A Book of the Dead Page 4

  “Yes, Mr Price or Mr Pike, what’s in a name, though I can only think of him as Pike.” She gave another soulful sigh. “The old boy told me the story himself. The K. 107 hit a mountain in Wales during its maiden flight and thirty-three people were killed. Faulty design was to blame and the court of enquiry threw the book at Pike and he was pilloried in the press. Rather like what happened to Sir Thomas Bouch, when the Tay Bridge got blown over. After a while, the poor old bleeder couldn’t stand the publicity, so he shaved off his beard, changed his name and became a book runner. Going from shop to shop buying and selling for a few pennies profit. Must have had quite a flair for it, because in no time at all he’d built up a mailing list and dealt with private customers. Aviation material at first, but he soon spread his net further.”

  “And he told you this himself, Mrs Tey.” For the first time Tom seemed to have a clear picture of Pike. That was the reason for the false accent, the loneliness and the hat which he always wore pulled low over his forehead. Even after thirty years those dead passengers and the crew still troubled him.

  “Of course he told me, Mr Mayne and why not? Everybody needs a friend to trust and confide in.” To Tom’s horror, she picked up his hand and fondled it. She then studied the palm. “You need to trust me, too, Mr Mayne, so tell me the truth. Make a clean breast and tell Mummy Peg everything.”

  And Tom did, though he never knew why. He told the repulsive woman everything he knew; his fears and suspicions. Pike’s death had no connection with a long-forgotten aircraft disaster; a book had killed him. A book which had lain on his desk looking quite innocent, though it held a secret which someone was desperate to conceal and would kill for if the need arose. Tom pulled his hand out of Mrs Tey’s clammy grasp and considered what might have happened.

  Pike was fairly well known as a dealer in his own specialities, and one day he might have had an enquiry by letter or postcard. “I would be glad if you can offer me any copies of Men of Courage which may come your way.” The writer might either have been a stranger or a regular customer who had been on his list for years.

  In any case it was probable that Pike had had at least one copy of the book in stock and had sent it off, and received cash by return. So he had offered the prompt payer more copies, possibly quoting from other dealers’ stock, and each offer had been accepted.

  Then slowly at first, the price had gone up and up. Tom had no illusions about Pike’s character. If he felt he had a customer with a compulsive urge to buy, he would have put the screws on like a Levantine usurer, and one couldn’t blame him for that. The edition was limited to a hundred and fifty copies and a good quarter of those would be stored away in libraries and private collections. Each one he sold would have made the edition a little scarcer and finally he might have believed it was worth what he charged.

  “I still think he killed himself, but what are we waiting for, Mr Mayne, and it’s worth a try.” He had been speaking aloud and Mrs Tey interrupted him and rummaged through the desk. “Here it is; old Pike’s list of customers with their wants written down beside ’em.”

  “We can ignore about half of these of course. No foreigners, and the Bishop of West Auckland is pretty unlikely – his Honour Judge Tenton, Sir Simon Vale, he’s chairman of Allied Chemical Engineering, I seem to remember, and they’re dead ducks too.”

  “No, we’ll put ’em all in, Mrs Tey. All British residents. A bishop, a judge and an industrialist might have a sick mania for collecting like anybody else.” Tom squinted at the first page. A list of fifty names and forty-nine individuals would look at the price and shake their heads, but one might be shocked into action. Always assuming that Pike had included his special customer on the list, of course.

  A laborious task, but worth a try. He slipped one of Pike’s quotation cards into the typewriter and started work, leaving the bill head intact but writing “successor to” and adding his own address and telephone number below. Then he described the goods he had to sell.

  “Men of Courage – Fine example, numbered . . .” He couldn’t remember the number of Pike’s last copy, so selected 50 at random and glanced at his watch. Nearly nine o’clock, but the central post offices had a collection at midnight. If he worked hard he might just make it. The big electric typewriter whirred and clicked under his fingers, the desk light lit him up like a figure on a stage set, the lines of books seemed to frown at him as though he was disturbing their sleep.

