Edmund Crispin - The Moving Toyshop

Its driver got out and gazed at it with some severity. While he was doing this it backfired suddenly – a tremendous report, a backfire to end all backfires. He frowned, took a hammer from the back seat, opened the bonnet and hit something inside. Then he closed the bonnet again and resumed his seat. The engine started and the car went into reverse with a colossal jolt and began racing backwards towards the President’s Lodging. The President, who had returned to the window and was gazing at this scene with a horrid fascination, retired again, with scarcely less haste than before. The driver looked over his shoulder, and saw the President’s Lodging towering above him, like a liner above a motor-boat. Without hesitation, he changed into forward gear. The car uttered a terrible shriek, shuddered like a man smitten with the ague, and stopped; after a moment it emitted its inexplicable valedictory backfire. With dignity the driver put on the brake, climbed out, and took a brief-case from the back seat.

At the cessation of noise the President had approached his window again. He now flung it open.

‘My dear Fen,’ he expostulated. ‘I’m glad you have left us a little of the college to carry on with. I feared you were about to demolish it utterly.’

‘Oh? Did you? Did you?’ said the driver. His voice was cheerful and slightly nasal. ‘You needn’t have worried, Mr President. I had it under perfect control. There’s something the matter with the engine, that’s all. I can’t think why it makes that noise after it’s stopped. I’ve tried everything for it.’

‘And I see no real necessity,’ said the President peevishly, ‘for you to bring your car into the grounds at all.’ He slammed the window shut, but without any real annoyance. The eccentricities of Gervase Fen, Professor of English Language and Literature and Fellow of St Christopher’s, were not on the traditional donnish pattern. But they were suffered more or less gladly by his colleagues, who knew that any treatment of Fen at his face value resulted generally in their own discomfiture.

Fen strode with great energy across the lawn, passed through a gate in a mellow brick wall against which, in their season, the peaches bloomed, and entered the main garden of the college. He was a tall, lanky man, about forty years of age, with a cheerful, lean, ruddy, clean-shaven face. His dark hair, sedulously plastered down with water, stuck up in spikes at the crown. He had on an enormous raincoat and carried an extraordinary hat.

‘Ah, Mr Hoskins,’ he said to an undergraduate who was perambulating the lawn with his arm round the waist of an attractive girl. ‘Hard at it already, I see.’

Mr Hoskins, large, raw-boned and melancholy, a little like a Thurber dog, blinked mildly. ‘Good morning, sir,’ he said. Fen passed on. ‘Don’t be alarmed, Janice,’ said Mr Hoskins to his companion. ‘Look what I’ve got for you.’ He felt in the pocket of his coat and produced a big box of chocolates.

Meanwhile Fen proceeded into an open passage-way, stone-paved, which led from the gardens into the south quadrangle of the college, turned into a doorway on the right, passed the organ scholar’s room, ran up a flight of carpeted stairs to the first floor, and entered his study. It was a long, light room which looked out on the Inigo Jones quadrangle on one side and the gardens on the other. The walls were cream, the curtains and carpet dark green. There were rows of books on the low shelves, Chinese miniatures on the walls, and a few rather dilapidated plaques and busts of English writers on the mantelpiece. A large, untidy flat-topped desk, with two telephones, stood against the windows of the north wall.

And in one of the luxurious armchairs sat Richard Cadogan, his face wearing the look of a hunted man.

‘Well, Gervase,’ he said in a colourless voice, ‘it’s a long time since we were undergraduates together.’

‘Good God,’ said Fen, shocked. ‘You’re Richard Cadogan.’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, of course you’re very welcome, but you’ve arrived at rather an awkward time…’

‘You’re as unmannerly as ever.’

Fen perched on the edge of the desk, his face eloquent of pained surprise. ‘What an extraordinary thing to say. Have I ever said an unkind word—’

‘It was you who wrote about the first poems I ever published: “This is a book everyone can afford to be without.”’

‘Ha!’ said Fen, pleased. ‘Very pithy I was in those days. Well, how are you, my dear fellow?’

‘Terrible. Of course you weren’t a professor when I saw you last. The University had more sense.’

‘I became a professor,’ Fen answered firmly, ‘because of my tremendous scholarly abilities and my acute and powerful mind.’

‘You wrote to me at the time that it was only a matter of pulling a few moth-eaten strings.’

‘Oh, did I?’ said Fen uneasily. ‘Well, never mind all that now. Have you had breakfast?’

‘Yes, I had it in hall.’

‘Well, have a cigarette, then.’

‘Thanks…Gervase, I’ve lost a toyshop.’

Gervase Fen stared. As he offered his lighter, his face assumed an expression of the greatest caution. ‘Would you mind explaining that curious utterance?’ he asked.

Cadogan explained. He explained at great length. He explained with a sense of righteous indignation and frustration of spirit.

‘We combed the neighbourhood,’ he said bitterly. ‘And do you know, there isn’t a toyshop anywhere there. We asked people who had lived there all their lives and they’d never heard of such a thing. And yet I’m certain I got the place right. A grocer, I ask you! We went inside, and it certainly was a grocer, and the door didn’t squeak either; but then there is such a thing as oil.’ He referred to this mineral without much confidence. ‘And on the other hand, there was that door at the back exactly as I’d seen it. Still, I found out that all the shops in that row are built on exactly the same plan.

‘But it was the police that were so awful,’ he moaned in conclusion. ‘It wasn’t that they were nasty or anything like that. They were just horribly kind, the way you are to people who haven’t long to live. When they thought I wasn’t listening they talked about concussion. The trouble was, you see, that everything looked so different in daylight, and I suppose I hesitated and expressed doubts and made mistakes and contradicted myself. Anyway, they drove me back to St Aldate’s and advised me to see a doctor, so I left them and came and had breakfast here. And here I am.’

‘I suppose,’ said Fen dubiously, ‘that you didn’t go upstairs at this grocery place?’

‘Oh, yes, I forgot to mention that. We did. There was no body, of course, and it was all quite different. That is, the stairs and passage were carpeted, and it was all clean and airy, and the furniture was covered with dust sheets, and the sitting-room was quite different from the room I’d been in. I think it was at that point that the police really became convinced I was crazy.’ Cadogan brooded over a sense of insufferable wrong.

‘Well,’ said Fen carefully, ‘assuming that this tale isn’t the product of a deranged mind—’

‘ I am perfectly sane .’

‘Don’t bawl at me, my dear fellow.’ Fen was pained.

‘Of course, I don’t blame the police for thinking I was mad,’ said Cadogan in tones of the most vicious reprehension.

‘And assuming,’ Fen proceeded with aggravating calm, ‘that toyshops in the Iffley Road do not just take wing into the ether, leaving no gap behind: what could inspire anyone to substitute a grocery shop for a toyshop at dead of night?’

Cadogan snorted. ‘Perfectly obvious. They knew I’d seen the body, and they wanted people to think I was mad when I told them about it – which they’ve succeeded in doing. The crack on the head could be produced as the reason for my delusions. And the window of the closet was left open deliberately, so that I could get out.’