Saturday Evening

A thin light filtered through the partly-glassed roof of Bland’s dungeon and illuminated his neat hair, as he took from a cupboard two tumblers, a chipped mug, and a decorated wineglass. He added to them a toothbrush glass, produced two bottles of beer and, gravely and carefully, poured the beer into the five receptacles, which were raised and lowered by his guests. Basingstoke’s young friend rubbed his nose reflectively and said, in a voice not entirely free from smugness, “You’re sure you want me to talk about it?”

Anthony rushed in before any of the others could reply: “Absolutely, old man. Basingstoke says you just sat here in this –” he was about to say “hole”, but altered it quickly to “room” – “and solved it all on the spot. I think it’s wonderful.”

“I still don’t know what it was all about,” said Ruth Cleverly.

Bland drained his toothbrush glass and set it down on the table. “And yet it was all obvious, and you would have seen what it was about if you’d not been thinking about a great international gang of forgers. You had all the clues in your hands, but you put a wrong interpretation on them. The evidence in the poems alone was enough to tell you the meaning of the case, and there were two clues which led straight to the murderer.”

Basingstoke turned his scarred face. “Evidence in the poems? I’ve read them a dozen times, and I didn’t see anything at all that could possibly have a bearing on the case.”

“That’s because you weren’t looking for the right thing. And yet on Thursday evening you were nearer than I to grasping the truth. I said that the crimes must have something to do with the Rawlings family, and you suggested that the Australian cousin who left Martin his money might have had an illegitimate son who regarded the money as rightly his. I scoffed at the suggestion, but it wasn’t far from the truth, except that we had our characters a little mixed. It was Martin Rawlings who had an illegitimate son.”

Vicky said with a gasp, “Not – Uncle Jack?”

“Certainly Uncle Jack.”

“But – he was the murderer, wasn’t he?” Bland nodded. “But I don’t understand. Why should he have wanted to harm anyone – he had the inheritance.”

“I see you still don’t understand. The object of the murders wasn’t to gain an inheritance, but to keep what wasn’t ever rightly his. Let me tell you things as they happened, or more or less as they happened.

“Martin Rawlings was a wild young man and, as we can see from Blackburn’s essay on him, very little indeed is known about his life in Italy. Blackburn says there that he disappeared for long periods at a time – and after one of these disappearances he turned up with a wife and a son. The very form of that phrasing should make one sit up and take notice. In fact, Caesar Rawlings was born in April 1861, and Martin Rawlings was married in June of that year. In other words, Caesar was born illegitimate.”

“How do you know all that?” Ruth Cleverly asked.

Bland’s smile was guileless. “I didn’t. I deduced it. But Inspector Wrax, with whom I had an uncomfortable but not unprofitable interview, made certain of it by checking on the details with the Italian police. He suspected Rawlings, but wanted to wait until he had positive proof before he took action. He waited too long.

“After their marriage Martin and Maria had another child – your father, Miss Rawlings. And it was after that – probably in 1865 or 1866 – that Martin Rawlings wrote Passion and Repentance, which was first published in 1868. Common sense should, indeed, tell anybody, that such poems must have been written after his conversion to Catholicism and not before – their whole tone is that of a convert, although a rather unorthodox one. In 1876 Martin Rawlings died, and, thanks to the fact that he had not made a will, his elder son Caesar inherited the whole estate. The brothers quarrelled bitterly, and as Miss Rawlings told John her father refused to accept any financial assistance from his elder brother, although it was offered.”

Vicky nodded. Her mouth was slightly open. Bland raised an admonitory forefinger.

“Caesar Rawlings wasn’t a habitual criminal – or perhaps he would have been a better one. There is no reason to suppose that he knew himself to be an illegitimate son, and the wrongful inheritor of the estate, in his youth. It is more likely that he discovered it when, as a young man, he went on a tour of Italy and visited those places where his father had lived. When he did so, no doubt he visited the little village where his father and mother were married, examined the register – and saw with shocked surprise that he had been born a bastard. At some time, at any rate, he discovered it, and must have pondered what, if anything, he should do about it. It’s possible that if he had been on good terms with his brother, he would have suggested to him a division of the estate. In view of the enmity between them, however, the question didn’t arise. As soon as Caesar Rawlings made known the circumstances, he placed himself at his brother’s mercy, for he was holding an estate to which he had no shadow of a legal claim. I’m right in thinking, Miss Rawlings, am I not, that such an appeal to your father to divide the estate wouldn’t have been looked on favourably by him. Eh, Miss Rawlings?”

Vicky came to with a start. “Dad was always very bitter – against Uncle Jack, and against grandfather Martin because he hadn’t made provision for him.”

