Silence Observed (9 page)

Heffer was silent for a moment. He might have been considering how to take this.

“Sorry,” he said. “You’re quite right in a way. But if I’ve been behaving idiotically it’s because this” – and again he nodded towards the body – “has been quite a shock to me. I’ve never run into it before – violent death, I mean. I was too young for the war, you know.” He hesitated. “It makes one think.”

“No doubt.”

“Seeing – well, ruthlessness.” Heffer had now brought himself, as with an effort, to look straight at the back of the dead man’s head. “I mean, somebody has carried a job right through, haven’t they? And there’s always a sort of impressiveness in that.”

Appleby called on Charles Gribble at nine o’clock next morning, and found the collector eating grilled kidneys while rather gloomily studying a sales catalogue.

“How did you hear about this fellow Trechmann’s death?” Appleby asked. “The evening papers didn’t have it.”

“But the ten o’clock news did. I heard it on that and rang you up at once. Hope I didn’t interrupt any conviviality.”

Appleby shook his head.

“We had a dinner party, as a matter of fact. But some woman – Carl Bendixson’s wife – began making faces at her husband rather early, so we’d just broken up. I went straight along to the scene of the crime.” Appleby paused. “Would you describe yourself yesterday,” he asked, “as having been out for Trechmann’s blood?”

“My dear chap!” Gribble reached out for a coffee jug while at the same time staring at Appleby in consternation. “Are you suggesting that I may have put a bullet in the man because he sold me some dud manuscripts?”

“It would be very improper in me to suggest anything.”

“If you ask me, it’s very improper in you to come nosing round my breakfast table. Cup of coffee?”

“No, thank you – although I take the offer as a forgiving one, all the same. And I’ll say at once that the possibility that you plugged Trechmann in an access of indignation over your Manallace deal seems an exceedingly remote one. Still, you were intending to tackle the chap. Did you?”

“No – although I tried to. I went round by Bloomsbury, that’s to say, on my way back to the City. But there was a notice on the door of his shop saying he wouldn’t be back till six, because he was working in the BM. I decided not to pursue him into the Manuscript Room or wherever, but to ring him up this morning and fix a meeting. As a matter of fact, I intended to ask him to lunch. Tactful approach, you know. I was dead keen to find out how he had come by those blasted forged forgeries. It looks as if I never shall, now.”

“Possibly it does. By the way, between our parting yesterday afternoon and your hearing of Trechmann’s death, did you tell anybody of the discovery of that fatal watermark on your supposed Manallace forgeries?”

“Certainly I didn’t.” Gribble was emphatic. “Nor have I – down to this moment. You and I are the only people in the world who know.”

Appleby laughed.

“Well, one can’t quite say that. Trechmann, or somebody from whom Trechmann had the stuff may have known there was that little flaw in the faking.”

Gribble nodded.

“I didn’t mean that – although, mark you, my own conviction is that Trechmann was an honest enough dealer. I mean that only you knew of my sudden discovery of the horrid truth yesterday afternoon.”

“Well, that isn’t quite true, either. Don’t you remember the chap who was pretending to be asleep?”

“Pretending to be asleep!” Gribble was highly indignant.

“Under a newspaper, you know. It’s a turn people sometimes do put on in clubs, wouldn’t you say, when they – um – don’t want to be conversable? He left a little after we’d got it clear that you’d been cheated. You wouldn’t have noticed who he was?”

“I haven’t the slightest idea.” Gribble seemed bewildered by Appleby’s interest in the matter. “Perhaps one of the club servants might know. But it’s a tricky thing to enquire about in a place like that. And could it possibly be important?”

“Possibly, yes. Probably, no. But this looks like being a thoroughly obscure affair, and I have to follow up everything I can.”

“I can see that.” Gribble absently reached for a square of toast. “But my little affair – and, after all, it
was
a little affair – didn’t involve the sort of stakes that set people shooting each other.” Gribble hesitated, and Appleby knew at once that he was struggling with his collector’s discretion.
Silence is observed
.

“As a matter of fact,” Gribble said, “I gave Trechmann £800 for those supposed Meredith forgeries by Manallace. If genuine – genuine Manallace, I mean – they’d have been, to my mind, cheap at a cool thousand. But nobody would murder anyone for a thousand pounds.”

