Killer Dolphin (4 page)

“That is nothing,” Mr. Conducis said. “It is of no consequence.” He went to the fire. A bluish flame sprang up and turned red. Mr. Conducis returned.

“It is the packet that may be of interest. Will you open it?” he said.

Peregrine pulled gingerly at the ribbon ends and turned back the silk wrapping.

He had exposed a glove.

A child’s glove. Stained as if by water, it was the colour of old parchment and finely wrinkled like an old, old face. It had been elegantly embroidered, with tiny roses in gold and scarlet. A gold tassel, now blackened and partly unravelled, was attached to the tapered gauntlet. It was the most heartrending object Peregrine had ever seen.

Underneath it lay two pieces of folded paper, very much discoloured.

“Will you read the papers?” Mr. Conducis invited. He had returned to the fireplace.

Peregrine felt an extraordinary delicacy in touching the glove. “Cheveril,” he thought. “It’s a cheveril glove. Has it gone brittle with age?” No. To his fingertip it was flaccid: uncannily so, as if it had only just died. He slipped the papers out from beneath it. They had split along the folds and were foxed and faded. He opened the larger with great care and it lay broken before him. He pulled himself together and managed to read it.

The accompanying note was no more than a slip of paper. The writing on it was much faded and so extraordinarily crabbed and tortuous that he thought at first it must be hieroglyphic and that he therefore would never make it out. Then it seemed to him that there was something almost familiar about it. And then, gradually, words began to emerge. Everything was quiet. He heard the fire settle. Someone crossed the room above the library. He heard his own heart thud.

He read.

Peregrine sat in a kind of trance and looked at the little glove and the documents. Mr. Conducis had left the paper knife on the table. Peregrine slid the ivory tip into the gauntlet and very slowly lifted and turned it. There was the mark, in the same crabbed hand:
HS.

“But where—” Peregrine heard his own voice saying, “where did it come from? Whose is it?”

“It is mine,” Mr. Conducis said and his voice seemed to come from a great distance. “Naturally.”

“But — where did you find it?”

A long silence.

“At sea.”

“At sea?”

“During a voyage six years ago. I bought it.”

Peregrine looked at his host. How pale Mr,. Conducis was and how odd was his manner!

He said: “The box — it is some kind of portable writing-desk — was a family possession. The former owner did not discover the false bottom until—” He stopped.

“Until—?” Peregrine said.

“Until shortly before he died.”

Peregrine said, “Has it been shown to an authority?”

“No. I should, no doubt, get an opinion from some museum or perhaps from Sotheby’s.”

His manner was so completely negative, so toneless that Peregrine wondered if by any extraordinary chance he did not understand the full implication. He was wondering how, without offense, he could find out, when Mr. Conducis continued.

“I have not looked it all up but I understand the age of the boy at the time of his death is consistent with the evidence and that the grandfather was in fact a glover.”

“Yes.”

“And the initials inside the gauntlet do in fact correspond with the child’s initials.”

“Yes. Hamnet Shakespeare.”

“Quite so,” said Mr. Conducis.

“I know that,” Peregrine said. “You don’t need to keep on at it, Jer. I know there’s always been a Bardic racket and that since the quatro-centenary it’s probably been stepped up. I
know
about the tarting-up of old portraits with dome foreheads and the fake signatures and ‘stol’n and surreptitious copies’ and phoney ‘discovered’ documents and all that carry-on. I
know
the overwhelming odds are against this glove being anything but a fake. I merely ask you to accept that with the things lying there in front of me, I was knocked all of a heap.”

“Not only by them, I understand. You were half-drowned, half-drunk, dressed up in a millionaire’s clobber and not knowing whether the owner was making a queer pass at you or not.”

“I’m almost certain, not.”

“His behaviour, on your own account, seems to have been, to say the least of it, strange.”

“Bloody strange but not, I have decided, queer.”

“Well, you’re the judge,” said Jeremy Jones. He bent over his work-table and made a delicate slit down a piece of thin cardboard. He was building a set to scale for a theatre-club production of
Venice Observed.
After a moment he laid aside his razor-blade and looked up at Peregrine. “Could you make a drawing of it?” he said.

“I can try.”

Peregrine tried. He remembered the glove very clearly indeed and produced a reasonable sketch.

“It
looks
O.K.,” Jeremy said. “Late sixteenth century. Elaborate in the right way. Tabbed. Embroidered. Tapering to the wrist. And the leather?”

“Oh, fine as fine. Yellow and soft and wrinkled and old, old, old.”

“It may be an Elizabethan or Jacobean glove but the letter could be a forgery.”

“But why? Nobody’s tried to cash in on it.”

“You don’t know. You don’t know anything. Who was this chum Conducis bought it from?”

“He didn’t say.”

