Publish and Be Murdered (5 page)

‘Didn’t you mention an assistant editor?’

Lambie Crump’s lips compressed. ‘Winterton is not with us at present and is not expected back for a week.’ He looked at his watch. ‘Scudmore almost certainly isn’t around either.’ He opened a door and nodded as he closed it again. ‘Advertising chappie. Has to have luncheons and all that.’ Trying the room next door, he found it also empty. This time he looked annoyed, stalked over to the desk and dialled zero. ‘Miss Mercatroid, is Mr Naggiar not about?’ His face took on a look of irritation. ‘Thank you,’ he said as he replaced the receiver. ‘Naggiar is our circulation manager, Robert. You will find that he is infrequently on the premises.’

Amiss raised an interrogative eyebrow. ‘Running around drumming up business?’

Lambie Crump’s neigh sounded bitter. ‘As no doubt you will find out, he is rather preoccupied with matters medical.’

‘He’s ill?’

‘Let us say one gathers that he has a multiplicity of conditions.’ He stopped again. ‘Now let me formally introduce you to your assailant.’ He threw open the door at the end of the corridor and revealed a vision of Dickensian squalor.

5

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‘And here is Josiah Ricketts, with whom you will be working closely.’

Amiss stifled the words, ‘In here??!!’ and tried to keep his facial expression steady. Windowless, the office was lit by fluorescent light. Had it instead been candlelit, it would have borne a close resemblance to what the unreconstructed Scrooge thought appropriate quarters for Bob Cratchit: airless, dark, cramped and very ugly. The walls were lined with shelves of ledgers and the tiny, wizened old man was writing in another at a wooden table, using a long steel pen to produce perfect, copperplate handwriting.

As he saw his visitors, he blotted his ink and clambered painfully to his feet. ‘Good afternoon, Mr Lambie Crump, sir,’ he said reverentially. And then, recognizing Amiss, he wailed, ‘Oh, sir. Are you all right? I don’t know how I can ever forgive myself…’

As Amiss murmured consolatory words, Lambie Crump waved a dismissive hand. ‘Absolutely nothing to worry about, Ricketts. Albeit briefly discomfited, Mr Amiss suffered no more than a small abrasion. ’ As the wailing continued, Lambie Crump became visibly irritated. ‘Pull yourself together, Ricketts. There is no time to waste. My taximeter cabriolet is due in five minutes.

‘Now, Mr Amiss is coming to help me. He will be manager of the journal. And you will, of course, give him every assistance you can.’

‘Honoured, sir,’ said Ricketts. ‘It will be a privilege. I can promise you my best endeavours, which I have always tried to give the ladies and gentlemen of
The Wrangler
.’

Amiss resisted the impulse to pat Ricketts on the head. Instead, he bowed. ‘I am most grateful to you, Mr Ricketts. I look forward to a happy collaboration.’ As they left, he was relieved that although Ricketts was palpitating with deference, at least he had not dropped to his knees.

‘Awfully sorry,’ said Lambie Crump, whose boredom with his present duties was palpable, ‘but it truly is necessary to hasten. Perchance you can introduce yourself around the place on Monday.’

‘Just one thing,’ asked Amiss. ‘Which will be my office?’

Lambie Crump clapped his hand to his head. ‘Good heavens,’ he said. ‘Alas, while that is a fair question, it is not one to which there has been time to give attention.’ For a moment he looked nonplussed, then he smiled seraphically and laid a hand on Amiss’s shoulder. ‘Surely that can be left to you, my dear chap. I’m sure you can sort something out. After all’ – his smile widened – ‘is that not precisely the kind of thing you’re here to deal with?

‘Now, will you be so kind as to excuse me? Can you show yourself out?’

If you don’t mind, Willie, I’ll hang on and have a little chat with Mr Ricketts about practicalities.’

‘Rather you than me, dear boy,’ And waving a languid farewell, Lambie Crump disappeared.

By now Ricketts was busily back at work. ‘Mr Ricketts,’ said Amiss gently. ‘Could we have a word?’

‘Excuse me just one moment, sir, or I’ll lose count.’ For the next three minutes, Ricketts continued his task of laboriously counting the contents of a carton of pencils. Then he looked up. ‘That’s right, sir. They’ve sent the right amount. You always have to check, you know. That’s what Mr Flitter always said: “Take nothing for granted.” ’

‘Do they use a lot of pencils here?’

