Slippery Creatures Page 4

  “Thanks, Secretan,” he said. “I’m grateful.”

  “Don’t be. It’s my pleasure. And—would you mind?—absolutely everybody calls me Kim. ‘Secretan’ always makes me expect a teacher to come looming over my shoulder.” He shuddered delicately.

  “All right then. And it’s Will.”

  Kim raised his glass. Will clinked it. It seemed they had a deal.

  CHAPTER THREE

  The afternoon’s work was a little less tedious on the back of two bottles of Guinness—they’d had just time for another before the pub shut at three—and the prospect of a bit of help. Will didn’t let his mind linger on the other prospect, in case it didn’t come off. He wasn’t entirely sure how one went about these things in Civvy Street, at least when one knew the other fellow’s name, but if Kim wanted to indulge, he’d doubtless say so. He was posh; he’d expect to have things for the asking.

  That said, he wasn’t a greatly forthcoming sort. They’d talked about this and that, and Kim had borne his fair share of the conversation in light and witty tones, but somehow Will hadn’t come away knowing any more about his companion. Then again, he had given his own views fairly frankly, so it was possible Kim had decided to hold back the details of privilege to avoid awkwardness. He’d known a couple of officers like that, careful never to mention the things that set them apart from the common men, as if you couldn’t tell.

  Another night passed without disturbance. That was a relief, though Will didn’t take it as a good sign. If he were the tattooed man, he’d let the interfering bookseller do the hard work and move in when the treasure turned up, rather than attempting to locate a needle in a haystack by torchlight.

  The next day, he found a letter.

  It was in a shoebox on top of a row of elderly Wisdens behind the desk, and contained mostly carriage notes and requests for this or that book. Will was putting those in a pile with the aim of taking the addresses for a list of possible customers, and he damn near put this one on it too before his mind shouted at his hand to stop. It was on plain cream notepaper, a tight angular hand in black ink, with no letterhead, address, or date.

  My dear Darling

  You gave me grave words in your last and I have come to fear you are right. My work is only graves, and my gain accordingly.

  I have destroyed almost all, but I must preserve the fruit. Keep the enclosed safe for me. If you are asked to give it up, the word is Bluebell. Nobody must have it without that safeguard. I am sorry to burden you with this.

  Burn this letter. I dare say you will want to burn the other, but I know you too well.

  Yours ever,

  Draven

  I hope we will meet again, but I am afraid.

  Will read the letter several times, then sat back in his creaky chair to think.

  My work is only graves. He didn’t like that, and he didn’t like any of the implications behind the need for a password, or the one Draven had used. He really didn’t like the confirmation that his uncle had received the ‘enclosed’ without any hints as to what it was or where he might have put the damn thing. He hoped, strongly, that Kim would turn up this Draven character safe and well. The last line did not fill him with optimism.

  He considered for a moment, then found a pair of scissors in the desk, carefully snipped out the word is Bluebell, and burned the shred of paper in an ashtray before he could have second thoughts.

  The bookshop didn’t have a safe, and cashboxes were far too portable. Will was quite unable to decide what to do with the letter, and ended up sticking it in his pocket as the shop door opened.

  Inevitably, he was faced with a busy day just when he could have used a dearth of customers. He sold a volume of Marlowe’s plays, a cheap Bagehot, a full set of Trollope’s Palliser novels, casebound, and two collections of poetry. He took in catalogues from three book dealers who stayed to offer condolences on his uncle’s death, and cast a suspicious eye on everyone who came in to browse in case they started turfing books on the floor. Nothing out of the ordinary happened at all, unless you counted a good day’s takings, and his nerves were strung up to fever pitch by five past five when the bell jangled again.

  “We’re closed!” he shouted across the shop, though admittedly his tone was rather more that of ‘sod off’.

  “I’m glad to hear it.”

  It was Kim’s voice, giving Will a rush of relief. He swung round the bookshelf that obscured his view at the same time Kim did, just managing not to collide with him.

