by Andrew Garve
I thanked her for her help and asked her where the house was. Now that I was here, I decided, I might as well take a look at it. I collected a fresh set of directions, together with the address of the agent’s representative in the village who would show me over the place—a Mrs. Whitelaw. In fact, Mrs. Whitelaw wasn’t able to come with me as she’d hurt her leg but after we’d had a little chat she said she’d trust me to look round on my own if I’d promise to bring the key back. A few minutes later I was parking the car at the edge of Bear Wood. It was a lovely bit of country, high up and with wide views to the south, but it certainly was lonely. Nothing of the house was visible from the road and if it hadn’t been for a “For Sale’’ board at the entrance to a rutted track I could easily have missed it. I walked along the track for about fifty yards and came upon the cottage in a small clearing among the trees. It was very tiny and rather dilapidated but it had a thatched roof and pink-washed walls and was highly picturesque from a distance. Judging by the footmarks around the place it had been viewed by quite a lot of people, and a broken pane of glass near the handle of one of the lattice windows suggested that someone had taken a look inside without bothering to get the key. Feeling very virtuous I unlocked the door and let myself in.
It wasn’t at all a bad cottage inside and I could quite understand why Blundell had liked it. There was a large combined sitting room and dining room downstairs, with a fine fireplace and a lot of old oak. The kitchen was small, but it had been modernized. Blundell must have paid heavily to have the electricity brought from the road, but it was there. The downstairs rooms were rather dark, but the three upstairs rooms were brighter. Two were bedrooms; the third was evidently Blundell’s work room. There was a roll-top desk and a filing cabinet; a table with a portable typewriter on it, now shut up in its case; a chair with a worn leather seat, and an array of bookshelves. The room had obviously been tidied up a bit, but otherwise Blundell’s stuff was still as he’d left it. There were a couple of old manuscripts on the table, a stick of typing paper, a Roget’s Thesaurus and a dictionary, some old maps and yellowing newspapers, a folder containing part of a story, and a large copper ashtray.
I didn’t very much fancy the idea of poking about among the dead man’s effects but by pure chance I’d been given the run of the place and the opportunity seemed too good to miss. If Blundell had had any guilty secrets, which I now doubted more than ever, this was the time to look for them. The roll-top desk was locked but I found the key in an unlocked drawer and opened it, releasing the catches of all the other drawers. Then I started to go systematically through the contents. It took quite a while. There was a large file of correspondence, and I glanced at every letter. They were the accumulation of a few months only, the last few months of Blundell’s life, and the letter that Shaw must have written submitting his manuscript was not among them. No doubt it had been part of an earlier batch, which had been destroyed. I put the pile back and flipped through some check stubs and had a look at a wad of royalty statements from Blundell’s literary agent. They were mostly for small sums and related to books by various authors—all of them, I assumed, Blundell under different pseudonyms. A glance at his bookshelves confirmed that, for they were filled with blocks of books, all thrillers, by the same variety of authors. It looked as though work had been Blundell’s life.
I examined the contents of the folder on the table. There were ten chapters of an uncompleted manuscript, evidently the story he’d been trying to finish at the time of his death. It was about a jewel robbery. There were some loose sheets beside it with some notes scribbled on them, also about the jewel robbery. I opened his typewriter and took a sheet of paper from the stack—it was Egerton Bond—and just as a matter of interest I typed out a few words. The typewriter was unmistakably the one that Blundell had used in his correspondence with Galloway and his letter to Shaw. It was an old Royal. Probably he’d had it for years.
I spent over an hour there altogether and I looked at everything. Then I took the key back to Mrs. Whitelaw and set off back to town. By now I had a pretty complete picture of Blundell in my mind. There was only one thing that puzzled me a little and that was that so crotchety a man should have gone to the trouble of reading and criticizing in a friendly way the manuscript of a total stranger. From what I’d heard of him, I’d have expected him to take at least as tough a line as Galloway. But that was the only point of interest. I’d found no indication of any kind that Blundell had met Shaw or known him personally, let alone conspired with him. I’d found no evidence of any special dislike of Galloway. I’d found nothing to suggest that Blundell had ever had anything to do with The Great Adventure. On the contrary, all the evidence went to show that he’d been immersed in work of his own right up to the end. My day, I reflected, could scarcely have been more negative in its results. But at least I wasn’t surprised.
Chapter Seven
With Blundell virtually out of the picture as a suspect, there seemed less reason than ever to suppose that a check up on Shaw would produce anything helpful. But I knew Mary would want answers to her questions, and I felt a certain curiosity myself about the man who’d become so fatally involved with Galloway. Sharp at nine next morning, therefore, I drove out to the library where Shaw had worked. His successor was shut away in a room of his own, which gave me a chance to talk to the two girl assistants, both of whom had been there in Shaw’s time. I told them I was a reporter on the Post and that I was collecting material for a complete history of the Shaw case and wanted to find out everything about Shaw that I could. They were quite amenable and chattered away freely in the intervals between stamping books. Very soon I had as good a picture of Shaw as I’d had of Blundell.
