A revolver is a powerful argument. Robbie did as Fanmole had told him. The back door led to a basement area containing the wood store. Robbie unbolted the door, conscious all the while of Fanmole behind him. Light from the candle spilled across the floor. There was no sign of Mary near the heap of logs.
“Take Sir John’s legs,” Fanmole said.
Robbie turned back. At that instant he saw Mary, standing by the doorway in her bloodstained yellow dress, her face as pale as wax. She held a finger to her lips. In her other hand was a hatchet.
“Hurry, damn you,” Fanmole urged.
Robbie bent down and took the old man by the ankles. He dragged him slowly into the wood store. Fanmole advanced slowly, the revolver in his right hand. He reached the doorway and gripped the jamb with his free hand.
“Where’s the slut gone?” he cried.
Robbie felt the air shift by his ear. There was a thud. Fanmole screamed. The revolver fell to the floor. Robbie saw the muzzle flash before he heard the crash of the shot. Mary fell backwards onto the logs. Fanmole danced with pain, blood spurting from his left hand, flashes of bone where the tips of two of his fingers had been.
As the echoes of the shot subsided, another sound forced its way down from the house above them: the pounding of the knocker on the front door.
Fanmole raised his head. His nostrils flared.
“The police,” Robbie said. “They’ve come for you.”
Fanmole ran up the steps to the garden at the back of the house. Robbie snatched up Sir John’s weighted stick and set off after him. With surprising agility, the little clergyman darted down the garden. The distant hammering continued. Fanmole unbolted a gate and slipped into the cobbled alley beyond. Robbie followed the running footsteps. Once, when they passed the lighted windows of a tavern, Fanmole looked back. His pale features were contorted with pain and effort, the face reduced to something slimy and inhuman, a creature of nightmare.
They ran through Sion Place and burst into the open. On the crest of the Downs, the Observatory was a black stump against the paler darkness of the night sky. Fanmole veered to the left, towards the edge of the Avon Gorge.
“Stop!” Robbie cried, but the wind snatched away his words.
The clergyman ran towards Brunel’s unbuilt bridge. Within a stone’s throw of the Clifton tower, he stopped. His breath came in ragged gasps.
“Leave me.” He fumbled in his waistcoat pocket and pulled out something that glittered faintly. “Take this, Sir John’s Breguet watch. Sell it or claim the reward. Just go. Say I gave you the slip in the dark.”
Robbie did not reply. The memory of Mary filled his mind, and the bloody stain spreading over the yellow silk dress. He moved slowly towards the clergyman. Fanmole clambered on the low wall around the abutment on which the tower stood, intending to drop down to the little footpath beneath. But Robbie’s advance made him change his mind and retreat along the parapet of the wall.
“No,” he said, flapping his hand as though waving Robbie away. “Pray leave me. I have valuables concealed in a place nearby. I shall tell you where to find them.”
He held out the watch. Robbie stepped forward and snatched it. But Fanmole jerked backwards immediately afterwards. By now he was on the corner of the wall, where it swung through ninety degrees to run parallel with the river more than 200 feet below.
“Watch out,” Robbie shouted.
But the clergyman’s hunched figure was still moving backwards. His left leg stepped into nothing.
Nothing begets nothing, as my mother used to say, Robbie thought.
Fanmole toppled out of sight. Branches snapped and crackled as he tumbled down the steep slope. He cried out only once. Then came a moment’s utter silence.
At last there was a thud: and another, longer silence, this time as long as the century.
* * * *
6: Postscriptum
Clearland Court
Lydmouth
23rd January
My Dear Brunel,
You will have heard from my solicitor that I have decided to accede to your request: I hope it will not be too many years before the Great Western Railway will bring you to Lydmouth.
As to that other business, I cannot tell you how glad I am that the girl, Mary Linnet, is no longer at death’s door. Without her intervention in Rodney Place, I might not have survived to write this letter. Both she and her mother are now on the road to recovery and I shall find them respectable employment when their health is restored.
It was fortunate that, with the obstinacy of his breed, my hackney driver chose to pound on the door to demand his fare. Trevine tells me that Fanmole believed the knocking heralded the arrival of the constabulary, and that this precipitated his fatal decision to flee.
I am informed that goods worth several thousand pounds were found in the shed which Fanmole rented by the Gorge. It appears that the work of his so-called Missionary Society among the poor allowed him to recruit weak-minded young people, such as Mary Linnet, and set them to thieving and other mischief on his behalf in Bristol and neighbouring towns. (So you see, my dear sir, the railway is not an unmitigated blessing!)
But Fanmole’s desire to have revenge on me proved his undoing. When he saw my arrival in Bristol announced in the newspapers, he sent the girl to discover where I was staying; she was then to take hold of me when I returned to the room, ring the bell, and complain vigorously that I had assaulted her! His design was to destroy my reputation as, he believed, I had destroyed his.
