Hammond Innes - Solomons Seal

Who had taught him, I wondered, to fashion such a weapon, and for such a deadly purpose? I had never met him, yet holding that wicked little sliver of wood in my hand, I seemed to feel his presence. I could see him, propped up in that bed with the pictures on the wall in front of him, pictures that represented his real world, and labouring to trim the point and cut the slits, and death in his heart as he struggled to control and direct the movements of his hands. And she had thrown it on the fire, hating it. The doll, too. And now, to save him from himself, she was working her passage back to the world he had come from, where she had been born.

Pay-back, Chips Rowlinson had called it. If I catch up with the man … I felt a chill run through me, though the darkened bar was heavy with the day’s heat trapped in the crush of people eating and drinking. An English pub, everything so ordinary, and the sliver of wood in my hand, the memory of her words. And those stamps. They were part of it, too. I was certain of it, so that sitting there, drinking the rest of my beer, I wondered how Timothy Holland had come by them. He couldn’t have inherited them, not from his father at any rate; otherwise the albums would have been at Aldeburgh all the time, not as his sister had said among personal belongings sent home with him from Papua New Guinea. No, he had either discovered them or been given them out there. But where? And had he known they were valuable, or was his interest in them in some way connected with the disappearance of the Holland Trader?

Unfortunately, I had other things to think about next day in London, and when I discovered the stamps were probably worth even more than Tubby had offered for them, I ceased to worry about their real significance. If you’re hungry, you don’t enquire where the manna comes from.

*

Canberra House, where I had to go for my visa, is near the Law Courts so that it was only a short walk to the Strand Stamp Arcade and on my way to the Qantas office to pick up my airline tickets. This philatelic hypermarket almost next door to the Savoy has the atmosphere of a bazaar, a sort of Aladdin’s cave of stamps. I preferred it to Stanley Gibbons on the other side of the Strand because you were not confined to any one dealer and could wander from counter to counter, looking at stamps, chatting to dealers, meeting other collectors, and no pressure on you to buy anything. However, since I had got to know Josh Keegan personally, most of my purchases had been through him. He was expensive, handling nothing but the best, but if you could catch him between Continental buying trips, he was fascinating to talk to, full of stories of deals he had pulled off, fakes he had exposed and, of course, his latest acquisitions, which were always superb and mostly beyond my modest means.

His stand was at the far end of the arcade: J. S. H. Keegan, Specialist in GB amp; Commonwealth. It was just before lunch when I arrived, and his manager, Jim Grace, was invoicing some early St Helena he had just sold to a thickset man flourishing a German credit card. The only other customer at the counter was picking over some Specimen GBs neatly packaged in plastic envelopes.

‘Is Josh Keegan in?’ I asked.

Grace nodded. ‘Just back from Birmingham. Our first auction is next week.’ To look at this small stand in a crowded arcade it was difficult to realise that he had a partner in Zurich, another in Munich, and had just gone into partnership with a firm of auctioneers in the Midlands. ‘If it’s about that little collection Commander Sawyer brought in, I know he’d like to see you.’ He reached for the credit card, jotting down the number on the invoice. ‘He’s upstairs in the office if you’d like to go up.’

I had only once before been to his office on the third floor; that was when Tubby had introduced me to him. It had originally been one large room; now it was partitioned off into small cubicles where his staff sorted, packaged and priced the material he acquired, most of it from private collectors. His own office was little bigger than the others, a desk, two chairs, a window looking down on to the Strand and the walls lined with small filing tray cabinets. He was standing at the window when I went in, a neatly dressed man with a shock of grey hair. He might have been a musician, except that he had a block of orange stamps gripped in a pair of tweezers and was holding it up to the light, his glasses pushed on to the top of his head and a jeweller’s magnifying glass screwed into his right eye.

He turned and smiled at me. I think he was Irish, the smile and the charm all part of his stock-in-trade. ‘Ever seen a block of four five-pound orange? Lightly cancelled, too. I thought they might be fakes, but no, they’re all right and it’s the blued paper.’ He held the block out for me to see. ‘Superb, isn’t it?’ His eyes were shining with enthusiasm.

‘What’s it worth?’ I asked.

He shrugged. ‘What anybody will pay for it — four thousand pounds, five thousand, I don’t know. But it’s something to bring the dealers down to Birmingham when we hold our big auction there in the autumn.’ He slipped the brilliant orange block back into its plastic mount, his eyes already fastened on the parcel I was carrying. ‘Is that the Holland collection you’ve got there?’ He sat down at his desk, clearing a space with a sweep of his hand. ‘Are you going to let us auction it for the lady, or is she prepared to sell direct? I’ll make you an offer for it if you like.’

‘Tubby has already made an offer,’ I said. ‘And I’ve given a man named Berners until July sixteenth to better it.’

‘Two dealers after it already, eh?’ He smiled and rubbed his hands together. ‘Tubby won’t get it, of course, poor fellow. I’ve already been on to my Zurich partner, and I’ve just heard that one of our clients over there is willing to go to thirty-five hundred pounds, probably more, provided the background is substantiated. In that case I might even go to four thousand myself.’

I stared at him. ‘But you were only willing to give five hundred and fifty for the Trinidad ship stamp.’

‘It’s not the “Lady McLeod”. Didn’t Tubby tell you what he had discovered?’

‘He said something very odd had come to light, but I was in a hurry and wasn’t prepared for one of his lectures. I thought it was some finer point of printing-’

‘Some finer point of printing?’ He laughed. ‘You could certainly call it that.’ He leaned back. ‘So you don’t know. And if I’d offered you four thousand pounds, you’d have taken it?’

‘There’s Berners,’ I said. ‘Also I’d have had to get advice about exchange regulations.’ And I told him about Perenna Holland’s movements. ‘As a UK resident, I think it might require Bank of England permission to send money out to her.’ That was before exchange controls were lifted.

‘No problem, if you’re willing to let us auction the collection.’

I hesitated. But it was what I had been hoping for. ‘Provided you can let her have some sort of guarantee in advance.’ And I explained her position and also that I was booked out for Sydney on Sunday evening.

‘Sydney, Australia?’ He looked at me with sudden interest. ‘That could be very helpful. But before I promise anything, let’s have another look at those die proofs. It’s the die proofs that make the collection unique.’

‘Because they’re ship stamps?’

‘No, because they could explain something that has always puzzled students of the Perkins Bacon printing house. Come on, open it up and let me have another look at them.’ And he added as I undid the wrapping, ‘The catalogue description would have to be very circumspect, but we could certainly say enough to bring every major GB and Commonwealth dealer running to have a look at it.’ He opened the albums, searching out the two pages with the proofs, placing them side by side on the desk in front of him. ‘Forgeries, fakes, re-entries, inverted watermarks, doubled surcharges, there are examples of every vagary of stamp printing. But stolen dies that were later used to prepare the transfer roller for a plate of ship labels — that’s something quite new. Hard to believe in connection with a firm like Perkins Bacon.’ He put the glass to his eye, peering closely at the seal in its frame. ‘Solomons Seal. That’s right, isn’t it? That’s how Berners described it to you.’