by Andrew Garve
“Yes,’’ I said. “I wondered if you could tell me who he is and how I could get hold of him. That is, if it’s not a publishing secret!’’
Cogan looked at me curiously. “May I ask why you’re interested?’’
“Of course … The thing is, I’m planning to write up the Shaw murder case—you remember, John Galloway …’’
“I do, indeed.’’
“Well, I’ve been going through some of Shaw’s documents, checking up on his interests and his contacts, and I found this photograph of Fresher among his belongings.…’’ I passed it across.
Cogan took it and looked at it for a moment and then he glanced at me again, a bit quizzically. “That’s right,’’ he said. “I gave this photograph to Shaw myself about two years ago.’’
I stared at him. “You did!’’
“Yes—I gave it to him when he called here one day, exactly as you’ve done, to ask about Fresher. Odd, isn’t it? He even brought this same copy of The Black Hat with him.’’
I felt completely at sea. I said, “Why was he interested?’’
“He said he was writing a monograph on what he called ‘the early tough school’ of English crime fiction, and he’d just read an old book by a man named Grant Fresher which we’d published and which came into the category, and he wondered if we could give him any information about the author.… Well, sometimes we can, of course, and sometimes we can’t. In this case, I didn’t feel particularly keen, but Shaw was rather pressing, and he was a librarian, and we always like to oblige librarians when we can! So in the end I told him what I could, and he was very much interested and asked if we had a picture of Fresher, and our publicity people hunted about in their files and managed to dig up this photograph.’’
“Yes, I see.… Well, may I know what you told Shaw?’’
Cogan smiled. “I don’t see why not, Mr. Rennie—we like to oblige newspapermen, too, and it’s all old history now. Anyhow, these are the facts. Fresher did three books for us, back in the early thirties. They were on the tough side, but they were quite well written, and we were happy to publish them because we were trying hard to build up a thriller list at the time and Fresher was a young man and we thought he probably had a future. The books didn’t set the Thames on fire but they sold fairly well considering that his name wasn’t known. Then he brought us a fourth manuscript. This time it wasn’t just tough—it was so nearly pornographic that we had no alternative but to turn it down flat. And that was the whole extent of our dealings with Mr. Fresher.’’
“What happened to him?’’ I asked.
“Well, he found another publisher. I can’t remember the fellow’s name—he was quite disreputable, anyway. The book that we’d rejected was published, and somehow it got by the police. The next one didn’t. Fresher and the publisher were both prosecuted for obscene libel, and if I remember rightly they got twelve months apiece. And that’s really all I can tell you.’’
“You don’t know what happened to Fresher when he came out of prison?’’
“I’ve no idea at all. I’m afraid I wasn’t very much interested.’’
“No,’’ I said, “I can understand that.… Anyway, what sort of a man was he? What sort of impression did you have of him when you were publishing him?’’
“Well, it’s a long time ago, Mr. Rennie, and my recollections are a little vague.… I know I didn’t care for him a great deal, but then there are many authors one doesn’t terribly care for! He was, if I remember, rather a tough young man himself—he was mixed up with the Blackshirt movement, and used to act as a bodyguard at meetings.… Not a very attractive type, I’m afraid.’’
“Was the name ‘Grant Fresher’ a pseudonym? It sounds like it.’’
“I imagine it was, but it was the only name I ever knew him by.’’
“Did he have an agent?’’
“No, he dealt with us direct. He used to write from some address in Hampstead, but of course that’s twenty years ago and he must have moved on. Anyway, we’ve no record of him now—it was pure chance that we still had his photograph.’’
“I’m rather surprised that Shaw wanted it,’’ I said, “after he’d heard your account.’’
“I was a bit surprised myself, but then he was a strange little man. He seemed to think it had historical value, and we certainly had no use for it ourselves.…’’ Cogan regarded me shrewdly. “You must be going into Shaw’s affairs in great detail, Mr. Rennie, if you’re following up every document with such care. I’d scarcely have thought he was worth a long biography.’’
