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  STOP PRESS

  First published in 1939

  © Michael Innes Literary Management Ltd.; House of Stratus 1939-2010

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

  The right of Michael Innes to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted.

  This edition published in 2010 by House of Stratus, an imprint of

  Stratus Books Ltd., Lisandra House, Fore Street, Looe,

  Cornwall, PL13 1AD, UK.

  Typeset by House of Stratus.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library and the Library of Congress.

  ISBN: 0755121155 EAN: 9780755121151

  This is a fictional work and all characters are drawn from the author’s imagination.

  Any resemblance or similarities to persons either living or dead are entirely coincidental.

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  About the Author

  Michael Innes is the pseudonym of John Innes Mackintosh Stewart, who was born in Edinburgh in 1906. His father was Director of Education and as was fitting the young Stewart attended Edinburgh Academy before going up to Oriel, Oxford where he obtained a first class degree in English.

  After a short interlude travelling with AJP Taylor in Austria, he embarked on an edition of Florio’s translation of Montaigne’s Essays and also took up a post teaching English at Leeds University.

  By 1935 he was married, Professor of English at the University of Adelaide in Australia, and had completed his first detective novel, Death at the President’s Lodging. This was an immediate success and part of a long running series centred on his character Inspector Appleby. A second novel, Hamlet Revenge, soon followed and overall he managed over fifty under the Innes banner during his career.

  After returning to the UK in 1946 he took up a post with Queen’s University, Belfast before finally settling as Tutor in English at Christ Church, Oxford. His writing continued and he published a series of novels under his own name, along with short stories and some major academic contributions, including a major section on modern writers for the Oxford History of English Literature.

  Whilst not wanting to leave his beloved Oxford permanently, he managed to fit in to his busy schedule a visiting Professorship at the University of Washington and was also honoured by other Universities in the UK.

  His wife Margaret, whom he had met and married whilst at Leeds in 1932, had practised medicine in Australia and later in Oxford, died in 1979. They had five children, one of whom (Angus) is also a writer. Stewart himself died in November 1994 in a nursing home in Surrey.

  Prologue

  The Spider began his career as a common criminal. Or perhaps as almost a common criminal, for it is arguable that from the first the scale of his operations lifted him slightly out of the rut. He did little practical work himself and into the normal haunts of his kind – pot-houses, thieves’ kitchens, shady pawnshops – he was never recorded to have strayed. He lived, much as a morally blameless rentier might live, in a largish house in the country, with an establishment running to a butler, two footmen, and a secretary. The secretary it is true was blind, which is unusual and slightly sinister in secretaries: the tap-tap of his stick as he went about his employer’s confidential commissions was one of the most effective strokes in the décor of the Spider. But the servants were wholly normal and wholly unsuspicious of their master’s real profession. Sitting in a library of old books the Spider controlled from afar a nefarious organization of surprising complexity. This, presumably, is why he was called the Spider. He was fond of quoting from the poet Pope of whose tangled bibliography he had a connoisseur’s knowledge – and to unruly lieutenants he would point out in a coldly terrifying way that his touch, infinitely fine, felt at each thread and lived along the line. He kept a private wireless transmitter concealed in a cocktail cabinet.

  About halfway through his career the Spider underwent a change of character. Hitherto businesslike and almost conscientiously diabolical, he now became intermittently chivalrous. More than once he was known to free a beautiful girl from the embraces of a brutalized accomplice and deliver her unscathed to an opponent – an opponent who, although boneheaded, was bronzed, gentlemanlike, and himself much too chivalrous to enlist against the Spider’s organization the prosaic assistance of the police. About the same time the Spider developed a philosophy of property. He would compare himself now to Robin Hood and now to the oil and steel kings of the United States. He took from the rich and gave to such people and causes as a really wise and nice man would give to. This went on for some years.

  Then came a further change. It seems to have been the result of a confused period of gang-warfare in the course of which the Spider acquired a machine-gun and an armoured car. They proved unsuccessful investments – England was too small for them – and for a time the Spider appeared to be getting nowhere. This check precipitated the crisis. There is no record of it, but the struggle was doubtless severe. The Spider emerged with moral perceptions which were wholly orthodox. His passion for the perpetration of crime became a passion for its detection. His old way of life ceased to exist except in so far as it gave him useful insight into the minds of his new quarry. The rich now came to him fearlessly and he solved their strangest perplexities with unfailing success. Those who had not known him for long wondered why he was called the Spider at all, and one or two who had read Swift thought he might better have been called the Bee. He was no wholly on the side of sweetness and light.

