Silence Observed (2 page)

Probably, too, Gribble had paid a great deal for the stuff. The market for such things was now entirely mad. And soon Gribble would no doubt publish his find, with appropriate critical remarks, on the back page of
The Times Literary Supplement
. Which was very harmless – very harmless, indeed. Appleby wondered why it was supposed to be up his street.

“Most satisfactory,” he repeated cordially. “You’ve really got hold of quite a lot of unpublished material by Meredith?”

“My dear chap, it’s not
by
Meredith!” Gribble produced a laugh which, although exuberant, still seemed to ring decorously of the most respectable propertied classes. “It’s much better fun than if it were
by
Meredith. And – oddly enough – I imagine it’s worth much more, too.”

And Gribble flourished his papers more unrestrainedly than before.

“Forgery, my dear boy,” he said. “Forgery – every sheet of it!”

“Well – that does sound a little up my street, I agree.” Appleby felt that, as a policeman, he could say no less than this. “But do I understand that you’re proposing to invoke the aid of the law? People commonly do, when they’ve been swindled. And yet you don’t
look
as if you were feeling particularly indignant about it all.”

“Swindled!” Now Gribble
was
indignant. “
Me
swindled? I assure you, Appleby, such a thing has never happened to me in my life. These papers are forgery, and as forgery I’ve acquired them. And I assure you that the job is absolutely first-class of its kind.”

“It all purports to be rejected passages and early drafts and so on?”

Gribble nodded.

“Most of it does. And there’s a very clever idea at the bottom of it, you’ll agree. Take the bits of ‘Phoebus with Admetus’ we’ve been considering. ‘Many swarms of wild bees’ – you remember? That’s the authentic Meredith, and first-class. Then ‘Purple glowed the clusters’ and so on. That’s the forgery I’ve got here.” And Gribble tapped his papers. “You – having, if I may say so, a developed taste in poetry, my dear Appleby – felt it at once to be rather inferior. But that, of course, is just what we’d expect, even supposing the stanza really to be Meredith’s.
He
thought it inferior – and therefore he rejected it. The supposed situation allows the forger a little margin, so to speak. He need never be quite as good as the poet himself.”

“Clever,” Appleby said. “Yes, I agree it’s clever. But a forger who is also an artist–”

Gribble beamed.

“Exactly! He will really want to equal his original now and then. And this stuff” – again Gribble tapped the papers – “does include a couple of efforts that aren’t meant to be thought of as belonging to the rejected order. There’s a complete companion poem to ‘Love in the Valley’ – which is possibly Meredith’s most famous thing – and an entire additional section to ‘The Woods of Westermain’ which would absolutely defy detection. But then, we’re dealing with Manallace, you know. This Meredith stuff is by Manallace himself. Perhaps you didn’t know that I’m forming a collection of work by the really great forgers? Manallace comes right at the top.”

“So I understand.” Appleby thought he sounded suitably impressed. Manallace – the younger Manallace – had been a very famous literary forger indeed.

“There isn’t the slightest question about it.” Gribble spoke as weightily as if he were laying down vital policy to a board of directors. “Mind you, the elder Manallace’s Chaucer forgery was pretty good. But it was young Geoffrey Manallace who had
range
. Quite first-class on typography, and quite first-class on manuscript material as well. And yet, although he
had
range, he didn’t over-produce. That’s the final charm of Geoffrey Manallace.”

“I see,” Appleby said. “Scarcity value.”

“Yes, indeed. And a good deal that he
did
produce, he didn’t
market
. Of course he had no economic motive to do so – or none worth speaking of. He was a wealthy man, and what prompted him to his forgeries was vanity and a perverted sense of fun. But apparently he developed compunctions. I haven’t got the whole story. But it seems there was a woman in it.”

“Ah,” Appleby said. This seemed the appropriate comment here.

“Yes, it seems there was a woman who pulled him up – so far as making money out of his queer talent was concerned.”

“Edifying,” Appleby said. “Geoffrey Manallace was reclaimed by the love of a pure woman. But, of course, that may be a forgery too. He may well have left hints for a bogus life story, as well as plenty of bogus Meredith.”

