'No relatives. Parents dead in a car smash. I mean it's like he never had an existence.'
'Shit,' said Hutchmeyer.
Which was more or less the word that sprang to Frensic's mind as he put the phone down after MacMordie's call. It was bad enough losing an author who hadn't written a book without having demands for background material on his life. The next thing would be the press, some damned woman reporter hot on the trail of Piper's tragic childhood. Frensic went into Sonia's office and hunted through the filing cabinet for Piper's correspondence. It was, as he expected, voluminous. Frensic took the file back to his desk and sat there wondering what to do with the thing. His first inclination to burn it was dissipated by the realization that if Piper had written scores of letters to him from almost as many different boarding-houses over the years, he had replied as often. The copies of Frensic's replies were there in the file. The originals were presumably still in safe keeping somewhere. With an aunt? Or some ghastly boarding-house keeper? Frensic sat and sweated. He had told MacMordie that Piper had no relatives, but what if it turned out that he had an entire lineage of avaricious aunts, uncles and cousins anxious to cash in on royalties? And what about a will? Knowing Piper as well as he did, Frensic thought it unlikely he had made one. In which case the matter of his legacy might well end up in the courts and then...Frensic foresaw appalling consequences. On the one hand the anonymous author demanding his advance, and on the other...And in the middle the firm of Frensic & Futtle being dragged through the mud, exposed as the perpetrators of fraud, sued by Hutchmeyer, sued by Piper's relatives, forced to pay enormous damages and vast legal costs and finally bankrupted. And all because some demented client of Cadwalladine had insisted on preserving his anonymity.
Having reached this ghastly conclusion Frensic took the file back to the cabinet, re-labelled it Mr Smith as a mild precaution against intruding eyes and tried to think of some defence. The only one seemed to be that he had merely acted on the instructions of Mr Cadwalladine and since Cadwalladine & Dimkins were eminently respectable solicitors they would be as anxious to avoid a legal scandal as he was. And so presumably would the genuine author. It was small consolation. Let Hutchmeyer get a whiff of the impersonation and all hell would be let loose. And finally there was Sonia, who, if her attitude on the phone had been anything to go by, was in a highly emotional state and likely to say something rash. Frensic reached for the phone and dialled International to put through a call to the Gramercy Park Hotel. It was time Sonia Futtle came back to England. When he got through it was to learn that Miss Futtle had already left, and should, according to the desk clerk, be in mid-Atlantic.
''Is' and 'above',' corrected Frensic before realizing that there was something to be said for American usage.
That afternoon Sonia landed at Heathrow and took a taxi straight to Lanyard Lane. She found Frensic in a mood of apparently deep mourning.
'I blame myself,' he said, forestalling her lament, 'I should never have allowed poor Piper to have jeopardized his career by going over in the first place. Our only consolation must be that his name as a novelist has been made. It is doubtful if he would ever have written a better book had he lived.'
'But he didn't write this one,' said Sonia.
Frensic nodded. 'I know. I know,' he murmured, 'but at least it established his reputation. He would have appreciated the irony. He was a great admirer of Thomas Mann you know. Our best memorial to him must be silence.'
Having thus pre-empted Sonia's recriminations Frensic allowed her to work off her feelings by telling the story of the night of the tragedy and Hutchmeyer's subsequent reaction. At the end he was none the wiser.
'It all seems most peculiar,' he said when she had finished. 'One can only suppose that whoever did it made a terrible mistake and got the wrong person. Now if Hutchmeyer had been murdered...'
