“I rather doubt that, Mr Loakes.” I pushed his book towards him with one finger. “Indeed, I think there’s a good deal more in this matter that will have to come to the attention of the police.”
Loakes laughed uncertainly. His resolution was failing him. “Discretion,” he said. “Just a quiet talk. Between gentlemen – whose word is as good as their bond. As I see it, we can tell the world, or we can refrain from telling the world. It will make no difference to the fate of the man Fishley. We put our heads together, therefore, and work out what will be most to our common advantage. A discussion on strictly business lines. I am resolved to make no reproach – not a syllable of reproach. Professional writers understand these things, after all.”
“I don’t understand anything.” Freddie had retrieved Loakes’s book and was turning over the pages in a way that reminded me of our looking, only a couple of days before, at the row of English and American thrillers in a bookshop.
“It’s very simple, very simple indeed.” Loakes’s voice was yet huskier. “At this moment the whole of England believes that Fishley got his idea from your book. Are we going to make public that it was nothing of the sort? Are we going to make public the truth of the matter?”
“The truth of the matter?” Freddie was still wholly bewildered.
“The truth being”—Loakes’s voice rose in pitch, and I realised that vanity as well as avarice was at play upon him—”the truth being, Mr Seston, that Fishley got his idea where you got yours. From my book, sir, as you very well know.” As well as being high-pitched, the voice was now trembling. “The situation is very clear, is it not? Here am I, sir, grown old in service – in unsuccessful but honourable service – to the profession of letters. Fallen silent, sir, fallen silent for some years through a combination of difficulties I need not detail. No doubt you thought I was dead. No doubt you thought that, with your reputation, you could safely and with impunity—”
“But this is absolute nonsense!” Freddie interrupted vehemently. Then he turned to me on the instant. “Jonathan,” he said desperately, “isn’t it?”
It was a question to which I had no disposition to reply. “Be quiet for a moment, Freddie.” I turned to our visitor. “Mr Loakes, you made a very sensible remark just now about avoiding recrimination. By all means let this be, as you express it, a discussion on strictly business lines. We were to consider what course of action would be most to our common advantage. Perhaps you will be good enough to amplify your thought a little on that?”
Loakes hesitated, and it struck me that our charmless visitor was more at home with his honest indignation than with whatever dishonest proposal he was trying to square with it. “Certainly,” he said. “I quite agree. In fact, I apologise. Mr Seston will understand me, I’m sure. After all, we’re both literary men. So let me put it this way. It might do me a great deal of good, a quite incalculable amount of good, to be publicly known as at – well, as at the bottom, shall we call it, of the crime-novel murder. Cherril believes it would put him into business again. The film rights of Murder in the Nude would undoubtedly become a valuable property. But what would be advantageous to me would be very disadvantageous to Mr Seston. I’m afraid there’s no blinking that, no blinking that, at all. At the moment he himself of course is enjoying a certain advantage from his supposed connection with the Golder’s Green affair. That’s not to be denied. It’s not at all the advantage, mark you, that I should gain, since Mr Seston’s work is already so well established. Still, the advantage exists. I make no bones about that. I understand there are reporters in Venice now.” Loakes paused on this with an effect of positive hunger. “No doubt Mr Seston has already got a good deal of publicity successfully launched. But it will boomerang – I think that’s the adequate word – if the unfortunate truth succeeds upon it. I wouldn’t myself use an ugly expression. Writers, after all, understand these things, as I’ve said. But ‘plagiarism’ will be the term to come into the public mind. And a very striking instance of it – I think you’ll agree – it will seem. I don’t at all know that Mr Seston’s reputation can survive it. It’s a reputation, mark you, worth tens of thousands of pounds. So you’ll understand the direction in which my mind is moving. It would be far better that the situation should remain as it is – I’m speaking, of course, from Mr Seston’s point of view – and my poor, forgotten book remain in oblivion. Provided, you know, that I can be adequately compensated in some way.”
