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Stop Press
Book: Stop Press Read Online Free
Author: Michael Innes
Tags: Stop Press
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“the Spider” is sheer encouragement to the confusion of mind which you say has overtaken your father.’
    ‘It seems convenient. Actually, I ought to have spoken so far of Spider One.’
    ‘Spider One?’
    ‘The master-crook. You see no sooner was Mrs Birdwire burgled by Spider One than Spider Two – the super-detective of recent years – fell to and began clearing the matter up.’
    ‘The dickens he did!’
    ‘Spider Two – daddy’s Spider Two – has a habit of reading newspaper reports of mysterious crimes and then sending the police vital hints which they’d otherwise have missed. Mrs Birdwire’s Spider Two did just that. The red paint had been bone dry when the gardener discovered it early in the morning. The Spider wrote to the police and pointed out that the only ordinary paint that would dry as quickly as that was some foreign stuff that was just beginning to be imported in small quantities. And sure enough that gave the police a line they’d missed. They traced a purchase of this stuff from a London warehouse by an unknown customer. This unknown had paid cash and asked that the stuff be delivered at some address in a suburb. It was duly delivered at an empty house and the unknown was there to receive it; he seems just to have commandeered an unoccupied house at random, breaking in at the back. No trace of him was ever found again. But Mrs Birdwire’s curios and what-not were neatly arranged round the floor of the principal room. If Spider Two hadn’t pointed out a valid detective process they would presumably never have been recovered. The thing, in fact, was a large, broad, pointless joke. Am I most frightfully boring you?’
    ‘I repeat that I am fascinated. Your story opens vistas of bewilderment. May I remind you, however, that you have yet to explain–’
    But Timmy Eliot had jumped up. ‘And now’, he said, ‘will you come down?’
    ‘Come down?’
    ‘Home with me for the weekend to see if we can get to the bottom of the business. I expect you can work me an exeat from Benton. And dons are always weekending.’
    Winter scrambled from his chair, genuinely perturbed. ‘Young man, steady on! And will you tell me why you have suddenly come to me with all this in such a hurry?’
    ‘Will you come down?’
    ‘And just what warrant may there be for the fantastic statement that this joker knows things your father’s precious character thought of doing, and didn’t?’
    Timmy grinned, as if conscious of the strength of his bait. ‘That’s the real beguilement, isn’t it – how can a joker give the impression of peering into a writer’s mind? Once more, will you come down?’
    Close by the chapel bell began its urgent and perfunctory peal. Winter glanced at a calendar, dived for his surplice. ‘Lord help me!’ he cried in despair. ‘I have to read Numbers xxxiii and I haven’t looked up the pronunciations.’ He turned to Timmy. ‘To your bath. And if you breakfast with me at half past eight I’ll make up my mind then.’
    Left to himself, Winter gave a moment to the dubious contemplation of his fire. In Timmy Eliot’s story there was a hint of matter sufficiently baffling to interest him; nevertheless he was inclined to call himself a fool for half-promising to investigate. He hurried downstairs with a mounting sense of his own rashness. In the quadrangle he ran into several of his colleagues and drew comfort from the thought that the adventure, should he undertake it, would afford a holiday from familiar faces.
    As it happened, this as a miscalculation. A good many familiar faces were to take part in the comedy of the next few days: some of them were actually about him in the quadrangle now. And the comedy was to be of the classical sort which is based on character. But for Gerald Winter’s rashness – but for a rashness which repeated itself almost within the hour – the history of a celebrated writer of romances would have been wholly different.
    After-dinner procedure in
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