The young man, who introduced himself as Richards, could have made a decent career out of the interpretation of ancient Sanskrit if bookselling or science didn’t work out, for the errant handwriting gave him not a moment’s trouble.
“That’s Old Mr. Blair’s hand,” he explained. “I’ve come to know it well over the years.”
“Is Mr. Blair available?” I asked.
His face assumed an awkward expression.
“I’m afraid Old Mr. Blair passed away some weeks ago.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“He was ninety-two.”
“I’m still sorry to hear it.”
“The original Mr. Steaford gave Mr. Blair his job,” Richards explained. “He was the last link to the store’s foundation. His handwriting was always terrible, though.”
He returned his attention to the list.
“There’s a definite pattern to these purchases,” he said.
“In what way?”
“Well, you have a copy of the Liebniz-Clarke correspondence, first published in English in 1717, although this is obviously a later edition. The main interest in it for most readers is a dispute over the nature of space and, indeed, time. Here’s Mach’s The Analysis of Sensations from 1897. Mach suggested that only sensations were real, and nothing else, if I understand him right, although it’s not entirely my area.”
He read out some more names that meant little to me—“Planck. Einstein—quite the coming chap”—and then frowned.
“Hullo,” he said. “He ordered various works by William James. Some of these are a bit outside our usual remit: Proceedings of the American Society for Psychical Research, Volume 3; The Varieties of Religious Experience; The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy. That’s a curious one. Not uninteresting, but certainly odd.”
I waited. Sometimes, my own patience astounded me.
Richards smiled apologetically. “Sorry. Fascinating stuff. James refers to something called the ‘multiverse,’ a hypothetical set of possible universes, of which this universe is just one part.”
“And what does he think is in these other universes?”
“I’m not sure he’s got that far, but I can’t confess to being an expert on James. Judging from Mr. Maulding’s list, though, I’d guess that he’d become interested in the nature of reality. Complex business, especially for the general reader.”
I thanked him. I wasn’t sure that there was any more to be learned here, or any more that I might have a chance of understanding.
“By the way,” I said, “have you ever heard of a bookseller called Dunwidge, or Dunwidge & Daughter, in Chelsea?”
“Can’t say that I have,” said Richards. “We can ask Young Mr. Blair, though. He knows every bookseller in London.”
He led me up various flights of stairs to a small section devoted entirely to works of psychology. A slight man in a dark suit, who must have been eighty if he was a day, was snoozing quietly behind a till.
“Old Mr. Blair’s brother?” I inquired.
“Strangely enough, no,” said Richards. “They weren’t even related, and they didn’t get on at all. Young Mr. Blair wouldn’t even make a contribution to the wreath.”
Mr. Richards gently woke Young Mr. Blair, who took the disturbance well. In fact, he seemed rather pleased that somebody wanted to talk to him. Perhaps he was just glad to have woken up at all. At his age, he was close to the time when the line between a short nap and the eternal rest was but a thin one.
“This is Mr. Soter, Mr. Blair. He has a question about a bookseller.”
Young Mr. Blair smiled and mumbled a string of words, out of which I managed to pick two, “delighted” and “help,” which boded well.
“I was wondering if you knew anything of a bookseller in Chelsea named Dunwidge?” I asked.
Young Mr. Blair’s face darkened. He scowled. He shook his head. An index finger appeared and was waved in an admonitory manner. Another string of muttered words emerged from his lips, blending into one long caw of disapproval. Eventually, spotting that I was somewhat at a loss to make any sense of what he was saying, he managed to force out some coherent, if short, sentences.
“Dreadful man,” he said. “Daughter worse. Umm . . . Occultists! Fire and brimstone sorts. Quite. Quite. Old books. Nasty books. Not science. Not science at all.”
He leaned forward and tapped his finger on the counter.
“Mumbo jumbo,” he said, enunciating each syllable carefully.
“I need an address for them,” I said. “I’ve been told they’re in Chelsea, perhaps on the King’s Road.”
