The Mammoth Book of Best British Mysteries

THE CASE OF THE CURIOUS QUORUM by Colin Dexter

Triply marked had been the white envelope, Personal Private Confidential; and after reading its contents, Inspector Lewis’s forehead registered considerable puzzlement. Furthermore, after re-reading the two-page letter, such puzzlement appeared compounded with each succeeding paragraph.

53 Cumberland Place

London W2 5AS

0207 3736642

10 April 2006

Dear Inspector,

My only connection with you is via the late Chief Inspector Morse, who once came to talk at the Detection Club’s annual jamboree at The Ritz. We had known of him because one of our number had written accounts of some of his high-profile investigations, particularly into murder, a crime ever nourishing the life-blood of our distinguished membership. Morse spoke rather stiffly, we thought, although after his speech he was somewhat more relaxed with his plentiful supply of single-malt Scotch.

It was at that point he came to speak of you, and in a most complimentary fashion. Clearly you formed an illustrious partnership and I know you will have learnt a great deal from him about the solving of crime. Indeed, one of our cruciverbalist members wrote an anagrammatic clue about his rank and name: “Person with crimes to resolve (9, 5)”. And it is in order to resolve a crime that I write to you now. Please, Inspector, consider the following facts.

I was myself, until a few years ago, the President of the Detection Club, during which time I naturally held an open cheque book on the Club’s account. I attended a committee meeting two weeks ago in the hotel lounge at Paddington Railway Station, taking with me the cheque book and intending (belatedly) to surrender it to the current President. There were five of us there, all male: our President, myself, and three other senior members. The business was conducted expeditiously; and before repairing to the bar with my colleagues, I collected up my own material, consisting of a few personal letters, the minutes of the last meeting, the morning’s agenda, my notes, etc, and stuffed them into my briefcase.

On returning home and taking out these papers, I found that the cheque book was missing, although I clearly remember that I had forgotten (yet again) to hand it over. Was my memory playing cruel tricks on me? I am certain this was not the case. My brain cells have not let me down for many a decade, to be frank – eight of them almost! I did not allow this matter to disturb me unduly, but it should have done. Why? Because two days ago I learnt that a considerable amount had been withdrawn from the Club’s account on a cheque from that very book, a cheque ostensibly signed by me.

My mind has been going round whirlygigwise this last forty-eight hours, since I am certain that it was one of us at the committee meeting who was responsible for the theft, as well as for the criminal usage made of it thereafter. One of those men is a complete monster – bit of one, anyway! One of them is a d- arrant robber! One of them ought to be roasted under a grill – he deserves it! Do I sound a little incoherent? So be it.

Where does this leave my reputation? I used to be called the Crime King – Father of Detection! And now I am left in much anger and despair as I see myself the victim of a person who is that most despicable thing – faker of cheques! He would need a cheque, of course, as well as a copy of my signature, which he could (did) practise. It may therefore be of some help to you to have a list of those members to whom, reasonably recently, I wrote and signed semi-official letters: Len Deighton, Anthony Lejeune, Simon Brett, Lionel Davidson, Peter Lovesey, James Melville, Reginald Hill, Robert Barnard, Jonathan Gash, John Malcolm, Ian Rankin, John Harvey, and Robert Goddard. All men. But it was a man. And the only reason I am not listing the names of those members attending the committee meeting must be fairly obvious. I find myself unwilling to point a finger at any specific person.

Now that Morse is no longer with us, I am looking to you, Inspector, feeling confident that after working for so many years with that remarkable man, some of his skills will have rubbed off on you. Yes, I am certain you can help me, if you will. Alas, the resolution of this sorry affair is urgent and imperative. We need no private eye on the assignment: let’s have it under your eye – let’s prove, between us, who this villain is!

Yours truly,

HRF Keating

PS On looking through what I have written, I notice that the phrase “I am certain” is used three times. Please know that what I tell you three times is true.

Later that morning, rather more quickly than Lewis, it had been Detective Sergeant Hathaway who read the letter.

“Puzzling, don’t you think?” queried Lewis.

“Well, yes. I don’t suppose everybody knows what a cruciver-”

“I know,” interrupted Lewis sharply. “I worked with a chronic cruciverbalist for twenty years.”

“Sorry, sir.”

Lewis pointed to the letter. “Don’t you find it all a bit of a mystery?”

Hathaway hesitated. “To be truthful, sir, I don’t, no. It seems pretty clear that either it’s all a joke or else this fellow’s more than halfway round the twist.”

“Really? Doesn’t read much like a joke to me. And I don’t reckon the fellow’s lost his marbles, either. I remember Morse talking about this Keating chap. Said he’d got one of the shrewdest brains in the business.”