I didn’t rise to that. Earlier, I’d been prepared to put my cards on the table and explain that Fresher’s picture had reminded me of someone else and that that was why I was interested. Now it seemed wiser not to.
“It’s just my newspaper training,’’ I said with a smile. “We’re supposed to be thorough!’’ I took the book that Cogan was holding out to me, and picked up Fresher’s picture. “Anyhow, thank you very much indeed for helping me.’’
Chapter Thirteen
I left the building in a state of simmering excitement. The possible implications of what I’d learned were startling. The Galloway case might well have taken an entirely new turn that morning. But everything depended on what was still no more than a suspicion—that Grant Fresher and Richard Dancy were in fact one and the same man. Before I launched out on a sea of speculation I had to satisfy myself of that. What was more I had to be in a position to prove it to others.
I had a quick lunch and then went along to the office. I knew no better place than the Post’s library for starting an identity check and I spent most of the afternoon there, going through old cuttings and reference books. My idea was that if I worked backward from Dancy and forward from Fresher, I might find some connecting link in the middle. But it didn’t work out like that. Dancy’s personal file proved to be extremely thin and gave no real picture of him at all. He didn’t appear to have carved out any special niche for himself in the thriller-writing business and he’d scarcely been mentioned by the gossip writers. He’d managed to get himself a bit of publicity at the time of the Mystery Guild exhibition and he’d taken part in a symposium on crime writing in the Gazette a few months ago, but that was about all. The reference books were hardly more informative. Even the Authors’ Who’s Who had no more than half a dozen lines on him, naming a few of his books and giving his publisher and his London address and his favorite recreation—fishing.
The Grant Fresher material was more interesting but equally unhelpful. Fresher had operated too long ago to appear in any of the reference books, but I managed to find some cuttings about him in an old file. There were several paragraphs about his early books, including a favorable mention of The Black Hat, and three separate reports of the twenty-year-old obscenity case, with a couple of bad photographs of him that seemed to me to resemble neither Dancy nor the picture of Fresher that I’d seen. The name of the publisher who’d been jailed with Fresher was given as James Evershed Cullis and I looked him up in the various directories but found nothing. He, too, no doubt, had changed his name. As far as the library’s resources were concerned, the Fresher trial ended with the verdict. My hopes of a link simply hadn’t materialized.
There were several courses still open to me. The longest and most laborious would be a personal investigation of Dancy’s life, tracing his movements and activities back through the years with the help of people who’d known him. That might or might not be productive. The short cut would be to get hold of his fingerprints somehow and have them checked at the Criminal Records Office, where Fresher’s prints would probably still be on file—but that would be difficult to organize and might get me into trouble. So far I’d nothing at all on Dancy except an expression in the eye, and unless I moved cautiously I might find myself at the wrong end of a slander action. An intermediate possibility would be to try and get Dancy and the publisher, Cogan, to some meeting place and see if Cogan could identify him as Fresher—b
ut that would be tricky, too. In the end I decided my best initial step was to see Dancy again myself and do a little preliminary probing. I could manage that, easily if not ethically, by telling him I’d like to interview him for the Post as he himself had suggested.
I went down to the Reporters’ Room and tried to get him on the phone right away, but there was no reply from his flat. It was Friday, and I wondered if he’d gone down to spend the weekend with his fiancée in the country. It seemed worth a try. I looked up her number in the Sussex directory and put a call in. The address was Sanctuary, Old Stone Lane, Clooden, near Lewes. Lavinia answered the phone herself. I recalled our earlier meeting and said I was rather anxious to get in touch with Mr. Dancy, and she said that would be easy because he was sitting right beside her. My luck was in. A moment later he came on the line. I explained that I’d like to interview him and he was delighted and asked me when I could come. I thought quickly. I was on duty the next day, Saturday, but free on Sunday. I said would it be all right if I drove down on Sunday morning. He said that Sunday afternoon would be better because he and Lavinia would probably be at church in the morning. We finally settled for three o’ clock.
