The Mammoth Book of Best British Mysteries (39 page)

He held up his hand to still our questions. “ To other matters,” he said.

“And where’s the rest of it?” I asked.

“In his father’s bank or in a private Swiss vault or in a tower of his auntie’s Bavarian castle,” said Percy.

“Is that what’s he’s like?”

“Strong London accent; almost like an Aussie, carefully trimmed black beard; brown corduroy suit; pompous, assertive; aggressive almost.”

“Could be any one of our authors,” I said.

“My authors are respectful,” said Percy.

“Because you send the aggressive ones to me.”

“And they are the ones that make the money,” said Percy. “Ever since that piece in
The Bookseller
, they all want you to be their editor, you know that. Fiction writers
do anyway.”

I read the sheet of paper again and said nothing.

“So what do you think?” said Percy after looking around the room. “Bloody untidy; your office.” He had removed a pile of books in order to sit in the soft leather chair I
put authors into when I have bad news for them. One leg was resting across the other to display a red cashmere sock and handmade Oxford shoe. Percy always looked like a page from a fashion magazine
even on days like today, when the rain was thrashing against the windows, and the sky was so dark that all the office lights were turned on.

“Is it a parody or what?” I said. “It has the same plodding style that I remember from all Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes yarns.”

“Is that a recommendation? Do you mean it’s genuine?”

“We have quite a big list, and it will be too late for the new catalogue, no matter how fast we move. I think we should stay out of this. Send him one of your sad rejection
letters.”

“Send him where? To HarperCollins? To Random House?”

“Why did he pick us?” I asked.

“He wanted to bring it to the last independent publisher in London, he said.”

“You didn’t tell me he was a philanthropist.”

“Now, now, Carl. Don’t let your nasty Teutonic streak show.”

“It’s been a long day,” I said. Percy’s Teutonic joke, a reference to my Christian name, had worn thin.

“And you’ve had your regular kick-boxing lesson from Princess Diana all afternoon.”

“Her agent told her our contract will have to be renegotiated.”

“More money. She can go to Hell and take
Footsteps to Heaven
with her.”

“We did rather well with her last Sharon du Parr,” I reminded him. “And she has a new agent now: Freckles. Her other agent was not commercial enough for her. New agents, Percy,
always want to flex their muscles.”

“Her last agent was a man,” said Percy who was high enough in the command structure to be in on the deals. “Sensible enough to keep her feet on the ground.”

“Was he? I never met him.”

“Blonde lady bomber pilots and female secret agents toting machine guns. The artwork on her last dust-jacket haunts me. I don’t know why we publish that crap.”

“You don’t?” I enjoyed winding him up. “She loved the dust-jacket. She wanted us to make it into a poster.”

“That wretched Freckles? Has she really started her own agency? Good grief.”

“I think we might be dealing with her for more of our lady writers before long. She wrote an amusing article in
The Author.
She said men authors always got paid twice as much as
women authors and she was going to fight for them. And you’d better not call her Freckles to her face, Percy.”

“Let’s get back to this Sherlock Holmes story,” said Percy. He put a finger on to his starched shirt cuff to sneak a look at his gold Rolex. “You want me to tell him to
get stuffed? He’s demanding some ‘token’ money down before we see the rest of it.”

“That’s just to keep us on the hook,” I told him.

“So I’ll tell him we’re not interested?”

“Not in as many words, Percy. You don’t want to make headlines as the publisher who turned down a Sherlock Holmes story that has been locked away undiscovered for a hundred
years.”

He wetted his lips and then sighed. “Make up your mind, Carl.”

“Everyone loves Sherlock Holmes,” I said. “If it’s the real thing this will make news. Not trade news; big international headline news and TV.”

“The paper looks old,” he picked it up and looked at it and smelled it. “But is it Conan Doyle’s writing?”

“Well, I don’t imagine he would bring us an autograph edition; he may have copied it out.”

“You’d think he’d put it on a computer or something.”

“Not very secure, computers, Percy. Put something like that on the hard drive and it’s only a couple of keystrokes away from going on to the Internet. And into the Public Domain, as
you lawyers say. Your – what did you say his name was? – seems to be a careful chap.”

