Silence Observed Read online

  Copyright & Information

  Silence Observed

  First published in 1961

  © Michael Innes Literary Management Ltd.; House of Stratus 1961-2011

  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 2011 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: 0755121147 EAN: 9780755121144

  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.

  Note for Readers

  Reader preferences vary, as do eReaders.

  This eBook is designed to be read by any eReading device or software that is capable of reading ePub files. Readers may decide to adjust the text within the capability of their eReader. However, style, paragraph indentation, line spacing etc. is optimised to produce a near equivalent reflowable version of the printed edition of the title when read with Adobe® Digital Editions. Other eReaders may vary from this standard and be subject to the nuances of design and implementation. Further, not all simulators on computers and tablets behave exactly as their equivalent eReader. Wherever possible it is recommended the following eReader settings, or their equivalent (if available), be used:

  Clear Local Data – off; Local Styling – off; Text Alignment – Publisher Default.

  www.houseofstratus.com

  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.

  1

  “I’ve got something uncommonly interesting here,” Charles Gribble said.

  Gribble, with a small bundle of papers in his hand, was standing directly in front of the fireplace. Just above his head, therefore, hung a notice which read:

  SILENCE IS OBSERVED.

  The committee was rather fond of notices. Some members said that the club was plastered with them in a thoroughly irritating way. They were couched in various grammatical forms, with perhaps a preponderant inclination towards passive or impersonal constructions. It is earnestly desired by the committee…was a favourite opening. The only taboo seemed to be on positive commands and injunctions. Hence the simple statement: Silence is observed.

  “Something really uncommonly interesting,” Gribble said in a rather louder voice.

  There were only two other men in the room. One was Sir John Appleby. The other, unidentifiable behind a newspaper, was clearly a man of resource. For, as Gribble spoke for the second time, the newspaper sank gently down upon its owner’s face and stomach, and from beneath it came the first of a regular succession of gentle snores.

  “That so?” Appleby said half-heartedly, and put down his coffee cup. It was time he was getting back to his desk at Scotland Yard.

  “And quite up your street, in a way,” Gribble continued. “Just listen to this.”

  Appleby’s heart sank. It was extraordinary what many people judged to be quite up the street of an elderly man absorbed in the administration of the Metropolitan Police. But he couldn’t positively refuse to listen to Gribble, who wasn’t a bad sort. He was a contemporary of Appleby’s, and understood to hold some position of modest hereditary power in the City. Whether because of this or otherwise, he clearly owned considerable wealth – quite enough to indulge in the various literary and dilettante pursuits which were what drew him to this particular club. He came in almost every day and talked Christie’s or Sotheby’s with cronies. With Appleby he had a common interest in mediaeval English pottery, which had been a reasonable poor man’s field thirty years ago. It wasn’t that now. But Appleby still picked up a piece from time to time – and occasionally after consultation with Charles Gribble. It obviously wasn’t pottery that Gribble had in his head now. But it was only civil to listen to him, all the same.

  And Gribble glanced, not at the sheaf of papers he was holding, but at the ceiling of the little reading-room. It was rather as if he was about to make a speech.

  “Many swarms of wild bees,” Gribble said, “descended on our fields.”

  For a moment Appleby didn’t make much of this. Then he understood.

  “Is this to be a poem?” he asked.

  Gribble nodded a shade impatiently.

  “Of course it’s a poem,” he said. “It scans, doesn’t it? I’ll begin again.

  Many swarms of wild bees descended on our fields:

  Stately stood the wheatstalk with head bent high:

  Big of heart we labour’d at storing mighty yields,

  Wool and corn, and clusters to make men cry!”

  Gribble took his glance from the ceiling and looked at Appleby. “What do you remember about that?” he asked.

  Appleby shook his head – with the odd result that something floated into it.

  “God!” Appleby said.

  Gribble beamed.

  “That’s it, my dear fellow. You’re right on the spot. Just go ahead.”

  And, with another second for thought, Appleby went ahead:

  God! of whom music

  And song and blood are pure,

  The day is never darken’d

  That had thee here obscure.”

  He glanced at Gribble. “That right? Meredith, isn’t it?”

  “Precisely, Appleby, precisely! George Meredith’s ‘Phoebus with Admetus’. Every stanza ends with
the four short lines that you’ve quoted. Rather a lovely effect, to my mind. There’s great charm in a really cunningly contrived refrain.”