He had been, it appeared, a quiet, mild-mannered little man—a bit humorless, but entirely inoffensive. He’d been unmarried and had lived with his sister, a Mrs. Green. He’d dressed neatly, spoken correctly, and always behaved impeccably. He’d been considerate to his staff, and though no one had been exactly fond of him, no one had disliked him. He’d been very conscientious about his job, always arriving on time and putting in a good day and never leaving early. Off duty, I learned, his great interest and hobby had been crime and mystery books. He’d been a real addict—not just as a reader but as a student of the genre. He’d contributed articles on the subject to the Librarian and various book trade papers, attended lectures by thriller writers whenever he could and taken part in the discussions, and built up a big collection of thrillers at home, going back years. Both the girls had known that he’d been trying to write a crime story himself about eighteen months ago—it seemed he’d often stayed in and worked on it during his lunch hour. I asked them if he’d told them what the plot was about, but they said no. I also asked if they could remember whether he’d ever shown any special interest in a writer named Blundell, but they didn’t think he had.
From the library I drove on to the house in Croydon which Shaw had shared with his sister. It was more than four months since Shaw had died and I thought Mrs. Green should have got over the worst of her distress by now. Number 12a Cavendish Road turned out to be a modest, semi-detached villa in a respectable road where every house had its small neat garden and its small neat garage and its television antenna. Mrs. Green answered the door herself. She was a thin, anemically pretty woman of about thirty with wispy hair and a discontented mouth and a genteel-cockney voice. Her face brightened when she saw me, but only for a moment—it appeared she’d just advertised a furnished room to let and had thought I might be an applicant. I apologized for not being and told her who I was and why I’d called. I said I was sorry to be harking back to an old tragedy but there was still a lot of public interest in the Shaw case and I was most anxious to get all the information I could. She looked most unforthcoming and I felt sure she was going to turn me down. I added that of course I’d be quite prepared to pay for any information. At the mention of money her interest quickened perceptibly and she asked me what I wanted to know. I said perhaps I coul
d take a look at her brother’s room first, because I was interested to see where he’d done his writing. She said I could look if I liked but there wasn’t much to see because that was the room she was letting and she’d just cleared it out and redecorated it. I said I might still be able to get an impression and she led the way upstairs and into the front room. It had been cheaply furnished as a bed-sitter, and there was a strong smell of distemper from the bright pink walls.
“His desk was over there by the window,’’ she said, “and his bookshelves used to stand against the wall there. His papers and things are in the back room—what’s left of them. Would you like to see them?’’
I said I would and she took me across the landing and showed me four large wooden boxes. Three of them contained books and various odd-looking bits of junk and the other was full of folders and files and what looked like personal papers. Here, evidently, was an appreciable slice of Robert Shaw’s life. I’d have liked to examine the stuff, but there was far too much to go through there and then.
I said, “I suppose these things belong to you, now, Mrs. Green?’’
“Oh, yes,’’ she said, “Robert left everything to me. Not that he had much, really.’’
“What are you going to do with them?’’
“Well, I’ve been meaning to send the books to a secondhand shop in Croydon—the man said he might give me a pound for them. The other boxes are mostly rubbish. Robert kept an awful lot of rubbish—he just couldn’t bring himself to throw papers away. This is nothing to what there was—I burned a lot in the garden.’’
I said, “Would you take five pounds for what’s here?’’
She looked at me in astonishment. “Five pounds!’’ she said. “It’s not worth that!’’
“It might be to me—and, anyway, that would include whatever information you could give me about your brother. I’d be very glad to pay it. I can give you a check when I leave and take the things with me. What do you say?’’
Her thin shoulders rose in a shrug. “Well, if you really mean it, I won’t say no. I could certainly do with the money.’’
I said most people could these days and asked her if she had any family and she said she had—two boys, aged seven and five, who were at school. By now I was over the hump with her—once she’d started talking about her own affairs she went on. Her husband, it appeared, had left her three years ago. He paid her the maintenance the court had ordered and that was all, and it didn’t go far. Things hadn’t been so bad while Robert had been living with her but now it was very hard. She did a bit of sewing work in Croydon three mornings a week, but she had to look after the house and the children so she couldn’t do a proper job. She’d sold everything of Robert’s that had been worth anything, like his clothes and his typewriter, and she’d got enough for his old car to buy new furniture for the room she was letting, and now it was a case of trying to make ends meet whatever way she could. I had a feeling she was missing her late brother a lot, but that it was financial care she was overcome with rather than grief.