‘Well, I keep the consumption in check, sir. Some of the ladies and gentlemen have no idea of economy. Why, I’ve known Mr Potbury to ask for as many as four pencils in a week. I have to remind him that they don’t grow on trees, you know – pencils.’

‘You operate strict economies here, then, Mr Ricketts?’

‘I do, sir. I keep a very tight eye indeed on my ladies’ and gentlemen’s requisites.’

‘Like?’

‘Oh, there’s paper and there’s pencils and then there’s steel pens – though mind you, that’s not a difficulty since I’m the only one who uses them now. We had a bit of a to-do a long time back about biros. The last editor, God bless him, he didn’t hold with them. Said it was an affront to decency to have them in the building. Fountain pens or steel pens only, he decreed. Or pencils, of course. But then, sir, you know how it is. It’s called progress, I suppose. We had to give in in the end, just like with those machines the typewriting ladies use.’

‘So you dispense biros freely now, do you?’

Ricketts giggled conspiratorially. ‘I can see you are a one, Mr Amiss. “Freely” indeed. That’s not what Mr Flitter trained me to do, I can tell you. There’s not one item goes out of this room that’s not accounted for.’

‘So you are a master of stock control, Mr Ricketts.’

‘I don’t go along with that fancy language, Mr Amiss. I just count my pencils. That’s what Mr Flitter said was my job. And when they ask for one too quickly, I go looking for the one that’s missing.’

He looked grave. ‘And I can tell you it’s the same about copies of
The Wrangler
itself. If you let them get away with it there would be rampant waste. They’d be leaving them all round the place or giving them away for nothing. Ladies and gentlemen with brains are all the same, sir. Not much common sense, if you’ll forgive my saying so. You have to keep an eye on them or you wouldn’t know what they’d be up to.’

He was warming to his theme. ‘I’ve kept my foot down – just like Mr Flitter did. Twenty-two copies come into this building and no more. That’s one each for the staff and two each for the editor and Mr Potbury, just in case they have to give the extra away to someone important.’ Ricketts emitted an arresting sound, which was made by blowing sharply down his nose while his lips were compressed. It indicated, as far as Amiss could see, a statement that once again the forces of order had overcome those of anarchy.

‘Mr Ricketts, I need help.’

‘You want me to issue you, sir, with pencil and paper?’

‘More than that. I need a room.’

Ricketts looked at him incredulously. ‘I’m sorry, sir. But they’re all full. They all have their uses, you see.’

‘But if I am to work here, Mr Ricketts, I must have an office.’

Seeing the aghast expression on Ricketts’s face and his hand clutching at his chest, Amiss intervened swiftly. ‘Now, Mr Ricketts, I’m sure everything is as it should be and we’ll find some way out of this that won’t upset anybody or anything. Why don’t you take me around the building and show me all the rooms, what is kept where and so on. Then we’ll see if there’s any little corner I might squeeze into.’

Ricketts’s agitation began to wane. ‘Just as long as you’re not thinking of changing things, sir.’

‘Rest assured, Mr Ricketts, that just like Mr Burke, I’m against making changes for change’s sake. I won’t be doing anything that doesn’t make us all happier.’

Looking at him half with alarm and half with a burgeoning trust, Ricketts left his desk and tottered towards the door.

The rooms unoccupied by people were certainly full. One was entirely devoted to bound copies of
The Wrangler
, another to spares, which Ricketts, Flitter and their predecessors had gathered up every week and preserved. Then there were rooms full of Georgian and Victorian furniture, presumably displaced by the modernizing process of the 1960s, and even a whole room devoted to broken furniture, which Ricketts explained would be repaired when the editor thought it a good idea.

Amiss made no comment on anything except to grunt reassuringly every time Ricketts assured him that this or that room was sacrosanct. ‘No one here likes anything to change, Mr Amiss,’ was Ricketts’s parting shot. ‘I’m sure you’re right,’ said Amiss. ‘Now don’t worry about anything, Mr Ricketts. You’ll hardly know I’m here.’

Where would we be, he reflected, without the humane lie?

