Silence Observed (7 page)

“What on earth was that?” Judith asked.

“Charles Gribble. It seems that some little dealer he was telling me about this afternoon has been–”

Another bell interrupted Appleby. This time, it was at his front door. Since the decayed couple had gone off duty, he went to answer it himself. And, a moment later, he was following Sir Gabriel Gulliver back into Judith’s drawing-room.

“Outrageous!” Gulliver was shouting. “Your damned police! Some little bookseller been murdered in Bloomsbury. And they’ve arrested my young man. The one I was telling you about. Jimmy Heffer.”

There was a moment’s silence. And then Appleby turned to his wife.

“So now we know,” he said, “why we were that rather awkward number at dinner.” He turned back to the telephone. “Didn’t you tell me, Gulliver” – he said, as he picked it up – “that your Jimmy had taken a rather sudden holiday? We can at least find out whether he’s really going to spend the tail end of it in jail.”

Gulliver threw back his head. He was still very excited.

“Thank you,” he said. “I’ll be grateful for anything you can discover. But the thing astounds me. It simply doesn’t make sense.”

“I’ll see that it soon does.” Appleby had already dialled his number, and his enquiries didn’t take long. He put down the receiver. “So far,” he said, “your young gentleman has simply been detained. Persuaded, that is, to stay put. At least, it sounds like that.”

“In this place in Bloomsbury?”

“Yes – in the dead man’s shop. I’ll go along and look into it now. Let Judith give you a drink, Gulliver, before you go home.”

“Can’t I–”

But Appleby interrupted rather brusquely.

“I don’t think that my damned police, as you are pleased to call them, will want a crowd. You can trust me to see that Heffer has immediate legal advice, if it’s required. And I’ll let you have in the morning anything that it’s proper you should know.”

For a moment Sir Gabriel Gulliver looked extremely angry. Then he nodded quickly.

“I apologize,” he said. “It wasn’t a proper way to speak of your people. But do what you can for Jimmy.”

Appleby made no reply. He had picked up the telephone again to call his car.

Jacob Trechmann – for that was the dead dealer’s name – would have appeared to the casual eye to be in a shabby as well as a small way of business. His small shop was in a shabby street. But it was a street opening at one end upon the majestic bulk of the British Museum – now silhouetted against the dull red glow of London’s night sky. There was a single small window, made yet smaller by a concave curtain of moth-eaten grey velvet. Before this, three or four small and ancient books were disposed, together with a small typed card that said:

Incunabula from the library of

the late Professor Ludwig von Zinzendorf

of the University of Heidelberg.

Appleby paused to peer at these treasures. The street lighting was indifferent, and in the little window there was no light at all. So in fact he didn’t make much of them. But at least they had such an enormous appearance of authenticity – of having dropped straight, so to speak, from the press of Gutenberg or whoever – that he was at once perversely prompted, doubtless as a result of his massive exposure to the subject that day, to speculate as to whether they might not in fact be monstrous forgeries. But of course people didn’t forge fifteenth-century printed books – although perhaps they sometimes fudged them up out of bits and pieces found lying around. Nor was there any reason to suppose that the late Jacob Trechmann was other than an impeccably honest dealer – or none except in the odd fact that he had sold to Charles Gribble as a desirable forgery what had turned out only to be a forgery of that again. It occurred to Appleby that if poor Mr Trechmann’s death became in any degree celebrated – if it proved intractably or sensationally mysterious – people might even set about forging forgeries of Manallace forgeries for what might be called their associative value. Logically, there was no point at which the process need cease. Once take satisfaction in counterfeiting counterfeits and a sort of infinite regress of the things became possible at once.

Appleby put aside this idle speculation and made to enter the shop. As he did so, he noticed a small oblong of cardboard lying at his feet. He picked it up. It seemed to be out of a card index, and written on it in a neat script he read:

K Burger, Monumenta Germaniae et

Italiae typographica, 1892.