“But no one could expect us to take this sort of stuff seriously. He’s told us next to nothing-”

“Except his home address and his telephone number.”

“So?”

“So ring him up.”

“And say what?”

“You think of something. You’re a university graduate, remember.”

Lewis pushed the telephone across the desk; and a few moments later both men could hear the words: “This number is not receiving incoming calls. I repeat, this…”

“Never mind,” said Lewis. “The President – ring him.”

“How do we know-?”

“The Club’ll be on Google, man.”

Hathaway looked up from the screen a minute later. “Fellow called Simon Brett. There’s a telephone number, too.”

But again both men were shortly to hear an automated voice. “The person you require is not available. Please try again later”.

Lewis grinned wryly. “They all seem to be telling us next to nothing, just like you said.”

But his eyes remained steadfastly on the letter as he wondered what Morse would have thought in the same situation…

He was still wondering a few minutes later when Hathaway interrupted whatever might have been going through the inspector’s mind.

“You remember we’re due out at ten o’clock, sir?” “Yep. But just you get a copy of that letter and take it home with you tonight. You see, I’m beginning to think we may be wrong about it not telling us anything. If I’d said that to Morse, do you know what he would have said?” Hathaway shook his head indifferently. “He’d have said that fellow’s probably told us everything.”

“Not told us how the guilty party sorted out the transfer of the money; not told us which bank it was or how much dosh was taken out… Ridiculous, really, that letter!”

Lewis made no reply, and Hathaway continued:

“Tell you something else, sir. My old tutor once told me that if I kept on using as many exclamation marks in my essays as this fellow’s done, he’d refuse to read ‘em. And any writer who kept on using those long dashes all the time hadn’t much idea on how to write the Queen’s English.”

Again Lewis made no reply, but something – some small, vague idea – was struggling into birth in the depths of his brain as Hathaway spoke again.

“I wonder whether Morse would think he was much of a writer, our man here. Things like ‘arrant monster’-”

“Arrant robber,” corrected Lewis.

“Ugh! Would your old boss have written that?”

“Dunno. He never wrote much. And if he had to read a lot of bumph, it was always the commas he was most particular about.”

“Wish I’d known him, sir,” said Hathaway with gentle irony as he closed the door behind him.

“A lot of people would!” said Lewis quietly to himself in the empty room.

Hathaway had finished his supper, and was looking through the evening’s fare in the TV Times when his mind drifted back to the Keating letter. He’d won himself no Brownie points when he’d misquoted “arrant robber” from the letter. “Robber”… not all that different from “Robert”, was it? And Lewis’s Christian name must surely be Robert, with his senior colleagues always calling him “Robbie”… He took out the letter from his jacket-pocket: yes, there it was, “arrant robber”. What was this stupid bloody letter all about?

But suddenly something clicked in his mind and his eyes were gleaming as he wrote out the letters of “arrant robber” and crossed them off one by one against a name on the members’ list. One letter short, agreed. But there it was, immediately before those two words: the letter “d-”, which he’d assumed to have been the way some people who’d never sworn in their lives expressed “damned”.

“Wow!”

It was 8.45 pm and he rang Lewis immediately. Almost. But if one of the four names was hidden there in the text, in “anagrammatic” form (the very word Keating had used), yes! If one of the names was nestling there, what about the other three?

Lewis was watching the 10 o’clock news on BBC1 when Hathaway rang.

“I went through that letter line by line, sir, letter by letter, and I’ve found them, found all of them. All four: ‘d-arrant robber’ is an anagram of Robert Barnard. Next one: ‘monster – bit’ is an anagram of Simon Brett, our honourable President. Then we’ve got ‘grill – he’, not quite so clear, but it must be Reg Hill. The last, near the end, is ‘eye – let’s prove’, which works out as Peter Lovesey. I checked all the other names on the list, but there’s no one else lurking there. No one!”

After finally replacing the receiver, Hathaway felt an inner glow of forgivable pride. Yet he realised that four names didn’t help all that much when the problem was deciding on just one name. But the other four would go down to three if the President (surely) could be shunted along with Caesar’s wife into the above-suspicion bracker. Which left him with Barnard, Hill, Lovesey…

When Hathaway had rung, Lewis had only just got back from hearing Papadopoulos conducting the Oxford Philomusica at the Sheldonian. He felt pleasingly tired, and would have welcomed an earlyish night. But he knew he would have little chance of sleep with Hathaway’s clever findings topmost in his mind, and with the idea that had begun to dawn on him that morning still undeveloped and unexamined. Unusually for him, he was aware of a strongly competitive urge to come up with something that could complement his sergeant’s discovery. But who was that one crook on the committee? One of the four – or perhaps one of the three – for he (like Hathaway) felt prepared to pass over the President.