Young Mr. Blair returned to his mutterings, but he found a scrap of paper and, in elegant copperplate, wrote down an address for me. I thanked him for his help and prepared to leave, but he stood and gripped my arm with a surprisingly strong hand.
“Stay away from ’em,” he urged. “Bad sorts, both of ’em, but the daughter most of all!”
I thanked him again, and he released his grip and returned to his seat. His eyes closed, and he returned to his slumbers.
Richards was quite impressed.
“You know,” he said, “I haven’t seen him that excited since Old Mr. Blair died.”
VI
I went next to Chancery to report my progress, or lack thereof, to Quayle, but he was not in his chambers. Only Fawnsley was present, scratching disconsolately with his fountain pen at a document thick with legalese, like a sick hen scrabbling for a piece of stray corn in the dirt.
“Took your time getting here,” he said, in lieu of a greeting.
“What do you mean by that?” I replied. “I’ve only been gone for two nights. I’m not a miracle worker.”
Fawnsley tapped the calendar on his desk. It was made of various blocks of ivory that could be turned to change the day, the month, and the year. The calendar read October 15.
“Your calendar is wrong,” I said.
“My calendar is never wrong,” he answered.
I sat down heavily in a chair by the wall. I had lost a week. It wasn’t possible. It simply wasn’t possible. I had taken the train on the eighth. I had the ticket in my pocket. I had kept it so that Quayle wouldn’t question my expenses. I searched my pockets and my wallet for the ticket, but it was gone.
“You look ill,” said Fawnsley.
“Trouble sleeping,” I said. I stared at the calendar. Not possible. Not possible.
Fawnsley chewed a question silently in his mouth. I could actually see his jaws working.
“You’re not . . . ?”
He trailed off. The shadow of Craiglockhart hung over us as surely as if the military psychiatric hospital itself lay outside Quayle’s chambers, and the sun was setting behind it.
“No,” I said. “I’m fine.”
He didn’t look as though he believed me. I tried not to look as though I cared.
“Did you get my telegram?” he asked.
“I did. Ten thousand pounds: a man could buy a lot with that kind of money.”
“Well, have you discovered what the man in question did buy with it?”
“Since you only informed me about it this morning, I may need a little more time,” I said.
Again, Fawnsley gave me that look. I corrected myself. I didn’t want Fawnsley reporting back to Quayle that I was troubled, or unreliable. I needed the money.
“Sorry,” I said, making the best of a bad situation. “I meant that I have only this morning received some information, based on what was contained in the telegram.”
“And what is this great leap?”
“I think Maulding might have spent the money on books.”
“Books?” squawked Fawnsley. “He could buy a whole bloody library of books for ten thousand pounds.”
“He already has a library,” I said. “When a man has as many books as Maulding, he stops being interested in the ones that are easy to acquire, because he already has them. Instead, he starts seeking out rare volumes, and the r
arer they are, the more they cost.”
“And what kind of rare volumes are we talking about?”
But before I could reply Fawnsley was considering his own question.
“Surely it’s not literature of a depraved nature? He never struck me as the type.”
“It depends upon what one means by ‘depraved,’ I imagine.”
“Don’t come the philosopher with me, man. You know precisely what I mean.”
“If you’re referring to works of an erotic nature, then, no, I don’t think that was Maulding’s weakness. He had some volumes of that type in his library, but not many. He did seem to have developed something of a fascination with the occult, though, and I couldn’t trace all the books on the subject that he had acquired. Most of them appear to be missing, although I admit that I might have overlooked a couple on his shelves. There are only so many titles that one man can examine at a time.”
“Occult? Erotica? You’ve become quite the expert, haven’t you, and all that in just a week? Clearly, our money is being well spent. We may not have Maulding, but you’re improving your education by leaps and bounds.”
There it was again: a week, a week.
“It’s just common sense. Tell Quayle I’ll be in touch when I have something more solid to offer him.”
