disagreement between the Bar and the Law Society, and that 62 New Square had been chosen as a particular object of hostile bombardment. The air was heavy with the dust of shattered plaster; the walls and timbers shuddered at the pounding of hammers and the pitiless reverberation of electric drills; muscular men in string vests were attacking the building with blowtorches. In short, the builders were in.
In such conditions, an offer of tea seemed unlikely: I retreated to the Chambers next door. Even there, though tea was available in generous quantities, the level of noise remained too high for civilised discourse. Moreover, Julia had an urgent Opinion to write on the provisions of the latest Finance Act. She proposed, therefore, that while drinking my tea I should read the most recent letters from her aunt Regina.
“Some rather odd things,” said Julia, “seem to be going on in Parsons Haver. I’m beginning to feel slightly worried about it.”
24 High Street
Parsons Haver
West Sussex
Friday, 16th July
Dear Julia,
I’m sorry I had to cancel our lunch. In London nowadays, I suppose, you’re all quite used to people being burgled and wouldn’t dream of letting it interfere with your social engagements. Down here, though, it’s still something of an event.
It happened just before midnight last night. Daphne was asleep in bed, but she was woken up by the vulture screeching. It doesn’t usually do that at night, she says, so she knew that something was wrong. She ran downstairs in her nightdress and into the drawing room and saw a man trying to break open the display cabinet — the one that contains the Book.
She screamed and he turned around. He had a knife or a chisel or something like that in his hand and she was frightened that he was going to attack her. She ran out through the front door and across the road to the Vicarage, still screaming, and rang the doorbell until Maurice answered it.
Maurice rang the police and then me, so I was up most of the night soothing Daphne and making tea for people. Which is why I didn’t feel at all like catching the train to London this morning.
The police came in the form of a young sergeant and an even younger woman police constable. They were quite pleasant and sympathetic, but they didn’t seem very hopeful of catching the burglar. One can’t really blame them — he had a black balaclava over his head and a long black raincoat over the rest of him, so Daphne wasn’t able to give them much of a description. She said that she thought he was quite tall, but that seemed only to mean that he was taller than she is.
They’re treating it as a fairly amateur sort of crime. They think that the burglar found the back door unlocked — it was open when they went round the house — and was simply making the most of his chances. Daphne, on the other hand, swears that it was locked when she went to bed and he must have used something quite sophisticated, like a skeleton key, to open it. She’s convinced that he broke in on purpose to steal the Book.
But when the police asked if they could examine it she wouldn’t let them — in fact she became almost hysterical at the idea. It isn’t lawful for anyone except the Custodian to read the Book or even touch it, and if they do, something terrible will happen to them. The police didn’t find this very helpful.
Even Maurice can’t persuade her to explain sensibly what the Book is supposed to be or what’s in it or why anyone might want to steal it. She simply says that the Book has its enemies and the enemies of the Book are the enemies of the Custodian, but it isn’t lawful for her to try to explain who they are.
She’s quite worryingly peculiar on the subject. If the idea of being the Custodian cheered her up and gave her a bit of confidence in herself one wouldn’t mind, however silly it was, but in fact I think it rather frightens her. She talks about the Book as if it weren’t a thing but a person — not a very nice person either, someone rather cruel and vindictive, who’ll punish her if she doesn’t do what it wants her to.
She also thinks she can read the future in it. She came round a couple of days ago, when Griselda was working in my garden, to warn her very earnestly that during August she should keep away from animals — not the most practical advice to a woman with three cats.
According to the Book, apparently, August is going to be the Month of the Animals. This means that animals are going to be very significant in all our lives and intensify the effect of all the other influences. For some reason August is a dangerous month for Griselda, so it’ll be particularly dangerous for her to have anything to do with animals. For me, on the other hand, it’s going to be rather prosperous, so something involving animals should be especially lucky for me.
I’m afraid we treated all this fairly lightheartedly, and poor Daphne became quite upset — she really seemed to believe that “something terrible” was going to happen to Griselda because of an animal. So Griselda had to promise to keep away from farms and zoos and wildlife parks, and be very careful of the bad-tempered Alsatian in the garden next door to the Vicarage.
Well, if that’s the best the Book can do in the way of prophesying the future I don’t think anyone’s likely to go to the trouble of stealing it. I expect the police are right and the burglar was just a casual sneak thief, but the trouble is that Daphne doesn’t think so and is frightened that he’ll come back.
We’re all hoping that when Isabella’s estate is dealt with and the Rectory can be sold Daphne will forget all this nonsense about the Book and get on with having a proper life in a sensible sort of way. The house alone must be worth between three and four hundred thousand, so she should be able to manage pretty comfortably on the income from the proceeds. Griselda and I have all sorts of plans for her — we’re going to transform her appearance and move her to a nice little flat in Brighton and enroll her in some not too demanding training course and make some nice friends for her of her own age. We haven’t quite got round to finding her a suitable husband yet, but I dare say we will.
So her future, as you see, is in good hands, but none of it can actually happen until the solicitors have sorted out the estate. And lawyers, if you don’t mind my saying so, don’t seem to deal with things very quickly.
Yours with much love,
Reg
I wondered whether Daphne might not be right in thinking that the burglar had had some specific objective. She was the heiress to a professional blackmailer: could he have been in search of some item of incriminating evidence, perhaps a document of some kind, which he believed to be now in her possession? Might he be in some way connected with — might he even be — the man in the black Mercedes? Was this the possibility that was worrying Julia?
Observing, however, that Julia was still diligently writing her Opinion, I continued my reading without disturbing her.
24 High Street
Parsons Haver
West Sussex
Monday, 2nd August
Dear Julia,
Though one should not speak ill of the dead, I am prepared in Isabella’s case to make an exception. She is managing — and it is, in her case, a considerable achievement — to make more trouble dead than alive. She has left poor Daphne in a quite impossible position, and Maurice thought you might know if there was anything to be done about it.
As I mentioned in my last letter, we’ve all been a little worried about the poor girl, but the one thing we