As you know, the matter turned out very differently: and this was in great part due to the young man Robert Trevine, who returned my late brother’s watch to me. He appears honest; he can even read and write. I offered to find him a situation on one of my estates—but no! the fellow wants nothing better than to stay in Bristol or its environs and work for you in some capacity on the Great Western Railway! It is true he shows some mechanical aptitude, but I fancy that the presence in the city of a certain young woman may have something to do with it. In any event, I should be very grateful if you could find him a position.
I am, sir, yours very truly,
J. Ruispidge
<
* * * *
PRICE CONFEDERATE
Andrew Martin
Peter the librarian held up a thin file of papers. He didn’t need to say anything, just grinned, and Anthony recognized the handwriting immediately.
“Where d’you turn these up?” he said.
“They were mis-filed,” said Peter. “They weren’t under “Price” but “Prince” - not that there’s any signature here.”
Anthony nodded.
“Price went through phases of wanting to be known as ‘Prince’,” he said.
“Why?” asked Peter.
“To ally himself with the Prince of Darkness,” said Anthony.
“Oh,” said Peter in his camp way. “Sorry I asked.”
“. . . So really it’s his own fault that his books and papers have been wrongly catalogued ever since,” said Anthony. “He has nobody but himself to blame.”
Peter the librarian passed over the papers and adjusted his tie as if to say “Anything else I can do for you?” He was a good librarian. He also dressed very well indeed. Anthony admired the way he could wear, say, a yellow and brown silk tie with a blue and white checked shirt, but he was at the same time aggrieved that a librarian should be better dressed than he himself.
“I haven’t a clue what it is,” said Peter, nodding again at the manuscript.
This might well have been a lie, but the librarians at the Mayfair Institute would not be so crass as to spoil your day by flagging up the contents of a book or document in advance. The readers were there to read, after all.
“... I mean, it’s not topped and tailed,” Peter continued. “It’s a fragment.”
He was coming dangerously near to admitting that he’d read it, and Anthony always wanted Price to himself, so he said:
“I shall enjoy this Peter, thank
s very much,” and turned away.
Anthony took the file and pushed open the door of the Main Reading Room. He was hoping that one of the four red leather armchairs arranged before the fireplace would be free. In fact, all four were, and he didn’t know which one to choose. There was only one other man in the reading room, at a far desk. He seemed very magnanimous, spurning the fireplace, and what was more, he didn’t sniff or cough as he worked.
The fire of course was unlit. Books and real fires didn’t go together. It was lit once a year, on Christmas Eve, when the Trustees of the Institute gave a sherry party. Anthony wasn’t eminent enough to have been asked, but that would come. Price would see to that. Anyhow, it was a fine Spring afternoon with no need of a fire. White blossom floated about above the trees of the Square beyond the windows, unwinding out from them like a benign, slow explosion. Mayfair was a good mix of old buildings and trees. It was like an American’s dream of London: the red buses were redder in Mayfair, the black taxis blacker, and you felt that a bowler-hatted man might be just around the next corner.
Anthony selected an armchair, guiltily aware that he much preferred the Institute to his own home, and that he over-used the place. The librarians ought not really to know his name, or that he was fixated on Arthur Price. He ought to use the Institute in the correct, gentlemanly way: as a respite from the serious literature; to kill a couple of hours before attending a social function; to wait for sunset and the Mayfair cocktail hour while reading a story by Oliver Onions or V.L. Whitechurch.
From the outside the place resembled a giant carriage clock, and the reading rooms were like a series of drawing rooms, with only about as many books on the wall as you’d expect tosee in a drawing room. The collections were mainly stored in the three levels of basement, where a different order of librarian roved - ones not as confident or well-dressed as those in the building proper, and sometimes the readers would hear the rumble of the primitive trolleys being pushed along the subterranean walkways. It was a confirmation of your status to know that this work - a species of academic mining - was going on for your benefit.
The subscription was a thousand pounds a year - not cheap - and you’d only pay it if you were interested in the books and manuscripts of a particular kind of author. The type had never been officially defined, but everyone knew it: the under-regarded marginals, the writers of ghost stories, mysteries, crime, the better class of pornographer, and if you asked for something wholesome like a copy of Pride and Prejudice (which only an outsider or a new member would ever do) the librarians would disapprovingly respond, ‘I’m afraid we don’t stock books like that.” The Institute had been built and was funded by grants from the more successful genre writers, and its grandeur was a kind of reproof to the critics, who ignored their works.
Anthony looked at the topmost page of the file. It was thin - poor quality paper presumably. The handwriting was elegant by modern standards but Price’s full stops were never quite conclusive; they were elongated, more like dashes, with the result that anything he wrote never seemed to stop, but became a steady stream of bile.
“I did Wilson’s, the one in Chelsea,” Anthony read, “by putting my arm through the letterbox hole in the outer shutter and unscrewing the bolt, this being wrongly placed (why put it so close to the letterbox aperture?). With me were some good fellows whose names I wouldn’t mention for fortunes. It was no trouble at all then to roll up the shutter. The glass of course I just smashed - took my Malacca cane to it. I enjoyed that.”