  He saw Mrs Tey depart to the kitchen and return with two glasses and a bottle of brown liquid, but he tried to ignore her till she patted his shoulder and filled a glass.

  “But why your own address, and what price are we goin’ to quote?” she asked. “Ah, I see. You may have inherited Pike’s money; bloody old fool that he was, but we don’t want any villains turning up here, so drink up and let me take over.

  “Ta very much and here goes!” He had given her the information and she took his seat and proceeded to stroke the keys with incredible swiftness. Men of Courage, Edition limited to 150 copies and our copy fine. Price £1000, plus postage and V.A.T.

  “Yes, that should do it and if I can finish the rest by eleven and you’re a fast driver . . . If Pike really was murdered and your hunch is right. . . Fill in the address of the customer by hand, Mr Mayne, to save me time.” She pulled out a card and held it out to him.

  “Yes, if you’re right somebody will be very angry when he looks at tomorrow’s mail.”

  By nine o’clock of the morning Peggy Tey mentioned, a number of people had read the quotation and dismissed it with sadness, bewilderment or contempt.

  His Honour Judge Tenton was on his way to court when he glanced at the card and at first he felt pleasure. He was grateful to Tom for remembering because he was mentioned in the book himself as a former rock climber. Tenton’s Rake on Scafell and Tenton’s Ruin in the Grampians testified to his prowess.

  Then, his eyes fell on the price and they seemed to draw back in his head and become smaller. Old offenders knew that cold, shrunken look well and many had quailed before it. A hard man, the judge, hard on the bench and hard on the rocks. Not at all a man to fall foul of.

  “A fool,” he muttered to himself as the car drew up. “A fool or a cheat.” He dropped the offending message onto the floor and hurried out to pass a remarkably savage sentence for bigamy.

  The Right Reverend Dr Hugo Scanner, Bishop of West Auckland, was slightly more charitable.

  “Dear me,” he said to his wife and glancing at the card propped up against a coffee-pot. “Old Pike’s business has fallen into extremely grasping or ignorant hands it appears. A thousand pounds plus VAT for a book worth twenty.” The bishop felt slightly annoyed, though his expression didn’t alter. In his youth he had had the misfortune to fall from the yard-arm of a sailing ship and the resulting collision between his face and the deck below had left him with a rigid mask which couldn’t really smile or scowl.

  “Still one must make allowances, I suppose.” He left the breakfast table and crossed to a desk. “Perhaps this man Mayne merely made a typing error . . .” He drew a circle in red ink around the price and wrote: “Is this intended as a jest?” Then he signed, “Hugo West Auckland, D.D.” with a flourish and slipped the card into an envelope.

  “Yes, a Christian priest should always give people the benefit of a doubt,” he thought and glanced at a clock. “Still, if the fellow really means what he wrote he is either an imbecile or a knave. A thousand pounds indeed! An insult to his own intelligence and knowledge.” Anger rose as he addressed the envelope and considered the enormity of the figure. The Diocesan Conference was due to start in twenty minutes and, though they didn’t know it, his assembled clerics were in for a pretty thin time.

  But if the judge and the bishop had dismissed the quotation, there were others who did not.

  Mr Jason Biggs, Keeper of the Walpole Library, for ins
tance, studied Tom’s card carefully and then called for his assistant. “Tell me, Miss Smith,” he said, speaking very slowly, as always happened when something disturbed him. “Isn’t this the book we had that unpleasantness about?”

  “Quite correct, sir. The limited edition of Men of Courage, though the serial number is different. Ours was a hundred and one.” She had picked up the card and squinted at it through her glasses. “But the price is quite absurd. A thousand pounds! The correct figure should be under thirty as far as I can remember offhand. I know that old Pike always tried to charge the limit, but this man who has taken over his business appears to be . . .”