“He says he wants a definite answer, and cash on the table, by the fifteenth of the month.”

“The fifteenth? Next week?”

“He’s out of the country till then; a business trip he said.”

“Writers all say that; they have a guilt complex about holidays.”

I was very busy over the next few days. One of our best line-editors had gone sick with what they suspected was chickenpox. Her daughter phoned us to say her mother might need
hospital treatment. She was having blood tests. I knew that would mean a week or more out of action. The worst of it was that she lived in deepest, darkest Cornwall and there was a tall pile of
typescripts sitting on her shelf. I couldn’t find time to go down there, and Percy was frightened he might catch chickenpox. Finally we decided to wait and see what the medical tests showed.
And Percy found an urgent need to visit one of our writers in Ireland. As usual, this meant a diligent exploration of the local pubs and Percy running at half speed for several following days.

Once back in action, Percy took his single sheet of handwritten Sherlock Holmes all around the building, swearing them all to secrecy, as he had before showing it to me. By Thursday he must have
run out of people to consult for he came back to talk to me again.

“That young fellow who does the computer stuff in accounts had a good suggestion.”

“About Sherlock Holmes?”

“He said we must insist on having a sheet from the original, and then have the paper examined and tested in a laboratory to see how old it was.”

“No great problem getting your hands on sheets of old paper, Percy. We could probably find some in the store room, or the slush pile, if we rooted around long enough.”

“And I thought of that too, Carl. I’m not a complete fool. It might be better to get one of these computer people to compare the syntax against other stories.” I suppose I did
not light up in the expected fashion. “Verbs, adjectives, the length of the sentences and so on. That ‘customarily’, for instance. Was that a word Doyle ever used?”

“It wouldn’t be conclusive. We shouldn’t assume that this fellow, What’s-his-name, is an untutored oaf. If he’s a forger he will have looked at the stories: verbs,
adjectives and the length of sentences.”

“You don’t have to be so bloody sarcastic, Carl. I’m trying to see some way out of this situation.”

“Way out?”

“Yes, I didn’t tell you but I’ve had the newspapers sniffing around, asking if we’d found some long-lost manuscript.”

“Sherlock Holmes?”

“One of them said H. G. Wells – he’d heard it was a sequel to
Things to Come
and the other didn’t have a clue about who wrote anything.”

“That must have been a senior literary editor. Let me guess which paper.”

“No, that’s just the point. These queries are coming from the news desks. The H. G. Wells loony had heard that it was going to be a major film.”

“Why doesn’t your punter just put it up for auction? One of the big boys might be willing to put it into their New York auctions.”

“Perhaps he’s frightened of it being turned down as a fake,” said Percy. “That could be a crippling setback for anyone selling it.”

“Will an auction house care too much whether it’s a fake? They’ll get their money; then it’s
cave canem
for the bidders. I sometimes think half the junk put up for
auction is bogus in one way or another.”

“
Caveat emptor
,” Percy solemnly corrected me.

“Same goes for the film,” I said. “If some sharp film man grabs it, he could ride along on the publicity generated by a controversy about whether it’s genuine. And if it
turns out fake that will hardly dent the takings at the box office.”

“So you think we should publish it?”

“I didn’t say that, Percy.”

“It’s all right for you. You can just move on if the firm hits a rock. I’m stuck here.” Percy was determined not to be deprived of his crisis.

“I don’t see why.”

“Because my uncle is the chairman, Carl. Be your age. You’ve made enough jokes at my expense.”

“Have I, Percy? I hope I have never been offensive.”

“I don’t mind your jokes. You can be very humorous sometimes. It’s the crap I get when people have to be sacked.”

“People say things they don’t mean.”

“They mean it all right,” said Percy and I almost felt sorry for him. It was, after all, Percy who had got me the job. The ad agency let me go after they lost the breakfast food
account I was working on. Percy got to his feet. “Well, I must leave you now. I have an important lunch appointment.”