“That’s no doubt true. But, whatever the actual truth of the matter, it’s certain that Manallace kept a considerable amount of really superb forgery tucked away in a drawer. And this Meredith effort I’ve been lucky enough to come by is the absolute gem of the whole thing. There are several other keen collectors of forgeries, you know, including a couple of Americans to whom money means nothing at all. But with
these
” – and this time Gribble positively stroked his papers – “I think I may say I’m a good step ahead.”

“I congratulate you,” Appleby said. “And the stuff really has the curious interest of being technically impeccable and undetectable? There are so many scientific tests nowadays.”

“Very true, my dear fellow. Photography under all those deuced cunning rays, and that sort of thing. But Geoffrey Manallace was years ahead of his time. He thought of everything. For instance, I’ve been at the ink. This forged ‘Phoebus with Admetus’ stanza turns out to be written in ink that went out of production in 1907. One wonders how he came by that. It’s an example of the perfect detail. Meredith, you’ll remember, died in 1909.”

“If he was a good enough chemist,” Appleby said, “Manallace could probably analyse old ink on a page, and then make up an ink which was chemically indistinguishable from it.”

“Quite so. To be a really good forger or faker nowadays a fellow has to be both an artist and a scientist. A perfect Leonardo, in fact. That’s no doubt part of the fascination of it. Take the manufacture of paper. Materials and processes are always changing, and an eye has to be kept on that. And there’s some nice old paper here. I’ve been having a look at it.”

As he said this, Gribble moved away from the empty fireplace before which he had been absent-mindedly thinking to warm himself and walked over to a window. There he held up the first sheet between himself and the view of Pall Mall.

“Yes,” he said. “Yes, indeed.” And he held up the second sheet. There was a silence – rather a long silence, broken only by the resolute snores of the man beneath the newspaper.

“Well?” Appleby said.

But – very evidently – it wasn’t well. Gribble was standing frozen and like a man transformed. When he spoke, it was in a new and troubled voice.

“Appleby – come over here. But I must be wrong, of course. I’ll be forgetting the date of my own birth next.” He gave a shaky laugh. “For God’s sake – come
here
!”

Appleby crossed the room. Gribble’s index finger, trembling with agitation, was resting on the bottom left-hand corner of the sheet. Against the clear sunlight it was possible to distinguish a complicated little arabesque of lighter tone.

“I suppose you know your watermarks?” Gribble asked huskily.

“Good Lord, no!” Appleby laughed. “It’s something I remember having to get up once or twice, long ago. But I’ve clean forgotten all that technical stuff, I’m ashamed to say. At the Yard I’ve got a young man who knows the rudiments of paper – chemical processes, watermarks and all. And I’d go to a fellow in the British Museum, if I wanted more.”

“You could come to
me
, for that matter. For I
do
know. And it’s no use pretending. I’m just
not
making a mistake now.
This
watermark” – and Gribble tapped the paper – “first appeared in 1924. Look – it’s on only one of the sheets of this Meredith stuff. And, indeed, there’s only about a third of it on that. But it’s fatal to the whole damned thing.”

Appleby couldn’t help laughing. He could remember plenty of occasions on which little snags of this sort had meant the difference between guilt and innocence in grave matters. So Gribble’s seemed to him to be a very absurd and comical sort of dismay.

“Too bad,” he said. “The great Geoffrey Manallace slipping up for once. But never mind. Perhaps it gives his Meredith forgery a bigger scarcity value than ever. It may represent the unique occasion on which Manallace
did
slip up.”

But at this – very strangely – Gribble gave what could only be described as a howl of rage. It was so alarming a demonstration that Appleby could hear, behind him, the supposedly slumbering man jump up and hasten from the room.

“You bloody fool!” Gribble cried – and it would have been impossible to tell whether he was addressing Appleby or apostrophizing himself. “Geoffrey Manallace – don’t you
know
, God help you? – Geoffrey Manallace died in 1922.”

Appleby – although not precisely slow-witted even in what he had come to think of as his declining years – took a second to get at this. When he did, he once more couldn’t help laughing.