“And who was M.E. whose dear grandma insisted it had belonged to the Poet?”

“Why ask me? You might remember that the great-
great
-grandmother was left it by a Mrs. J. Hart. And that Joan Hart—”

“Née Shakespeare, was left wearing-apparel by her brother. Yes. The sort of corroborative details any good faker would cook up. But, of course, the whole thing should be tackled by experts.”

“I told you: I said so. I said wouldn’t he take it to the V. and A., and he gave me one of his weird looks; furtive, scared, blank—I don’t know how you’d describe them—and shut up like a clam.”

“Suspicious in itself.” Jeremy grinned at his friend and then said: “ ‘
I would I had been there.
’ ”

“Well, at that, ‘
it would have much amazed you.
’ ”

“ ‘
Very like. Very like.
’ What do we know about Conducis?”

“I can’t remember with any accuracy,” Peregrine said. “He’s an all-time-high for money, isn’t he? There was a piece in one of the Sunday supplements some time back. About how he loathes publicity and does a Garbo and leaves Mr. Gulbenkian wondering what it was that passed him. And how he doesn’t join in any of the joy and is thought to be a fabulous anonymous philanthropist. A Russian mum, I think it said, and an Anglo-Rumanian papa.”

“Where does he get his pelf?”

“I don’t remember. Isn’t it always oil? ‘Mystery Midas’ it was headed and there was a photograph of him looking livid and trying to dodge the camera on the steps of his Bank and a story about how the photographer made his kill. I read it at the dentist’s.”

“Unmarried?”

“I think so.”

“How did you part company?”

“He just walked out of the room. Then his man came in and said the car was waiting to bring me home. He gave me back my revolting, stinking pocket-book and said my clothes had gone to the cleaner and were thought to be beyond salvation. I said something about Mr. Conducis and the man said Mr. Conducis was taking a call from New York and would ‘quite understand.’ Upon which hint, off I slunk. I’d better write a sort of bread-and-butter, hadn’t I?”

“I expect so. And he owns The Dolphin and is going to pull it down and put up, one supposes, another waffle-iron on the South Bank?”

“He’s ‘turning over the idea’ in his mind.”

“May it choke him,” said Jeremy Jones.

“Jer,” Peregrine said. “You
must
go and look at it. It’ll slay you. Wrought iron. Cherubs. Caryatids. A wonderful sort of pot-pourri of early and mid-Vic and designed by an angel. Oh God, God, when I think of what could be done with it.”

“And this ghastly old Croesus—”

“I know. I know.”

And they stared at each other with the companionable indignation and despair of two young men whose unfulfilled enthusiasms coincide.

They had been at the same drama school together and had both decided that they were inclined by temperament, interest and ability to production rather than performance in the theatre. Jeremy finally settled for design and Peregrine for direction. They had worked together and apart in weekly and fortnightly repertory and had progressed to more distinguished provincial theatres and thence, precariously, to London. Each was now tolerably well known as a coming man and both were occasionally subjected to nerve-racking longeurs of unemployment. At the present juncture Peregrine had just brought to an auspicious opening the current production at The Unicorn and had seen his own first play through a trial run out of London. Jeremy was contemplating a decor for a masque which he would submit to an international competition for theatrical design.

He had recently bought a partnership in a small shop in Walton Street where they sold what he described as “very superior tatt. Jacobean purses, stomachers and the odd codpiece.” He was a fanatic on authenticity and had begun to acquire a reputation as an expert.

Jeremy and Peregrine had spent most of what they had saved on leasing and furnishing their studio flat and had got closer than was comfortable to a financial crisis. Jeremy had recently become separated from a blonde lady of uncertain temper: a disentanglement that was rather a relief to Peregrine, who had been obliged to adjust to her unpredictable descents upon their flat.

Peregrine himself had brought to uneventful dissolution an affair with an actress who had luckily discovered in herself the same degree of boredom that he, for his part, had hesitated to disclose. They had broken up with the minimum of ill-feeling on either part and he was, at the moment, heart-free and glad of it.

Peregrine was dark, tall and rather mischievous in appearance. Jeremy was of medium stature, reddish in complexion and fairly truculent. Behind a prim demeanour he concealed an amorous inclination. They were of the same age: twenty-seven. Their flat occupied the top story of a converted warehouse on Thames-side east of Blackfriars. It was from their studio window, about a week ago, that Peregrine, idly, exploring the South Bank through a pair of field-glasses, had spotted the stage-house of The Dolphin, recognized it for what it was and hunted it down. He now walked over to the window.

“I can just see it,” he said. “There it is. I spent the most hideous half hour of my life, so far, inside that theatre. I ought to hate the sight of it but, by God, I yearn after it as I’ve never yearned after anything ever before. You know, if Conducis does pull it down I honestly don’t believe I’ll be able to stay here and see it happen.”

