Maxim Jakubowski - The Mammoth Book of Best British Mysteries 6

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 that Tales 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 would 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.

Anthony looked at his watch: five o’clock. Not late enough, on the whole, to justify the darkness of the sky. He wanted a pint but he stayed on by the window, watching the rain. He saw now that it fell on a policeman on a horse. The copper wore one of those big capes that covered not only his own body, but much of the horse’s. They were both in it together, stoically receiving the rain at the corner of the Square.

Anthony turned back towards the chair and picked up the manuscript. He had been thinking he might write his book from the point of view of Mayer. He imagined that Mayer had originally regarded Price in the same way that he himself did: with appalled fascination. But the trouble with this plan was that Mayer had been found battered to death in the West End (just on the borders of Mayfair, in fact) in 1907, three years before the end of the story of Price. Obviously, Price had done it. Anthony was sure of that, and he would make the case in his novel.

He walked through the empty Reading Room, and through the double doors, where he saw Peter at the book desk. He found that he was relieved to see him.

“Thanks for that, Peter,” he said, handing back the document.

“What was it?” asked Peter.

“Oh, just… Descriptions of how he broke into various jewellery shops.”

“Charming,” Peter said, and he laughed.

Collecting his coat, which was the last one left in the cloakroom, Anthony thought: he wouldn’t laugh if he knew anything about Price. There was nothing funny about him. He was no gentleman thief, and the robberies had sometimes lead to violence. Newspaper cuttings mentioned one associate of Price’s who had been found murdered – a known receiver of stolen goods. Price had missed a court appearance to attend the man’s funeral, which was ironic in several ways. For a start, he’d killed the man. Anthony was certain of that, and the killing would make a scene for his novel.

Anthony walked out into the Square. The policeman had gone, and the place was deserted, the rain coming down on the trees alone. They were – what? – twenty times taller than a man. Seemed unreasonable somehow. They were rocking in the warm wind that was blowing through the rain, looking restless.

Anthony left the Square by the first available street, but that was all right because it led to one of the best pubs in Mayfair. He walked quickly along the street of distinguished, reserved buildings, moving in the opposite direction to the water flowing along the gutter. All other pedestrians seemed to have retreated in the face of his advance. Anthony took his mobile phone out of his pocket. He pressed the “on” switch and white light seeped between the number keys, but there was a worrying, restless little display on the screen: dots in a line groping after something, like an ellipsis. It was a new phone and he’d not seen this before. Then the display went all still and sullen, and the message read: “No signal.” Was it to do with the rain?

The pub, The Unicorn, glowed in the rain like a little blue lantern, cosily framed by antiquarian bookshops. With the bulge at the front, and the flagpole that came out over the doorway, it looked sea-going somehow. Opposite was a block of flats: Horace Mansions. Anthony had earmarked Horace Mansions for when he became successful. It was Edwardian, which was his period.