It was an extraordinary place that Lavinia Hewitt had. Clooden turned out to be miles from anywhere—the “near Lewes’’ in the phone book was just a thundering lie—and Old Stone Lane proved to be a dangerously eroded track that almost bounced me out of my car. The house itself was a small and quite hideous red brick bungalow, set in what appeared to be an endless expanse of wasteland. The “sanctuary’’ part of the address presumably referred solely to animals, for humanly speaking the place looked scarcely habitable. Poles and wire netting rose up on all sides, dividing the immediate surroundings of the house into separate compounds for dogs, cats, goats, an aviary, some donkeys and a horse. I parked my car beside Lavinia’s ancient station wagon and a slightly more reputable Austin, which I assumed was Dancy’s, and made my way past a row of kennels to the front door. Inside the small porch there was a wooden box with some literature in it about vivisection and cruelty to old horses in North Africa, and an invitation to “Help Yourself.’’ Above the door, a slogan informed me that “There Is No Welfare State for Animals.’’ I was about to press the bell when a big healthy-looking girl emerged from the side of the house with a pail in her hand and called out to me above the noise of barking dogs that Miss Hewitt was “round the back.’’ I went round and found Lavinia and Dancy sitting in deck chairs on a scrubby bit of grass that evidently passed for lawn. Lavinia, in a curious sort of smock and gum boots, looked even more eccentric than when I’d seen her before. She shook hands and Dancy gave me what I thought was a slightly sheepish grin and after a few polite exchanges I got down to the business of the interview.
I started with the routine stuff—how many books Dancy had written and how long it took him to write them and what hours he worked and so on. He said he’d done about fifteen books and they’d all been published by the same publisher and had been moderately successful. He’d also written a lot of short stories as well. I asked him what he’d done before he became a writer and he said he’d been in the Army all through the war, in the Royal Engineers, and before that he’d knocked around the world, doing a bit of farming and a bit of oil drilling—chiefly with the idea of getting interesting experiences to write about later, because he’d always wanted to write. He talked well and easily, and all the time Lavinia beamed at him fondly. I asked him where he’d been to school and he said in Sydney, New South Wales—he’d been born in Australia and had come to England as a young man. I said that was a reversal of the normal procedure and he said yes, but he preferred England, he thought it was a grand country and he couldn’t stand people who tried to run it down. I asked him if he’d ever been interested in politics and he said no. I touched on his hobbies and said I understood he was a keen fisherman and he grinned and said he’d done a lot of trout fishing in Wales, but he didn’t know what was going to happen about that now because Lavinia thought fishing was a cruel sport. I moved on from there to his current plans and asked Lavinia when they expected to get married and she said at Christmas and proceeded to tell me about their “romance.’’ Apparently they’d met about a year earlier and all because of her animals. Dancy had needed some background material about the boarding of animals for one of his books, and a society had put him in touch with Lavinia, who was one of their stalwarts. As a result he’d become fond not only of Lavinia but of animals too, and when they were married they hoped to develop the “Sanctuary’’ into a much larger establishment I asked Lavinia if she’d always lived at Clooden and she said yes, but not in this bungalow—her father had had a house called “The Gables,’’ where she’d kept a horse and a few dogs, but after he’d died three years ago she’d moved here because there was more land and plenty of room for expansion.
Presently she excused herself and went in to make tea. I continued to prod away at Dancy for a bit, but I knew I wasn’t getting very far. He had an air of being very forth-coming about everything, but he’d scarcely given me a single fact that I could check. I watched him all the time as he talked and in spite of the plump face and the jovial grin I still thought I could detect a likeness to the Fresher picture. Fresher had been dark, of course, and Dancy with his bald head and rosy cheeks gave a general impression of pinkness, but now that I was able to look at him more closely I saw that his chin and upper lip were blue-shaved. As a young man, he’d have been dark, too. And he was about the right age. Suddenly I decided to put the matter to the test. It might work, and I’d nothing to lose.
“You know,’’ I said, “I was rather surprised to hear that you’d never used a pseudonym. I had the idea that you’d once written under the name of Grant Fresher.’’