Directly I could get a word in, I steered the conversation back to Shaw’s activities. I said I gathered he’d always wanted to be a writer and she said, yes, only he hadn’t had much luck, and the book he’d written hadn’t brought him much luck, had it? I agreed that it hadn’t and asked her when he’d first started writing and she said he’d been sending articles to newspapers ever since she could remember, but he’d only tried stories in the last year or two. I asked her if he’d spent much time writing and she said almost all his spare time while he’d been living with her—his typewriter had been a perfect nuisance, rattling away like a machine gun and preventing the children from going to sleep. I said I supposed he’d been a pretty expert typist and she said not really, he’d only used two fingers, but he’d done so much of it that he’d got quite fast. I asked her if he’d discussed his writing with her and she said hardly ever. I said what about the book that had given all the trouble, surely he’d told her about his wonderful plot, and she said, no, he hadn’t said a word about it till last March when he’d discovered that John Galloway had stolen his idea. I asked her if he’d ever mentioned Galloway to her before then and she said, yes, a long while back, after his story had been returned without even a friendly word. He’d been very fed up about that. She thought Galloway must be an absolute monster and it was a wicked thing he hadn’t been hanged as he deserved. Some friends of hers had said she ought to sue him for damages the way Robert had intended to and she’d thought of asking a lawyer about it, only she had enough worries to be going on with. I nodded sympathetically and asked her if Robert had said anything to her about sending his story to the other man, Blundell, and she said not at the time, she hadn’t heard about that until just before Robert’s death. She said Robert had usually told her only about things that had annoyed him and of course he must have been pleased to hear from Blundell. As far as Shaw’s relations with Blundell were concerned, she couldn’t help me at all. Robert had only mentioned him that once, she said, so she couldn’t say whether they’d known each other well or not, or whether they’d continued to correspond after Robert had got his story back. They might have, because Robert had always enjoyed writing to authors about their books and about crime. Personally she’d never thought much of Robert‘s interest in crime, she thought it was morbid, particularly the things he’d collected. I asked her what things and she said, well, for one thing there was a sort of cotton bag that had been put over the head of some murderer on the gallows—it was in one of the boxes I was taking away and I was welcome to it! I had the impression again that Mrs. Green hadn’t really liked her brother very much.
By now I’d exhausted my questions. I wrote out a check and told her if she came across anything else of Robert’s I’d be glad to have it. Then she helped me carry the four boxes downstairs and a passing milkman gave me a hand getting them onto the roof of the car, and I drove to the office for lunch and my two o’clock stint.
Chapter Eight
I telephoned Mary that evening and gave her a full account of my busman’s holiday. I said that as far as I’d been able to discover both Blundell and Shaw had been absolutely genuine and there was nothing at all to suggest they’d ever met each other. I said I hadn’t quite finished the inquiry into Shaw as I’d got hold of some of his belongings and hadn’t had time to look at them yet. She said she’d like to go through them with me and we arranged that she should come over to my flat first thing in the morning.
She arrived well before ten. She was obviously far from happy about my findings, but her manner toward me was much more forthcoming and friendly than it had been. She said it was nice of me to have gone to so much trouble when I hadn’t expected any results, anyway, and I felt glad I’d made the effort.
We got down straight away to investigating Shaw’s belongings. I turned the three boxes of books out on the floor in a dusty heap, and we dipped here and there but found nothing to linger over. The bulk of them were thrillers, many of them paperbacks. It was an impressive collection if you happened to be interested in the progress of the thriller through the ages, for it included practically all the famous classics of detection from Wilkie Collins and Edgar Allan Poe onward, as well as books by many writers I’d never heard of. But it didn’t tell us anything about Shaw that we hadn’t known already, and we soon pushed them aside and turned to the other box.
First came a lot of museum junk. There was the executioner’s bag that Mrs. Green had mentioned and a length of hemp rope with a label on it saying it was part of a hangman’s rope that had been used in an actual execution, which Mary didn’t find very amusing. There were several other objects of criminal interest but they were less macabre—a plaster cast of a footprint with another label on it, a woolen thread that had led to the capture of some murderer, a bag of counterfeit coins, a pair of knuckle dusters and a jemmy, and various other relics. Underneath were some more books, mostly reference works—one about fingerprints, one about poisons, one of
forensic medicine, and several in the “Great Trials’’ series. There was also a book on How to Become a Writer. There were two folders of typed short stories by Shaw—all of them, at a casual glance, as wordy as The Great Adventure had been. There was a thick wad of rejection slips from newspapers and magazines. There was also a file of correspondence, which we went through carefully. It was incomplete, and didn’t tell us much beyond confirming what we already knew, that Shaw off-duty had had a single-track mind. There were several letters from editors of book trade periodicals, mostly about some aspect of the thriller business. There was a letter from the secretary of the Mystery Writers’ Guild regretting that Shaw couldn’t be accepted as a member until he’d had a crime story actually published. There was a letter from a crime writer named Flowers admitting that trains to Tilbury ran from Fenchurch Street and not from St. Pancras, as he’d said in his last book, and thanking Shaw for pointing it out. There was nothing at all from Blundell.
We continued to delve. There was a typed document entitled A Study of the Plots of 200 Detective Stories, by Robert Shaw, a sort of monograph on which much labor had evidently been spent. There were some publishers’ lists and some more correspondence. About the last thing we picked out was a program of the Mystery Writers’ Guild exhibition that had been held in April of the previous year.
“That’s the exhibition I went to,’’ Mary said, riffling through its pages. “It looks as though Shaw went, too.’’