His tone was all there in those few sentences: a combination of the literary and the streetwise, and the shrill arrogance was betrayed by that parenthesized question: “Why put it so close to the letterbox aperture?” as if he knew how to design protective shutters for jewellers’ shops better than the men who did that for a living. Well, he probably did. Arthur Price had written crime stories, but he’d gone one better in that he had actually been a criminal as well. He made his living by “doing” jewellers’ shops together with a little band of followers, the Price Confederates. He was often interrupted in his round of thefts by arrest and imprisonment (hence the books - he wrote while inside) but it was a relentless cycle that had continued, Anthony presumed, until his death.
Anthony had first come across him in Pelham’s Guide to Interesting Out-of-Print Authors, which was written in telegraphese, as though the title was a bluff, and the authors didn’t even justify full sentences. Of Price, Pelham had written: “Roguish character. At once hated and aspired to join literary establishment. Author of crime stories, habitual theme a criminal’s bloodthirsty revenge. Repellent style oscillates between coarse and grandiose. Definitive collection: Tales of the London Night (1904). Arthur Price disappeared in about 1910.”
Anthony had appreciated the languor of that one proper, concluding sentence. It had got him hooked, and he had immediately read such Price stories as survive. They were all more or less the same. A decent, honest, brave criminal is minding his own business robbing or assaulting people when a policeman presumes to arrest him, or an associate betrays him. The criminal then murders the policeman or the associate, sometimes summoning in aid mysterious dark forces raised by rituals and incantations described at great length.
But Anthony was more interested in the writer than the writing. Price’s first publishers had to take out an injunction to keep him away from their offices. A reviewer who had written thatTales of the London Night was “too lurid for the common taste, but undoubtedly vigorous” - which was just about the best thing that any contemporary said of Price - was sent a loaded revolver in the post with no address to which it might be promptly returned, but instead an order to meet Price at dawn in St James’ Park in order to fight a duel.
Price had turned up for the occasion accompanied by Paul Mayer, who proposed doing duty as his second. Mayer was an educated man, and yet, as one assize court judge had observed, he was “practically enslaved” to Price. He’d been a Price Confederate, but he’d also been a journalist on the Times, and at one point had been committed to a mental hospital in South London. He believed not only that Price was the Prince of Darkness, but also that he - Mayer - had lived in the future; that he had, in the past, lived in the future, and would be liable to go back there again. Mayer’s problem, among others, was that he found it hard to stay put in any given century. He had often complained about it in writing.
“Wilson’s shop was preferred to Maxwell’s,” Anthony read, “only on account of the dairy across the road from the latter, which never closed but ran right round the clock, seven days a b----------week. Maxwell thought his place safe as a bank. I know because I called in masquerading as a customer looking for a new watch (silk waistcoat and Malacca cane well to the fore) and he said so. What f----------rot. The man’s protected only by the little doxies put to slaving around through the night over opposite . . . and what honour is there in that?”
Anthony quickly read the whole six pages and then stood up and walked towards the window. The manuscript had been an account of a series of jewellery shop break-ins, probably written to impress an associate. Anthony doubted that it was a confession. Names had been kept back, and Price wasn’t the confessional type. He’d made no mention of his writings, and there had been no mention of his cohort Mayer, who particularly intrigued Anthony, perhaps more so than Price himself.
But what mattered now was not what Price wrote about himself but what Anthony wrote about him.
The man at the far desk had gone. From the Square came the sound of heavy rain - and a helicopter. The rain was coming down so heavily that Anthony had the idea of a sort of crisis going on, with the helicopter as part of an evacuation. It might have been a different day entirely from the last time Anthony had looked.
The relationship between Arthur Price and Paul Mayer - the autodidact force-of-nature and his educated, middle-class disciple . . . This would be the theme of the book that would make Anthony Latimer’s name. He would write it in the Institute, and on publication he w
ould buy a new flat that would enable him to establish a continuum between his home life and his working life. The flat would have thick red carpets and tall sash windows like the Institute, and he would find out whether a yellow and brown silk tie against a blue and white checked shirt worked for him, too.
The book would be a novel, but based on the real characters of Price and Mayer. He was sure it would do better than his own series of crime novels with Edwardian settings, and the critics might take an interest for once, because Price was under-chronicled. There had been no biography. (There wasn’t enough material to generate one - just a few letters threatening his various literary mentors, the couple of dozen stories, and now this document unearthed by Peter. No photograph of Price had survived.) The core of reality would give legitimacy to Anthony’s novel. People generally couldn’t be persuaded to take an interest in the imaginings of an obscure individual like himself. Pure fiction by the non-famous was regarded as whimsy and that was that.
Best British Crime 6 - [Anthology] Page 58