By this time Loakes was trembling all over. I didn’t know whether it was funk or conscience; but I did know that he was not much better than Freddie would have been in putting through a bit of actual crime. Presumably he had given long years to concocting such nonsense on paper – and, since Messrs Cherril and Cherril’s closing down on him, he was no doubt constrained to go on doing it just in his head. Perhaps Freddie would turn equally daft if denied his own harmless outlet in print. But these reflections didn’t much reconcile me to wasting more time with Loakes now. I wasn’t disposed to reason with him; to hunt laboriously for some unclouded corner of his brain which would acknowledge his blackmailing project to be useless fantasy since he hadn’t the nerve for it. Instead, I got out my wallet – and from my wallet, my cheque book. Then I produced and poised my fountain pen. It was at least a fittingly theatrical dénouement to our occasion. “Very well, Mr Loakes,” I said. “What will you take”—and I paused—”to keep your mouth shut?”
There was a moment’s silence. Since I have had to reveal myself as sadly lacking in foresight at various junctures of Freddie’s affair, I shall indulge myself by saying that Loakes’s reaction was now, broadly, what I had anticipated. He sank into a chair and wept.
At this moment there was a knock at the door and Cuff came in. I judged his arrival timely. “Inspector,” I said, “this is a Mr Cyril Loakes from London. He is”—I was halted for a moment by the look of extreme astonishment that came over Cuff’s face—”he is the author of a novel called Murder in the Nude, published in 1921, which appears to be the actual—um—manual to which Fishley had recourse. Mr Seston’s book, it seems, contains a certain amount of what may be termed unconscious reminiscence from this earlier work. Mr Loakes, you can see, is much distressed by the circumstances of the case. But he has very kindly come to Venice to talk the matter over with Mr Seston.”
“I see, sir.” Cuff was now impassive again.
“Moreover, Mr Loakes believes himself to be in possession of the actual copy of Murder in the Nude which Fishley is likely to have read. It’s on the table there.”
“Well, that’s something.” Cuff walked over to the table and picked up the book with satisfaction. “But about Mr Loakes, sir, it happens that I’ve heard. It’s the reason of my having been so long on the telephone. One of my young men – a very promising youngster, I must say – got on the track of this Murder in the Nude today. He went through the publisher’s lists since 1900, noting down any title that might suggest bathrooms. And nudity was one of them. He took his list straight to the Reading Room at the British Museum, and he’d discovered the significance of Murder in the Nude before closing time. What he had to tell me on the telephone, of course, was that Mr Seston here is probably out, and that I may well have had my trip to Venice for nothing.” Cuff smiled indulgently. “Well, sir, that’s how real detective work goes.”
“Quite so. But if Mr Seston is out of it – as he plainly is – Mr Loakes here is still quite handsomely in. He not only invented your bathroom business in the first instance. He has also, it seems, got you that clear line you’re after. I repeat, Inspector, that what you have in your hand is almost certainly the identical copy of Murder in the Nude that the man Fishley read. Mr Loakes can give you information about Fishley’s sister having used the particular fourpenny library where this copy of his book – now, it’s sad to say, extremely rare – came from. May I suggest that you take Mr Loakes away and have a chat with him?”
“A very good suggestion, if I may say so, sir.” Cuff nodded coolly and t
hen turned to Freddie’s abject professional colleague. The man had a little composed himself. He must have gathered that I was going to make no fuss about his late hopeful proposal. But he regarded the emissary from Scotland Yard with misgivings all the same. Cuff’s expression however indicated nothing but respectful admiration. “Very smart, sir,” he said. “Very smart, indeed. Nothing in the files to touch it, I’ll be bound. First you think up that clever business with a standing waste – I can understand Mr Seston here being minded quietly to borrow a trick as clever as that – and then, forty years later, you provide the final link in the chain of evidence that will convict an actual murderer.” Cuff tapped Loakes’s novel. “It deserves to be famous, sir. And I don’t doubt it will be. This will make a tremendous sensation.”