  “A fool or a villain, Miss Smith, though there may be a simple mistake. If Mr Mayne was doing a number of quotations from Pike’s stock, he might have mixed it up with another title.” As the idea came to him, Biggs’s speech speeded up.

  “Yes, of course; a simple mistake, but we’d better get onto him at once and ask the proper price. Tell him what happened to our own copy. It might make him more co-operative. A nasty business that, Miss Smith.

  “Very objectionable, indeed!”

  Less than ten miles away from the Walpole Library Tom’s card had hit pay dirt and the book had a potential buyer. Sir Simon Vale, chairman of Allied Chemical Engineering, stared at the quotation and he hardly noticed the price. Once there had been a time when he’d studied every price carefully. Once, there had been a time when he’d haggled over a few shillings, but now he was too old and rich to bother. A thousand was ridiculous of course. This fellow Mayne was a crook, but he wouldn’t argue with him. He wanted a copy of Men of Courage and here was one for sale.

  “I wonder if you’d do me a favour, my dear,” he said, smiling at his niece Janet across a vast mahogany table, which was ridiculously large for two people. “Would you run out to Chelsea and pick up a book for me? The man won’t find many buyers at his price, but I don’t want to lose it.”

  “Of course I can.” Janet smiled back at him and reached for the card. She had lived with Simon Vale since her parents died, several years ago, and they were very fond of each other. They also pitied each other.

  Janet pitied her uncle because, though on paper he was still chairman of A.C.E., it was only on paper. Since his last stroke, he had been forced to delegate authority and Peter Kent virtually ran the firm now. Apart from herself, the firm was the one thing that mattered to Sir Simon Vale and he was like a dry husk. An empty shell without hope or interest, but many fears.

  On his part, Sir Simon pitied Janet because she was too rich and might someday become too powerful. One of the richest women in England, probably, since he’d transferred that last block of shares to her in the hope of avoiding death duties and keeping the firm in the family. He respected money and power himself. Almost loved them, but without another form of love, they could be very dangerous things.

  Wealth – real wealth, not just thousands of pounds, but hundreds of thousands, could make a woman grow sour before her time and he dreaded that that might happen to Janet. A telephone call; the fairy godmother was always available at the end of the line to provide minks and cars, yachts and a string of eager suitors. Also to sow insecurity.

  Insecurity, that was the curse of the rich, if they were weak and inexperienced and he’d seen the results a score of times. Women who wore the best clothes and jewellery, women who had the best beauty treatment, who had everything material to live for, sat staring over the blue seas with faces of frightened harlots. Women whose thoughts were always the same. “Does he want me for myself, this time? Is it the real thing at last, or just the cheque-book? Oh, God, if only I was sure he loved me.”

  “Poor Janet Vale,” he thought. She might have to pay for his pride; his stupid, boneheaded ignorance. He’d never encouraged her to take a job or show an interest in the business. Why should his niece have to work when he had money to burn, and how he’d slaved for it.

  A woman’s place was in the home, that had been his philosophy. There was no reason for Janet to wear her eyes out studying at some damned university. Social work for charity was all right of course, but not for financial gain. Finance was a man’s line of country and there was no room at the top for women. Simon Vale had firmly believed that once and now he was beginning to regret his firmness.

  “Poor little Janet.” The thought kept repeating itself. “Let her marry soon. Let her marry anyone, however old or unattractive he may be. He’ll get my blessing providing he has money of his own. Providing he can give her love and some sense of security.”

  “It’s that book, uncle.” Janet looked up from the card. “A copy of the one you lost.”

  “Yes, the book which was lost, stolen or strayed. Most probably borrowed and never returned.” Vale gave a tired, sad smile. “Odd thing how perfectly honest people who would always hand over a wallet they found in the street think nothing of borrowing a book and failing to return it.” He shook his head wearily. “But in any case, I want that copy. Hubris – personal vanity, maybe, but I figure in one chapter myself.”