  He began to keep bees. He improved himself in the art of music and became a finished executant on the clarinet. And in other ways his domestic life was modified. His house, though still in the country, was smaller. The books were even more in evidence and to Pope had been added Shakespeare, Wordsworth, St John of the Cross, Hegel, Emerson, and Donne. The Spider had grown remarkably literary: sometimes more literary than anything else. The wireless transmitter had disappeared. In its place the Spider had found a bosom friend, a retired engineer who accompanied him everywhere and wrote down everything he said, always without any inconvenient penetration into why he was saying it. But the engineer, though not clever, was literary too. He had the Spider were never so hot on a trail that they would not stop to bandy a little poetry by the way. The poetry was delightful in itself. And its served to distinguish the Spider in what was becoming a seriously overcrowded profession.

  Mr Richard Eliot, the creator of the Spider, had not meant to do it. Or not as much of it as he eventually found himself doing. The first Spider story, he would say in that allusive literary way which was growing on him, had come into
the world with the same apology as the baby in Mr Midshipman Easy: it was only a very little one. And, curiously enough, it had been the product of unnecessary fastidiousness.

  Some twenty years before this chronicle opens Mr Eliot had inherited a largish house in the country and here he lived as any morally blameless rentier might live. He superintended unremunerative agricultural operations in an amateurish but competent way. Occasionally he ran up to town for the opera, the exhibitions of the Royal Academy, interviews with his stockbroker, and the Eton and Harrow match. It was the Eton and Harrow match of 1919 that was critical in his history.

  This match took place three days after the birth of Mr Eliot’s second child. For the first time Mr Eliot entered his club in St James’s as the father of a son. And he there found a number of his contemporaries who were already the fathers of Etonians and Harrovians – for Mr Eliot had married somewhat late in life. It at once became clear to Mr Eliot that Timothy must go to Eton. The decision was, it has been hinted, unnecessarily fastidious, for the education of a gentleman may be received at a number of less expensive schools. But every Englishman will understand Mr Eliot’s processes of mind.

  Mr Eliot, then, put the infant Timothy down for Eton and went home to count the cost. It promised to be considerable: moreover there was the possibility of further sons being born to him, and it would hardly be fair to send Timothy to Eton and his younger brothers to lesser schools. And this was the point at which Mr Eliot remembered that he was by way of being a literary man. Years before, and during his short service in the Indian army, he had printed a couple of sketches in a regimental magazine. His friends had liked them and he had been encouraged to send a short story, full of careful local colour and the correct reactions to physical danger, to a London editor. The story was published; others succeeded it; and in those severely unillustrated magazines that lie about in clubs for the recreation of the elderly, Mr Eliot’s name was for a time frequently to be remarked. But when he retired to the English countryside he dropped this habit of authorship. He was no longer in contact with the tigers and fakirs he had been in the way of writing of, and he found that he remembered surprisingly little about them. Moreover he was becoming rather too bookish greatly to enjoy writing; he had a fondness for Shakespeare, Wordsworth, and others of whom there is singularly little to be said. On his favourite poet Pope he became quite an authority; and he sometimes dared to wonder if there might not be room for a monograph, of an unassumingly scholarly sort, to be called ‘Pope’s Use of the Terms Nature, Reason, and Common Sense: a Study in Denotation and Connotation.’ Rough notes for this opusculum, together with a neatly typed title-page, lay about on Mr Eliot’s desk for years.

  That Mr Eliot, thus circumstanced and thus inclined, should have invented the Spider in order to provide schooling for his son is something on which he himself probably came to look back with a good deal of perplexity. Partly it was due to that realistic turn of mind which made him a tolerably competent gentleman farmer. A sum of money was required; literature might provide it; so Mr Eliot sat down and read Anthony Trollope’s Autobiography, that textbook of the economics of authorship. He then reflected on the numbers of people who read old-established magazines in quiet clubs and compared them with the numbers of people who have to read what is readily readable in noisy tubes and buses. From these reflections emerged the Spider.

  But there was more to it than this. Had the Spider been merely an economic expedient Mr Eliot, who was not venal, would never have called him forth from the night of his forebeing. The truth is that to his realism Mr Eliot united a restless fancy, and to his mature if rather ineffective literary culture a juvenile taste for vicarious romantic adventure. In devising the highly improbable adventures of the Spider he was weaving his own magic carpet. At the outset nobody enjoyed these adventures more keenly than their inventor. His imagination was of the refrigerating sort from which the fantasies of boyhood can step with convincing freshness; and it was this quality, no doubt, that made the stories the instant and almost embarrassing success that they were. Nor at first was Mr Eliot’s bookishness a handicap. Rather it helped him to a useful critical control of the magic carpet, so that his contraptions of the sort flow straighter and cleaner than most. And it gave him from the start a good deal of craft.He had pondered Gulliver’s Travels and knew that the best way to pass off an improbability is to set another improbability hard up against it. He knew that literature is naturally divided into ‘kinds’, which the writer mixes at his peril. The early Spiders kept carefully within their own ‘kind’.

