The Mammoth Book of Best British Mysteries 6

PRICE CONFEDERATE by Andrew Martin

Peter the librarian held up a thin file of papers. He didn’t need to say anything, just grinned, and Anthony recognized the handwriting immediately.

“Where d’you turn these up?” he said.

“They were mis-filed,” said Peter. “They weren’t under “Price” but “Prince” – not that there’s any signature here.”

Anthony nodded.

“Price went through phases of wanting to be known as ‘Prince’,” he said.

“Why?” asked Peter.

“To ally himself with the Prince of Darkness,” said Anthony.

“Oh,” said Peter in his camp way. “Sorry I asked.”

“… So really it’s his own fault that his books and papers have been wrongly catalogued ever since,” said Anthony. “He has nobody but himself to blame.”

Peter the librarian passed over the papers and adjusted his tie as if to say “Anything else I can do for you?” He was a good librarian. He also dressed very well indeed. Anthony admired the way he could wear, say, a yellow and brown silk tie with a blue and white checked shirt, but he was at the same time aggrieved that a librarian should be better dressed than he himself.

“I haven’t a clue what it is,” said Peter, nodding again at the manuscript.

This might well have been a lie, but the librarians at the Mayfair Institute would not be so crass as to spoil your day by flagging up the contents of a book or document in advance. The readers were there to read, after all.

“… I mean, it’s not topped and tailed,” Peter continued. “It’s a fragment.”

He was coming dangerously near to admitting that he’d read it, and Anthony always wanted Price to himself, so he said:

“I shall enjoy this Peter, thanks very much,” and turned away.

Anthony took the file and pushed open the door of the Main Reading Room. He was hoping that one of the four red leather armchairs arranged before the fireplace would be free. In fact, all four were, and he didn’t know which one to choose. There was only one other man in the reading room, at a far desk. He seemed very magnanimous, spurning the fireplace, and what was more, he didn’t sniff or cough as he worked.

The fire of course was unlit. Books and real fires didn’t go together. It was lit once a year, on Christmas Eve, when the Trustees of the Institute gave a sherry party. Anthony wasn’t eminent enough to have been asked, but that would come. Price would see to that. Anyhow, it was a fine Spring afternoon with no need of a fire. White blossom floated about above the trees of the Square beyond the windows, unwinding out from them like a benign, slow explosion. Mayfair was a good mix of old buildings and trees. It was like an American’s dream of London: the red buses were redder in Mayfair, the black taxis blacker, and you felt that a bowler-hatted man might be just around the next corner.

Anthony selected an armchair, guiltily aware that he much preferred the Institute to his own home, and that he over-used the place. The librarians ought not really to know his name, or that he was fixated on Arthur Price. He ought to use the Institute in the correct, gentlemanly way: as a respite from the serious literature; to kill a couple of hours before attending a social function; to wait for sunset and the Mayfair cocktail hour while reading a story by Oliver Onions or V.L. Whitechurch.

From the outside the place resembled a giant carriage clock, and the reading rooms were like a series of drawing rooms, with only about as many books on the wall as you’d expect to see in a drawing room. The collections were mainly stored in the three levels of basement, where a different order of librarian roved – ones not as confident or well-dressed as those in the building proper, and sometimes the readers would hear the rumble of the primitive trolleys being pushed along the subterranean walkways. It was a confirmation of your status to know that this work – a species of academic mining – was going on for your benefit.

The subscription was a thousand pounds a year – not cheap – and you’d only pay it if you were interested in the books and manuscripts of a particular kind of author. The type had never been officially defined, but everyone knew it: the under-regarded marginals, the writers of ghost stories, mysteries, crime, the better class of pornographer, and if you asked for something wholesome like a copy of Pride and Prejudice (which only an outsider or a new member would ever do) the librarians would disapprovingly respond, ‘I’m afraid we don’t stock books like that.” The Institute had been built and was funded by grants from the more successful genre writers, and its grandeur was a kind of reproof to the critics, who ignored their works.

Anthony looked at the topmost page of the file. It was thin – poor quality paper presumably. The handwriting was elegant by modern standards but Price’s full stops were never quite conclusive; they were elongated, more like dashes, with the result that anything he wrote never seemed to stop, but became a steady stream of bile.

“I did Wilson’s, the one in Chelsea,” Anthony read, “by putting my arm through the letterbox hole in the outer shutter and unscrewing the bolt, this being wrongly placed (why put it so close to the letterbox aperture?). With me were some good fellows whose names I wouldn’t mention for fortunes. It was no trouble at all then to roll up the shutter. The glass of course I just smashed – took my Malacca cane to it. I enjoyed that.”

His tone was all there in those few sentences: a combination of the literary and the streetwise, and the shrill arrogance was betrayed by that parenthesized question: “Why put it so close to the letterbox aperture?” as if he knew how to design protective shutters for jewellers’ shops better than the men who did that for a living. Well, he probably did. Arthur Price had written crime stories, but he’d gone one better in that he had actually been a criminal as well. He made his living by “doing” jewellers’ shops together with a little band of followers, the Price Confederates. He was often interrupted in his round of thefts by arrest and imprisonment (hence the books – he wrote while inside) but it was a relentless cycle that had continued, Anthony presumed, until his death.

