitt?”

  “Richer and more famous and more courteous than ever.”

  “The diamond?”

  “Well… Somewhere. I suppose we’ll never know.”

  They never did know, but at the last, one man, without knowing it, knew.

  Police Constable Bowker’s “manor” was centered on the hamlet of Amble Harrowby, a focus for much rich agricultural activity. Left-wing himself, Bowker was unable to suppress at least a theoretical distaste for the local Socialist peer, Lord Levin, whose notional egalitarianism had somehow never prevented him from enjoying such benefits as an inherited title, with additional tremendous inherited wealth, could bestow. At the same time, Bowker realized that in this respect he was perhaps being a little naïve, the more so as Lord Levin went to such particular trouble to be pleasant to everyone, Bowker himself by no means excluded. There could scarcely—Bowker reflected, as he buzzed through the lanes in his white crash-helmet, on his little machine—be a more agreeably conscienceless man in the entire land.

  In particular, this scheme of a trout-lake was good. Lord Levin had many farm tenancies on his property; one of these—always notable for the combined age, idleness and incapacity of its tenant—had recently been caused to be vacated by death; and Lord Levin was taking the opportunity of converting some fifteen acres of notoriously unproductive land into a fairly large-scale water for fishing.

  Now, Police Constable Bowker, whatever his general feelings about Lord Levin, didn’t at all disapprove of this. On the contrary, since the lake was to be a natural-seeming sort, confluent with the surrounding mild bulges of the countryside, he felt, and felt quite strongly, that here was an instance where private riches might quite well redound to the public good.

  He stopped his machine, therefore, at a specially good point of vantage—Copeman’s Rise—from which the lake-making proceedings, which had by now been going on for a good two weeks, could be unusually well viewed.

  Immense scars, bulldozer-induced, lay across the land. Hedgerows had been ripped up and tossed aside. Tons of unsifted earth were being lorry-laden and whipped off to unknown dumping grounds. The whole spectacle—admittedly for the moment hideous, but still, Bowker felt, marginally better than the grubby little contraceptive-infested copses it was replacing—was one of massive alteration and change. Bowker’s heart warmed. Soon, all this unavoidable scooping-out would give way to a placid expanse of brownish waters (Bowker’s romanticism would have preferred bluish, but his practicality forbade this), lightly ruffled by the prevailing winds.

  So far, so good. But as Bowker came to a halt, it became evident to him that his emotions regarding this presently tormented landscape, so soon to be converted to beauty, were not entirely shared. Two men, who had parked their shabby car close by, were having to support each other, arms round shoulders, in order to contemplate the scene with equanimity.

  Bowker thought that he perhaps recognized them.

  They were a jeweler and his brother with a country cottage at Stickwater, fifteen miles away. Bowker also thought that they were possibly supporting one another because they were drunk.

  But then he shifted a little nearer—and decided he had been wrong about that.

  Bowker went back to his machine, re-started the engine, gunned it up and headed for the London road. There are some things even a country copper thinks it best not to interfere with: and one is when he sees two male adults watching a trout-lake being made with great scalding tears pouring down their cheeks.

  Merry-Go-Round

  “No,” said Detective Inspector Humbleby. “No, it doesn’t really do to play jokes on the police. You’re liable to get yourself into serious trouble, for one thing. And for another, it’s essentially unfair…

  “However, there has been just one instance, quite recently, of the thing’s being brought off with impunity and, on the whole, justification.” He chuckled suddenly. “I don’t think anything’s given us so much simple pleasure at the Yard since Chief Inspector Noddy tripped over his sword and fell headlong at the Investiture last year… Tell me, did you ever come across a DI called Snodgrass?”

  Gervase Fen said that he was sorry, he had not.

  “I thought you might have done, for the reason that Snodgrass is our expert on literary forgeries… However. The thing about him is that although he’s undoubtedly a very good man at his job, he’s far from being an amiable character.

  “Not to put too fine a point on it, Snodgrass is dour and suspicious to a quite offensive degree. And with decidedly left-wing political views, too. So that when he came to deal with Brixham—”

  “Brixham the newspaper baron?”

  “Yes. Though it was Brixham the book-collector whom Snodgrass offended. Brixham specializes in the Augustan period, you know—Pope and Addison and all that lot. That’s relevant to what follows, in the sense that Brixham would obviously know a great deal about the pitfalls of literary forgery and would be in a position, with this money and printing-presses and laboratories and so forth, to turn out a very creditable forgery himself.

  “He must have had accomplices, of courses-technicians of various softs. But Snodgrass never succeeded in getting a line on them, and it’s evident that Brixham secured their secrecy by the simple process of letting them into the joke.

  “Well now, the origin of it all was five years ago, when trouble arose over a first edition which Brixham had sold to a fellow-collector, and which was suspected to be a forgery.

