“Of course, but—”
A customer came in, one of the regulars. Braid gave him a nod and wished he had gone to the kiosk up the street.
Messiter picked up the conversation. “Was it a month’s notice we agreed? I’ll see that my bank settles the rent.” He took the keys of the flat from his pocket and put them on the counter with the photostat. “For you. I won’t need these again.” Putting a hand on Braid’s arm, he added, “Some time we must meet and have a drink to Miss E. D.’s memory.”
He turned and left the shop and the customer asked for 20 Rothmans. Braid lifted his hand in a belated salute through the shop window and returned to his business. More customers came in. Fridays were always busy with people collecting their cigarettes for the weekend. He was thankful for the activity. It compelled him to adjust by degrees and accept that he was now a rich man. Unlike Messiter, he would not object to the story getting into the press. Some of these customers who had used the shop for years and scarcely acknowledged him as a human being would choke on their toast and marmalade when they saw his name one morning in The Times.
It satisfied him most to recover what he owned. When Messiter had disclosed the secret of the building, it was as if the 27 years of Braid’s tenure were obliterated. The place was full of Miss E. D. That young lady — she would always be young — had in effect asserted her prior claim. He had doubted if he would ever again believe the building was truly his own. But now that her “whimsical project” had been ceded to him, he was going to take pleasure in dismantling the design, stamp by stamp, steadily accumulating a fortune Miss E. D. had never supposed would accrue. Vengeful it might be, but it would exorcise her from the building that belonged to him.
Ten minutes before closing time Inspector Gent entered the shop. As before, he waited for the last customer to leave.
“Sorry to disturb you again, sir. I have that warrant now.”
“You won’t need it,” Braid cheerfully told him. “I have the key. Mr. Messiter was here this morning.” He started to recount the conversation.
“Then I suppose he took out his cutting from Times,” put in the Inspector.
“You know about that?”
“Do I?” he said caustically. “The man has been round just about every stamp shop north of Birmingham telling the tale of that young woman and the Penny Blacks on her dressing-room wall.” Braid frowned. “There’s nothing dishonest in that. The story really did appear in The Times, didn’t it?”
“It did, sir. We checked. And this is the address mentioned.” The Inspector eyed him expressionlessly. “The trouble is that the Penny Blacks our friend Messiter has been selling in the north aren’t off any dressing-room wall. He buys them from a dealer in London, common specimens, about ten pounds each one. Then he works on them.”
“Works on them? What do you mean?”
“Penny Blacks are valued according to the plates they were printed from, sir. There are distinctive markings on each of the plates, most particularly in the shape of the guide letters that appear in the comers. The stamps Messiter has been selling are doctored to make them appear rare. He buys a common Plate 6 stamp in London, touches up the guide letters, and sells it to a Manchester dealer as a Plate 11 stamp for seventy-five pounds. As it’s catalogued at more than twice that, the dealer thinks he has a bargain. Messiter picks his victims carefully: generally they aren’t specialists in early English stamps, but almost any dealer is ready to look at a Penny Black in case it’s a rare one.”
Braid shook his head. “I don’t understand this at all. Why should Messiter have needed to resort to forgery? There are twenty thousand stamps upstairs.”
“Have you seen them?”
“No, but the newspaper story—”
“That fools everyone, sir.”
“You said it was genuine.”
“It is. And the idea of a roomful of Penny Blacks excites people’s imagination. They want to believe it. That’s the secret of all the best confidence tricks. Now why do you suppose Messiter had a mortice lock fitted on that room? You thought it was because the contents were worth a fortune? Has it occurred to you as a possibility that he didn’t want anyone to know there was nothing there?”
Braid’s dream disintegrated.
“It stands to reason, doesn’t it,” the Inspector went on, “that the stamps were stripped off the wall generations ago? When Messiter found empty walls, he couldn’t abandon the idea. It had taken a grip on him. That young woman who thought of papering her wall with stamps could never have supposed she would be responsible over a century later for turning a man to crime.”
The Inspector held out his hand. “If I could have that key, sir, I’d like to see the room for myself.”
Braid followed the Inspector upstairs and watched him unlock the door. They entered the room.
“I don’t mind admitting I have a sneaking admiration for Messiter,” the Inspector said. “Imagine the poor beggar coming in here at last after going to all the trouble he did to find the place. Look, you can see where he peeled back the wallpaper layer by layer” — gripping a furl of paper, he drew it casually aside — “to find absolutely—” He stopped. “My God!”
The stamps were there, neatly pasted in rows.
Braid said nothing, but the blood slowly drained from his face.
Miss E. D.’s scheme of interior decoration had been more ambitious than anyone expected. She had diligently inked over every stamp with red, purple, or green ink — to form an intricate mosaic of colors. Originally Penny Blacks or Twopence Blues, Plate 6 or Plate 11, they were now as she had described them in The Times — “worthless little articles.”
Evensong
by Francis M. Nevins, Jr.[6]
“He felt a return of the old terror” and then “the old terror and guilt vanished... He was a professional again...”
For nine years his work had compelled him to take short flights to cities he had never seen before, but the queasy feeling in his stomach every time he was in the air refused to go away, and once in a while he would wonder if he was in the right business. That Sunday afternoon in mid-February he played in luck. Eastern’s flight from New York to Atlanta was smooth as kitten fur, no choppy air, no sudden dips or jolts, no circling above the destination like a lost soul. The whisperjet touched down at 3:27 P.M. Plenty of time. The cathedral service didn’t begin till 5:45.
He strolled unhurriedly up the long corridor to the terminal entrance. Casual, keep it casual. He browsed through the paperbacks at the magazine stand, then relaxed as best he could in a seat in the main lounge. The thought of a cocktail in the airport bar tempted him but he resisted. Not professional. At 3:50 he took the escalator to the lower level and purchased a round-trip ticket on the limousine. A cab would have given him more privacy and a chance to unwind before work, but the risk wasn’t worth it.
Again he played in luck. Just enough passengers boarded the limo so that he blended in satisfactorily. He doubted that they would remember a thing about him. As directed, he gave the Riviera Hyatt as his destination.
The springlike mildness of the day was tonic after the New York chill. He congratulated himself on not wearing an overcoat for the trip and tried to shut down his mind and nerves as the car whisked north on Interstate 85 through light traffic. Sounds and images of his boyhood echoed inside him. Snatches of antiphon and response from the Mass. Phrases from the Baltimore catechism the nuns had made everyone memorize. High pre-adolescent voices singing the O salutaris hostia, and the other Benediction hymn, Tantum ergo sacramentum. The sweet heavy odor of incense wafting from the half darkness of the altar. It had been 17 years since he had set foot in a church, and he almost dreaded to visit the cathedral this afternoon, but the mission had fallen to him and O salutaris hostia someone had to do it.