“I congratulate you again,” he said presently. “Here is a completely new category of rarities. You and your fellow collectors have bumped up the value of Manallace’s forgeries to the point at which it becomes worth some ingenious person’s while to forge some. A forged forgery! I declare, I’ve never heard of such a thing before. Positively, my dear Gribble, it ought to be the pride of your collection.”

But Charles Gribble refused to see the joke. Appleby was confirmed in the view that he had paid quite a lot of money for what he’d thought was Manallace’s Meredith. And its turning out to be – as one might say –
X
’s Manallace’s Meredith was upsetting him correspondingly.

Still, the money couldn’t mean much to Gribble. It was his vanity – his specialized collector’s vanity – and not his pocket that had received the really severe blow. Hadn’t he been declaring, rather noisily, that he’d never been swindled in his life? Well, now he had been. And – what was worse – he’d slipped up in a humiliatingly elementary way. Not to have scanned every inch of those papers for watermarks before putting down his cheque was a beginner’s error in this particular game.

“Well, well,” Appleby said comfortingly, “I suppose you can take the matter up with your dealer, whoever he was. If you’re an important customer of his, he won’t be disposed to stand by the principle of
caveat emptor
. He’ll cancel the deal – and keep quiet about it, too.”

Gribble was now looking puzzled as well as angry.

“That’s no doubt true,” he said. “He’s a little fellow with whom I’ve done a good many deals. And entirely reliable in what he tells you about the provenance and so forth of what you buy.”

“But he doesn’t always tell you a great deal?”

“Oh, exactly. These fellows often have to be very discreet. And that makes it correspondingly important that one should be able to trust their word absolutely. Otherwise one may find oneself embarrassingly mixed up in questions of legal title and so on. This little chap has a high reputation. And when he explained to me that there had been a lady involved – a lady very decidedly in Geoffrey Manallace’s confidence who was equally decidedly not Geoffrey Manallace’s wife – I was perfectly willing to leave it at that. But now I must take it up with him. I’m confident he hasn’t been consciously cheating me. It’s he who’s been had.”

“At least in the first instance,” Appleby said. “But, even if you’ve been had too, mayn’t you be on to something rather interesting? This forger of forgeries may operate in quite a big way – and he’s clearly up to the standards of Manallace himself. Moreover, you are at this moment the only person to have tumbled to his existence. Go after him. Study the finer points of his technique – and then look around for more of him in the light of that knowledge. You might manage a virtual corner in him. The situation, to my mind, is full of promise.”

Gribble brightened. If he recognised irony in this, he didn’t resent it.

“Perhaps there’s something in what you say,” he admitted. “Yes, there’s something in it.” He looked more cheerfully at his sheaf of papers, and then thrust them into a pocket. “And I’ll start by having a word with my little chap. Share a cab? Bloomsbury’s my direction.”

Appleby shook his head, and watched Gribble out of the room. Gribble, it occurred to him, had shown the true collector’s instinctive caginess in failing to mention the little chap’s name. And Appleby glanced at the notice above the chimney piece. It fitted, he thought. That sort of acquisitive world is one in which, habitually, a good deal of SILENCE IS OBSERVED.

Simple persons, of unassuming colloquial speech, will sometimes be heard to remark that one damned thing leads to another. But policemen are only too happy when it does. A distinguishable sequence or concatenation between events is just what they are after. And when one thing merely
follows
another they are sometimes a little slow to see that it is anything more than that. Appleby was going to feel that he had been slow in just this way in what he thought of at first as the Manallace affair.

He had dropped into his club again at six. It was something he did twice a week for the purpose of glancing through a few continental newspapers. And this, of course, took him back to the little reading- room.

He settled in with that morning’s
Figaro
.

“Come out of this morgue,” a voice murmured. “We’ll have a drink.”

A bishop who was reading the
New Yorker
looked round disapprovingly, pointed a solemn episcopal finger at the notice over the chimney piece, and then returned to his studies.

It was an elderly man with a short grey beard who had paused for a moment beside Appleby’s chair. Sir Gabriel Gulliver was the Director of an august national institution. He was also some sort of connection of Appleby’s wife. So Appleby rose and followed him from the slumberous room. They walked in silence down the great staircase and into the hall. Through tall glass doors London showed rain-sodden and cheerless.