Anthony had first come across him in Pelham’s Guide to Interesting Out-of-Print Authors, which was written in telegraphese, as though the title was a bluff, and the authors didn’t even justify full sentences. Of Price, Pelham had written: “Roguish character. At once hated and aspired to join literary establishment. Author of crime stories, habitual theme a criminal’s bloodthirsty revenge. Repellent style oscillates between coarse and grandiose. Definitive collection: Tales of the London Night (1904). Arthur Price disappeared in about 1910.”

Anthony had appreciated the languor of that one proper, concluding sentence. It had got him hooked, and he had immediately read such Price stories as survive. They were all more or less the same. A decent, honest, brave criminal is minding his own business robbing or assaulting people when a policeman presumes to arrest him, or an associate betrays him. The criminal then murders the policeman or the associate, sometimes summoning in aid mysterious dark forces raised by rituals and incantations described at great length.

But Anthony was more interested in the writer than the writing. Price’s first publishers had to take out an injunction to keep him away from their offices. A reviewer who had written that Tales of the London Night was “too lurid for the common taste, but undoubtedly vigorous” – which was just about the best thing that any contemporary said of Price – was sent a loaded revolver in the post with no address to which it might be promptly returned, but instead an order to meet Price at dawn in St James’ Park in order to fight a duel.

Price had turned up for the occasion accompanied by Paul Mayer, who proposed doing duty as his second. Mayer was an educated man, and yet, as one assize court judge had observed, he was “practically enslaved” to Price. He’d been a Price Confederate, but he’d also been a journalist on the Times, and at one point had been committed to a mental hospital in South London. He believed not only that Price was the Prince of Darkness, but also that he – Mayer – had lived in the future; that he had, in the past, lived in the future, and would be liable to go back there again. Mayer’s problem, among others, was that he found it hard to stay put in any given century. He had often complained about it in writing.

“Wilson’s shop was preferred to Maxwell’s,” Anthony read, “only on account of the dairy across the road from the latter, which never closed but ran right round the clock, seven days a b____________________week. Maxwell thought his place safe as a bank. I know because I called in masquerading as a customer looking for a new watch (silk waistcoat and Malacca cane well to the fore) and he said so. What f____________________rot. The man’s protected only by the little doxies put to slaving around through the night over opposite… and what honour is there in that?”

Anthony quickly read the whole six pages and then stood up and walked towards the window. The manuscript had been an account of a series of jewellery shop break-ins, probably written to impress an associate. Anthony doubted that it was a confession. Names had been kept back, and Price wasn’t the confessional type. He’d made no mention of his writings, and there had been no mention of his cohort Mayer, who particularly intrigued Anthony, perhaps more so than Price himself.

But what mattered now was not what Price wrote about himself but what Anthony wrote about him.

The man at the far desk had gone. From the Square came the sound of heavy rain – and a helicopter. The rain was coming down so heavily that Anthony had the idea of a sort of crisis going on, with the helicopter as part of an evacuation. It might have been a different day entirely from the last time Anthony had looked.

The relationship between Arthur Price and Paul Mayer – the autodidact force-of-nature and his educated, middle-class disciple… This would be the theme of the book that would make Anthony Latimer’s name. He would write it in the Institute, and on publication he would buy a new flat that would enable him to establish a continuum between his home life and his working life. The flat would have thick red carpets and tall sash windows like the Institute, and he would find out whether a yellow and brown silk tie against a blue and white checked shirt worked for him, too.

The book would be a novel, but based on the real characters of Price and Mayer. He was sure it would do better than his own series of crime novels with Edwardian settings, and the critics might take an interest for once, because Price was under-chronicled. There had been no biography. (There wasn’t enough material to generate one – just a few letters threatening his various literary mentors, the couple of dozen stories, and now this document unearthed by Peter. No photograph of Price had survived.) The core of reality would give legitimacy to Anthony’s novel. People generally couldn’t be persuaded to take an interest in the imaginings of an obscure individual like himself. Pure fiction by the non-famous was regarded as whimsy and that was that.

Anthony looked at his watch: five o’clock. Not late enough, on the whole, to justify the darkness of the sky. He wanted a pint but he stayed on by the window, watching the rain. He saw now that it fell on a policeman on a horse. The copper wore one of those big capes that covered not only his own body, but much of the horse’s. They were both in it together, stoically receiving the rain at the corner of the Square.

Anthony turned back towards the chair and picked up the manuscript. He had been thinking he might write his book from the point of view of Mayer. He imagined that Mayer had originally regarded Price in the same way that he himself did: with appalled fascination. But the trouble with this plan was that Mayer had been found battered to death in the West End (just on the borders of Mayfair, in fact) in 1907, three years before the end of the story of Price. Obviously, Price had done it. Anthony was sure of that, and he would make the case in his novel.

He walked through the empty Reading Room, and through the double doors, where he saw Peter at the book desk. He found that he was relieved to see him.