Loakes appeared to struggle for words. When they came, they were mildly surprising. “It is precisely what I feared,” he said. “Most distressing, most distressing indeed, Inspector. You won’t be aware of the fact, but a man of letters abhors publicity of that sort. It is a circumstance which formed part of my conversation with these gentlemen.” Loakes divided between Freddie and myself a glance that was at once humiliated, triumphant, and malignant. “But it must be faced, decidedly it must be faced. I’m at your disposal, my dear Inspector – although I must get back to London with all speed. An important conference with my publisher. But, of course, if there are members of the press in Venice—”
Cuff nodded benignantly. I don’t think that he in the least failed to take the measure of Loakes, but this didn’t prevent his being warm in his admiration. Freddie was now a fallen idol indeed. “Yes,” Cuff said, “I think you’d better face them. I don’t doubt they’ll fly you back to London, if you have a mind to it. But, if you’ll take a word of advice from me, don’t agree to sell them your story until you’ve tested the market. Prices are quite remarkable these days.” He turned to Freddie – still benignant, but with a sort of condescending sorrow that I’d have found galling in an extreme. “I’m afraid it will be awkward, Mr Seston. I’m afraid it won’t look well. But I don’t think you need alarm yourself from the point of view of the law. Not, that is, unless Mr Loakes involves you in civil proceedings. Infringement of copyright, it would be, no doubt. And it sounds as if he might have a bit of a case.”
Freddie made no reply. He was sitting near the open window and staring in a dazed way into the night. Loakes got to his feet, and picked up his dismally gnawed gloves and his incredible hat. He hesitated, and then transmitted to his stooped figure a jerk that might have been interpreted as a manly squaring of the shoulders. He went over to Freddie and patted him on the arm. “No, no,” he said soothingly. “Nothing, of that sort, I assure you. We have our code – we literary men.” He moved to the door, glancing at me as he passed. There were again two ugly spots of colour on his cheeks. I suppose they were a blush. He walked out of the room. Cuff gave us a curt nod and followed him. I looked at my watch, reached for the telephone, and rang up my wife. I could reasonably promise to be across the Ponte dell’Accademia within an hour.
Freddie spoke as soon as I had set down the instrument. “I wish it were true,” he said. “It would be a weight off my mind. But Cuff will discover in no time that it’s a cock and bull story. That chap, what did he say his name was, is simply attempting a monstrous imposition.”
“I think not. In fact, Freddie, the whole affair now makes sense. It seemed very queer to me that our wholesale fishmonger’s clerk should come across any novel at its thirteen-and-sixpenny stage – let alone before its publication. But a fourpenny library is quite another matter. It’s no tribute to our national education – but the fact remains that, to the Fishleys, a ‘book’ means either a magazine or just what we have in this case: a battered volume hired for the price of a couple of cigarettes. Say, Cyril Loakes’s Murder in the Nude.”
Freddie shuddered. It was clear that the very title of this fast-vanishing masterpiece was abhorrent to him. “You can’t mean that the miserable old scribbler was telling the truth?”
“Certainly I do. The miserable old scribbler must rank – well, as your collaborator, Freddie, in Death by Water.” I thought my friend had better get it pretty stiffly. “Let’s face it, my boy.”
“But it’s absurd! His name conveys nothing to me. The title of his book conveys nothing to me.”
“My dear chap, aren’t you never tired of saying that you read oceans of these things donkey’s ages ago, and now remember nothing about them? And isn’t your blessed Hugo St Swithin a sort of intermittent hangover from the way you swallowed the stuff down – back there in the ‘twenties? Do you realise how vague you are – how vague Frederick Seston is – about the positive and negative prints in Death Lies Dead, and what was hidden in the wine-cooler in Dead on the Hour – and, for that matter, about precisely what’s deadly in standing wastes? I haven’t the slightest doubt that a large part of your stock-in-trade comes from reading that has utterly seeped out of your conscious memory. Usually it must all emerge again so mixed up and reassorted that no real issue of borrowing—”
“Of plagiarism,” Freddie said, “—that no real issue of plagiarism could be raised. But it just hasn’t been so this time.”
Freddie sprang to his feet. He was extremely agitated. “Good God!” he said. “And I wasn’t even civil to the old man! I must find him. I owe him an apology.”
