The Moving Toyshop. Edmund Crispin

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       4

       The Episode of the Indignant Janeite

      ‘Which in effect,’ said Cadogan, ‘leaves us exactly where we were before.’

      They were sitting in the bar of the Mace and Sceptre, Fen drinking whisky, Cadogan beer. The Mace and Sceptre is a large and quite hideous hotel which stands in the very centre of Oxford and which embodies, without apparent shame, almost every architectural style devised since the times of primitive man. Against this initial disadvantage it struggles nobly to create an atmosphere of homeliness and comfort. The bar is a fine example of Strawberry Hill Gothic.

      It was only a quarter past eleven in the morning, so few people were drinking as yet. A young man with a hooked nose and a broad mouth was talking to the barman about horses. Another young man with horn-rimmed glasses and a long neck was engrossed in Nightmare Abbey. And a pale, rather grubby undergraduate with untidy red hair was talking politics to an earnest-looking girl in a dark green jersey.

      ‘So you see,’ he was saying, ‘it’s by such means that the moneyed classes, gambling on the Stock Exchange, ruin millions of poor investors.’

      ‘But surely the poor investors were gambling on the Stock Exchange too.’

      ‘Oh, no, that’s quite different…’

      Mr Hoskins, more like a vast, lugubrious blood-hound than ever, was sitting at a table with a dark and beautiful girl called Miriam. He was drinking a small glass of pale sherry.

      ‘But, darling,’ said Miriam, ‘it will be simply awful if the proctors catch me in here. You know they send women down if they catch them in bars.’

      ‘The proctors never come in in the mornings,’ said Mr Hoskins. ‘And in any case, you don’t look a bit like an undergraduate. Now, just don’t you worry. Look, I’ve got some chocolates for you.’ He pulled a box from his pocket.

      ‘Oh, you darling…’

      The only other occupant of the bar was a thin, rabbit-faced man of about fifty, greatly muffled up in coats and scarves, who was sitting by himself drinking rather more than was good for him.

      Fen and Cadogan had been running over the facts of the case as far as they knew them, and it was the result of this investigation which had prompted Cadogan’s remark. Those facts boiled down to dispiritingly little:

      ‘And I suppose,’ said Fen, ‘that he wasn’t allowed to communicate directly with any known address of Miss Tardy. By the way, I was meaning to ask you: did you feel the body at all?’