The Mammoth Book of Best British Mysteries

by Maxim Jakubowski

  “You don’t have to be so bloody sarcastic, Carl. I’m trying to see some way out of this situation.”

  “Way out?”

  “Yes, I didn’t tell you but I’ve had the newspapers sniffing around, asking if we’d found some long-lost manuscript.”

  “Sherlock Holmes?”

  “One of them said H. G. Wells – he’d heard it was a sequel to Things to Come and the other didn’t have a clue about who wrote anything.”

  “That must have been a senior literary editor. Let me guess which paper.”

  “No, that’s just the point. These queries are coming from the news desks. The H. G. Wells loony had heard that it was going to be a major film.”

  “Why doesn’t your punter just put it up for auction? One of the big boys might be willing to put it into their New York auctions.”

  “Perhaps he’s frightened of it being turned down as a fake,” said Percy. “That could be a crippling setback for anyone selling it.”

  “Will an auction house care too much whether it’s a fake? They’ll get their money; then it’s cave canem for the bidders. I sometimes think half the junk put up for auction is bogus in one way or another.”

  “Caveat emptor,” Percy solemnly corrected me.

  “Same goes for the film,” I said. “If some sharp film man grabs it, he could ride along on the publicity generated by a controversy about whether it’s genuine. And if it turns out fake that will hardly dent the takings at the box office.”

  “So you think we should publish it?”

  “I didn’t say that, Percy.”

  “It’s all right for you. You can just move on if the firm hits a rock. I’m stuck here.” Percy was determined not to be deprived of his crisis.

  “I don’t see why.”

  “Because my uncle is the chairman, Carl. Be your age. You’ve made enough jokes at my expense.”

  “Have I, Percy? I hope I have never been offensive.”

  “I don’t mind your jokes. You can be very humorous sometimes. It’s the crap I get when people have to be sacked.”

  “People say things they don’t mean.”

  “They mean it all right,” said Percy and I almost felt sorry for him. It was, after all, Percy who had got me the job. The ad agency let me go after they lost the breakfast food account I was working on. Percy got to his feet. “Well, I must leave you now. I have an important lunch appointment.”

  When I saw Percy later that afternoon he was roseate and ebullient. And it wasn’t all due to the unspecified number of bottles of Chevalier-Montrachet he and his luncheon guest had consumed. “There it is,” he said. He put a brown packet on my desk. His aim erred to the extent that it sideswiped my keyboard and put about three hundred z’s across a letter I was concocting for the “Princess” about the bewildering way her characters were apt to change names and/or appearance and then sometimes change back again. “That’s it.” He pointed. “That’s the Sherlock Holmes story. That’s your Christmas bonus and my seat on the board.”

  “He gave it to you?”

  “It wasn’t easy but lunch at the Ritz can have a magical effect upon authors. I’ve noticed that before.”

  “And this is the only copy? No photocopies in your desk?”

  He hesitated. “He made me promise on my honour. I signed a piece of paper for him. It wouldn’t have much effect in a court of law but he knows I wouldn’t want him brandishing it if there was evidence that I’d cheated on him. So look after it. Don’t leave it on the train or something. You remember how you went past your station and had to get a minicab home that night after the Christmas party?”

  “Yes,” I said. I wished I’d never mentioned that journey home to him. At the time I was hoping he’d offer to reimburse the cab fare but instead of that he kept using it to beat me over the head with implications that I got everything wrong. “So how much did you have to pay him?”

  “Nothing. Not a penny.”

  “He just handed it over?”

  “I said the directors would have a meeting on Monday and have an offer and a contract ready for Tuesday morning. I thought that would give you a chance to read it.”

  “What about you reading it?”

  “I have read it,” said Percy. “I read it as soon as I got back from lunch.”

  I noticed that the packet had been torn open and then sealed up again, so perhaps he had.

  “And?” Percy was not an avid reader.