  Kim gave a slightly startled smile. “In a hurry?”

  He was wearing a different suit, something beautifully cut in a fawn sort of shade that suited his colouring, with a dark brown handkerchief protruding from his pocket. He was so spotless and elegant as to make Will aware that he wanted a wash.

  “I’ve news,” Will said.

  “So have I.” Kim’s eyes glinted.

  “Let me lock up first. If you’re all right to talk in here?”

  “There is nowhere I would rather be,” Kim assured him, and waited for him to secure the door.

  “Back room?” Will suggested as he returned. “I’d rather not be observed.”

  Kim’s eyebrow rose, just a little twitch, but enough to make Will redden. He jerked a thumb at the windows that ran along one wall.

  “Quite so,” Kim said. “Lead on. Good heavens, are these your quarters?”

  The back room wasn’t a bad space. It had the camp bed, a gas fire with an attachment for cooking, a sink with a tap, a dresser that could have held six times as many clothes as he currently owned. Kim had doubtless never lived like this: even during the war, most officers had done better for themselves. In the context of the housing crisis that had been going on for the last years, it was luxury. At least he didn’t have to share the room with five others. “It does for me.”

  “Highly efficient,” Kim said, tossing his hat on the dresser, next to the Messer. He couldn’t have failed to notice the eight-inch blade but he didn’t comment. “I suppose one uses the bed as a sofa? Comfortable and economical.”

  “I can bring in a chair if you like.”

  “Not on my account, dear fellow. I am big with news.” He seated himself neatly at the end of the bed. Will took the other end, shifting his pillow out of the way rather self-consciously.

  “Well,” Kim said. “Who wants to go first?”

  “You.”

  “All right. Firstly, I am disappointed to report that Captain Ingoldsby is indeed who he says he is, in that he’s at the War Office and is considered highly conscientious if not likeable. So if the official imprimatur sways your decision, you have it.”

  “Mph. If he’s War Office, why couldn’t he get a warrant to search the shop?”

  “Good question,” Kim said. “It may have to do with the second part of my news, which is that a man called Professor Edward Draven was found dead a fortnight ago. He seems to have taken cyanide.”

  “You’re joking.”

  “I am not. Draven was a scientist who worked in his own well-equipped laboratory at home. There was surprisingly little information about his death in the newspapers, a mere sentence or two about the coroner’s report.”

  Will whistled. “How did you find that out?”

  “I started with Who’s Who, which gave one sole Draven, in his early sixties, your uncle’s age. He was a widower and left no dependents, according to the newspaper. His will, if he left one, might point us to somebody who can give more information, but it appears we have to wait for it to be lodged at Somerset House to have a squizz at it.”

  “I’m jolly glad you’re in this with me,” Will said. “I’d never have thought of that.”

  “I’m sure you would, but glad to be of service. So, to recap, the War Office is formally interested in information that was sent to your uncle by a scientist who was later found dead by his own hand. That’s starting to sketch a rather worrying picture, to my mind.”

  “This might colour it in a bit.” Will pulled
out the letter and handed it over.

  Kim read it, eyebrows moving steadily up. “Good Lord. Good Lord.”

  “I know.”

  “Were the censor’s scissors yours?”

  “Draven gave a code word, without which my uncle wasn’t supposed to hand anything over. That isn’t much use if you let people see it, so I cut it out and burned it.”

  “A wise precaution, except—well, you do realise you’ve tied yourself irrevocably into this situation now?”

  “I’m tied in it anyway. Listen. When the first chap turned up asking for the information, he said to me, ‘the word is daffodil’. I thought he wanted a gardening book, but he must have meant Draven’s code word.”

  “And that was ‘daffodil’?”

  “No, it wasn’t, but it was a flower. A different one.”

  Kim’s brows drew together. “That might be a very unlikely coincidence. Or it might suggest that someone had been putting pressure on Draven to hand over the information, and he gave them something sufficiently close to the truth that he could make it sound plausible—”

  “Before he killed himself.”