Appleby made no reply. In Stepney the amount is round about a five-pound note. And a mother may get at least a crack on the jaw at a figure as low as half-a-crown.

“If Trechmann was shot because of something to do with fakes and forgeries,” Gribble pursued, “it would have been a matter of larger stakes than any represented by the efforts of poor Geoffrey Manallace.”

“Yes and no.” Appleby was now prowling about Gribble’s dining-room. He had to be careful not to bump into a number of rather costly objects. “Trouble over this paltry little eight-hundred-quid Manallace affair might have threatened some more general exposure.” Appleby halted, stared through a window, and found that he was surveying Hyde Park. “At least that’s how my mind inclines to work on the matter. What would have happened if you’d had the opportunity to tackle Trechmann? Let’s begin with that. Of course it may be an utterly wrong approach. Your concerns with the fellow may be wholly irrelevant.”

“Yes, I suppose they
may
be.” Gribble now seemed reluctant to see himself thus possibly excluded from the case. “But, if that’s so, it’s a deuced odd coincidence, isn’t it? A highly reputable dealer turns out either to have been tricked or to have been promoting trickery. And suddenly he’s shot.”

“Suppose Trechmann to have been in his shop yesterday afternoon. You’d have walked in. What would have happened then?”

“I’d have shown him that watermark, and pointed out that it was pretty well conclusive proof that the whole job wasn’t by Manallace at all. And then I’d have said that, in the circumstances, I felt entitled to a full account of their provenance as he understood himself to have established it. That’s to say, I’d have expected him to come clean. About that woman who had an influence over Geoffrey Manallace, and so forth.”

“If Trechmann were honest, he would be bound to have a story which, if you were disposed to, you could follow up?”

“Certainly.”

“Suppose him to be dishonest. If again you were pertinacious – and in the general interest of collectors you would probably feel bound to be so – sooner or later there would come a point at which his dishonesty would be exposed?”

“Undoubtedly. And that might be an occasion for the poor devil’s blowing out his own brains. But scarcely for somebody else’s stepping in and doing the job for him.”

Appleby considered this.

“Once more, yes and no. If Trechmann were on the fringes of something really big, and if he was the sort of chap who might crack in a tight spot–”

“Yes, I see.” Gribble was visibly impressed by his visitor’s rapid professional dealing with the matter on hand. “But isn’t it the simplest explanation – and therefore on the whole the likeliest – that Trechmann was shot in the course of robbery or attempted robbery? There must be a good deal of really valuable stuff tucked away in that shop.”

“No doubt there is. But if common robbery was the motive, then the robber was of a very uncommon type. He didn’t shoot because he was caught on the job. He walked in and killed a totally unsuspecting man as a mere preliminary measure. Such things do sometimes happen. A type of criminal exists whose ruthlessness knows no bounds. But it is a comparatively rare type. And I find it hard to associate with the kind of robbery which could be brought off in Trechmann’s shop. Disposing of stolen property in the shape of
incunabula
from the library of a German professor must be quite a specialized affair. It scarcely seems a proposition that would be attractive to a desperado.”

“I can see all that,” Gribble said. “So what?”

“Well, I remain interested in the Manallace affair, for one thing. As I understand the matter, Trechmann said to you, in effect: ‘Here are some forgeries by Geoffrey Manallace. I have satisfied myself that they are really Manallace’s work, but their provenance is a matter of some delicacy.’ Was that it?”

Gribble folded a table napkin with precision.

“Just that,” he said.

“Was there any suggestion that, if you had doubts in the matter, he could provide further evidence?”

“Oh, certainly. The manuscripts had belonged to this woman I was speaking of, who had been Manallace’s mistress. She was still alive, Trechmann said, and at a pinch she could be appealed to. But the old soul didn’t much care for that sort of intrusion into her past, and Trechmann hoped I’d take his word for it. And I hadn’t the slightest disposition not to do so. He’s always been entirely reliable, as I’ve said.”

“But, since these forgeries are
not
by Manallace, it is now clear that this story about a surviving mistress must be moonshine?”