  “It’s damned clever; almost too clever for a Sherlock Holmes yarn. Corpus delicti, it all turns on that. You know what I mean?”

  “You don’t plough your way through a thousand whodunits without discovering what corpus delicti means,” I told him.

  Percy was not to be denied a chance to display his legal qualifications. “Body; but not necessarily a human body. It’s the facts, money, physical substance, evidence of any kind that a crime has been committed.”

  “How does the story read?”

  “You’ll have to read it for yourself but at the conclusion of the story, Holmes finds there is no written evidence, no substance, no witnesses, not even this gigantic ship, to prove that any crime was ever committed. Holmes ends up baffled . . . but anyway you must read it.”

  “Doyle was ingenious,” I admitted

  “It’s good,” said Percy. “A page-turner. But you are the senior editor, senior fiction editor, anyway.”

  “Ummm,” I said. I could see into Percy’s mind. If it turned out well, the firm would make umpteen thousands, Percy would get his seat on the board – there was going to be a vacancy in January anyway – and I would get a small Christmas bonus. If it became the sort of fiasco that Percy feared, it would all be my fault.

  “Take it home. Read it over the weekend and let me know on Monday.”

  “Monday is a difficult day for me, Percy.”

  “Your day at home, I know.”

  “It’s the only way I can get through the backlog. Here in the office there is always something cropping up.”

  “Like me.”

  “It’s not only that, Percy. I have to see Sergeant McGregor in the morning and so I asked him to come to my flat for a sandwich and a beer. I want to switch a couple of his chapters and I’ve drafted out a new beginning. It’s not as much work as it sounds but getting an author to understand the need for revisions is always a delicate job.”

  “Who the devil is Sergeant McGregor?”

  “Peter Cardiff. He writes the ‘Copper’s Diary’ series. We’ve done six of them now. They have all been trade paperbacks but marketing think he’s ready to go mass-market.”

  “Why do these fellows have to have nom de plumes? Isn’t Cardiff a good enough name? Better, in my humble opinion.”

  “Not for a police series about Glasgow criminals. And when he first started he was still on the Glasgow force. He had to have an assumed name.”

  “Move him to Tuesday, Carl. This Sherlock Holmes decision is important.”

  “He’s coming all the way down from the other side of Aberdeen. And he is a widower; with a school-age child. He has to arrange for someone to collect her and look after her. I really wouldn’t like to throw a spanner into his arrangements. And he’s one of our best authors, Percy.”

  “What is best about him?”

  “He can spell; he puts a capital letter at the beginning of each sentence and a full-stop at the end. He knows an adjective from a verb and doesn’t use flashbacks or dream sequences or try to write sexy scenes that he can’t handle.”

  “He’s old fashioned, is that what you mean?”

  “Yes, exactly.”

  “And now I’ve annoyed you.”

  “A few more old-fashioned writers like Cardiff and I would have a weekend to myself now and again.”

  “A palpable hit, Carl.”

  “Yes, well, he’s not old-fashioned, Percy. He’s a fine writer who stays within his capabilities, and understands instinctively the taste and intelligence of the reading public in a way that n
ot many people in this building do.”

  “I say, Carl. A streak of passion! You are always able to surprise me. Very well then; 10 a. m. Tuesday morning. And don’t leave it on the train tonight.” He rummaged around in the cupboard where unpublished books grow dusty before going into the bin and found a green plastic bag with a Harrods motif. He put the manuscript into it, and hung it on the bentwood stand with my raincoat.

  “Red sealing wax and string.” I observed.

  “I wanted it to be secure. On this floor, any wrapped parcel of A4 size gets thrown into the slush pile without being opened.”

  “Is that your signet ring you used on the wax?”

  “It looks good doesn’t it? I’m going to start using it on letters too. What about on the contracts?” I gave him a wintry smile. “We worked hard at college didn’t we Carl? Not many parties; not very often drunk; work, work, work.” I nodded. “Well I was going through the numbers with Uncle John last week, and I noticed that only one of our top earners even got into college, and she didn’t graduate.”