‘Though hardly a great proponent of revolution myself,’ Amiss reported to Rachel that evening, ‘I found myself badly in need of someone who wasn’t completely reactionary. The only one who seemed a possible candidate was the young door-opener, Jason, whose taste in reading material at least was contemporary. I requested Miss Mercatroid to allow me to borrow him for a couple of minutes and took him outside for a brief walk. Having ascertained that he was bright and bored I arranged to meet him in a pub after hours.

‘ “Can I wear me normal clothes, or must I go like this?” he asked.

‘My heart bled for him. I think I’d sooner wear a frock in a pub than go dressed like that. So he turned up in his tracksuit and trainers and we had an amicable couple of pints, and he’s coming in at the weekend to help me make a nest for myself by Monday.’

‘Won’t that give the organization a corporate heart attack?’

‘No one will care except Ricketts, and I know how to fix him. I’ll tell him it was that or move in with him. The territorial implications of that should do the job.’

6

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Amiss sat in his office on Monday morning, delighted with what he and Jason had accomplished. Though modest in size, the room was magnificently furnished. The removal of spare
Wranglers
to the back of the room housing bound
Wranglers
had freed up quarters with ample room for a fine Georgian desk with a green leather top of the kind he had always coveted, a Victorian leather armchair, a wooden filing cabinet that was not too unsightly and a few portraits of
Wrangler
-approved luminaries to remind him what his politics were supposed to be. He had had a shock halfway through Saturday morning, when Lambie Crump, wearing a perfectly foul pair of yellow corduroy trousers and an orange tweed jacket, hurried down the fire escape past the window of the room they were raiding. But Jason had explained that there was nothing sinister about this: it was merely Lambie Crump’s preferred route to the outside world from his flat. ‘Off to breakfast, probably. And then to shoot things.’

It was with a feeling of real achievement that Amiss left Ricketts, who had taken only half an hour of reassurance to come to terms with this new dispensation, and set off to the Monday morning editorial conference to which Lambie Crump had graciously invited him.

Henry Potbury, looking sober, was already there, as were Wilfred Parry and Phoebe Somerfield. During the next few minutes there trickled in a well-known philosopher of extreme right-wing views, a backbench Tory MP and notorious gossip who specialized in writing amusingly of the vulgarities of his colleagues, and a very young woman who was simultaneously so good-looking and clever and had a mind so well furnished as to make Amiss feel old and jealous.

The main subject was law and order and disagreement was profound, though expressed with extreme courtesy: opinions ranged between those of relative moderation (zero tolerance of crime, more rigorous discipline in schools, boot camps) to those of the philosopher, who was keen for the reintroduction of the stocks, as well as corporal and capital punishment. Lambie Crump sat there with an urbane smile and for most purposes let them fight it out. At the end, he summed up fluently enough and went for the middle path. However much one might abhor the New Labour government, he announced, the fact was that on this issue they were making sense and should be encouraged. Miss Somerfield was charged with writing the leader.

Amiss enjoyed himself. The proceedings reminded him of evenings at Oxford when the more pretentious of his colleagues began showing off in the Junior Common Room. With the exception of the philosopher, who indulged in an anti-immigrant rant, and Henry Potbury, who got angry about some misdemeanor of the foreign secretary’s, he detected little passion among the participants. Phoebe Somerfield spoke only to skewer flights of fancy with well-aimed statistics, while the others seemed happily engaged in a familiar intellectual exercise: they fenced with each other and occasionally scored a point, but for most purposes they were almost in a ‘Look-at-us-aren’t-we-clever?’ conspiracy.

At midday Tozer arrived with champagne and the meeting broke up. The Tory MP disappeared with Henry Potbury; Phoebe Somerfield, who seemed to have been allocated at least a third of the work, scuttled off, while the others stood round sipping and gossiping. Amiss was introduced to Clement Webber, the philosopher, and the clever and beautiful Amaryllis Vercoe. When Webber heard the word ‘manager’, he gazed at Amiss incredulously and said, ‘So they’re letting the technicians in now.’ Unable to think of an appropriate reply, Amiss decided to leave. As he opened the door, he heard Amaryllis Vercoe asking, ‘Where’s Dwight?’ and Lambie Crump replying shortly that he was damned if he knew.

Amiss headed for the administration corridor, knocked on the first door and followed the instruction to enter.

‘May I introduce myself?’

The circulation manager, who was listlessly opening a pile of envelopes with a silver paperknife, looked up and smiled wanly. ‘Come in.’