“What about receipts?” said Fawnsley.
“You’ll get them.”
“I should hope so. We’re not made of money, you know.”
“I never thought you were, Mr. Fawnsley,” I said. “If that were the case, you’d invest in a better suit of clothes and the manners to go with it.”
Fawnsley seemed about to say something in reply, but decided against it. I knew what he thought of me already. Through a half-open door, I’d once overheard him carefully trying to steer Quayle away from hiring me shortly after I’d left Craiglockhart. I’d done some work for Quayle before the war, much like the work I was doing now, but back then Fawnsley was merely a junior clerk. Quayle’s factorum had been a chap of the old school named Hayley, who was wounded at Sevastopol and drank port with his lunch.
“He wasn’t even a proper officer,” Fawnsley had protested, a reference to the fact that I had been promoted from the ranks. “Worse, he is a broken man!”
And Quayle had replied, “He was more of an officer than you or I, and a broken man can be fixed, especially one who wants to mend himself.”
That was why I was loyal to Quayle. He had faith in me. It also helped that he paid me for my services: not well, and not fast, but he paid.
“Good-bye, Mr. Fawnsley,” I said, but he bade me no farewell.
• • •
It was already dark when I reached the address in Chelsea occupied by Dunwidge & Daughter, Booksellers. It lay in an area known as World’s End, named after a pub at the western extreme of the King’s Road. In the last century, this area had been something of an artists’ colony: Turner, Whistler, and Rossetti lived and worked there, and it still had something of a bohemian feel to it.
Dunwidge & Daughter, though, seemed intent on maintaining a discreet presence, and the only indication that the terraced house might shelter a business lay in a brass plate on the front door, engraved with a pair of interlocking Ds. I rang the bell. After a minute, a bald man wearing a suit jacket and waistcoat over his otherwise bare chest opened the door. He held a cigarette in one hand and a brass candlestick in the other.
“Yes?” he said.
“Mr. Dunwidge?”
“That’s me. Do I know you?”
“No. I’m here on behalf of Mr. Lionel Maulding, one of your customers.” This was not so much a lie as an approximation of truth. “My name is Soter.”
“It’s late, but I suppose you’d better come in if you’re here on Maulding’s business.”
He opened the door wider, and I stepped inside. The house was dimly lit, but reminiscent of Maulding’s own home in the sheer numbers of books that lined the walls of the hall. A stairway led up to the next levels of the house, but Dunwidge directed me through a door on the right. It was one of two interconnected rooms that served as a kind of shop floor, with books on tables and shelves and, in some cases, securely locked away behind glass-fronted and barred cabinets.
“He send you with his shopping list, then?” asked Dunwidge. He put the cigarette in his mouth and gestured with his right hand. “Well, hand it over. Let’s see what he wants this time.”
I didn’t answer. There was a table by the window in the main room, and on it rested an ashtray filled with cigarette butts. It was clearly where Dunwidge worked when he had no customers to trouble him. The rest of the table was taken up by various sheets of paper covered in handwritten symbols, part of some code that I could not decipher. I flicked through them, but they were all similarly arcane.
“What are these?” I asked.
“You might want to tell your Mr. Maulding about those,” said Dunwidge. “Very interested in them, he was, but I didn’t have a full set of sixty folios to offer him, not then. They’re Cipher Manuscripts. I suppose you could call them a compendium of magic.”
“What language is this?”
“English and Hebrew, mostly. It’s a substitution cryptogram. It’s not hard to interpret, once you find the pattern. This one came from a former Adeptus Major in the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Seems he had a falling-out with Berridge over at the Iris-Urania, and Crowley, too. Can’t say I blame him when it comes to Crowley. I won’t have him in the house. He’s a wrong ’un, and I should know: I’ve seen enough of them in this business. Once I’m sure that we have the lot, I’ll let your Mr. Maulding know. I’ll give him a good price, he need have no fear of that.”
