The Moving Toyshop Read online

  At the cessation of noise the President had approached his window again. He now flung it open.

  ‘My dear Fen,’ he expostulated. ‘I’m glad you have left us a little of the college to carry on with. I feared you were about to demolish it utterly.’

  ‘Oh? Did you? Did you?’ said the driver. His voice was cheerful and slightly nasal. ‘You needn’t have worried, Mr President. I had it under perfect control. There’s something the matter with the engine, that’s all. I can’t think why it makes that noise after it’s stopped. I’ve tried everything for it.’

  ‘And I see no real necessity,’ said the President peevishly, ‘for you to bring your car into the grounds at all.’ He slammed the window shut, but without any real annoyance. The eccentricities of Gervase Fen, Professor of English Language and Literature and Fellow of St Christopher’s, were not on the traditional donnish pattern. But they were suffered more or less gladly by his colleagues, who knew that any treatment of Fen at his face value resulted generally in their own discomfiture.

  Fen strode with great energy across the lawn, passed through a gate in a mellow brick wall against which, in their season, the peaches bloomed, and entered the main garden of the college. He was a tall, lanky man, about forty years of age, with a cheerful, lean, ruddy, clean-shaven face. His dark hair, sedulously plastered down with water, stuck up in spikes at the crown. He had on an enormous raincoat and carried an extraordinary hat.

  ‘Ah, Mr Hoskins,’ he said to an undergraduate who was perambulating the lawn with his arm round the waist of an attractive girl. ‘Hard at it already, I see.’

  Mr Hoskins, large, raw-boned and melancholy, a little like a Thurber dog, blinked mildly. ‘Good morning, sir,’ he said. Fen passed on. ‘Don’t be alarmed, Janice,’ said Mr Hoskins to his companion. ‘Look what I’ve got for you.’ He felt in the pocket of his coat and produced a big box of chocolates.

  Meanwhile Fen proceeded into an open passage-way, stone-paved, which led from the gardens into the south quadrangle of the college, turned into a doorway on the right, passed the organ scholar’s room, ran up a flight of carpeted stairs to the first floor, and entered his study. It was a long, light room which looked out on the Inigo Jones quadrangle on one side and the gardens on the other. The walls were cream, the curtains and carpet dark green. There were rows of books on the low shelves, Chinese miniatures on the walls, and a few rather dilapidated plaques and busts of English writers on the mantelpiece. A large, untidy flat-topped desk, with two telephones, stood against the windows of the north wall.

  And in one of the luxurious armchairs sat Richard Cadogan, his face wearing the look of a hunted man.

  ‘Well, Gervase,’ he said in a colourless voice, ‘it’s a long time since we were undergraduates together.’

  ‘Good God,’ said Fen, shocked. ‘You’re Richard Cadogan.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well, of course you’re very welcome, but you’ve arrived at rather an awkward time … ’

  ‘You’re as unmannerly as ever.’

  Fen perched on the edge of the desk, his face eloquent of pained surprise. ‘What an extraordinary thing to say. Have I ever said an unkind word – ’

  ‘It was you who wrote about the first poems I ever published: “This is a book everyone can afford to be without.” ’

  ‘Ha!’ said Fen, pleased. ‘Very pithy I was in those days. Well, how are you, my dear fellow?’

  ‘Terrible. Of course you weren’t a professor when I saw you last. The University had more sense.’

  ‘I became a professor,’ Fen answered firmly, ‘because of my tremendous scholarly abilities and my acute and powerful mind.’

  ‘You wrote to me at the time that it was only a matter of pulling a few moth-eaten strings.’

  ‘Oh, did I?’ said Fen uneasily. ‘Well, never mind all that now. Have you had breakfast?’

  ‘Yes, I had it in hall.’

  ‘Well, have a cigarette, then.’

  ‘Thanks … Gervase, I’ve lost a toyshop.’

  Gervase Fen stared. As he offered his lighter, his face assumed an expression of the greatest caution. ‘Would you mind explaining that curious utterance?’ he asked.

  Cadogan explained. He explained at great length. He explained with a sense of righteous indignation and frustration of spirit.

