Read Online Silence Observed by Michael Innes - Free Book Online

card that said:
     
    Incunabula from the library of
    the late Professor Ludwig von Zinzendorf
    of the University of Heidelberg.
     
    Appleby paused to peer at these treasures. The street lighting was indifferent, and in the little window there was no light at all. So in fact he didn’t make much of them. But at least they had such an enormous appearance of authenticity – of having dropped straight, so to speak, from the press of Gutenberg or whoever – that he was at once perversely prompted, doubtless as a result of his massive exposure to the subject that day, to speculate as to whether they might not in fact be monstrous forgeries. But of course people didn’t forge fifteenth-century printed books – although perhaps they sometimes fudged them up out of bits and pieces found lying around. Nor was there any reason to suppose that the late Jacob Trechmann was other than an impeccably honest dealer – or none except in the odd fact that he had sold to Charles Gribble as a desirable forgery what had turned out only to be a forgery of that again. It occurred to Appleby that if poor Mr Trechmann’s death became in any degree celebrated – if it proved intractably or sensationally mysterious – people might even set about forging forgeries of Manallace forgeries for what might be called their associative value. Logically, there was no point at which the process need cease. Once take satisfaction in counterfeiting counterfeits and a sort of infinite regress of the things became possible at once.
    Appleby put aside this idle speculation and made to enter the shop. As he did so, he noticed a small oblong of cardboard lying at his feet. He picked it up. It seemed to be out of a card index, and written on it in a neat script he read:
     
    K Burger, Monumenta Germaniae et
    Italiae typographica, 1892.
     
    But this had been roughly struck out, and under it was written in pencil:
     
    Sorry, working in BM
    Back at six o’clock. J T
     
    There was a drawing pin with its point ineffectively askew through the ‘M’ of Monumenta . It seemed clear that Mr Trechmann, whether today or on an earlier occasion, had made a somewhat inefficient attempt to affix this notice to the door of his shop. It appeared, too, that the exigencies of his business had at times been sacrificed to the pleasures of research in the vast repository of learning nearby. He seemed an unlikely sort of person to get himself murdered. Robbery, of course, might well have been a motive, since the modesty of the dead man’s premises probably by no means corresponded to the value of what they contained. Yet the thief – if there had been a thief – had at least shown no interest in the conspicuously exposed incunables of the late Professor Ludwig von Zinzendorf.
    Appleby paused for a moment longer on the threshold. He was noticing – and with an almost guilty pleasure – that his pulse had quickened. Returning to this sort of thing – for his looking in, so to speak, on common metropolitan homicide was precisely that – carried just the excitement that such affairs had carried thirty years ago – when he had driven up to them not only with the rule of law to vindicate, but also with a career to make. But he paused, too, to recall something else. Trechmann was the person who had sold Charles Gribble the Meredith forgeries purporting to be by Geoffrey Manallace. But Jimmy Heffer, the man apparently under suspicion of killing Trechmann, had been the person associated with Sir Gabriel Gulliver in the curious affair of the false Astarte Oakes and her (as it seemed) entirely genuine Rembrandt. Here, one might say, were two stories, which were at present equally obscure and problematical. And the dead Jacob Trechmann looked as if he might be a link between them… The shop door wasn’t locked. Appleby pushed it open.
    And there was the body.
    There was the body, with disorder all around it. But whether there was any connection between the fact of this disorder and