When I saw Percy later that afternoon he was roseate and ebullient. And it wasn’t all due to the unspecified number of bottles of Chevalier-Montrachet he and his luncheon guest had
consumed. “There it is,” he said. He put a brown packet on my desk. His aim erred to the extent that it sideswiped my keyboard and put about three hundred z’s across a letter I
was concocting for the “Princess” about the bewildering way her characters were apt to change names and/or appearance and then sometimes change back again. “That’s
it.” He pointed. “That’s the Sherlock Holmes story. That’s your Christmas bonus and my seat on the board.”

“He gave it to you?”

“It wasn’t easy but lunch at the Ritz can have a magical effect upon authors. I’ve noticed that before.”

“And this is the only copy? No photocopies in your desk?”

He hesitated. “He made me promise on my honour. I signed a piece of paper for him. It wouldn’t have much effect in a court of law but he knows I wouldn’t want him brandishing
it if there was evidence that I’d cheated on him. So look after it. Don’t leave it on the train or something. You remember how you went past your station and had to get a minicab home
that night after the Christmas party?”

“Yes,” I said. I wished I’d never mentioned that journey home to him. At the time I was hoping he’d offer to reimburse the cab fare but instead of that he kept using it
to beat me over the head with implications that I got everything wrong. “So how much did you have to pay him?”

“Nothing. Not a penny.”

“He just handed it over?”

“I said the directors would have a meeting on Monday and have an offer and a contract ready for Tuesday morning. I thought that would give you a chance to read it.”

“What about you reading it?”

“I have read it,” said Percy. “I read it as soon as I got back from lunch.”

I noticed that the packet had been torn open and then sealed up again, so perhaps he had.

“And?” Percy was not an avid reader.

“It’s damned clever; almost too clever for a Sherlock Holmes yarn.
Corpus delicti
, it all turns on that. You know what I mean?”

“You don’t plough your way through a thousand whodunits without discovering what
corpus delicti
means,” I told him.

Percy was not to be denied a chance to display his legal qualifications. “Body; but not necessarily a human body. It’s the facts, money, physical substance, evidence of any kind that
a crime has been committed.”

“How does the story read?”

“You’ll have to read it for yourself but at the conclusion of the story, Holmes finds there is no written evidence, no substance, no witnesses, not even this gigantic ship, to prove
that any crime was ever committed. Holmes ends up baffled . . . but anyway you must read it.”

“Doyle was ingenious,” I admitted

“It’s good,” said Percy. “A page-turner. But you are the senior editor, senior fiction editor, anyway.”

“Ummm,” I said. I could see into Percy’s mind. If it turned out well, the firm would make umpteen thousands, Percy would get his seat on the board – there was going to be
a vacancy in January anyway – and I would get a small Christmas bonus. If it became the sort of fiasco that Percy feared, it would all be my fault.

“Take it home. Read it over the weekend and let me know on Monday.”

“Monday is a difficult day for me, Percy.”

“Your day at home, I know.”

“It’s the only way I can get through the backlog. Here in the office there is always something cropping up.”

“Like me.”

“It’s not only that, Percy. I have to see Sergeant McGregor in the morning and so I asked him to come to my flat for a sandwich and a beer. I want to switch a couple of his chapters
and I’ve drafted out a new beginning. It’s not as much work as it sounds but getting an author to understand the need for revisions is always a delicate job.”

“Who the devil is Sergeant McGregor?”

“Peter Cardiff. He writes the ‘Copper’s Diary’ series. We’ve done six of them now. They have all been trade paperbacks but marketing think he’s ready to go
mass-market.”

“Why do these fellows have to have nom de plumes? Isn’t Cardiff a good enough name? Better, in my humble opinion.”

“Not for a police series about Glasgow criminals. And when he first started he was still on the Glasgow force. He had to have an assumed name.”

“Move him to Tuesday, Carl. This Sherlock Holmes decision is important.”

“He’s coming all the way down from the other side of Aberdeen. And he is a widower; with a school-age child. He has to arrange for someone to collect her and look after her. I really
wouldn’t like to throw a spanner into his arrangements. And he’s one of our best authors, Percy.”

“What is best about him?”

“He can spell; he puts a capital letter at the beginning of each sentence and a full-stop at the end. He knows an adjective from a verb and doesn’t use flashbacks or dream sequences
or try to write sexy scenes that he can’t handle.”