But this had been roughly struck out, and under it was written in pencil:

Sorry, working in BM

Back at six o’clock. J T

There was a drawing pin with its point ineffectively askew through the ‘M’ of
Monumenta
. It seemed clear that Mr Trechmann, whether today or on an earlier occasion, had made a somewhat inefficient attempt to affix this notice to the door of his shop. It appeared, too, that the exigencies of his business had at times been sacrificed to the pleasures of research in the vast repository of learning nearby. He seemed an unlikely sort of person to get himself murdered. Robbery, of course, might well have been a motive, since the modesty of the dead man’s premises probably by no means corresponded to the value of what they contained. Yet the thief – if there had been a thief – had at least shown no interest in the conspicuously exposed incunables of the late Professor Ludwig von Zinzendorf.

Appleby paused for a moment longer on the threshold. He was noticing – and with an almost guilty pleasure – that his pulse had quickened. Returning to this sort of thing – for his looking in, so to speak, on common metropolitan homicide was precisely that – carried just the excitement that such affairs had carried thirty years ago – when he had driven up to them not only with the rule of law to vindicate, but also with a career to make. But he paused, too, to recall something else. Trechmann was the person who had sold Charles Gribble the Meredith forgeries purporting to be by Geoffrey Manallace. But Jimmy Heffer, the man apparently under suspicion of killing Trechmann, had been the person associated with Sir Gabriel Gulliver in the curious affair of the false Astarte Oakes and her (as it seemed) entirely genuine Rembrandt. Here, one might say, were two stories, which were at present equally obscure and problematical. And the dead Jacob Trechmann looked as if he might be a link between them… The shop door wasn’t locked. Appleby pushed it open.

And there was the body.

There was the body, with disorder all around it. But whether there was any connection between the fact of this disorder and the circumstance that Trechmann had a bullet through his head, Appleby saw no immediate means of telling. The little shop looked as if it was always untidy, so that even a reckless pillaging operation would make little difference to its appearance. There was a little counter almost invisible behind buttresses of books and beneath sheaves of prints and papers. There were a few chairs similarly encumbered. There were valuable-looking books behind steel grilles and equally valuable-looking books on open, rather dusty shelves. In the middle of the floor there was what looked at first like an elaborate infernal machine, but which turned out to be a clockwork model of the solar system. And there was a bust of Homer hazardously perched on a pedestal formed out of bound volumes of the Proceedings of the British Academy.

The body was seated in an old swivel chair, and slumped forward over rather a narrow desk. Trechmann had been an elderly man, shabbily dressed, and with a bald patch on the back of his head. It was very exactly through the centre of this that the bullet had gone. Some blood had flowed from the punctured scalp. But, on the whole, there wasn’t much mess.

Appleby stepped forward. The sight of this nondescript person, so efficiently and ruthlessly despatched, oddly moved him – so that he found himself ignoring a constable who had stepped indignantly forward, not knowing him from Adam. The dead man’s left arm hung limply down to the floor. The right arm was flexed on the desk, and the fingers had contracted on an open book, crumpling its title page. Automatically Appleby deciphered the print beneath the nerveless hand:

Premiers Monuments

de l’Imprimerie en France

au XVe Siècle.

It was difficult not to feel that the late Mr Trechmann’s pursuits had been of a singularly harmless kind.

“Excuse me, sir – but might that be something Top Secret-like?”

The constable, who was very young, had somehow been apprised of the newcomer’s importance. And he was putting his best foot forward.

Appleby looked again at the large clockwork toy.

“Top Secret?” he said.

“I think I’ve seen something of the sort in pictures, sir. Like it might be about a bomb, sir. A working model of an atom, you might say, with the neutrons and molecules and all moving like they should.”

“Ah – I see.” This appeared to Appleby a very intelligent conjecture. “As a matter of fact, it’s something of the sort on a larger scale. That’s the sun, and that’s the earth, and these are the other planets. You’ll see that they’ve all got their moons – except that this one, sixth from the centre, has rings.”

“Saturn, sir?”

“I believe so. And the thing’s called an orrery. Who’s in charge here?”