“Caesar Rawlings, anyway, did what many men would have done, and decided to hold on to his inheritance. And then one day it must suddenly have occurred to him, as it occurred to me, that the story of his illegitimacy was set down plainly enough in his father’s poems.

“Most of the critics were baffled by the exact meaning of Passion and Repentance, and in fact didn’t trouble themselves to examine its literal meaning closely. They restricted themselves to vague generalities about ‘unseemly frankness’ and poems that ‘had their origin in the author’s married life’. But it’s perfectly plain that the poems describe in metaphorical language the poet’s sinful production of a child, and his repentance of that act.” There were gestures of protest from Basingstoke and Ruth. “Perhaps I should say that this meaning is plain once you are looking for it. It is made very clear in one of the sonnets, which begins ‘Out of the sighs and anguish beauty comes’ and talks of ‘What’s begot in stealth and sin and shame’ and of the ‘small errant son’ who was ‘the germ of darkness and ecstatic joy’. Once the meaning of this sonnet has been realised it illuminates all the others, and one wonders how it was possible to miss a theme which is so obvious – Adam feeling for Eve ‘the dark desire that leads to loss and sighing’, the reference to ‘Bitter, fruitful, all too fruitful days’, ‘the record of past sin’ joined to such phrases as ‘Waking knew your body like a fire, And neither of us recked a reckoning’. It’s all, when you look for it, clearly set down that Martin Rawlings had a child whose creation was an act of ‘stealth and sin and shame’, a sin of which he repented now that he had become a Catholic. Caesar Rawlings read the poems with this knowledge of their meaning, and it must have brought him out in a cold sweat. If ever his brother should read them in the same light – if any damned good-natured friend should do so, and tell his brother about it – a few investigations need only be made in Italy, and he would be dispossessed of his fortune. And then what seemed a bright idea occurred to him. Nobody had ever troubled in the past to attach a precise meaning to the poems – could he prevent anyone from doing so in the future by making it appear that they were written before his own birth in 1861? Then any inquisitive soul who became curious about them and got an inkling of the truth would find that apparently his dates were all wrong, and give up in despair. But how could that be done? Simple – publish an edition of the poems dated a year before his birth, so that they must refer to events before that time.”

“Then Uncle Jack was the forger?” Vicky said. “But he was never much interested in books.”

“He never professed much interest, but when you went to see him with John he said casually that he had collected first editions in his youth. He let slip the fact that he knew Jacobs by saying that he had bought his own first edition of Passion and Repentance from him. Finally, in an access of foolishness, he showed you the copy of the book that Cobb had given his father, and told you that he had known Cobb when he was a child. It may have been Rawlings’ acquaintance with Jacobs that put the whole idea in his mind. Wrax has discovered that Caesar Rawlings got to know Jacobs in the South African war, when he was an officer and Jacobs was in his regiment. Lord knows how or why Jacobs got into the Army, but once there he was involved in a jewel robbery. Rawlings made Jacobs return the jewels and let him go, but he forced him to write out a confession, which Wrax found in Rawlings’ safe.”

“You didn’t know any of that,” Ruth said.

“It wasn’t possible or necessary to know the exact relation between them. Both of them had been in South Africa and the other circumstances of the case made it certain that Rawlings must have been Jacobs’ ‘client’. But I’ll deal with my own thought processes later, and tell the story as Caesar Rawlings saw it.

“Some time after Caesar Rawlings came back from Italy, he conceived this idea and carried it out, printing a very few copies of Passion and Repentance with the date 1860 on them, and marketing them through Jacobs. No doubt he told Jacobs a story about finding them in some odd corner, which appeared perfectly plausible. He put on the booklet the name of a publisher who was no longer in business – making the slip that John’s keen eye observed – and he must also have taken or sent one or two copies of his ‘find’ to Cobb. Cobb gave it his authority as a bibliographical discovery and, when approached by Blackburn for information connected with his biographical essay, cheerfully passed on the story Rawlings had told him. Cobb also presented one of the copies Rawlings gave him to the British Museum. So the bibliographical ‘find’ was firmly established.

“In the meantime Cobb had made a find of his own in the books left to him for disposal by Leon Amberside. Whether he guessed that those pamphlets were forgeries or not, he saw immediately that they were worth a good deal of money, and he was confronted by the same problem as that which confronted Rawlings, although for different reasons. How could he dispose of the pamphlets without spoiling the market? He was put in touch, he said in that interesting document he left, with a certain Mr Jacobs, who was absolutely to be relied on in confidential matters. It is a good guess that the person who put him in touch was Caesar Rawlings.