  “No doubt,” Appleby said. “But I don’t quite see–”

  “And now listen!” This time, Gribble applied himself, not to the ceiling, but to his papers:

  Purple glowed the clusters ripened on our vines,

  Golden was our honey in the cool dark combs,

  Golden gleamed the metal wrested from our mines,

  Purple were the hangings in our high proud homes.”

  Gribble paused from his reading and looked up. He was evidently in a mood of modest triumph.

  “Do you remember that?” he asked.

  “I can’t say that I do.” Appleby frowned. “And I have a very fair memory for verse, as it happens – although declaiming it isn’t much in my line. And I’m blessed if I recall that bit about our vines and mines and combs and homes. Or all that about purple and gold. Not quite up to the rest of the poem, is it?”

  “Um,” Gribble said. He didn’t look too pleased.

  “‘High proud homes’, was it?” Appleby went on. He felt like mildly teasing Gribble. “Of course Meredith could be terribly vulgar. But homes like that sound to me a bit too much like Gracious Living and all that – even for Meredith.”

  Gribble chuckled. Or rather, it wasn’t quite a chuckle, which is essentially a plebeian sort of thing. The sound emitted by Charles Gribble was conditioned by the existence of three or four generations of Gribbles flourishing on banking or whatever. And it seemed to hold a suggestion of – so to speak – wheels quite enchantingly within wheels. There was, it appeared, some quite enormous joke that Appleby wasn’t yet within a mile of.

  “Well, yes,” Gribble said. “Meredith could strike uncertain notes. And perhaps ‘high proud homes’ would be one – eh?” Gribble momentarily put down his papers in order to rub his hands together. “Meredith never quite got clear of his grandfather’s tailor’s shop. But he tried. He tried damned hard. Perhaps that’s what he’s doing here. Would that be it, Appleby? I mean to say, that’s how your mind would work, isn’t it, if I told you that Meredith had scrapped this ‘proud homes’ stanza? Struck it out, you know, before the poem was published. That would be why you don’t remember these particular lines. Eh – my dear Appleby? Lines existing” – Gribble was clutching his papers again, and now he flourished them – “only in manuscript.”

  “Now I understand you.” Appleby had no difficulty in showing decent interest. “You’ve secured a batch of Meredith’s manuscripts?”

  Gribble again produced his gilt-edged chuckle.

  “That’s the inference,” he said. “That’s the inference, certainly. Holograph, you know. Are you acquainted with Meredith’s fist? Highly idiosyncratic. Spot it anywhere.”

  “Most satisfactory,” Appleby said – having glanced at the sheet thrust at him. And he could understand Gribble’s sense of triumph. His bundle of papers was a substantial one. He must have come by this unpublished material of Meredith’s in quite a big way, and he was losing no time in crowing over it.

  Probably, too, Gribble had paid a great deal for the stuff. The market for such things was now entirely mad. And soon Gribble would no doubt publish his find, with appropriate critical remarks, on the back page of The Times Literary Supplement. Which was very harmless – very harmless, indeed. Appleby wondered why it was supposed to be up his street.

  “Most satisfactory,” he repeated cordially. “You’ve really got hold of quite a lot of unpublished material by Meredith?”

  “My dear chap, it’s not by Meredith!” Gribble produced a laugh which, although exuberant, still seemed to ring decorously of the most respectable propertied classes. “It’s much better fun than if it were by Meredith. And – oddly enough – I imagine it’s worth much more, too.”

  And Gribble flourished his papers more unrestrainedly than before.

  “Forgery, my dear boy,” he said. “Forgery – every sheet of it!”

  “Well – that does sound a little up my street, I agree.” Appleby felt that, as a policeman, he could say no less than this. “But do I understand that you’re proposing to invoke the aid of the law? People commonly do, when they’ve been swindled. And yet you don’t look as if you were feeling particularly indignant about it all.”

  “Swindled!” Now Gribble was indignant. “Me swindled? I assure you, Appleby, such a thing has never happened to me in my life. These papers are forgery, and as forgery I’ve acquired them. And I assure you that the job is absolutely first-class of its kind.”

  “It all purports to be rejected passages and early drafts and so on?”

  Gribble nodded.