Dunwidge lit a fresh cigarette without offering me one, and peered at me suspiciously through the smoke.
“He usually comes down here himself, does Mr. Maulding,” he said. “Always struck me as a private sort. Unusual that he’d send someone else along on an errand.”
I turned to face him.
“Mr. Maulding seems to have disappeared,” I said. “I’ve been asked to find him.”
“I see,” said Dunwidge. “Well, he ain’t here.”
“When did you last see him?”
Dunwidge engaged in some ear-tugging and cheek-puffing. “Oh, not for two or three months or more, I would have to say.”
“Really?”
“At least.”
I reached into my pocket and removed a sheaf of receipts from Dunwidge & Daughter.
“That’s odd,” I said, “because all these receipts are more recent than that.”
“Well, we do a lot of business by mail.”
“I’m sure. Nevertheless, Mr. Maulding made a number of visits to London in the last month, and he was not in the habit of traveling to the city more often than was necessary. He was a meticulous man. He kept train tickets, notes of meals eaten and taxis taken. I’ve gone through them all, and it seems that your premises was his destination on more than one of those occasions.”
I waited to be called on the lie, but Dunwidge buckled.
“I might be mistaken, of course,” he said. “We get all sorts of people through here, at all sorts of hours. I might have missed him. My daughter, she deals with most of the customers. I’m more of a backroom boy myself. Always have been.”
“Is your daughter here, Mr. Dunwidge?”
“Oh, she’s about, right enough. I expect she’ll be along in her own good time.”
He fussed with some books, straightening their spines so that they were aligned with the edge of their shelf. It was clear that he now regretted being the one who had answered the door to me.
“Do you recall what books Mr. Maulding might have purchased?”
“Not off the top of my head. You’d be surprised how many books we sell. Lot of interest in our area, lot of interest.”
More fussing, more aligning, the tension knotting in his shoulders.
“But you keep records, I’m sure?”
“My
daughter does. I’m a numbers man. I add up the takings at the end of the day and see it all safely to the bank in the morning.”
“A backroom boy and a numbers man,” I said. “The only limit to your talents appears to be your memory.”
He didn’t let the sarcasm bite, but merely smiled bashfully.
“I’m not as young as I used to be,” he said, and the smile twisted just slightly so that it became a thing more unpleasant, more knowing. “My memory does tend to come and go, I’ll admit, and that can be a curse, you know, but a blessing, too.”
He glanced over my right shoulder, and I saw relief and, perhaps, a hint of fear on his face.
“Ah, here she is,” he said. “I was wondering where you’d got to, my dear. Gentleman here has some questions about Mr. Maulding.”
There came that sly grin again. “You’ll forgive me, sir, but your name has already slipped my mind.”
“It’s Soter,” I said, as I turned to face his daughter.
• • •
What struck me first about her was her solidity. She was certainly not thin, but neither was she fat. She had the bulk of one who had engaged in heavy physical labor for much of her life, and I felt that, if I were to poke her with a finger, there would be only a little give to her flesh before I encountered hard muscle. She was tall for a woman—five eight or a fraction more—and might have been any age from thirty to fifty. Her hair was a muddy brown, pulled tight in a bun and fixed with pins. Her face was largely unadorned, apart from a slash of lipstick that was rather too pale for her complexion and lent her an aspect of bloodlessness that belied her bulk. She wore a black dress with mother-of-pearl buttons which, although it was relatively tight, showed few curves. I might almost have said that there was a sexlessness to her, but that would not have been right. She was clearly a woman, but I would no more have considered seducing her than I would have considered seducing a statue of Queen Victoria herself. There was an unattractiveness to her that emanated from within. I had met plain women, even ugly women, whose physical shortcomings had been remedied by their spirit, their decency and kindness even effecting a kind of transformation upon them, softening the bluntness of their features. This was not such a woman. The blight was inside her, and no restyling of her hair, no careful use of cosmetics, no pretty dresses could have made her any less unsettling than she was.