Maxim Jakubowski - The Mammoth Book of Best British Mysteries 6

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

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, thanks 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 to see 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.”