  “Most of it does. And there’s a very clever idea at the bottom of it, you’ll agree. Take the bits of ‘Phoebus with Admetus’ we’ve been considering. ‘Many swarms of wild bees’ – you remember? That’s the authentic Meredith, and first-class. Then ‘Purple glowed the clusters’ and so on. That’s the forgery I’ve got here.” And Gribble tapped his papers. “You – having, if I may say so, a developed taste in poetry, my dear Appleby – felt it at once to be rather inferior. But that, of course, is just what we’d expect, even supposing the stanza really to be Meredith’s. He thought it inferior – and therefore he rejected it. The supposed situation allows the forger a little margin, so to speak. He need never be quite as good as the poet himself.”

  “Clever,” Appleby said. “Yes, I agree it’s clever. But a forger who is also an artist–”

  Gribble beamed.

  “Exactly! He will really want to equal his original now and then. And this stuff” – again Gribble tapped the papers – “does include a couple of efforts that aren’t meant to be thought of as belonging to the rejected order. There’s a complete companion poem to ‘Love in the Valley’ – which is possibly Meredith’s most famous thing – and an entire additional section to ‘The Woods of Westermain’ which would absolutely defy detection. But then, we’re dealing with Manallace, you know. This Meredith stuff is by Manallace himself. Perhaps you didn’t know that I’m forming a collection of work by the really great forgers? Manallace comes right at the top.”

  “So I understand.” Appleby thought he sounded suitably impressed. Manallace – the younger Manallace – had been a very famous literary forger indeed.

  “There isn’t the slightest question about it.” Gribble spoke as weightily as if he were laying down vital policy to a board of directors. “Mind you, the elder Manallace’s Chaucer forgery was pretty good. But it was young Geoffrey Manallace who had range. Quite first-class on typography, and quite first-class on manuscript material as well. And yet, although he had range, he didn’t over-produce. That’s the final charm of Geoffrey Manallace.”

  “I see,” Appleby said. “Scarcity value.”

  “Yes, indeed. And a good deal that he did produce, he didn’t market. Of course he had no economic motive to do so – or none worth speaking of. He was a wealthy man, and what prompted him to his forgeries was vanity and a perverted sense of fun. But apparently he developed compunctions. I haven’t got the whole story. But it seems there was a woman in it.”

  “Ah,” Appleby said. This seemed the appropriate comment here.

  “Yes, it seems there was a woman who pulled him up – so far as making money out of his queer talent was concerned.”

  “Edifying,” Appleby said. “Geoffrey Manallace was reclaimed by the love of a pure woman. But, of course, that may be a forgery too. He may well have left hints for a bogus life story, as well as plenty of bogus Meredith.”

  “That’s no doubt true. But, whatever the actual truth of the matter, it’s certain that Manallace kept a considerable amount of really superb forgery tucked away in a drawer. And this Meredith effort I’ve been lucky enough to come by is the absolute gem of the whole thing. There are
several other keen collectors of forgeries, you know, including a couple of Americans to whom money means nothing at all. But with these” – and this time Gribble positively stroked his papers – “I think I may say I’m a good step ahead.”

  “I congratulate you,” Appleby said. “And the stuff really has the curious interest of being technically impeccable and undetectable? There are so many scientific tests nowadays.”

  “Very true, my dear fellow. Photography under all those deuced cunning rays, and that sort of thing. But Geoffrey Manallace was years ahead of his time. He thought of everything. For instance, I’ve been at the ink. This forged ‘Phoebus with Admetus’ stanza turns out to be written in ink that went out of production in 1907. One wonders how he came by that. It’s an example of the perfect detail. Meredith, you’ll remember, died in 1909.”

  “If he was a good enough chemist,” Appleby said, “Manallace could probably analyse old ink on a page, and then make up an ink which was chemically indistinguishable from it.”

  “Quite so. To be a really good forger or faker nowadays a fellow has to be both an artist and a scientist. A perfect Leonardo, in fact. That’s no doubt part of the fascination of it. Take the manufacture of paper. Materials and processes are always changing, and an eye has to be kept on that. And there’s some nice old paper here. I’ve been having a look at it.”

  As he said this, Gribble moved away from the empty fireplace before which he had been absent-mindedly thinking to warm himself and walked over to a window. There he held up the first sheet between himself and the view of Pall Mall.

  “Yes,” he said. “Yes, indeed.” And he held up the second sheet. There was a silence – rather a long silence, broken only by the resolute snores of the man beneath the newspaper.