  ‘We combed the neighbourhood,’ he said bitterly. ‘And do you know, there isn’t a toyshop anywhere there. We asked people who had lived there all their lives and they’d never heard of such a thing. And yet I’m certain I got the place right. A grocer, I ask you! We went inside, and it certainly was a grocer, and the door didn’t squeak either; but then there is such a thing as oil.’ He referred to this mineral without much confidence. ‘And on the other hand, there was that door at the back exactly as I’d seen it. Still, I found out that all the shops in that row are built on exactly the same plan.

  ‘But it was the police that were so awful,’ he moaned in conclusion. ‘It wasn’t that they were nasty or anything like that. They were just horribly kind, the way you are to people who haven’t long to live. When they thought I wasn’t listening they talked about concussion. The trouble was, you see, that everything looked so different in daylight, and I suppose I hesitated and expressed doubts and made mistakes and contradicted myself. Anyway, they drove me back to St Aldate’s and advised me to see a doctor, so I left them and came and had breakfast here. And here I am.’

  ‘I suppose,’ said Fen dubiously, ‘that you didn’t go upstairs at this grocery place?’

  ‘Oh, yes, I forgot to mention that. We did. There was no body, of course, and it was all quite different. That is, the stairs and passage were carpeted, and it was all clean and airy, and the furniture was covered with dust sheets, and the sitting-room was quite different from the room I’d been in. I think it was at that point that the police really became convinced I was crazy.’ Cadogan brooded over a sense of insufferable wrong.

  ‘Well,’ said Fen carefully, ‘assuming that this tale isn’t the product of a deranged mind – ’

  ‘I am perfectly sane.’

  ‘Don’t bawl at me, my dear fellow.’ Fen was pained.

  ‘Of course, I don’t blame the police for thinking I was mad,’ said Cadogan in tones of the most vicious reprehension.

  ‘And assuming,’ Fen proceeded with aggravating calm, ‘that toyshops in the Iffley Road do not just take wing into the ether, leaving no gap behind: what could inspire anyone to substitute a grocery shop for a toyshop at dead of night?’

  Cadogan snorted. ‘Perfectly obvious. They knew I’d seen the body, and they wanted people to think I was mad when I told them about it – which they’ve succeeded in doing. The crack on the head could be produced as the reason for my delusions. And the window of the closet was left open deliberately, so that I could get out.’

  Fen gazed at him kindly. ‘Very nice, as far as it goes,’ he said. ‘But it doesn’t explain the fundamental mystery of the business – why the grocery shop was turned into a toyshop in the first place.’

  Cadogan had not thought of this.

  ‘You see,’ Fen continued, ‘they couldn’t have known you were going to blunder in. You’re the fly in the ointment. The groceries were removed, and the toys substituted, for some entirely different purpose. Then they had to be switched back again, in any case.’

  Something like relief was coming back to Cadogan’s mind. For a while he almost wondered if he were, in fact, suffering from delusions. Belying all outward appearance, there was something extremely reliable about Fen. Cadogan assembled his sharp-cut, supercilious features into a frown.

  ‘But why?’ he asked.

  ‘I can think of several good reasons,’ said Fen gloomily. ‘But they’re probably all wrong.’

  Cadogan stubbed out his cigarette and groped for a fresh one. As he did so his fingers came in contact with the scrap of paper he had picked up near the body. He was astonished to realize that he had forgotten all about it until this
moment.

  ‘Here!’ he cried excitedly, pulling it out of his pocket. ‘Look! Tangible proof. I picked this up by the body. I didn’t remember I had it. I’d better go back to the police.’ He half rose, in some agitation, from his chair.

  ‘My dear fellow, calm yourself,’ said Fen, taking the scrap of paper from him. ‘Anyway, what is this thing tangible proof of?’ He read out the pencilled figures. ‘07691. A telephone number, apparently.’

  ‘Probably the number of the woman who was killed.’

  ‘Dear good Richard, what an extraordinary lack of perceptivity … One doesn’t carry one’s own telephone number about with one.’

  ‘She may have written it down for someone. Or it may not have been hers.’

  ‘No.’ Fen ruminated over the scrap of paper. ‘Since you seem to be forgetting rather a lot of things, I suppose you didn’t come across her handbag and look inside it?’