  “‘There are only three things needed for writing a bestseller; but no one knows what they are.’ Somerset Maugham.”

  “Yes it’s all very well for an old buzzard like that to be sardonic but he was sitting on a barrel of cash in his villa in the south of France and lunching with the likes of Winston Churchill.”

  “Maugham was a doctor at St Thomas’s Hospital. Doesn’t that rather undermine your theory about illiterate best-selling authors?”

  “And Conan Doyle was a doctor, too. So were a lot of bestselling authors but that was all long ago. Now we all know what is needed for a best-seller. Not three things, only one damned thing: TV. It doesn’t matter what illiterate rubbish you write, if it becomes a TV series you’ll be feted and feasted and rich, and people will say you are a famous writer.”

  “Not always, Percy.”

  “Yes, always. Good grief, Carl, who would have guessed, in Maugham’s day, that any silly little cookery book could be made into a best-seller? Or a book about exercising, wriggling your derrière, like that one we did with that frightful athlete woman who insisted on having her photo on every page?”

  “We did well with it, as I remember.”

  “That was because the photographer did such wonders. Or his retoucher or someone at the printer. He made her look like Jane Fonda, that’s why it sold.”

  “For whatever reason. She asked for twice as much for her second book.”

  “She didn’t get it from us,” said Percy with some force. “She didn’t get another TV series. I could see that it was going to be the end of her. Her end, perhaps I should say.” He didn’t need to remind me that she’d made a loud and angry scene in Percy’s office before taking her book to another publisher. And they had advertised it in the Sunday papers and lost a great deal of money on it. He laughed. It was good to see him happy and there is nothing that makes a publisher happier than to have a rival company steal authors, and then lose money with them.

  Peter Cardiff arrived at my flat on the dot. A result of twenty-five years on the force, I suppose. His books had the series title “A Copper’s Diary” and everyone in the trade, including me, admired them as fast-moving, well-written stories. Judging by his mail, the police service liked them too. But the joke was that Cardiff had actually kept a diary right from the first day he joined up as a constable recruit. He retired with dozens of notebooks and was unhurriedly making them into a literary career.

  He hadn’t been to my flat before. After I took his coat, he moved around the room. There wasn’t much furniture. He went to the built-in shelves and started looking at all my books in a systematic way. “Reference mostly,” I said. “Specialist dictionaries and encyclopaedias, maps and so on. I do most of my editing work here, away from the telephones and interruptions.”

  “I thought my stuff went off to someone in the country for corrections of that sort.”

  “For line editing; yes it does, but if I can pick something up in the early readings I can call the author with a query. It’s quicker like that.” I opened two cans of beer and poured them out. Then I opened the packets of smoked salmon sandwiches and arranged them on the plates. He bent to look at one of the photos on the fireplace. “My wife,” I said. “She’s a wonderful woman.”

  “I thought you were getting divorced,” he said. “I’m sorry, it’s the policeman in me.”

  I had no doubt referred to my wife in one of my letters or emails; it was sharp of him to remember so well. “We’ve had our ups and downs,” I explained. “She went to see her family in Brisbane. My teenage son is with her. She wants me to join her there. It’s not something I want to rush into. On the other hand, if I decide to go, her fare back here and return would be money wasted.”

  “Looks like you were there when you were getting married,” he said, pointing to our wedding photo in a silver frame on the hi-fi. “The eucalyptus trees, the coastline and the man in the bush shirt – just a guess, of course.”

  “Ten years back. It can get very hot in summer and I’m very fond of hot weather.”

  He smiled and we both listened to the wind howling in the chimney. Despite the heat turned fully on, it was cold in the flat and it had been raining on and off for almost a week. “And my son wants to go to college there.”

  “What will he study?”

  “He’ll try for a Ph D in surfing and sunning.”