“Shall we wait upon him and crash down on our knees before him crying, ‘Oh, sir, please sir, spare The Dolphin, pray do, sir’?”

“I can tell you exactly what the reaction would be. He’d back away as if we smelt and say in that deadpan voice of his that he knew nothing of such matters.”

“I wonder what it would cost.”

“To restore it? Hundreds of thousands no doubt,” Peregrine said gloomily. “I wonder if National Theatre has so much as thought of it. Or
somebody.
Isn’t there a society that preserves Ancient Monuments?”

“Yes. But ‘I know nothing of such matters,’ ” mocked Jeremy. He turned back to his model. With a degree of regret to which wild horses wouldn’t have persuaded him to confess, Peregrine began packing Mr. Conducis’s suit. It was a dark charcoal tweed and had been made by a princely tailor. He had washed and ironed the socks, undergarments and shirt that he had worn for about forty minutes and had taken a box that Jeremy was hoarding to make up the parcel.

“I’ll get a messenger to deliver it,” he said.

“Why on earth?”

“I don’t know. Too bloody shy to go myself.”

“You’d only have to hand it over to the gilded lackey.”

“I’d feel an ass.”

“You’re mad,” said Jeremy briefly.

“I don’t want to go back there. It was all so rum. Rather wonderful, of course, but in a way rather sinister. Like some wish-fulfillment novel.”

“The wide-eyed young dramatist and the kindly recluse.”

“I don’t think Conducis is kindly but I will allow and must admit I was wide-eyed over the glove. You know what?”

“What?”

“It’s given me an idea.”

“Has it, now? Idea for what?”

“A play. I don’t want to discuss it”

“One must never discuss too soon, of course,” Jeremy agreed. “That way abortion lies.”

“You have your points.”

In the silence that followed they both heard the metallic clap of the letter box downstairs.

“Post,” said Jeremy.

“Won’t be anything for us.”

“Bills.”

“I don’t count them. I daren’t,” said Peregrine.

“There might be a letter from Mr. Conducis offering to adopt you.”

“Heh, heh, heh.”

“Do go and see,” Jeremy said. “I find you rather oppressive when you’re clucky. The run downstairs will do you good.”

Peregrine wandered twice round the room and absently out at the door. He went slowly down their decrepit staircase and fished in their letter box. There were three bills (two, he saw, for himself), a circular and a typed letter.

“
Peregrine Jay, Esq. By Hand
”

For some reason that he could not have defined, he didn’t open the letter. He went out-of-doors and walked along their uneventful street until he came to a gap through which one could look across the river to Southwark. He remembered afterwards that his bitch-muse as he liked to call her was winding her claws in his hair. He stared unseeing at a warehouse that from here partly obscured The Dolphin: Phipps Bros., perhaps, where the man with the oilcan—Jobbins—worked. A wind off the river whipped his hair back. Somewhere downstream a hooting set up. Why, he wondered idly, do river-craft set up gaggles of hooting all at once? His right hand was in his jacket pocket and his fingers played with the letter.

With an odd sensation of taking some prodigious step he suddenly pulled it out of his pocket and opened it.

Five minutes later Jeremy heard their front door slam and Peregrine come plunging up the stairs. He arrived, white-faced and apparently without the power of speech.

“What now, for pity’s sake,” Jeremy asked. “Has Conducis tried to kidnap you?”

Peregrine thrust a sheet of letter paper into his hand.

“Go on,” he said. “Bloody read it, will you. Go on.” Jeremy read.

“Not true,” Jeremy said, looking over the tops of his spectacles.

“True. Apparently. As far as it goes.”

Jeremy read it again. “Well,” he said, “at least he doesn’t want you to approach him. We’ve done him wrong, there.”

“He doesn’t want to set eyes on me, thank God.”

“Were you passionately eloquent, my poor Peregrine?”

“It looks as if I must have been, doesn’t it? I was plastered, of course.”

“I have a notion,” Jeremy said with inconsequence, “that he was once wrecked at sea.”

“Who?”

“Conducis, you dolt. Who but? In his yacht.”

“Was his yacht called
Kalliope
?”

“I rather think so. I’m sure it went down.”

“Perhaps my predicament reminded him of the experience.”

“You know,” Jeremy said, “I can’t really imagine why we’re making such a thing of this. After all, what’s happened? You look at a derelict theatre. You fall into a fetid well from which you are extricated by the owner who is a multi-millionaire. You urge in your simple way the graces and excellence of the theatre. He wonders if before he pulls it down, it might just be worth getting another opinion. He turns you over to one of his myrmidons. Where’s the need for all the agitation?”

“I wonder if I should like M. Smythiman if I met him and if I shall take against S. Greenslade at first sight. Or he against me, of course.”