“Inspector Parker, sir.” The young constable nodded towards an inner door. “Through there, he is. And I’m waiting the word to get the body away. We’ve had the whole outfit now, sir – photographers and all. But now the Inspector is marking time, as you might say.”

Appleby smiled.

“You mustn’t criticize Inspector Parker, except to Inspector Parker. And do something about securing that outer door. We might have anybody walking in.”

The constable did as he was told. Appleby went on into the inner room. It was much like the outer one, except that it was not furnished with a corpse. Inspector Parker, looking far from amiable, was standing at one end of it. At a hastily cleared square of table a uniformed sergeant was sitting over a blank notebook, visibly sweating at the effort of doing nothing at all. And in an ancient basket chair in a corner, apparently engaged simply in giving Parker sour look for sour look, was a young man of wholesome appearance and athletic build.

“Mr Heffer?” Appleby asked, as his two subordinates got to their feet.

The young man didn’t rise.

“Yes,” he said. “Are you another policeman?”

“I am. And my name is Appleby.”

“How do you do?” the young man said – civilly but entirely without interest.

“My wife, Mr Heffer, is much distressed that you were unable to dine with us.”

“Oh, good Lord!” Now the young man did tumble to his feet. “I say – what a frightful thing. But I did clean forget. Please explain to Lady Appleby. And of course I’ll call and apologize just as soon as ever I can.”

At this Inspector Parker, who had been obtrusively impassive before so startling an event as Appleby’s appearance, spoke for the first time. It was briefly.

“Um,” Inspector Parker said.

“And ‘Um’ to you,” the young man said rather childishly. “Why can’t you
do
something?” He turned to Appleby. “Why don’t they arrest me, if they want to? This chap will do nothing but ask me to be reasonable – by which he seems to mean that I should pour my life history into the sergeant’s waiting notebook. Why doesn’t he caution me, and say I ought to send for a solicitor, and that sort of thing?”

“I imagine, Mr Heffer, that he feels there are circumstances of which you could give him a perfectly simple explanation if you were disposed to. As for your solicitor, I should certainly advise you to have him along. Summoning him will not establish the slightest adverse inference as to your position in this affair.”

“I’ll be damned if I summon anybody. And we’ve been staring at each other like this for hours, with the consequence that I’ve been extremely discourteous to your wife. And all because I happened to find old Trechmann shot dead. It’s outrageous!”

“That a harmless man should be murdered?”

“Well, yes – that too, of course.” Jimmy Heffer seemed a little checked by this.

“Then might it not be reasonable that we should approach the matter in a co-operative spirit?” Appleby turned to Inspector Parker. “Just what is the situation, Parker, and what do we want to know?”

“Well, sir, Mr Heffer has some story about an old woman.”

Appleby frowned. He plainly thought poorly of this as the beginning of an expository speech.

“
Some story
, Parker? I don’t think we can have that. It carries an implication of prevarication which isn’t at all proper at this stage. I can see that Mr Heffer is an irritating person – or at least that he is behaving in an irritating manner now. But irritated is just what we mustn’t get. So let’s start again.”

“Yes, Sir John. Well, the circumstances are these. At just after six o’clock this evening a constable on his beat turned into this street from the direction of the British Museum. He believes himself to have been aware of two persons, both male, walking down it in the same direction as himself, and a little ahead of him. Unfortunately, as it turns out, his attention was then distracted. He had occasion, that is to say, to examine the window of the stationer’s and newsagent’s shop near that end of the street.”

Appleby considered this gravely.

“Wasn’t that rather an idle occupation on this constable’s part, Parker?”

“A matter of vigilance, sir. He had reason to suppose that the window might be displaying publications of a pornographical character.”

“Well, well! And what was it that he failed to observe as a consequence of this distracting pornography?”

“He failed to observe what had happened to the two persons walking down the street in front of him. Not, of course, that there was any particular reason why he
should
observe them. But he is fairly sure that the street was empty when he heard a shot.”