Think, Lewis! Think!

How would Morse have looked at the letter? Probably looked at it the wrong way round, say? How do you do that, though? Read it back to front? Ridiculous. Read the PS before the salutation? But where had he read the PS’s “what I tell you three times is true” before? From Lewis Carroll, wasn’t it? He located the words immediately in The Oxford Book of Quotations, from “The Hunting of the Snark”. So what? What had that got to do with anything? Just a minute. Three suspects… but Keating hadn’t mentioned any single one of the suspects three times. He hadn’t mentioned anything three times.

Or had he?

Well, even if he had, it was past midnight, and he was walking up the stairs when he remembered what Hathaway had said about punctuation. Morse had once told him that Oscar Wilde had spent two hours one morning looking through one of his poems before removing a comma; and then spent a further two hours the same afternoon before deciding to re-instate the said comma. And after standing motionless on the third step from the top of the staircase, Lewis finally retraced his steps downstairs and looked at the letter for the umpteenth time, now paying no attention whatsoever to what things were being said, but how they were being said.

And suddenly, in a flash, eureka.

Thank you, Hathaway! Thank you, Morse!

Lewis took a can of beer from the fridge and drank it before finally completing his ascent of the staircase. Hathaway may have fallen asleep that night with a look of deep satisfaction on his face, but with Lewis it was one bordering on the beatific.

It was three days after the aforementioned events that Mr HRF Keating received a letter at his London address with the envelope marked “Thames Valley Police HQ, Kidlington, Oxon”.

13 April 2006

Dear Mr Keating,

I write to thank you for your letter of 10 April 2006. You asked for my help.

Between us, my sergeant and I finally fathomed the anagrammatized names of the committee quorum; and leaving aside yourself, and giving the benefit of the doubt to your successor as President, we were left with three names from the list you gave us: Messrs Barnard, Hill, Lovesey. The clues were there and we spotted them. But this didn’t get us very far. Which of the three men was it?

It was more difficult for us to spot the vital clue, but in reality you had made it quite complex. The three names we had, as well as the President’s, were each signposted by two items of punctuation: the long em dash and the exclamation mark. It was cleverly done. But we were a bit slow to notice the full implication of this. These two punctuation marks were each used, always closely together, not four times, but seven times, and used nowhere else in your letter. Why had our suspect-list suddenly grown so much longer? The reason eventually became clear. The name of the perpetrator of the “crime” was not included in the list of club-members. But there he was, three times: “frank-eight”; “King-Father”; “thing-faker”, and each of the three is a perfect anagram of the man responsible for the alleged theft of the chequebook: a man, as I say, who was not listed among the suspects. A man named HRF Keating. You, sir!

Only one problem remains, a more difficult one than that posed by your letter. Why on earth did you go in for all that rigmarole? What was the point of it? If, as we suspect, it was for sheer amusement, please remember that irresponsible wasting of police time is liable to be interpreted as a crime, and as such be liable for prosecution.

Please satisfy our curiosity about your motive, although we trust that your reply can be rather shorter than your original communication.

Yours sincerely,

R Lewis (Detective Inspector)

16 April 2006

Dear Inspector Lewis,

Thank you so much for your letter, and heartiest congratulations on your cleverness.

An American philanthropist was one of our guests when Morse spoke to us, and the two of them got on finely. This same person revisited us a month ago, and was naturally saddened to hear of Morse’s death. He remembered Morse mentioning to him the work of the Police Service of Northern Ireland Benevolent Fund, and expressed the wish to make some donation to this fund. But on one specific condition. Together we amused ourselves by jointly composing the letter I originally sent to you. The agreed condition was that the police should prove themselves still able to exhibit the high degree of mental acumen and flexibility that Morse himself had shown with crossword puzzles, and with criminal cases.

It was also agreed that I should write to you to explain the whole thing should you have shown no interest, or have been utterly flummoxed by our letter. Had such been the case, we had decided to consider the merits of the next two charities on my friend’s giftlist: the Salvation Army, and the Donkey Sanctuary. I rang him immediately on receipt of your wonderfully welcome letter, and a cheque is now on its transatlantic flight to the police charity: a cheque for $25,000. This I hope should compensate in some degree for the time you and your colleague spent on the puzzle, and perhaps you can now cross my own name off the list of those potentially liable for prosecution. It remains for me only to subscribe this letter, which I now do.

A right nerk?-Ay!

PS Please note the punctuation.