The Moving Toyshop. Edmund Crispin

       1

       The Episode of the Prowling Poet

      Richard Cadogan raised his revolver, took careful aim and pulled the trigger. The explosion rent the small garden and, like the widening circles which surrounded a pebble dropped into the water, created alarms and disturbances of diminishing intensity throughout the suburb of St John’s Wood. From the sooty trees, their leaves brown and gold in the autumn sunlight, rose flights of startled birds. In the distance a dog began to howl. Richard Cadogan went up to the target and inspected it in a dispirited sort of way. It bore no mark of any kind.

      ‘I missed it,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘Extraordinary.’

      Mr Spode, of Spode, Nutling, and Orlick, publishers of high-class literature, jingled the money in his trousers pocket – presumably to gain attention. ‘Five per cent on the first thousand,’ he remarked. ‘Seven and a half on the second thousand. We shan’t sell more than that. No advance.’ He coughed uncertainly.

      Cadogan returned to his former position, inspecting the revolver with a slight frown. ‘One shouldn’t aim them, of course,’ he said. ‘One should fire them from the hip.’ He was lean, with sharp features, supercilious eyebrows, and hard dark eyes. This Calvinistic appearance belied him, for he was a matter of fact a friendly, unexacting, romantic person.

      ‘That will suit you, I suppose?’ Mr Spode continued. ‘It’s the usual thing.’ Again he gave his nervous little cough. Mr Spode hated talking about money.

      Bent double, Cadogan was reading from a book which lay on the dry, scrubby grass at his feet. ‘“In all pistol shooting,”’ he enunciated, ‘“the shooter looks at the object aimed at and not at the pistol.” No. I want an advance. Fifty pounds at least.’

      ‘Why have you developed this mania for pistols?’

      Cadogan straightened up with a faint sigh. He felt every month of his thirty-seven years. ‘Look,’ he said. ‘It will be better if we both talk about the same subject at the same time. This isn’t a Chekhov play. Besides, you’re being evasive. I asked for an advance on the book – fifty pounds.’

      ‘Nutling…Orlick…’ Mr Spode gestured uncomfortably.

      ‘Both Nutling and Orlick are quite legendary and fabulous.’ Richard Cadogan was firm. ‘They’re scapegoats you’ve invented to take the blame for your own meanness and philistinism. Here am I, by common consent one of the three most eminent of living poets, with three books written about me (all terrible, but never mind that), lengthily eulogized in all accounts of twentieth-century literature…’

      ‘Yes, yes.’ Mr Spode held up his hand, like one trying to stop a bus. ‘Of course, you’re very well known indeed. Yes.’ He coughed nervously. ‘But unhappily that doesn’t mean that many people buy your books. The public is quite uncultured, and the firm isn’t so rich that we can afford—’

      ‘I’m going on a holiday, and I need money.’ Cadogan waved away a mosquito which was circling round his head.

      ‘Yes, of course. But surely…some more dance lyrics?’

      ‘Let me inform you, my dear Erwin’ – here Cadogan tapped his publisher monitorily on the chest – ‘that I’ve been held up for two months over a dance lyric because I can’t think of a rhyme for “British”…’

      ‘“Skittish,”’ suggested Mr Spode feebly.

      Cadogan gazed at him contemptuously. ‘Besides which,’ he pursued. ‘I am sick and tired of earning my living from dance lyrics. I may have an aged publisher to support’ – he tapped Mr Spode again on the chest – ‘but there are limits.’

      Mr Spode wiped his face with a handkerchief. His profile was almost a pure semicircle – the brow high, and receding towards his bald head, the nose curving inward in a hook, and the chin nestling back, weak and pitiful, into his neck.

      ‘Perhaps,’ he ventured, ‘twenty-five pounds…?’

      ‘Twenty-five pounds! Twenty-five pounds!’ Cadogan waggled his revolver menacingly. ‘How can I have a holiday on twenty-five pounds? I’m getting stale, my good Erwin. I’m sick to death of St John’s Wood. I have no fresh ideas. I need a change of scene – new people, excitement adventures. Like the later Wordsworth. I’m living on my spiritual capital.’

      ‘The later Wordsworth.’ Mr Spode giggled, and then, suspecting he had committed an impropriety, fell abruptly silent.

      But Cadogan pursued his homiletic regardless. ‘I crave, in fact, for romance. That is why I’m learning to shoot with a revolver. That is also why I shall probably shoot you with it, if you don’t give me fifty pounds.’ Mr Spode stepped back alarmedly. ‘I’m becoming a vegetable. I’m growing old before my time. The gods themselves grew old, when Freia was snatched from tending the golden apples. You, my dear Erwin, should be financing a luxurious holiday for me, instead of quibbling in this paltry fashion over fifty pounds.’

      ‘Perhaps you’d like to stay with me for a few days at Caxton’s Folly?’

      ‘Can you give me adventure, excitement, lovely women?’

      ‘These picaresque fancies,’ said Mr Spode. ‘Of course, there’s my wife…’ He would not have been wholly unwilling to sacrifice his wife to the regeneration of an eminent poet, or, for the matter of that, to anyone for any reason. Elsie could be very trying at times. ‘Then,’ he proceeded hopefully, ‘there’s this American lecture tour…’

      ‘I’ve told you, Erwin, that that must not be mentioned again. I can’t lecture, in any case.’ Cadogan began to stride up and down the lawn. Mr Spode noticed sadly that a small bald patch was beginning to show in his close-cropped, dark hair. ‘I have no wish to lecture. I decline to lecture. It’s not America I want; it’s Poictesme or Logres. I repeat – I am getting old and stale. I act with calculation. I take heed for the morrow. This morning I caught myself paying a bill as soon as it came in. This must all be stopped. In another age I should have devoured

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