  “I’d miss you if you moved,” he said. “You are painstaking and understand what I would like to be able to do. The editor they gave me at first scribbled all over my typing, scribbled in red ballpoint. That was before I got the word processor. It all had to be typed again. It used to make me livid.”

  He was still looking around when I said: “I like the new one very much. You are really exploring McGregor’s character now. The indecision and the anger . . . and that chapter with the kid who can’t speak English. You’ve come a long way from your first book with the motorcycle cops.” It was enough to bring him to the table where I had my notes.

  “So you went back and read my first one?” he said. He sipped some beer and bit into a sandwich.

  “I try to see how writers develop. And I must keep you to the continuity. We don’t want you slipping up about past references; things like the new inspector going to the staff college.”

  “No, that was stupid. So you picked that one up? I wondered who had spotted it. I should have sent a proper thank you letter. I’m not in touch as closely as I should be.”

  “You need a London agent,” I told him.

  “That doesn’t sound like a publisher speaking.” He was much more relaxed now and I could hear his soft Glasgow accent; the only Scots accent that I could recognize.

  “Someone who knows the way around town could get you some radio plays and maybe TV too. It would get you known to a larger public and that’s what publishing is all about nowadays.”

  “Yes, I know but I’m a slow worker. You wouldn’t believe how many hours I spend in front of that damned screen. And I’ve always liked to be outdoors.” He tucked into the sandwiches. He probably hadn’t eaten since getting off the train. I should have offered him something more substantial.

  “Peter, old pal,” I said. He looked up sharply. I usually kept to more distant forms of address. It made it easier to criticize if I made it a bit formal. ‘I have a safe here. I was broken into over the weekend.”

  He looked at me as if I had gone mad. “How much did you lose?”

  “There was no money there; just my lease and bank statements and passport and so on. Other than that: six silver spoons that were my mother’s, and a packet.”

  “Packet?”

  “With a small manuscript inside. Keep it to yourself. I haven’t told anyone at the office about it. I didn’t go to the police either.”

  “No, I understand. It’s more or less useless reporting robberies to your local coppers. Can I look at the front door?” He got up. He was a policeman now.

&n
bsp; We went and looked at the door and the surround. “The door shows no sign of being forced,” I said. “And all the windows look OK too.”

  “What sort of safe?”

  “Not very wonderful.” I went and opened the closet in the hall to show him where the safe was hidden behind the coats. “Guaranteed fireproof; that was important to me. Four figure combination lock. No sign of it being forced either.”

  He ran his hands round the back of it to see if he could detect damage of any kind. “Only four digits. That’s useless.”

  “The salesman said it meant almost ten thousand variations.”

  “Who else has the key to this place?”

  “No one. At least, there is an extra one I keep in the main safe at the office – in case I locked myself out – and the cleaning lady has one.”

  “Look at it like this,” he said as he sat down and swallowed the rest of his beer, “most of these combination safes have locks that are quick to operate. User friendly. That means it’s quick to swing through the numbers. Try and you’ll see.”

  “Ten thousand numbers.”

  “Five hundred wouldn’t be too daunting, would it?”

  “No, it wouldn’t.”

  “Five hundred a day. Try it; click click click. You’d be through it in twenty visits. And your winning combination is unlikely to be at the very end. On average, a thief would find the number halfway through his search. That may not be in line with the science of probability but you see what I mean.”

  “Yes, I see what you mean. But I don’t know what I should do.”

  “If it’s insured you’d better report it as soon as possible. Insurance companies are always looking for an excuse not to pay out.”

  “I’ll speak to the cleaning lady. She’s Estonian. She only comes in twice a week: She’s a nice young woman. She’s been doing the flat for almost a year.” I realised how stupid it all sounded but I suppose Cardiff knew that crime victims are likely to become a little disoriented.

  “She probably met some tearaway. It’s a familiar story, I’m afraid. They meet in a pub and he gets the key and makes a copy. She may not be in on it but I doubt if you will see her again. It’s a nasty old world. That’s why I was happy to retire to my little hovel in the highlands.”