  ‘I’m certain it wasn’t there. Obviously, it’s the first thing I should have done.’

  ‘One never knows with poets.’ Fen sighed deeply and returned to the desk. ‘Well, there’s only one thing to be done with this number, and that is to ring it.’ He took off the receiver, dialled 07691, and waited. After a while there was an answer.

  ‘Hello.’ A rather tremulous woman’s voice.

  ‘Hello, Miss Scott,’ said Fen cheerfully. ‘How are you? Have you been long back from Baluchistan?’

  Cadogan gazed at him blankly.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said the voice. ‘But I’m not Miss Scott.’

  ‘Oh.’ Fen gazed at the instrument in great dismay, as though he were expecting it to fall apart at any instant. ‘Who is that speaking, please?’

  ‘This is Mrs Wheatley. I’m afraid you have the wrong number.’

  ‘Why, so I have. Very stupid of me. I’m sorry to have bothered you. Good-bye.’ Fen seized the telephone directory and flipped over the pages.

  ‘Wheatley,’ he murmured. ‘Wheatley … Ah, here it is. Wheatley, Mrs J. H., 229 New Inn Hall Street, Oxford 07691. The lady seemed to be in very good health. And I suppose you realize, my dear Cadogan, that it might be any one of a thousand exchanges besides this?’

  Cadogan nodded wearily. ‘Yes, I know,’ he said. ‘It’s hopeless, really.’

  ‘Look here, did you go round to the back of the shop with the police? The way you got out?’

  ‘Actually, no.’

  ‘Well, we’ll do that now. I want to have a look at the place, anyway.’ Fen considered. ‘I’ve got a tutorial at ten, but that can be put off.’ He scribbled a message on the back of an envelope and propped it up on the mantelpiece. ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘We’ll drive.’

  They drove. Driving with Fen was no pleasure to a man in Cadogan’s condition. It was all right in St Giles’ because St Giles’ is an immensely broad street where it is quite difficult to hit anything, except for the pedestrians who constantly scuttle across its expanses like startled hens, in a frantic and perilous gauntlet race. But they nearly smashed into a tradesman’s van in Broad Street, despite its width, they tore across the traffic lights by the King’s Arms just as they were changing, and they traversed Holywell Street and Long Wall Street in rather under a minute. Their eventual emergence into the thronged High Street Richard Cadogan describes as being by far the most horrifying episode of his entire adventure, for Fen was not the man to wait for anyone or anything. Cadogan stopped his eyes and ears and tried to meditate on the eternal verities. Yet somehow they did it, and were across Magdalen Bridge, and for the third time that morning he found himself in the Iffley Road.

  Fen brought Lily Christine III to a shuddering standstill some way away from the location of the phantom toyshop.

  ‘You’ve been here before,’ he pointed out. ‘Someone might recognize you.’ The car backfired. ‘I wish it wouldn’t do that … I’m going to spy out the land. Wait till I come back.’ He climbed out.

  ‘All right,’ said Cadogan. ‘You’ll find it quite easily. Just opposite that church.’

  ‘When I get back, we’ll go round behind the shop.’ Fen strode off with his customary vigour.

  The morning shopping rush had not yet begun, and the establishment of Winkworth, Family Grocer and Provisioner, was empty except for the grocer himself, a fat man swathed in priestly white, with a rotund and jolly face. Fen entered with a good deal of noise, observing, however, that the door did not squeak.

  ‘Good morning, sir,’ said the grocer amiably, ‘and what can I do for you?’

  ‘Oh,’ said Fen, who was looking curiously about him, ‘I want a pound of’ – he cast about in his mind for something suitable – ‘of sardines.’

  Manifestly the grocer was somewhat taken aback. ‘I’m afraid we don’t sell them by weight, sir.’

  ‘A tin of rice, then.’ Fen frowned accusingly.

  ‘I beg your pardon, sir?’

  ‘Are you Mr Winkworth?’ Fen hastily dismissed the subject of purchases.

  ‘Why, no, sir. I’m only the manager here. It’s Miss Winkworth as owns the shop – Miss Alice Winkworth.’