“Thanks for that, Peter,” he said, handing back the document.

“What was it?” asked Peter.

“Oh, just… Descriptions of how he broke into various jewellery shops.”

“Charming,” Peter said, and he laughed.

Collecting his coat, which was the last one left in the cloakroom, Anthony thought: he wouldn’t laugh if he knew anything about Price. There was nothing funny about him. He was no gentleman thief, and the robberies had sometimes lead to violence. Newspaper cuttings mentioned one associate of Price’s who had been found murdered – a known receiver of stolen goods. Price had missed a court appearance to attend the man’s funeral, which was ironic in several ways. For a start, he’d killed the man. Anthony was certain of that, and the killing would make a scene for his novel.

Anthony walked out into the Square. The policeman had gone, and the place was deserted, the rain coming down on the trees alone. They were – what? – twenty times taller than a man. Seemed unreasonable somehow. They were rocking in the warm wind that was blowing through the rain, looking restless.

Anthony left the Square by the first available street, but that was all right because it led to one of the best pubs in Mayfair. He walked quickly along the street of distinguished, reserved buildings, moving in the opposite direction to the water flowing along the gutter. All other pedestrians seemed to have retreated in the face of his advance. Anthony took his mobile phone out of his pocket. He pressed the “on” switch and white light seeped between the number keys, but there was a worrying, restless little display on the screen: dots in a line groping after something, like an ellipsis. It was a new phone and he’d not seen this before. Then the display went all still and sullen, and the message read: “No signal.” Was it to do with the rain?

The pub, The Unicorn, glowed in the rain like a little blue lantern, cosily framed by antiquarian bookshops. With the bulge at the front, and the flagpole that came out over the doorway, it looked sea-going somehow. Opposite was a block of flats: Horace Mansions. Anthony had earmarked Horace Mansions for when he became successful. It was Edwardian, which was his period.

A century away was a perfect distance of time: distant enough to be strange, near enough to be comprehensible. Anthony had set all of his thrillers in that period, and this was why he would be able to do justice to an Edwardian maverick like Price. Also he spoke the lingo: Anthony knew that the Edwardians called a jacket a coat (a coat in the modern sense was a “top-coat”); a weekend, to the Edwardians, was a “week-end”; and when they were tired they were “all-in”. Anthony aimed always to wear a suit like Edwardian men; he wore boots rather than shoes, wrote with a fountain pen. He would in time become a full, flamboyant Edwardian dandy rather than the muted dandy he was at present.

There were three or four people inside the pub, all turned away from him. A clock ticked. Anthony liked the fact that there was no piped music in The Unicorn, but that clock was loud and couldn’t be turned down. And there was no barman to be seen. Anthony was joined at the bar by one of the silent customers. The pub was all buckled wood, as though the ceiling was too heavy, pressing down. There didn’t seem to be much air.

The man next to him wore a black suit, and it was muddy – mud splashes up the trouser legs. Mud in Mayfair. Anthony nodded at him nonetheless, and he didn’t nod back. His eyes were a very pale blue in the thin red face; his hair was black and pulled back with grease or oil that smelled like lemon, but another smell came off him at the same time: a bitter smell of a small room in which a dozen people have been smoking cigars around the clock. But the man now took cigarettes out of his pocket. He kept them in a tin. Anthony had once thought of doing that, but he’d stopped smoking a year ago. The Unicorn, actually, was a non-smoking pub. The man opened his mouth to put in the cigarette, and it went into a mass of blackness – no teeth.

Anthony didn’t have to put up with this; there were plenty of other pubs in Mayfair. He walked through the open door of The Unicorn, and straight into a new noise: spattering rain in the gathering darkness, and a metallic rumbling and grating. He noticed a countrified smell, which was almost pleasant, until he looked down and saw that he was standing in horse manure. Had the police horse been this way? He looked over the road, and the block of flats was being dismantled. They had started dismantling the block of flats within the past five minutes. No, on the contrary: scaffolding, a tarpaulin sheet, lanterns, a wheelbarrow dangling from a pulley… the block of flats was being built. Anthony both knew, and didn’t know, what was happening, He felt that he was about throw up. He looked up at the sky, searching for an aeroplane – there were always jets above Mayfair – or the helicopter growling away. But the sky was clear, apart from the falling rain, and the drifting smoke. Who was having a fire? On the rooftops all around, chimneys were smoking. Hundreds of chimneys were smoking.

The man from the pub was behind him, and there were two others with him. The man from the pub was talking fast, the blackness coming and going as he opened and closed his mouth. Anthony couldn’t make out the words. Was it English? Anthony thought to himself: I have been caught in a landslide, and removed to another place. The rain fell more softly now, but it seemed to be the same rain; it made him wet in much the same way as before, and even though he knew he was in terrible trouble, Anthony was trying to take comfort from this as one of the men – not Price – approached him and spoke out in a voice of the kind you didn’t hear much any more. He was unquestionably addressing Anthony. “Paul,” he said, “… come here Paul. The governor wants a word.”