Anthony selected an armchair, guiltily aware that he much preferred the Institute to his own home, and that he over-used the place. The librarians ought not really to know his name, or that he was fixated on Arthur Price. He ought to use the Institute in the correct, gentlemanly way: as a respite from the serious literature; to kill a couple of hours before attending a social function; to wait for sunset and the Mayfair cocktail hour while reading a story by Oliver Onions or V.L. Whitechurch.
From the outside the place resembled a giant carriage clock, and the reading rooms were like a series of drawing rooms, with only about as many books on the wall as you’d expect to see in a drawing room. The collections were mainly stored in the three levels of basement, where a different order of librarian roved – ones not as confident or well-dressed as those in the building proper, and sometimes the readers would hear the rumble of the primitive trolleys being pushed along the subterranean walkways. It was a confirmation of your status to know that this work – a species of academic mining – was going on for your benefit.
The subscription was a thousand pounds a year – not cheap – and you’d only pay it if you were interested in the books and manuscripts of a particular kind of author. The type had never been officially defined, but everyone knew it: the under-regarded marginals, the writers of ghost stories, mysteries, crime, the better class of pornographer, and if you asked for something wholesome like a copy of Pride and Prejudice (which only an outsider or a new member would ever do) the librarians would disapprovingly respond, ‘I’m afraid we don’t stock books like that.” The Institute had been built and was funded by grants from the more successful genre writers, and its grandeur was a kind of reproof to the critics, who ignored their works.
Anthony looked at the topmost page of the file. It was thin – poor quality paper presumably. The handwriting was elegant by modern standards but Price’s full stops were never quite conclusive; they were elongated, more like dashes, with the result that anything he wrote never seemed to stop, but became a steady stream of bile.
“I did Wilson’s, the one in Chelsea,” Anthony read, “by putting my arm through the letterbox hole in the outer shutter and unscrewing the bolt, this being wrongly placed (why put it so close to the letterbox aperture?). With me were some good fellows whose names I wouldn’t mention for fortunes. It was no trouble at all then to roll up the shutter. The glass of course I just smashed – took my Malacca cane to it. I enjoyed that.”
His tone was all there in those few sentences: a combination of the literary and the streetwise, and the shrill arrogance was betrayed by that parenthesized question: “Why put it so close to the letterbox aperture?” as if he knew how to design protective shutters for jewellers’ shops better than the men who did that for a living. Well, he probably did. Arthur Price had written crime stories, but he’d gone one better in that he had actually been a criminal as well. He made his living by “doing” jewellers’ shops together with a little band of followers, the Price Confederates. He was often interrupted in his round of thefts by arrest and imprisonment (hence the books – he wrote while inside) but it was a relentless cycle that had continued, Anthony presumed, until his death.
Anthony had first come across him in Pelham’s Guide to Interesting Out-of-Print Authors, which was written in telegraphese, as though the title was a bluff, and the authors didn’t even justify full sentences. Of Price, Pelham had written: “Roguish character. At once hated and aspired to join literary establishment. Author of crime stories, habitual theme a criminal’s bloodthirsty revenge. Repellent style oscillates between coarse and grandiose. Definitive collection: Tales of the London Night (1904). Arthur Price disappeared in about 1910.”
Anthony had appreciated the languor of that one proper, concluding sentence. It had got him hooked, and he had immediately read such Price stories as survive. They were all more or less the same. A decent, honest, brave criminal is minding his own business robbing or assaulting people when a policeman presumes to arrest him, or an associate betrays him. The criminal then murders the policeman or the associate, sometimes summoning in aid mysterious dark forces raised by rituals and incantations described at great length.
But Anthony was more interested in the writer than the writing. Price’s first publishers had to take out an injunction to keep him away from their offices. A reviewer who had written that Tales of the London Night was “too lurid for the common taste, but undoubtedly vigorous” – which was just about the best thing that any contemporary said of Price – was sent a loaded revolver in the post with no address to which it might be promptly returned, but instead an order to meet Price at dawn in St James’ Park in order to fight a duel.
Price had turned up for the occasion accompanied by Paul Mayer, who proposed doing duty as his second. Mayer was an educated man, and yet, as one assize court judge had observed, he was “practically enslaved” to Price. He’d been a Price Confederate, but he’d also been a journalist on the Times, and at one point had been committed to a mental hospital in South London. He believed not only that Price was the Prince of Darkness, but also that he – Mayer – had lived in the future; that he had, in the past, lived in the future, and would be liable to go back there again. Mayer’s problem, among others, was that he found it hard to stay put in any given century. He had often complained about it in writing.
“Wilson’s shop was preferred to Maxwell’s,” Anthony read, “only on account of the dairy across the road from the latter, which never closed but ran right round the clock, seven days a b____________________week. Maxwell thought his place safe as a bank. I know because I called in masquerading as a customer looking for a new watch (silk waistcoat and Malacca cane well to the fore) and he said so. What f____________________rot. The man’s protected only by the little doxies put to slaving around through the night over opposite… and what honour is there in that?”
Anthony quickly read the whole six pages and then stood up and walked towards the window. The manuscript had been an account of a series of jewellery shop break-ins, probably written to impress an associate. Anthony doubted that it was a confession. Names had been kept back, and Price wasn’t the confessional type. He’d made no mention of his writings, and there had been no mention of his cohort Mayer, who particularly intrigued Anthony, perhaps more so than Price himself.
But what mattered now was not what Price wrote about himself but what Anthony wrote about him.
The man at the far desk had gone. From the Square came the sound of heavy rain – and a helicopter. The rain was coming down so heavily that Anthony had the idea of a sort of crisis going on, with the helicopter as part of an evacuation. It might have been a different day entirely from the last time Anthony had looked.
The relationship between Arthur Price and Paul Mayer – the autodidact force-of-nature and his educated, middle-class disciple… This would be the theme of the book that would make Anthony Latimer’s name. He would write it in the Institute, and on publication he would buy a new flat that would enable him to establish a continuum between his home life and his working life. The flat would have thick red carpets and tall sash windows like the Institute, and he would find out whether a yellow and brown silk tie against a blue and white checked shirt worked for him, too.