  ‘Oh. May I see her?’

  ‘I’m afraid she’s away from Oxford at the moment.’

  ‘Oh. Does she live above here, then?’

  ‘No, sir.’ The man looked at him oddly. ‘No one lives above here. And now, about your purchases – ’

  ‘I think I’ll leave them till later,’ said Fen blandly. ‘Much later,’ he added.

  ‘I shall be at your service any time, sir,’ the grocer answered magniloquently.

  ‘A pity’ – Fen watched the man closely – ‘a pity you don’t sell toys.’

  ‘Toys!’ the grocer ejaculated, and it was obvious that his astonishment was genuine. ‘Well, sir, it’s hardly likely you’d find toys in a grocer’s shop, is it?’

  ‘No, it isn’t, is it?’ said Fen cheerfully. ‘Nor dead bodies either. Good morning to you.’ He went out.

  ‘It’s no good,’ he told Cadogan, who was sitting in Lily Christine III, trying to adjust his bandage and staring in front of him. ‘I’m convinced that man knows nothing about it. Though he did behave rather queerly when I asked about the owner of the shop. A Miss Alice Winkworth, apparently.’

  Cadogan grunted ambiguously at this information. ‘Well, let’s go round to the back, if you think it will do any good.’ His tone indicated little confidence in this prospect.

  ‘And by the way,’ Fen added as they walked down the narrow, sloping alley-way which led to the back of the shops, ‘was there anyone about when you came with the police this morning?’

  ‘In the shop, you mean? No, no one. The police let themselves in with skeleton keys, or something. The door was locked by then.’

  They counted the creosoted wooden fences which marked off the little garden.

  ‘This is it,’ said Cadogan.

  ‘And someone’s been sick here,’ said Fen with distaste.

  ‘Yes, that was me.’ Cadogan peered in at the gate. The neglected overgrown enclosure, which had seemed so sinister in the half-light, looked quite ordinary now.

  ‘You see that small window?’ he said. ‘To the right of the front door? That’s the sort of closet place I got out of.’

  ‘Is it, now?’ Fen answered thoughtfully. ‘Let’s go and have a look at it.’

  The small window was still open, but it was higher from the ground than Cadogan had remembered, and even Fen, tall as he was, could not see inside. Somewhat disappointed they went on to the back door.

  ‘This is open, anyway,’ said Fen. Cadogan banged against a dustbin which stood beside it. ‘For goodness’ sake try to avoid making that terrible noise.’

  He moved inside with some caution, and Cadogan followed him. He was not very clear what they were supposed to be doing. There was a short corridor, with a kind of kitchen, untenanted, on the left, and the door of the closet, half open, on the right. From the shop in front came the murmur of voices and the bell of the cash register.

  But the c
loset contained cleaning things no longer. There were, instead, piles of groceries and provisions. And Cadogan was seized by a sudden doubt. Was the whole thing, after all, a delusion? Surely it was all too fantastic to be real? After all, it wasn’t impossible that he should have fallen on his way into Oxford, struck his head, and dreamed the entire business – its quality was nightmarish enough. He blinked about him. He listened. And then, in some alarm, he tugged Fen by the sleeve.

  There was no doubt about it. Footsteps were approaching the closet.

  Fen did not hesitate a moment. ‘Every man for himself,’ he said, leaped on to a pile of boxes and projected himself feet first out of the window. Unfortunately in so doing he knocked over the boxes with a great clatter, and thus cut off Cadogan’s line of retreat. There was no time to pile them up again, and the back door was out of the question – the handle of the closet was already turning. Cadogan seized a tin of baked beans in his right hand, and one of kidney pudding in his left, and waited, adopting a forbidding aspect.

  Fatly expectant, the grocer entered his closet. His eyes bulged and his mouth gaped in stupefaction when he saw the intruder, but to Cadogan’s surprise he made no aggressive movements. Instead, he raised both hands above his head, like an Imam invoking Allah, called out ‘Thieves! Thieves! Thieves!’ in a loud theatrical voice, and fled away as fast as his bulk would allow. Evidently he was much more afraid of Cadogan than Cadogan was of him.