  And they were a success. A fatal moment came when Mr Eliot ought to have stopped – and didn’t. After that there was no stopping. An adjoining estate came into the market and he bought it. It ate money. So did various indigent relations, including a couple of disreputable cousins whom the good news brought hurrying home from the colonies. And soon on the continued activities of the Spider a score of remoter livelihoods came to hang. There was the old lady who dramatized and the young man who did the films; there was the American agent who had contrived to marry Mr Eliot’s niece; there was the little staff at Mr Eliot’s publishers which ran the absurd and irritatingly successful Spider Club; there was an amusing Jew who called himself Helmuth somebody and did translations into German, and there was the same Jew calling himself André something else and doing translations into French. For a time there were even three young women in Chelsea who proposed to paint the Spider, together with Sherlock Holmes and kindred notabilities, on crockery designed for the modern home – but at this Mr Eliot rebelled, and by buying back these particular ‘rights’ for an exorbitant sum nipped the nascent industry in the bud.

  For years, then, the Spider contributed to the gaiety of nations. But Mr Eliot, who had been brought up to believe that life should be earnest as well as gay and sober as well as fantastic, became more and more uneasy at the increasing demands which the Spider made upon his energies. For months on end he was obliged to submerge himself wholly amid such absurdities and improbabilities as are agreeable to a well-balanced man only on an occasional lazy evening by the fire. It was rather like living out one’s span of days in a cinema or through an unintermitted succession of dramas. And whenever he proposed to emerge or wake up he knew that the old lady who dramatized and all the other servants whom the Spider had gathered about himself trembled for their bread – or at least for their cake. Mr Eliot, who was kind-hearted, liked to think that there was cake all round; in a way it made up for his disappointment over Timothy. For Timothy had not gone to Eton after all. A precocious interest in educational theory, coupled with an equally precocious strength of will, had taken him to a modest co-educational school such as his father might very well have afforded without once setting pen to paper. So Mr Eliot had to comfort himself with the thought that his activities brought unexpected prosperity to a number of indifferently deserving people. But he came, it was believed, to feel positively uncomfortable about his creation.

  The decidedly protean character of the Spider was no doubt due to this uncomfortableness. There would come a point at which Mr Eliot could no longer contemplate the Spider as he was – whereupon there had to be a change. These changes, each of which had thrown Mr Eliot’s publishers into a sub-acute agony, were by a strange fatality always overwhelmingly successful. Kindly reviewers spoke of the progressively revealed complexity, the subtle maturing of the Spider’s character, and when he finally came over wholeheartedly to the side of law and order his conversion was the subject of approving comment from more than one distinguished pulpit. Mr Eliot himself, as the Spider pursued malefactors dramatically about the globe, had for a time the illusory sense of being the henchman of a sort of cosmic police.

  Novelists have often recorded the almost uncanny way in which their everyday life has come to be influenced by their own creations. The beings of a writer’s imagination are said to throng and press about him and even to impose for a time their own fictitious personalities upon the real person
ality of their creator. And it may be supposed that when a writer makes of a single character a companion for life and experiences in his company a series of adventures terminable only by death he may come to he haunted by this single dominating creation in an extraordinary way. Perhaps this happened to Mr Eliot. It is certain that in the Spider’s final phase the Spider and Mr Eliot became a little mixed up. There was a disconcerting novel in which a good deal turned upon the Spider’s habit – hitherto unknown to his admirers – of writing stories about tigers and fakirs. And there was an increasing element not only of literary allusiveness in the badinage between the Spider and his friend the engineer but of realistic and unromantic matter on the problems of English land-owners and the condition of English rural society. Against these hazardous trends more than one interested party held complicated and costly insurance policies.

  More and more, in fact, Mr Eliot and his interests seemed to be creeping into the world of the Spider. Was the Spider, the curious speculated, creeping correspondingly into the world of Mr Eliot? Mr Eliot’s own opinions were unknown. Probably he was undisturbed; it is noteworthy that none of his acquaintances had thought of him as a nervously unbalanced man. Nevertheless his acquaintances, observing that he no longer came up for the Royal Academy or even the Eton and Harrow match, suspected that all was not well with him; a few believed that he had conceived for the wearisome Spider something not unlike a mild obsessive hatred.

  This was the situation when the thing happened.

  PART ONE

  Rust Hall

  1