  “Before he ingested cyanide, yes,” Kim said. “I don’t like that at all.”

  “Nor do I.”

  “This is gnarly stuff, Will. I understand that you are taking on your uncle’s duty, but it sounds from this as though Mr. Draven imposed that duty on him without his agreement. He says that your uncle would have wanted to burn the enclosure.”

  “Then maybe I’ll burn it. But I won’t give it to anyone without knowing what I’m doing.”

  “It’s moot in any case until we find the blasted thing.” Kim turned the letter over and back. “It would be more useful if he’d specified exactly what he’d sent.”

  “Wouldn’t it just.”

  “When next I send an acquaintance a mysterious letter, I’ll write with posterity in mind. Why didn’t your uncle destroy this as instructed, I wonder?”

  “Maybe he was afraid he’d forget the word. Or he just put the paper in a box out of habit. It’s what he did with every other letter he received, after all,” Will added sourly.

  Kim grinned. “Long day?”

  “If I never see paper again...”

  “I can imagine. Hmph. You gave me grave words, he says, and I dare say you will want to burn the other, but I know you too well. We infer that your uncle knew about Mr. Draven’s activities and disapproved, as well he might if Draven’s work is graves. An ominous way to put it.”

  “It doesn’t sound good, does it?”

  Kim tapped the letter against his thigh. “Did your uncle take his obligations as seriously as you do? Might he have burned the enclosure after all?”

  Will shrugged. “I didn’t have time to get well acquainted with him, but he certainly took responsibility for me. I’d hope he or anyone would keep something safe if a friend asked him to, no matter his disapproval.”

  “Surely that depends. If it was a letter that was being used for purposes of blackmail, for example, and keeping something safe for a friend meant doing harm to the innocent, what would you do?”

  “I’d burn the damn letter if it was blackmail, yes, but I wouldn’t knowingly have a blackmailer as a friend,” Will said. “And this doesn’t sound like blackmail, does it? I must preserve the fruit. Sounds more like jam.”

  “If the War Office is in this because they want his recipe for bramble jelly—”

  “Maybe the burglars were hired by the Women’s Institute to eliminate a rival.”

  Kim laughed aloud at that. The bed shook a little beneath them. “Jam wars. If only. I think we have to assume that this refers to the fruit of his labours, which is to say something he’s achieved, worked on. And he was a scientist.”

  “You think it’s a discovery of some sort?”

  “Discoveries are what scientists do. And the War Office wants it, and it looks like someone else forced a code word out of him to get it.”

  They were both silent. Will said, eventually, “Damn.”

  “Quite.”

  “Is there any way to find out what he was working on, do you think?”

  “I suppose I can ask,” Kim said. “If it was a patent lice medication, nobody will be trying to keep that secret. If everyone refuses to talk about it, that would also be suggestive. I suppose we’re thinking about weapons, aren’t we?”

  “I suppose we are.”

  Kim made a face. “Then isn’t the War Office the right place for this information?”

  “You’re joking,” Will said. “If this is a scientific weapon, the War Office can go to hell.”

  Kim twisted to look at him. “Are you serious?”

  “Were you ever gassed?”

  “I wasn’t at the Front.”

  “I was at Wipers in April ’15, when Jerry brought out the chlorine gas.”

  “My God.”

  “I was well down the line, not in the thick of it, so I just had a whiff. Damned lucky. I saw men dead—a lot of men. More than a thousand in the first attack, they said, and it wasn’t a good way to go. You breathe it in and it burns your lungs out from the inside. I know a fellow who trod in a pool of the liquid stuff, wearing boots, and he’ll never walk without pain again. War is one thing, but gas is evil.” He stopped there, because his throat hurt. The memory was blistering his lungs.

  “I see your point,” Kim said. “I truly do. But—and I don’t say this lightly—is it not better that our government should have such a weapon if it exists? At least as a deterrent?”