  “I know, Uncle, the Sam and Helen.” Janet remembered the story well. The Sam and Helen was an armoured tugboat which Vale, then a naval lieutenant, had served on during the war. The Sam had been sailing back from Murmansk during the end of 1944 when she and her escort were torpedoed and sank within minutes, but her uncle came through. With incredible luck and courage, through ice, fog and mountainous seas, he had brought the survivors home. The lifeboat reached Scotland three weeks later, and there were only four men alive. One of them died later and one was Peter Kent.

  “Of course you must have a copy, Uncle, and I won’t bother to beat the man down.” Janet frowned at Tom’s price. “A thousand quid is a bit steep, but it’s not every family that can claim to have a hero.”

  “Thank you, my dear, though collate the book before handing over your cheque. See that the photograph taken from the Sam’s lifeboat isn’t missing.

  “And now I’ll get along to the office, Janet. Peter Kent is a good, loyal subordinate. Been with me since the war, but he can’t carry the whole concern single-handed!” Vale heaved himself to his feet and walked slowly to the door. Very slowly – since his stroke every step was an effort and Janet knew how much he hated it.

  “Goodbye, Uncle,” she said, watching those dragging feet on the carpet, which only will-power kept moving. “And don’t worry about Men of Courage. I’ll go round and get Mayne’s copy now and have it on your desk by lunch-time. Give me something useful to do for a change.” She watched him close the door and grinned to herself. “God knows I need that something.”

  Forty-five people had received Tom’s cards and noted the contents with bewilderment, anger and acceptance. One noted them with sheer murderous rage.

  “Number 50.” It wasn’t the price but the copy number which aroused the man’s wrath and he scowled at it over his breakfast. The man believed in large breakfasts and he was large himself. Eighteen stone and all of them bone and muscle. An unpleasant sight, dressed in surprisingly vulgar pyjamas, open at the top to show a mat of reddish hair. He had a flowing ginger moustache and an expression of almost inhuman arrogance. Not at all a man to fall foul of. A very bad enemy at the slightest provocation.

  At first, he had merely glanced at the card and then his bulging eyes fell on the number and something rather horrible happened to him. If possible, his body seemed to swell and grow bigger. His tanned, leathery face glowed like a lamp and a string of curses poured from his lips. For a moment he eyed a rhinoceros hide whip on the wall longingly, but soon discarded the idea of using it.

  “Too bulky, quite unnecessary,” he muttered to himself. “But just wait till I get my hands on you, Mr Thomas Mayne.”

  Four

  Five minutes after Tom opened his shop the next morning, he received a telephone call from the Walpole Library. A long, rambling call with
Mr Jason Biggs slurring on the end of the line. But when he finally replaced the receiver, Tom’s eyes were very thoughtful. At least, part of his suspicions were true, it seemed. Somebody with an extremely strange and abnormal mind was interested in Men of Courage.

  He arranged the outside shelves as usual, he read a couple of letters and answered one of them, he paced the floor and thought about Pike’s death. He opened the catalogue and studied Pike’s list.

  It was a lovely day. Spring breaking into summer with the sun peering through the windows and as he looked at the catalogue, his ideas about Pike began to change. He wanted them to change – he wanted to stay alive.

  And it could have been suicide, he thought. Even after what Goldsmith and Biggs had told him, Pike had probably killed himself. The fact that a man had an obsession with a certain book didn’t make him a murderer and the disappearance of that last copy could be explained. Some dishonest policeman with a taste for literature, slipping it under his coat as he went out.

  Yes, he thought, lying to himself and he knew he was lying. The objectionable Mrs Tey was probably right and Inspector Pounder knew his job. After all, he himself was the only person to benefit directly from Pike’s death and he’d benefited. The catalogue told him that he was several thousand pounds richer, so why hadn’t he stuck to his own business and let the police stick to theirs? If his theory was wrong, those quotations he’d sent would label him a fool or a crook in the eyes of many librarians or collectors. If correct, he’d left himself wide open to a person who had killed once and would have no hesitation in killing a second time.