Stephen Barr - Best of the best detective stories - 25th anniversary collection

“Once a year I threaten suicide. ‘It doesn’t matter about me, my boy,’ I write. ‘ You will carry on the name and title.’ My word, what a flap that puts him in! Always good for ten quid pronto via cablegram.”

A sound, so dim and distant that it failed to reach the ear of Denny the Dip, caused the peerless peer to break off discourse and raise his head. “Bogey,” he announced. “Policeman, to you. Weighs about a hundred and sixty and has trouble with his left arch. Neglects his tum, too — hear it rumble!”

Denny strained, could hear nothing but the traffic passing through the park, its sound rising and falling with the wind, like surf. He murmured, “What a talent you got, Grooley! What a team we’d make!”

“A team we certainly will not make!” the peer snorted. “But, as to your playing squire to my knight, hmm, well, we’ll consider it. I plan to take a brisk walk in the morning, down to the Battery and vicinage. We’ll see if you can stand the pace — no sinecure being gunbearer, as it were, to the man who outwalked The Man-Eater of Mysore. And another thing—” He thwacked The Dip across the feet with his swagger stick. “No more of this ‘Grooley!’ Call me Sahib, Bwana, Kyrios, or M’lord.”

“Hmm,” murmured Lord Grue and Groole, pausing and looking in the shop window. “I find that curious. Don’t you find that curious, Denny?”

Denny, panting and aching from the long trek down from Central Park, was finding nothing curious but his inability to break away and sink to rest. “Wuzzat, Gr — I mean Bwana?” he moaned. He was bearing, in lieu of gun, the Marquess’ swagger stick.

“Use your eyes , man! There, in the window. What do you see?”

The Dip wiped the sweat out of his eyes. “Leather goods?” he inquired. “Outboard motors? Canned crabmeat?” The Marquess clicked his tongue, and swore rapidly in Swahili (Up-Country dialect). “Seasoned Honduras mahogany?” The Dip continued hastily. “Flowered organdy? Blue rayon? Manila hemp?”

“ Ahah! Just so, a great lovely coil of Manila hempen rope. Notice anything odd about it? No? You were pulling the wrong mendicant dodge, you should’ve used a tin cup. You really don’t see that scarlet thread running through it, so cleverly and closely intertwined that it cannot be picked out without spoiling the rope? You do see it; good. No use to ask if you know what it means; you don’t, so I’ll tell you. It means that rope was made by and for the Royal Navy. It is never sold, so it must have been stolen. No one would dare fence it in Blighty, so they’ve shipped it over here. Clever, I call that. Must look into this.”

He entered the shop, followed by Denny, who sank at once into a chair. The dog Guido, looking as cool and fresh as his master, stood motionless. Mrs. Goodeycoonce emerged from the back.

“Afternoon, ma’am,” said Lord Grue and Groole, touching the brim of his quasi-caracul cap, and giving her no chance to speak. “My name is Arthur Powisse, of the Powisse Exterminating Company. Allow me to offer you my card — dear me, I seem to have given the last one away; ah, well, it doesn’t signify. This is my chief assistant, Mr. Dennis, and the animal is one of our pack of trained Tyrolean Rat Hounds. We have just finished a rush job at one of the neighborhood warehouses, and, happening to pass by and being entranced by your very attractive window display, thought we would drop in and offer you an estimate on deratting your premises.”

Mrs. Goodeycoonce opened her mouth, but the Marquess swept on. “I anticipate your next comment, ma’am. You are about to say, ‘But I keep a clean house’ — and so you do, so you obviously do. But do your neighbors ? Aye, there’s the rub; they don’t, alas. Around the corner is an establishment of the type known as, if you will pardon the expression, a common flophouse — the sort of place where they throw fishbones in the corner and never sweep up. Three doors down is the manufactory of Gorman’s Glossy Glue Cakes, a purely animal product, on which ratus ratus thrives, ma’am, simply thrives! ”

Something flickered in Granny Goodeycoonce’s eyes which seemed to indicate she had long been aware of the proximity of Gorman’s Glossy Glue Cakes, particularly on very warm days, and found in it no refreshment of soul whatsoever.

“How often at night,” Lord Grue and Croole waxed almost lyrical, “when all should be quiet, must you not have heard Noises, eh? — and attributed them to the settling of the timbers, the expansion and contraction of the joists and beams. Not a bit of it! Rats !” His voice sank to a whisper. “Oh, the horror of it! First one gray shadow, then another—”

He took a step forward, she took one backward, he advanced, she retreated. “Then great grisly waves of them, first in the foundations, then in the cellar, then — does this door lead to the cellar? I had better examine it.”

Later that evening found the Marquess and his bearer deep in the shadowy doorway of an empty warehouse. “It was the advent of that offensively wholesome-looking young chap, her grandson, that broke the spell,” the Marquess mused. “Said she’d consider it. No matter. I saw the cellar. Those crates and crates of Polish hams! Those bales of raw rubber! Turkish Sipahi Cigarettes! That infinite variety of portable, sea-borne merchandise!

“It can only mean one thing: the people are pukka river pirates. I know the signs — seen them on the Thames, the Nile, Hoogli, Brahmapootra, Whampoa, Pei-Ho — eheu fugaces . Nice setup she’s got there — snug shop, tidy house, fine figger, and a widow woman, I’m sure — no sign of a husband and anyone can see she’s not the divorcing type. Hmm, well Question is: How does the lad get the stuff there? How do river pirates usually get the stuff there? Just so.”

And they had walked along the waterfront, the Marquess examining the water as intently as one of the inhabitants of the Sundra Straits peering for bêche-de-mer . The Dip plodding along to the rear of Guido, as sunken beneath the weight of the swagger stick as if it had been an elephant gun. He reflected on the day he might have spent, conning old ladies out of coins, and on a certain bat-cave he knew of, where an ounce and a quarter of Old Cordwainer retailed for the ridiculous sum of 21 cents. But there was that about the Marquess which said Hither to me, caitiff, and therein fail not, at your peril; therefore Denny plodded meekly.

“Ho,” said His Lordship, stopping, and pointing at the filthy waters of the East River, which, in a happier time, lined with forests and grassy meads, were thick with salmon, shad, cod, ale-wives, herring, sturgeon, and all fruits of the sea; now the waters were merely thick. “Observe,” said His Lordship. “You see how — there — the oil slick, orange peel, bad bananas, and other rubbish floats down with the tide. Whereas the flotsam rides more or less straight out from under us and joins the current at a right angle. The main current, that is. Let’s have a dekko,” he declared, and shinnied down the side of the wharf timbers almost to the water’s edge.

His enthusiasm, as he clambered up, almost communicated itself to The Dip. “Whuddaya see, Sahib?” he asked, craning.

“Enough. Tonight, when the eyes of the Blessed Houris in Paradise, yclept ‘stars’ in our rude Saxon Tongue, shine as clearly as this filthy air will allow them to, we shall follow young Mr. Goodeycoonce. Here are rupees, or whatever the juice they call them — ‘quarters’? Just so. Go thou and eat, and return within the hour. As for me, a strip of biltong will do, and fortunately I took care to refill the flask. They make good whiskey in Belfast, I must say, cursed Orangemen though they be.” He raised his drink and waved it across a trickle in the gutter. “To the King over the water” — and drank. His glass eye glittered defiance to all the House of Hanover.