‘Is there anybody else in there?’ someone asked me and surely I shook my head. Pip tells me that at this point she had shifted her eyes to David Swansby. He was watching the blaze with the crowd and absently patting the cat’s head at his neck. He had the look of a man embarrassed that he could not go down with his ship, she said.
Later, Pip explained exactly what she saw when she ran into David upstairs in the dusty, smoky rooms above my office. She had noticed at once that there was a mobile phone kicked aside or dropped by his shoes, its screen still bright with use, and as she rounded the threshold of the room she had found David frantically trying to extinguish a small blue fire springing from a parcel in his hands. We now know that this was a bomb with a timer. David had messed up setting this timer – ‘I’m a words man, no good with numbers!’ he later joked on the stand, getting not one laugh from the galleries – and had ended up igniting the incendiary prematurely. He admitted this fact in court with a sad defeated shrug.
Pip said she recognised the smell at once, the dull sour tang of electrics fusing and melting.
‘He looked aghast,’ Pip told me, using a word that sat ungainly and uncomfortable in her mouth. On the evening of the fire she recounted to police officers as precisely as possible what she had seen, then repeated this to different officers at the station, and then again months after that she used the same words in court, wearing a blazer she only ever used for weddings, funerals and job interviews. Each time she chose her words carefully and tried not to get emotional as she imparted, divulged, disclosed the truth whole truth and nothing but the etcs of what she had seen, spelling out the scene as best she could remember. Yet even as I heard it, even as she asked me to check her account for errors or slip-ups, doubting herself, somehow I would not fully let myself believe the truth of what had happened for months. It is hard to shift from one way of understanding the world.
It was certainly impossible to ignore aspects of the facts, however, thanks to the frenzy of press reports and online articles. It began the very night of the fire, with editorials speculating what had happened in the Sad Final Days of Erstwhile Great British Institution Swansby’s Dictionary. There, my quiet, boring days at Swansby’s were suddenly transformed into something far more operatic and formidable. I noticed that every picture printed of David Swansby during this time was edited ever-so slightly before it was published, its filters or colour saturation twiddled infinitesimally so that any discernible cragginess of the editor’s face, any hint of a scowl or glower, became supremely emphasised. At the time of the fire I remember him standing mildly and blankly by the SW1H kerbside, looking up at Swansby House and cradling his cat. He might have been humming on a promenade, he seemed that calm. The pictures of him that were snapped that evening and appeared in newsprint, however, had an undeniable air of Vincent Price or Christopher Lee to them.
I noticed also that a number of photographs from that evening had been assiduously photoshopped before they were published so that the cat’s ears were removed from the neckline of his jumper. The inexplicable streamlined, the not-relevant smoothed away so that it was not too distracting.
But, what exactly happened?
One could turn to published accounts. The story in the press ran thus: heir to a depleted, now-derisory and undeserved fortune and with his family name and its legacy in tatters, David Swansby had been driven mad with financial instability and embarrassment at his folly of a dictionary. All of the spurious and gossipy tabloid accounts of what took place that night prove quite a fun read if you lay the pages out and sift through the fictions. Words like dastardly, bungled, diddle, dodge and hoax crop up with particular prevalence. I remember that one headline even had a spin on some kind of NOT-SO HARMLESS DRUDGERY pun, above a picture of David sitting in a police car looking baffled. The story ran for about a week that Swansby’s Dictionary – a ‘national treasure’ (SEE ALSO: eccentric, laughable, barely tolerated) – had run into such economic hardship and existed with such a skeleton staff that its final editor had tried to pull off an insurance fraud of epic, combustible proportions.
According to these reports and much like Swansby’s infamous editorial probity, the plan had been overly complicated and disarmingly, quaintly ludicrous. David Swansby posed as a hoax bomber and made various threats against the dictionary. He wanted the building gutted, razed and useless so that a big insurance cheque could wangle his way – blame being laid at the feet of anonymous misguided fruitcakes. No harm in that, surely!, and the Swansby name would not be left a laughing stock. In complete tatters, yes, but with some bruised and noble honour attached to it. This way, the narrative ran, the dictionary would not simply dwindle away in the public consciousness as was his greatest fear. Go out with a bang. It appeared that he hoped to get away with it all. He thought he would be recognised as the presiding, grieving steward who was there to the last when the dictionary’s once-bright light was so violently snuffed out.
Can’t buy that kind of publicity.
Of course, I was also called in to have my say and put things into my own words and explain what my experiences at Swansby’s had been. Did I ever suspect David was behind the bomb threats? Do you think this was his plan all along, or was it a hoax that backfired? How could he hide in plain sight? And Pip was asked similar questions too, where the tone was accusatory rather than exploratory – she wasn’t supposed to be in the building, had no authority there: what was her story? But the second that David Swansby confessed, these interviews melted away from our lives.
Pip and I read the reports with incredulity, intrigue. People who barely knew us took the time to remind themselves of our numbers. Whereas before the fire, mention of Swansby’s Dictionary might elicit conversations about unfinished grand projects and the Lost Generation, now they all began with a nod and a wink about insurance. I did my best to dispel this whenever journalists got in contact or I overheard conversations in Pip’s café, but it was a new, tasty, excellent fact. It was stated as such in the dictionary’s Wikipedia page on the evening of the fire, and that part of the article became the largest section with the most citations. The rest of the dictionary’s history has been eclipsed.
To my knowledge, no papers ever made any mention of mountweazels, nor Swansby’s Dictionary as something contaminated by false words. I hope David thinks of that as a triumph or at least some small consolation.
For years later, every time I read about it – what should it be called: the case? Episode? What word fits the bill? – I felt myself become a tangle of question marks. I could not help but scour each and every article to see whether I was mentioned. Not once. No one cares about a hired anonymous amanuensis when such a blundering cartoon villain is at the centre of a story. I could have been a nice footnote, I suppose, or cast sympathetically as the naïve patsy in a devious, dog’s dinner of a plan. My fielding of these ‘threats’ on the phone was all part of the scheme, of course. My existence meant that David could provide ample evidence to any insurance brokers that there had been foul play.