“Well, you certainly did owe him an apology – and perhaps a certain amount of money as well. But, considering that he has just made a disgraceful if inefficient attempt to blackmail you—”
“So much the worse!” Freddie’s voice rose in despair. “I’m criminally responsible for having put the temptation in his way – for bringing such a degradation upon the poor devil in his last miserable years. Where will he have got to? I must see him at once.”
“Listen,” I said. “You’re no more responsible for his attempted crime than he is morally or materially responsible for Fishley’s achieved one. As for his last miserable years – well, Loakes himself feels they’re now likely to be fine. And certainly he’s going to be England’s number one sensation for a week. He’s cock-a-hoop, I tell you. Leave him alone.” I paused and saw Freddie still hesitate. “You needn’t go out after trouble,” I added. “It will presently be ringing your front-door bell.”
“That’s true.” I could see the prospect appealed at once to Freddie’s masochistic strain. He grew calmer. “Ruin,” he said with his subdued drama.
“Nonsense. You’ll make a frank statement of the facts, and they’ll be universally believed by responsible people.”
“Perhaps so.” Freddie paused. “But most people,” he added with mournful satisfaction, “are far from responsible, wouldn’t you say?” He walked moodily to the window and I followed him. There was now a moon high over Venice, and what of the place was visible lay steeped in a beauty Carpaccio had never caught. “Pitch,” Freddie said. He turned to me. “You can’t touch pitch without being defiled. Isn’t that it?”
Midnight had slipped by, and I didn’t feel inclined for a conference lingering on into platitude. Freddie was very miserable – but I thought that, at the same time, he looked promisingly sleepy. It was a moment for the simpler modes of our earliest acquaintanceship. “Freddie,” I said, “stop being a bloody fool and go to bed.”
THE GLORY FROM THE GREY
Miss Dumbill—or would it prove to be Mrs Dumbill?—was due at five, and shortly before that hour Charles Ballaster had another look at her letter. The lady could hardly be a temptress – not with a name like that – and there seemed no reason to class her as a menace. Most probably she was simply a pest. Pests formed the largest of the categories into which Ballaster was accustomed to divide those of his readers who found themselves impelled to enter into correspondence with him.
Although his private mind was thus somewhat uncharitably tinged Ballaster sent a polite answer to every letter he received – even to those intimating that if he came to tea at this or that addr
ess he would be favoured, straight out of real life, with a wonderful idea for a plot. This punctilio would have been highly approved by his publisher. But Ballaster’s motive in scribbling so many graceful notes was not commercial. In his novels the most painful things kept on happening to people, and he couldn’t help it. In compensation for this he was anxiously considerate in matters of everyday – or at least in all the more trivial of them. It wasn’t indeed a considerateness that stretched to his venturing into strange mansions or cottages or flats. But he did himself sometimes invite unknown correspondents to call at this hour. Should one of these ladies – for they were, of course, invariably ladies – tear off her garments and begin to scream there was always Mrs Kember, whose sworn testimony no sane magistrate could doubt. Ballaster, perhaps because his fiction didn’t much run to this kind of scene, was rather morbidly addicted to it in fantasy. So Mrs Kember, announcing the visitor, and then bringing in the tray, and then perhaps returning later to draw the curtains or fill the coal-scuttle, was reassuring. She was reassuring, for instance, on an occasion like the present, when he had rashly invited the Dumbill woman to come and say something she wanted to say.
The writing-paper wasn’t indecently opulent. But it was quite as good as the address which was printed on it in old-fashioned black. Ballaster approved. There had been a time, he remembered, when only tradesmen used coloured inks for letter-heads; nowadays you got the most garish affairs from the most unexpected quarters. He paused to make a mental note of this reflection as one which could be given effectively to a snobbish character, and then he read the letter through.
Dear Mr Ballaster,
I feel that I must thank you for The Glory from the Grey. None of your earlier books that I have read (and that means not quite all, but nearly all) has given me so much pleasure. There is nothing confusing or difficult, and yet it is so true and moving and deep – the sort of rare book, surely, that really helps people to see life steadily and see it whole. I have just sent a copy to my brother in Persia. He is not a great reader of novels, but I am certain that he will enjoy a work so outstanding as this.
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