Gribble considered this for a moment.

“It certainly looks like that,” he said. “But we can’t be quite certain. I may have been deceived in Trechmann, and his whole story been a fib. But it is just possible that this woman really exists, and was herself unaware that her fakes were false. She might have bought them just as I was to buy them – believing they were her former lover’s work.”

“But wasn’t it Trechmann’s suggestion that they had been in this woman’s possession from the start?”

“Well, yes – I think it was. But he may have picked up the facts rather inaccurately.”

“Possibly so.” Appleby didn’t sound impressed. “By the way, Trechmann offered no clue as to who this woman was, or where she lived?”

“None at all. But if she has any real existence, and if she is still alive, she must be a very old woman now. Manallace, you remember, died nearly forty years ago.”

“What about there being a hint of her in some biographical record? Have you looked up Manallace in
The Dictionary of National Biography
? Hasn’t anybody written a life of him? Are no younger contemporaries who were really intimate with him still alive?”

“My dear Appleby, I’m not an absolute idiot.” Gribble had shaken his head impatiently. “I haven’t started collecting Manallace forgeries without trying to delve a little into the life of the man. And there’s nobody in the record that I can think to identify with this lady. But that’s not entirely surprising, after all. People kept much quieter about such affairs in those days than they do now. Mind you, I might try a little further research.”

“I wish you would.” Appleby had got to his feet. “And now I’m off to take up the investigation elsewhere.”

Gribble accompanied Appleby amiably to the door.

“Do you often,” he asked curiously, “go sleuthing round like this nowadays?”

“Very seldom. It’s my job to see that such matters are in competent hands, and if I push in myself there’s likely to be the inference that I lack confidence in someone. But I’m risking that this time.”

“The mystery appeals to you?”

“The mystery revolts me.” Appleby snapped this out. “I don’t know whether you’ve read of a lad in Stepney who has just killed somebody in circumstances of the most naked brutality? That’s bad enough. But when I saw your little man Trechmann, shot dead through the back of the head, clearly without challenge or parley – well, I found myself liking it even less. As somebody said to me last night, it was a particularly ruthless sort of outrage. And I have a feeling that ruthlessness of that sort is catching. I propose to jump on it.”

And opening the front door of his flat, Charles Gribble nodded soberly.

“Good hunting,” he said. “I’m coming round to the view that Jacob Trechmann mayn’t have been entirely what he seemed. But there was no call to do
that
to him.”

Rain fell on Bloomsbury, and the little street showed forlorn and dismal. Opposite the premises of the late Mr Trechmann a press photographer lurked glumly in a doorway on the off-chance of snapping some eminent detective-officer from Scotland Yard. He glanced at Appleby first hopefully and then incuriously. Appleby’s, clearly, wasn’t a face he had in mind. Then some memory must vaguely have stirred in him, for he suddenly started into activity. But by this time the door of the shop had been smartly opened from within, and Appleby entered. It was the same young constable as on the previous night. Although given this lonesome and rather useless bit of caretaking he was a young man determined to keep on his toes.

“Good morning,” Appleby said. “I don’t think I got your name.”

“James, sir.”

“Oh.” Being engaged in looking rapidly round the gloomy shop again, Appleby took this for a naively familiar reply. “James what?”

The young constable blushed.

“Just James, sir. Henry James.”

“I see.” It would have been odder, Appleby thought, if the young man had said “Joseph Conrad” or “Aldous Huxley”. He walked over to the desk across which Trechmann’s body had been sprawled. “Nothing been happening here, I suppose?”

“Nothing at all, sir.”

“Have our people taken anything away?”

“No, sir. Or only the weapon. There were more photographs being taken and inventories being made nearly all through the night. But I understand nothing has been disturbed.”

“You can’t have got much sleep. Why didn’t you have them send you off duty this morning?”

“Well, sir, it’s interesting, a case like this. Out of the ordinary, like.”

“Quite so. Well, lock the door again, and turn on some lights.” Appleby waited till this had been done. “Have you ever seen a stage farce, James? The good, clean English variety, of course.”

“Well, yes, sir – I think I may say I have.”