in a colourless voice, ‘it’s a long time since we were undergraduates together.’
‘Good God,’ said Fen, shocked. ‘You’re Richard Cadogan.’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, of course you’re very welcome, but you’ve arrived at rather an awkward time…’
‘You’re as unmannerly as ever.’
Fen perched on the edge of the desk, his face eloquent of pained surprise. ‘What an extraordinary thing to say. Have I ever said an unkind word—’
‘It was you who wrote about the first poems I ever published: “This is a book everyone can afford to be without.”’
‘Ha!’ said Fen, pleased. ‘Very pithy I was in those days. Well, how are you, my dear fellow?’
‘Terrible. Of course you weren’t a professor when I saw you last. The University had more sense.’
‘I became a professor,’ Fen answered firmly, ‘because of my tremendous scholarly abilities and my acute and powerful mind.’
‘You wrote to me at the time that it was only a matter of pulling a few moth-eaten strings.’
‘Oh, did I?’ said Fen uneasily. ‘Well, never mind all that now. Have you had breakfast?’
‘Yes, I had it in hall.’
‘Well, have a cigarette, then.’
‘Thanks…Gervase, I’ve lost a toyshop.’
Gervase Fen stared. As he offered his lighter, his face assumed an expression of the greatest caution. ‘Would you mind explaining that curious utterance?’ he asked.
Cadogan explained. He explained at great length. He explained with a sense of righteous indignation and frustration of spirit.
‘We combed the neighbourhood,’ he said bitterly. ‘And do you know, there isn’t a toyshop anywhere there. We asked people who had lived there all their lives and they’d never heard of such a thing. And yet I’m certain I got the place right. A grocer, I ask you! We went inside, and it certainly was a grocer, and the door didn’t squeak either; but then there is such a thing as oil.’ He referred to this mineral without much confidence. ‘And on the other hand, there was that door at the back exactly as I’d seen it. Still, I found out that all the shops in that row are built on exactly the same plan.
‘But it was the police that were so awful,’ he moaned in conclusion. ‘It wasn’t that they were nasty or anything like that. They were just horribly kind, the way you are to people who haven’t long to live. When they thought I wasn’t listening they talked about concussion. The trouble was, you see, that everything looked so different in daylight, and I suppose I hesitated and expressed doubts and made mistakes and contradicted myself. Anyway, they drove me back to St Aldate’s and advised me to see a doctor, so I left them and came and had breakfast here. And here I am.’
‘I suppose,’ said Fen dubiously, ‘that you didn’t go upstairs at this grocery place?’
‘Oh, yes, I forgot to mention that. We did. There was no body, of course, and it was all quite different. That is, the stairs and passage were carpeted, and it was all clean and airy, and the furniture was covered with dust sheets, and the sitting-room was quite different from the room I’d been in. I think it was at that point that the police really became convinced I was crazy.’ Cadogan brooded over a sense of insufferable wrong.
‘Well,’ said Fen carefully, ‘assuming that this tale isn’t the product of a deranged mind—’
‘I am perfectly sane.’
‘Don’t bawl at me, my dear fellow.’ Fen was pained.
‘Of course, I don’t blame the police for thinking I was mad,’ said Cadogan in tones of the most vicious reprehension.
‘And assuming,’ Fen proceeded with aggravating calm, ‘that toyshops in the Iffley Road do not just take wing into the ether, leaving no gap behind: what could inspire anyone to substitute a grocery shop for a toyshop at dead of night?’
Cadogan snorted. ‘Perfectly obvious. They knew I’d seen the body, and they wanted people to think I was mad when I told them about it – which they’ve succeeded in doing. The crack on the head could be produced as the reason for my delusions. And the window of the closet was left open deliberately, so that I could get out.’
Fen gazed at him kindly. ‘Very nice, as far as it goes,’ he said. ‘But it doesn’t explain the fundamental mystery of the business – why the grocery shop was turned into a toyshop in the first place.’
Cadogan had not thought of this.
‘You see,’ Fen continued, ‘they couldn’t have known you were going to blunder in. You’re the fly in the ointment. The groceries were removed, and the toys substituted, for some entirely different purpose. Then they had to be switched back again, in any case.’
Something like relief was coming back to Cadogan’s mind. For a while he almost wondered if he were, in fact, suffering from delusions. Belying all outward appearance, there was something extremely reliable about Fen. Cadogan assembled his sharp-cut, supercilious features into a frown.
‘But why?’ he asked.
‘I can think of several good reasons,’ said Fen gloomily. ‘But they’re probably all wrong.’
Cadogan stubbed out his cigarette and groped for a fresh one. As he did so his fingers came in contact with the scrap of paper he had picked up near the body. He was astonished to realize that he had forgotten all about it until this moment.
‘Here!’ he cried excitedly, pulling it out of his pocket. ‘Look! Tangible proof. I picked this up by the body. I didn’t remember I had it. I’d better go back to the police.’ He half rose, in some agitation, from his chair.
‘My dear fellow, calm yourself,’ said Fen, taking the scrap of paper from him. ‘Anyway, what is this thing tangible proof of?’ He read out the pencilled figures. ‘07691. A telephone number, apparently.’
‘Probably the number of the woman who was killed.’
‘Dear good Richard, what an extraordinary lack of perceptivity…One doesn’t carry one’s own telephone number about with one.’
‘She may have written it down for someone. Or it may not have been hers.’
‘No.’ Fen ruminated over the scrap of paper. ‘Since you seem to be forgetting rather a lot of things, I suppose you didn’t come across her handbag and look inside it?’
‘I’m certain it wasn’t there. Obviously, it’s the first thing I should have done.’
‘One never knows with poets.’ Fen sighed deeply and returned to the desk. ‘Well, there’s only one thing to be done with this number, and that is to ring it.’ He took off the receiver, dialled 07691, and waited. After a while there was an answer.
‘Hello.’ A rather tremulous woman’s voice.
‘Hello,