  “But it isn’t a deterrent. When Jerry gassed us, we didn’t surrender. We gassed him right back, with the same evil stuff, and he didn’t stop once we took it up. It wasn’t a deterrent to either side that the other one had gas, any more than that they had guns. They both had it so they both used it. I don’t think the world needs new weapons.”

  “You’ve a fairly tidy one there, for a pacifist,” Kim said, nodding over at the trench knife.

  “Who says I’m a pacifist? I did my bit out there and I’d do it again, but I got my medals for hand to hand fighting. It’s when you take the personal out of it—the barrage from miles away, the machine guns—that it becomes slaughter. And gas is worse than that. Gas is mass murder, and I’m not handing anyone the means to that. You talked about destroying a blackmail letter—well, I’d burn the formula for some new gas like a shot. Like a bloody shot.”

  Kim was watching him again, dark eyes locked on his face, expression intent. Will made a conscious effort to loosen his muscles and relax his shoulders. “Anyway. That’s what I think.”

  “I hear you. Of course we don’t know that it’s a weapon.”

  “My work is only graves. What else could it be?”

  Kim nodded reluctantly. “Certainly the priority has to be getting hold of it before your friend with the tattoo does. Because all this puts a rather different complexion on that business.”

  “Yes. Hell’s teeth.”

  “Quite. If the tattoo man is, let us say, a German spy, or even a Russian one, a terrorist of one stamp or another—”

  “We need to find this damn thing and make it safe.”

  “Are you sure you don’t have any idea where it might be? Places your uncle put things? A safe deposit box?” Will shook his head. “I’m sure you’ve searched his desk.”

  “I emptied it after he died, and I had another look for concealed drawers or whatnot yesterday, but there’s nothing.”

  Kim sighed. “Then I dare say it will be somewhere in here, won’t it? In a pile of papers, or perhaps he put it between the pages of a book, for safe keeping. Oh Lord, that’s it, isn’t it? If you really wanted to hide a paper in here...”

  “Put it in a book, which might be on a shelf or in one of the piles upstairs, God help us,” Will said hollowly. “Easy to find for you, infallibly hidden from everyone else.”

  Kim ran a hand over his sleek hair. “This puts you in a rather awkward situation, you realise. I’d feel happie
r knowing you could get this hot potato out of your hands.”

  “There’s maybe forty thousand books in here. It would take an army to go through them all.”

  “Which is where the War Office would have an advantage,” Kim pointed out. “If you want to be rid of it, and I would, there’s your answer. If you’re set on doing this yourself—well, I admire your stamina.”

  “I don’t see I’ve a choice,” Will said. “I’m trapped in here with several tons of dusty books to go through anyway: I might as well have a purpose. It’ll add interest to the next six months of my life sorting all this out.”

  “I bet it will. Oh. I don’t suppose you’ve been in the habit of shaking out books as they’re bought, have you?”

  “You mean, someone might already have walked off with it?” Will asked with a sinking sensation.

  “It’s possible, whether by accident or on purpose.”

  “Oh God. No. I’ll start now, but if it’s already gone, it’s gone. I have to work on the basis it’s still here, don’t I?”

  “I think so. We must assume, or hope, your uncle didn’t put it in anything likely to fly off the shelves.”

  “On the bright side, I don’t sell many books at the best of times.”

  Kim snorted with amusement. “That is a bright side. Well, I can’t fault your attitude, so I shall try to imitate it. I have always wanted to go on a treasure hunt, after all. How much greater the achievement at the end if it takes six months’ hard labour to discover it! What jolly fun this will be!”

  Will grinned at that. Kim’s face lit with an answering smile. “All right, maybe not, but it’s a challenge.”

  “You like challenges?”

  Kim’s eyelids lowered a little. “Love them.”

  Will felt the prickle down his back that promised action. He wasn’t sure if it was the puzzle or Kim or the combination of the two; he didn’t care in the joy of his blood pumping again after years of civilian life, joblessness, poverty, and old books. He wanted to do something, and he had a pretty good idea what he could do right now.