  “Snodgrass investigated. And in the course of his investigations he was quite needlessly uncivil to Brixham (who turned out in the end to be completely innocent)—uncivil enough to have justified a strong complaint to the AC, if Brixham had chosen to make it. He didn’t choose, however. He had other ideas.

  “And just six months ago, after a long interval of patient preparation, those ideas came to fruition.

  “What happened was that an old boy called Withers (who I think must have been a party to the plot) came to the Yard asserting that a letter recently sold him by Brixham was faked. The sum involved was only a pound or two. B
ut if the letter was a fake, and Brixham knew it, then unquestionably a fraud had been committed. And accordingly Snodgrass started to inquire into the matter with a fervor worthy, as they say, of a better cause.

  “The letter was dated 9 August 1716, and purported to be written by one Thomas Groate. You’ve heard, of course, of the publisher Edmund Curll?”

  Fen nodded. “The man of whom Arbuthnot said that his biographies had added a new terror to death.”

  “Just so. Well, this Groate was apparently a clerk of Curll’s. Nothing is known of him except that he was once alive and kicking. And no authenticated specimens of his handwriting remain. His letter—the one Brixham sold to Withers—consisted of petty gossip about the publishing world of his time. And its only real interest lay in a scabrous and, I should think, patently untrue anecdote about the poet Pope.

  “Now, it’d be wearisome if I were to detail all the tests Snodgrass applied to this document. As you know, there are a good many these days—constitution, size, cutting, creasing and watermark of the paper; constitution of the ink, and the chemical changes brought about in it by aging; whether the writing overlays or underlays stains and mold-marks; style of calligraphy, spellings, accuracy of topical reference; provenance; and so on and so forth. What with ultra-violet and spectroscopy and all those things, the ordinary forger doesn’t have much chance.

  “But Brixham wasn’t an ordinary forger. And it was only when Snodgrass came to consider the pen with which the letter had been written that he at last struck oil. For the letter had been written with a steel pen. And so far as is known, the first steel pens weren’t produced till about 1780.

  “Snodgrass ought to have paused at this point, and considered. Of all the mistakes which Brixham might have made in faking such a letter, this was one of the least likely. And if Snodgrass hadn’t been so furiously intent on convicting Brixham, he must have realized that the mistake was a deliberate one.

  “He didn’t realize, however. Triumphantly he confronted Brixham with the proof of his fraud. And what should Brixham do, after hearing him out, but suddenly ‘remember’ that he had in his possession an advertising handbill of the period, in which, among other things, the advertiser (one Wotton) called the public’s attention to his new steel pens, never before made, and of sovereign advantage…

  “Baffled, Snodgrass returned with the handbill to the Yard.

  “Once again the machinery was put into operation. And once again every test failed excepting one.

  “This time it was a matter of the advertiser’s address. The paper of the handbill was watermarked 1715, and the address was given as Bear Hole Passage, Fleet Street. But reference to a historical gazetteer revealed the fact that on the accession of the Tories to power in 1714, Bear Hole Passage was renamed Walpole Lane. So if the advertiser didn’t know his own address…

  “For the second time Snodgrass confronted Brixham with the proof of his forgery. And for the second time Brixham ‘happened’ to have an answer.

  “On this occasion it was a letter purporting to be written by the publisher Lintot, in which reference was made in passing to the fact that the stationer Wotton, a convinced Whig, ‘doth obstinately and childishly refuse to employ the new address’—or words to that effect. In short, Wotton would seem, judging from Lintot’s letter, to have done much what Mr. Bevan would probably do if the Post Office insisted on renaming his house Winston Villa.

  “I think that at this stage Snodgrass must have begun to suspect that he was being made a fool of. But by now he was too deeply involved to draw back. Again all possible tests were made. Again they all failed excepting one. That one disclosed a radical oversight, certainly: the handwriting of the Lintot letter, shaky and uneven, did not correspond at all with the handwriting of letters known to have been written by Lintot…

  “But that was just what finished it, you see.”

  “Finished it?” Fen was surprised. “It’s a glorious trick as far as it goes, of course. But I’ve been wondering all along how it could be artistically rounded off. How did the Lintot handwriting finish it?”

  Humbleby laughed delightedly. “It finished it becruse one of the bits of gossip in the forgery that started the chain—the letter from the clerk Groate—was that the publisher Lintot had recently had a slight stroke, ‘which hath altered his hand almost beyond recognising.’

  “So you see, Snodgrass couldn’t prove the Groate letter a forgery until he’d proved the Wotton handbill a forgery. And he couldn’t prove the Wotton handbill a forgery until he’d proved the Lintot letter a forgery. And he couldn’t prove the Lintot letter a forgery until he’d proved the Groate letter a forgery…”

  Humbleby reached for his beer. “Withers’s check which he’d paid for the Groate letter was returned to him by Brixham. Some doubt had arisen, said Brixham in a covering letter, regarding the document’s authenticity. As to Snodgrass, he was granted extended sick-leave, and is now away on a cruise,” Humbleby shook his head. “But we’re afraid—or perhaps I should say we hope—that he’ll never be the same man again.”

