Edmund Crispin - The Moving Toyshop

A turn to the left, and he was at an alleyway which brought him back into the road down which he had walked four hours before – yes, unmistakably it was the same road, and he was three shops away from the toyshop – he had counted – on the side nearest Magdalen Bridge. Pausing only to notice landmarks and fix the position in his mind, he hurried off towards the town and the police station. The growing light showed him a plate which bore the words IFFLEY ROAD, as he came out at a road-junction where there was a stone horse-trough. So that was it. Then Magdalen Bridge, grey and broad, and safety. He looked back and saw that he was not being followed.

Oxford rises late, except on May morning, and the only person at large was a milkman. He stared very blankly indeed at the bloodied and dishevelled figure of Richard Cadogan, staggering up the long curve of the High Street; and then, presumably, dismissed him as a belated reveller. The grey freshness of the new day washed the walls of the Queen’s and University College. Last night’s moon was a lustreless coin pasted on the morning sky. The air was cool and grateful to the skin.

Cadogan’s head, if still aching abominably, now at least permitted him to think. The police station, he seemed to remember, was in St Aldate’s, somewhere near the post office and the town hall, and it was in that direction that he was heading now. One thing puzzled him. He had found in his pocket his torch, complete with battery, and what was more, his wallet, with Mr Spode’s cheque, still perfectly safe. A considerate assailant, evidently…Then he remembered the old woman with the cord tight round her neck, and was not so pleased.

The police were courteous and kind. They listened to his rather incoherent story without interruption, and asked a few supplementary questions about himself. Then the sergeant in charge of the night shift, a substantial red-faced man with a wide black moustache, said:

‘Well, sir, the best thing we can do now is to get that crack on the head dressed and give you a cup of hot tea and some aspirin. You must be pretty much under the weather.’

Cadogan was slightly annoyed at his failure to grasp the urgency of the situation. ‘Oughtn’t I to take you back there at once?’

‘Well, now. If you were out four hours, as you say, I don’t expect they’ll have left the body lying there conveniently for us, as you might say. The rooms above aren’t occupied, then?’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘No. Well, that means we can easily get there before they open the shop, and have a look round. Curtis, clean up the gentleman’s head and put a bandage on it. Here’s your tea, sir, and your aspirin. You’ll feel better for the rest.’

He was right. Cadogan felt better not only for the rest and the tea and the ointment on his bruised skull, but also for the cheerful solidity of his companions. He thought a little wryly of the craving for excitement upon which, the evening before, he had discoursed to Mr Spode in the garden at St John’s Wood. There had been quite enough of it, he decided: quite enough. It is perhaps fortunate that he did not know what was still in store.

It was full daylight, and the multitudinous clocks of Oxford were chiming 6.30, when they got into the police car and drove back down the High Street. The milkman, still on his rounds, shook his head with mournful resignation on seeing Richard Cadogan, turbaned like an oriental potentate with his bandages, sitting in the middle of a police escort. But Cadogan did not observe him. He was taking a moment off from consideration of the lethal toyshop to enjoy being in Oxford. He had scarcely had time to look around him previously, but now rushing smoothly amid noble prospects down to the high tower of Magdalen, he drew a deep breath of sheer pleasure at the place. Why – why in heaven’s name did he not live here? And it was going to be another fine day.

They crossed the bridge, reached the road-junction where the horse-trough stood, and plunged into the Iffley Road. Staring along it:

‘Hello,’ said Cadogan, ‘they’ve put the awning up.’

‘You’re sure of the place, sir?’

‘Yes, of course. It’s opposite a red-brick church of some kind – Nonconformist, I think.’

‘Ah yes, sir. That’ll be the Baptist Church.’

‘All right, driver. You can pull up now,’ said Cadogan excitedly. ‘There’s the church on our right, there’s the alley-way I came out of and there—’

The police car drew into the kerb. Half rising in his seat, Cadogan stopped and stared. In front of him, its window loaded with tins, flour, bowls of rice and lentils, bacon, and other groceries in noble array, was a shop bearing the legend:

WINKWORTH

FAMILY GROCER AND PROVISION MERCHANT

He gazed wildly to right and left. A chemist’s and a draper’s. Farther on to the right, a butcher, a baker, a stationery shop; and to the left, a corn merchant, a hat shop, and another chemist…

The toyshop had gone.

Out of the grey light came a gold morning. The leaves were beginning to fall from the trees in the Parks and in St Giles’, but they still made a brave show of bronze and yellow and malt-brown. The grey maze of Oxford – from the air, it resembles nothing so much as a maze – began to stir itself. The women undergraduates were the first abroad – cycling along the streets in droves, absurdly gowned and clutching complicated files, or hovering about libraries until the doors should be open and admit them once again to study the divine mysteries which hang about the Christian element in Beowulf , the date of the Urtristan (if any), the complexities of hydrodynamics, the kinetic theory of gases, the law of tort, or the situation and purposes of the parathyroid gland. The men rose more circumspectly, putting a pair of trousers, a coat, and a scarf over their pyjamas, shambling across quadrangles to sign lists, and shambling back to bed again. Art students emerged, subduing the flesh in their endeavour to find a good light, elusive and nearly as unattainable as the Grail itself. Commercial Oxford, too, awoke; shops opened and buses ran; the streets were thronged with traffic. All over the city, in colleges and belfries, the mechanism of clocks whirred, clanged, and struck nine o’clock, in a maddening, jagged syncopation of conflicting tempo and timbre.

A red object shot down the Woodstock Road.

It was an extremely small, vociferous, and battered sports car. Across its bonnet were scrawled in large white letters the words LILY CHRISTINE III. A steatopygic nude in chromium leaned forward at a dangerous angle from the radiator cap. It reached the junction of Woodstock and Banbury roads, turned sharply to the left, and entered the private road which runs up beside the college of St Christopher, patron saint of travellers (for the benefit of the uninitiated, it should here be said that St Christopher’s stands next door to St John’s). It then turned in at a wrought-iron gate and proceeded at about forty miles an hour down a short gravel drive which was bordered with lawns and rhododendron bushes and which terminated in a sort of half-hearted loop where it was just impossible conveniently to turn a car. It was evident that the driver had his vehicle under only imperfect control. He was wrestling desperately with the levers. The car made directly for the window where the President of the college, a thin, demure man of mildly epicurean tastes, was sunning himself. Perceiving his peril, he retreated in panic haste. But the car missed the wall of his lodging and fled on up to the end of the drive, where the driver, with a tremendous swerve of the wheel and some damage to the grass borders, succeeded in turning it completely round. At this point there seemed to be nothing to stop his rushing back the way he had come, but unhappily, in righting the wheel, he pulled it over too far, and the car thundered across a strip of lawn, buried its nose in a large rhododendron bush, choked, stalled, and stopped.