“Well, no enquiring literary critic or other busybody worried about the meaning of the Passion and Repentance sonnets – or if they did they were put off the scent by Rawlings’ forged edition. Years passed. Rawlings married, had a son, his wife died. His right to the inheritance was never questioned. He probably put the whole affair of the booklet which he had forged in a panic out of his mind. But then one day out of the blue he received a letter from Jebb, who spread his discoveries far and wide, in spite of his talk of the necessity of keeping them secret. He gave a courteous rebuff to Jebb, but he realised the danger of these enquiries. The forgery which had been designed as his protection might now be his undoing, simply because Jebb was on the track of some other forgeries. If it were discovered that this booklet was forged, his own connection with it might be made known, and all sorts of awkward questions would be asked. He began to collect all the copies he could lay hands on, using for the purpose his old friend, Jacobs. The bookseller got in touch with one of his old criminal associates and Rawlings got back a number of copies – some of them by robbery, others by purchase. It was expensive, but less expensive than dispossession.

“That was the position when, on Monday, Shelton bought a copy of the booklet and John here suggested that there was something wrong about it, on the evidence of the publisher’s name being incorrect. Rawlings had given instructions that it should be bought for him, and must have been furious when he found that it had slipped through his fingers. He foolishly increased the offer, through Jacobs, to an extent which was suspicious in itself, and when that was refused had Shelton knocked over the head in order to get the copy away from him. That was a stupid thing to do, and it was stupidly carried out – it would have been much more sensible to arrange a robbery in which the theft of the booklet was only an incident.

“His panic was increased when Miss Rawlings came to see him on Tuesday with John, and you told him your suspicions. He put you off with a story about being robbed of a copy of the booklet himself – a story containing a fairly palpable flaw, which I’ll come to in a moment. He sent you to see Jacobs, got in touch with him while you were on the way there, and told him what to say. Jacobs made very fair fools of you both, and told you that he had obtained his copies from Cobb.”

“Do you mean to say,” Vicky asked, “that when we went in the shop that man Jacobs knew who we were?”

Bland coughed. “Yes.”

“Well,” said Vicky, “I never heard of such a thing.”

“The two of you sealed Jebb’s death warrant, unknowingly, when you told Rawlings that Jebb was being consulted. It would be quite easy to show by his tests of paper alone that the pamphlet was a forgery. On Tuesday evening he went up to London, telephoned Jebb, and no doubt said he knew of the investigations and had some important information. He saw Jebb, killed him, and destroyed his papers. That wasn’t very difficult.”

The corners of Ruth Cleverly’s mouth were pulled down. She looked as if she were going to cry. Basingstoke leaned over and patted her hand. The young man went on without looking at them.

“Perhaps he was safe now, then? But he very soon saw that he wasn’t, and that his move in telling Jacobs to put you on to Cobb was not clever, but crassly stupid. He had thought that you wouldn’t be able to obtain access to Cobb, and that the affair would die down. He hadn’t reckoned that you would be involved in the police investigation, and tell the police the whole story. When you did, he knew that he was finished unless he could silence Cobb, for although you might not be able to induce Cobb to talk, the police would certainly do so. Cobb would tell them immediately that it was not he, but Caesar Rawlings, who had passed on those copies to Jacobs. He should have thought of all that before he put you on to Cobb’s trail, but he didn’t. He was fundamentally a very stupid man, although he had a good nerve for action, like other stupid men. He silenced Cobb. And he was lucky – he got away. He must have had a bad time when that statement of Cobb’s was being read, for fear that his name should be mentioned. It wasn’t, but something happened that was almost as bad. Wrax had discovered that the pamphlet was forged. Nobody at the time, not even Wrax, realised the full implications of that discovery.

“By now, however, he was above his neck in trouble, for he was in the hands of Jacobs. Jacobs knew everything – he was party to the thefts, and knew where the forgeries had come from. He was in an ideal position to levy a little blackmail. I realised on Thursday evening, when John was telling me his story, that Jacobs was the key to the case, because he plainly knew the true origin of the pamphlets. When, on Friday morning, I understood that Caesar Rawlings was the murderer, I knew that Jacobs was in danger. I went down to Blackheath, but I was too late. Rawlings had strangled Jacobs, and made a clumsy attempt to make his murder look like suicide.” He sighed. “That’s all, really. Thirsty work talking so much. Have some more beer.”

“But,” Vicky asked, “what did he do it all for? We didn’t want his money. At least –” She hesitated.