  Occupational Risk

  It was nearly half-past two by the time Detective Inspector Humbleby arrived at The Grapes. Weaving his way across the upstairs dining-room, he slumped down in a chair beside a tall, lean man who was drinking coffee at a table by a window.

  “Sorry about this,” said Humbleby. “And now that I am here, I’m afraid I can’t stop for more than a few minutes.” He ordered sandwiches and a pint of bitter. “You got my message all right?”

  “Oh yes.” The tall man, whose name was Gervase Fen, nodded cheerfully enough as he lit a fresh cigarette. “‘Detained on official business.’ Anything interesting?”

  Humbleby grunted. “In some ways. But chiefly it’s awkward. Am I to let a certain eminent professional man catch the evening plane to Rome, or am I not? That’s my problem. There isn’t really enough evidence to justify my holding him here. But then for that matter, there’s not much evidence of any sort, so far…

  “You see it’s like this… Late yesterday afternoon there was a burial in the churchyard of St. Simeon’s, in Belgravia. At the time, the grave was only half filled in; but they did, of course, leave a fair amount of earth covering the coffin—so that when the sexton went along early this morning to finish the job, dropped his pipe out of his waistcoat pocket into the hole, clambered down to get it, and felt his foot strike wood, he decided he’d better investigate.

  “Underneath the coffin he found the naked body of a man, which it’s obvious must have been dumped there—and a very good hiding-place, too—under cover of last night’s fog. The man was thin, elderly, distinguished-looking. He’d been killed by a violent blow on the back of the head. His dentures were gone, and there were no obvious identifying marks on his body. In due course he was taken to the nearest police station.

  “And there, for the second time, chance took a hand. One of the sergeants, a reliable man called Redditch, recognized this corpse as someone he’d talked to in a pub near Victoria early yesterday evening.

  “Redditch—a plain-clothes officer—was going off duty at the time, and had stepped in for the odd pint on his way home. The stranger was sitting alone at one of the tables, Redditch says, drinking brandy and scribbling music of some sort on a scrap of music MS paper. There was no other seat free, so Redditch settled down beside him…

  “And presently they got into conversation.

  “The conversation to start with was general. Redditch mentioned that he was thinking of having a fishing holiday in the West Country, and the old gentleman recommended a particular inn in Devonshire. He wrote it down for Redditch. His pockets were full of odd bits of paper, Redditch says, and he tore the top off one of these and wrote the address on the back.” Humbleby groped in his pocket. “Here’s what he wrote. It’s been tested for prints, so…”

  He handed the sliver of paper across to Fen, who examined it pensively. On one side, written in pencil in a large and sloping but nonethel
ess educated hand, was the legend “Angler’s Rest Hotel, Yeopool, nr Barnstaple”; on the other, in the same calligraphy, a fragment which ran: “…ving…hysterical fugues…wh…”.

  “A music critic?” Fen suggested, as he passed this tenuous piece of evidence back.

  “We think it’s obvious he must have been some sort of musician, yes.”

  “A musician, or else…” Fen hesitated. “I say, Humbleby, what was Redditch’s impression of the man? I mean, how did he size him up?”

  “Well, as cultivated, certainly,” said Humbleby. “Cultivated, retiring, not rich but decidedly respectable, honest, dignified—and in spite of the education, a rather simple and unsophisticated mind where worldly matters were concerned. Also not, Redditch thinks, at all a practiced drinker. Which is just as well. Because but for the fact that this kindly, respectable old party was knocking back brandy without, apparently, any clear conception of what it was likely to do to him, we’d probably never have known where to begin to look for his murderer. The brandy went to his head, you see, and he became suddenly confiding. He was up from the country—Redditch had already gathered that much. Now, moved by alcohol and moral indignation, he fell abruptly to telling Redditch why.

  “Some eight months previously, it seemed, the old gentleman had taken on a servant girl, a stranger to his part of the world, to help look after him. She appears to have been a pleasant straightforward creature and her employer soon became very fond of her, in what Redditch is quite sure was a genuinely paternal way. Presently, However, the signs of this girl’s pregnancy became too plain to ignore. The old gentleman wasn’t at all the sort to turn her out of his house on that account; on the contrary, as she had no relations to go to, he was quite agreeable to her having the child on his premises… But if he wasn’t angry with the girl, he was certainly angry with her seducer. The girl refused, obstinately, to name this person. But then, in bearing the child, she died—and her employer, going through her belongings after her death, found a letter which enabled him to identify the guilty party with a virtual certainty. A knight, he told Redditch: a knight, and an eminent professional man, and pretty well off: definitely not the sort of person who ought to be allowed to wriggle out of his responsibilities in the matter. Our man wrote to this knight, saying as much. He got no reply. Whereupon, full of dignified fury, he had determined to come to London to attend to the business in person.