Lewis grinned wryly. “They all seem to be telling us next to nothing, just like you said.”
But his eyes remained steadfastly on the letter as he wondered what Morse would have thought in the same situation…
He was still wondering a few minutes later when Hathaway interrupted whatever might have been going through the inspector’s mind.
“You remember we’re due out at ten o’clock, sir?” “Yep. But just you get a copy of that letter and take it home with you tonight. You see, I’m beginning to think we may be wrong about it not telling us anything. If I’d said that to Morse, do you know what he would have said?” Hathaway shook his head indifferently. “He’d have said that fellow’s probably told us everything.”
“Not told us how the guilty party sorted out the transfer of the money; not told us which bank it was or how much dosh was taken out… Ridiculous, really, that letter!”
Lewis made no reply, and Hathaway continued:
“Tell you something else, sir. My old tutor once told me that if I kept on using as many exclamation marks in my essays as this fellow’s done, he’d refuse to read ‘em. And any writer who kept on using those long dashes all the time hadn’t much idea on how to write the Queen’s English.”
Again Lewis made no reply, but something – some small, vague idea – was struggling into birth in the depths of his brain as Hathaway spoke again.
“I wonder whether Morse would think he was much of a writer, our man here. Things like ‘arrant monster’-”
“Arrant robber,” corrected Lewis.
“Ugh! Would your old boss have written that?”
“Dunno. He never wrote much. And if he had to read a lot of bumph, it was always the commas he was most particular about.”
“Wish I’d known him, sir,” said Hathaway with gentle irony as he closed the door behind him.
“A lot of people would!” said Lewis quietly to himself in the empty room.
Hathaway had finished his supper, and was looking through the evening’s fare in the TV Times when his mind drifted back to the Keating letter. He’d won himself no Brownie points when he’d misquoted “arrant robber” from the letter. “Robber”… not all that different from “Robert”, was it? And Lewis’s Christian name must surely be Robert, with his senior colleagues always calling him “Robbie”… He took out the letter from his jacket-pocket: yes, there it was, “arrant robber”. What was this stupid bloody letter all about?
But suddenly something clicked in his mind and his eyes were gleaming as he wrote out the letters of “arrant robber” and crossed them off one by one against a name on the members’ list. One letter short, agreed. But there it was, immediately before those two words: the letter “d-”, which he’d assumed to have been the way some people who’d never sworn in their lives expressed “damned”.
“Wow!”
It was 8.45 pm and he rang Lewis immediately. Almost. But if one of the four names was hidden there in the text, in “anagrammatic” form (the very word Keating had used), yes! If one of the names was nestling there, what about the other three?
Lewis was watching the 10 o’clock news on BBC1 when Hathaway rang.
“I went through that letter line by line, sir, letter by letter, and I’ve found them, found all of them. All four: ‘d-arrant robber’ is an anagram of Robert Barnard. Next one: ‘monster – bit’ is an anagram of Simon Brett, our honourable President. Then we’ve got ‘grill – he’, not quite so clear, but it must be Reg Hill. The last, near the end, is ‘eye – let’s prove’, which works out as Peter Lovesey. I checked all the other names on the list, but there’s no one else lurking there. No one!”
After finally replacing the receiver, Hathaway felt an inner glow of forgivable pride. Yet he realised that four names didn’t help all that much when the problem was deciding on just one name. But the other four would go down to three if the President (surely) could be shunted along with Caesar’s wife into the above-suspicion bracker. Which left him with Barnard, Hill, Lovesey…
When Hathaway had rung, Lewis had only just got back from hearing Papadopoulos conducting the Oxford Philomusica at the Sheldonian. He felt pleasingly tired, and would have welcomed an earlyish night. But he knew he would have little chance of sleep with Hathaway’s clever findings topmost in his mind, and with the idea that had begun to dawn on him that morning still undeveloped and unexamined. Unusually for him, he was aware of a strongly competitive urge to come up with something that could complement his sergeant’s discovery. But who was that one crook on the committee? One of the four – or perhaps one of the three – for he (like Hathaway) felt prepared to pass over the President.
Think, Lewis! Think!
How would Morse have looked at the letter? Probably looked at it the wrong way round, say? How do you do that, though? Read it back to front? Ridiculous. Read the PS before the salutation? But where had he read the PS’s “what I tell you three times is true” before? From Lewis Carroll, wasn’t it? He located the words immediately in The Oxford Book of Quotations, from “The Hunting of the Snark”. So what? What had that got to do with anything? Just a minute. Three suspects… but Keating hadn’t mentioned any single one of the suspects three times. He hadn’t mentioned anything three times.
Or had he?
Well, even if he had, it was past midnight, and he was walking up the stairs when he remembered what Hathaway had said about punctuation. Morse had once told him that Oscar Wilde had spent two hours one morning looking through one of his poems before removing a comma; and then spent a further two hours the same afternoon before deciding to re-instate the said comma. And after standing motionless on the third step from the top of the staircase, Lewis finally retraced his steps downstairs and looked at the letter for the umpteenth time, now paying no attention whatsoever to what things were being said, but how they were being said.
And suddenly, in a flash, eureka.
Thank you, Hathaway! Thank you, Morse!
Lewis took a can of beer from the fridge and drank it before finally completing his ascent of the staircase. Hathaway may have fallen asleep that night with a look of deep satisfaction on his face, but with Lewis it was one bordering on the beatific.
It was three days after the aforementioned events that Mr HRF Keating received a letter at his London address with the envelope marked “Thames Valley Police HQ, Kidlington, Oxon”.
13 April 2006
Dear Mr Keating,
I write to thank you for your letter of 10 April 2006. You asked for my help.
Between us, my sergeant and I finally fathomed the anagrammatized names of the committee quorum; and leaving aside yourself, and giving the benefit of the doubt to your successor as President, we were left with three names from the list you gave us: Messrs Barnard, Hill, Lovesey. The clues were there and we spotted them. But this didn’t get us very far. Which of the three men was it?
It was more difficult for us to spot the vital clue, but in reality you had made it quite complex. The three names we had, as well as the President’s, were each signposted by two items of punctuation: the long em dash and the exclamation mark. It was cleverly done. But we were a bit slow to notice the full implication of this. These two punctuation marks were each used, always closely together, not four times, but seven times, and used nowhere else in your letter. Why had our suspect-list suddenly grown so much longer? The reason eventually became clear. The name of the perpetrator of the “crime” was not included in the list of club-members. But there he was, three times: “frank-eight”; “King-Father”; “thing-faker”, and each of the three is a perfect anagram of the man responsible for the alleged theft of the chequebook: a man, as I say, who was not listed among the suspects. A man named HRF Keating. You, sir!