“Your guess is as good as mine, but remember that he had enjoyed a property, and the use of money to which he had no right, ever since his father’s death. Remember that he had a son, whom he obviously loved. I don’t think you need look further for a motive. And remember also that, from his point of view, the first steps he took were mere peccadilloes. He hoped that he would be able to get the pamphlets back by theft and purchase, and if he had done so, from his point of view there would have been no trouble at all. It was only your inquisitiveness, and Jebb’s infernal nosiness – as he considered it – that made him tell a pack of ridiculous lies, and finally take the irrevocable step of murder.”

Anthony was frowning. “I still don’t see how you knew he was the murderer on Friday morning.”

“The poems, darling,” Vicky said airily.

“Yes; I can see it’s awfully clever and all that, to have seen what those things meant, but I mean they weren’t evidence, were they?”

“They were sufficient to convince me,” Bland said, “that Caesar Rawlings was probably an illegitimate child, and once I had realised that, everything else fell into place. But there were two pieces of quite concrete evidence, which led direct to Caesar Rawlings. One of them was the evidence of the book that wasn’t there. Caesar Rawlings had lost his copy of the early edition of Passion and Repentance – or said he had. And there was something very special about that copy – Rawlings told you, John, that it was a presentation copy. That was one of those inspired pieces of authentication in which he specialised, and which turned out to be extremely foolish. As Jebb said, the existence of association copies, given by the author to his friends, is one way of helping to determine the authenticity of a doubtful edition. And this, curiously enough, was the only presentation copy of this book that was ever mentioned. Now, when the Inspector discovered by paper tests that the book was a forgery the question arose: how could a presentation copy exist? The answer was, of course, that we only had Rawlings’ word for its existence, and that the very fact that he had been trying to authenticate a forgery was damning evidence against him.

“Once the book had been shown by Wrax to be a forgery, also, the question arose: what of the authentication of it by that story told in Blackburn’s essay? That story was either a true authentication or a deliberate lie. Blackburn referred it back to Cobb as authority for it, but who was Cobb’s authority? Isn’t it obvious that it must have been either Martin Rawlings or his son? And since – as was shown by the fact that the book was forged – the story was a lie, the person who told it must be the forger.

“But there was one piece of evidence that was quite damning. Jebb kindly left the name of his murderer on the blotting pad.” He went over to a bookcase. When he came back he was laughing as he showed them an illustration. “Is that the face in your medallion?”

“Why, yes,” Anthony said. “But what –”

Basingstoke was laughing too as Bland took his hand away and showed them what was written underneath it: Julius Caesar. Profile of the Bust in the British Museum. “It wasn’t hard to guess what Jebb had in mind in making this symbolical drawing of his visitor, Caesar Rawlings, when you remembered the nature of the drawing he made earlier in the day – Ruth amidst the alien corn.

“What fools we were.” Basingstoke stroked his chin ruefully. Bland protested.

“The essential thing, unless you were in command of all Inspector Wrax’s apparatus of investigation, was to discover the meaning of the poems. Once that was done, lots of little things fell into place – including, by the way, Rawlings’ knowledge of facts about Jacobs’ death, which he couldn’t have got from the newspapers. On Saturday afternoon I dropped a little note in the marquee, so that Rawlings should know that he was finished. He had some pills on him, and used them when he was at the wicket. A cricketing death,” Bland said solemnly.

It was almost dark in the great room. “Poor Uncle Jack,” Vicky sighed. “I always liked him. He was very nice to me.”

“He was a murdering rat,” Ruth Cleverly said.

Basingstoke got up. “I must be going.” He looked at Ruth.

“All right. I’m coming too.”

“I’m going to look for a job,” Basingstoke said to Bland with a straight face.

Vicky advanced with her hand held out. “So we’re the heirs to the Rawlings fortune – though we shall come to a arrangement with Philip, of course. And it’s all through you. You must come to our wedding. Anthony and I are going to be married next week.” Anthony muttered something.

“I shall be delighted,” Bland said. “Where are you spending your honeymoon?”

“Anthony is playing for Southshire on their Northern tour,” Vicky said serenely, “and, of course, I shall be with him.”

“One more thing,” Basingstoke said. “What was in that note? It must have been something awfully potent to induce him to take poison.”

“I simply told him what I knew,” Bland said, and smiled.

“But why didn’t he try to – dispose of you – as he had of the others?”

“Because I also told him that I’d taken the precaution of writing out my story and posting it to Inspector Wrax. You saw me do that on Saturday morning.”

They were standing on the steps now, outside his dungeon. The sun was dying in a blaze of red and gold. “You think of everything,” said Vicky. “You ought to be a detective. I mean,” she added hurriedly, “a policeman.”

“Perhaps I shall be,” Bland said, “one day.”