The Moving Toyshop. Edmund Crispin

– ‘you see, any ordinary solicitor, if two total strangers rushed into his office and demanded details of his clients’ private affairs, would quite certainly just kick them out. Why was Mr Rosseter so candid, so open and informative? Because he was telling a pack of lies? But as he quite rightly remarked, we can check what he said from Somerset House. All the same, I don’t trust Mr Rosseter.’

      ‘Well, I’m going to the police,’ said Cadogan. ‘If there’s anything I hate, it’s the sort of book in which characters don’t go to the police when they’ve no earthly reason for not doing so.’

      ‘You’ve got an earthly reason for not doing so immediately.’

      ‘What’s that?’

      ‘The pubs are open,’ said Fen, as one who after a long night sees dawn on the hills. ‘Let’s go and have a drink before we do anything rash.’

       4

       The Episode of the Indignant Janeite

      ‘Which in effect,’ said Cadogan, ‘leaves us exactly where we were before.’

      They were sitting in the bar of the Mace and Sceptre, Fen drinking whisky, Cadogan beer. The Mace and Sceptre is a large and quite hideous hotel which stands in the very centre of Oxford and which embodies, without apparent shame, almost every architectural style devised since the times of primitive man. Against this initial disadvantage it struggles nobly to create an atmosphere of homeliness and comfort. The bar is a fine example of Strawberry Hill Gothic.

      It was only a quarter past eleven in the morning, so few people were drinking as yet. A young man with a hooked nose and a broad mouth was talking to the barman about horses. Another young man with horn-rimmed glasses and a long neck was engrossed in Nightmare Abbey. And a pale, rather grubby undergraduate with untidy red hair was talking politics to an earnest-looking girl in a dark green jersey.

      ‘So you see,’ he was saying, ‘it’s by such means that the moneyed classes, gambling on the Stock Exchange, ruin millions of poor investors.’

      ‘But surely the poor investors were gambling on the Stock Exchange too.’

      ‘Oh, no, that’s quite different…’

      Mr Hoskins, more like a vast, lugubrious blood-hound than ever, was sitting at a table with a dark and beautiful girl called Miriam. He was drinking a small glass of pale sherry.

      ‘But, darling,’ said Miriam, ‘it will be simply awful if the proctors catch me in here. You know they send women down if they catch them in bars.’

      ‘The proctors never come in in the mornings,’ said Mr Hoskins. ‘And in any case, you don’t look a bit like an undergraduate. Now, just don’t you worry. Look, I’ve got some chocolates for you.’ He pulled a box from his pocket.

      ‘Oh, you darling…’

      The only other occupant of the bar was a thin, rabbit-faced man of about fifty, greatly muffled up in coats and scarves, who was sitting by himself drinking rather more than was good for him.

      Fen and Cadogan had been running over the facts of the case as far as they knew them, and it was the result of this investigation which had prompted Cadogan’s remark. Those facts boiled down to dispiritingly little:

       1. A grocery shop in Iffley Road had been turned into a toyshop during the night, and then back into a grocery shop.

       2. A Miss Emilia Tardy had been found dead there, and her body had subsequently vanished.

       3. A rich aunt of Emilia Tardy, Miss Snaith, had been run over by a bus six months previously, and had left her fortune to Miss Tardy under certain conditions which made it as likely as not that Miss Tardy would never even become aware of her inheritance (if Rosseter was telling the truth).

      ‘And I suppose,’ said Fen, ‘that he wasn’t allowed to communicate directly with any known address of Miss Tardy. By the way, I was meaning to ask you: did you feel the body at all?’