His pale blue stare transfixed me. I’d caught him utterly off guard—his gaze showed much more than the mild inquiry that would have been natural if Fresher had meant nothing to him. In that moment of revelation I knew that I’d been right.
He quickly recovered himself, and tried to bluff it out. “Grant Fresher?’’ he said. “Never heard of him. Who’s he?’’
I produced Fresher’s picture and showed it to him. He looked at it for a moment in a puzzled way. Then he said, “I don’t get it—you’re not suggesting I’m like this chap, are you?’’
“It struck me there was a resemblance,’’ I said. I caught the chink of crockery on a tray as Lavinia emerged from the bungalow. “Let’s see what your fiancée thinks.’’
He stared at me for a second. Then he suddenly said in an urgent whisper, “Put it away!’’ and winked violently and put his finger to his lips. I slipped the picture back into my pocket.
Lavinia put the tray down and said, “Well, have you two finished your interview?’’ and Dancy said, “Yes, I think Mr. Rennie’s got pretty well all he needs now,’’ and gave me another collusive wink. Lavinia poured the tea and for the next twenty minutes we talked solidly about cats. After that she insisted on showing me round the whole place. It was Dancy who said at last, “Well, I expect you’d like to be getting along, Rennie.’’ I agreed that it was about time and he said he’d walk down to the gate with me.
I said good-by to Lavinia and followed Dancy through the maze of wire netting to the car. As soon as we were out of sight of the house he stopped and gripped my arm. He had a grip like iron but he was friendly enough.
“Look, I’m sorry about all that,’’ he said, “but you had me properly scared.… Where on earth did you get that picture?’’
“It was among Robert Shaw’s things,’’ I said. “Remember—the Galloway case man.’’
“Really …? Now how the devil would he have got it?’’
I shrugged. “He collected old thrillers—I found it in a Grant Fresher book called The Black Hat.‘’
“And you thought it was like me?’’
“It is like you,’’ I said.
He nodded grimly. “Well, now, look here, old boy—I’m going to ask yo
u to do me a big favor and forget all about it. I’ll tell you why. I was Grant Fresher, and I did a damn stupid thing. I wrote a couple of smutty books—sort of literary wild oats, you know. You’re a man of the world, I’m a man of the world—these things do happen.… I was pretty young at the time and I’ve often regretted it since. Anyway I got into a bit of trouble with the police—nothing much, but I was hauled up before the beaks and fined. It’s all forgotten now—I’ve been a respectable citizen for twenty years. But my fiancée’s rather strait-laced—fine woman, you know, bit religious and all that. I’d hate her to know about it—I can tell you I was really shaken, up there at the house.… So if you could just forget the whole thing I’d be enormously obliged. What do you say?’’
“But of course,’’ I said. I didn’t challenge his version—I’d got his identity confirmed and that for the moment was all that mattered. “I certainly don’t want to make any trouble—it was just that I was intrigued by the resemblance. Don’t worry—Miss Hewitt won’t hear anything about it from me.’’
“That’s very decent of you, old boy.’’ He seized my hand and shook it heartily. “Very decent of you indeed.…’’ He grinned. “If you ever want to board a dog I’ll see it’s put up at a reduced rate! Good-by.’’
Chapter Fourteen
I scarcely noticed the journey back to town. I was too busy dreaming up a dramatic new theory.
Until this Fresher business had come to light I’d had no reason to doubt Dancy’s good faith in the Shaw affair. I’d accepted him as an independent and reputable writer whose letter to Shaw, reinforcing Blundell’s, had virtually put paid to any possibility of Galloway’s innocence. But now, with the Fresher-Dancy identity established, his credit as a witness was badly shaken. He’d been a crook twenty years ago and he might still be a crook. If he was, he could have had a crooked tie-up with Shaw. He could have teamed up with Shaw in a plot to frame Galloway for money, and a phony, predated letter from him, written to collaborate one from Blundell that Shaw had already faked, could have been his contribution. Later, there could have been a quarrel, and Dancy could have murdered Shaw!