Devices and Desires Read Free

in the country?”
    “I hate the country and I particularly loathe flat country. Think of the public money you’ll be saving. I’ll come down—or is it up?—if he’s worth looking at. Decent of you, Adam. Have a good leave.”
    Only Cummings would have had the cheek. But the request was not unreasonable, made, as it was, to a colleague his senior only by a matter of months, and one who had always preached co-operation and the common-sense use of resources. And it was unlikely that his holiday would be interrupted by the need to take even a cursory glance at the Whistler, Norfolk’s notorious serial killer, dead or alive. He had been at his work for fifteen months now and the latest victim—Valerie Mitchell, wasn’t it?—was his fourth. These cases were invariably difficult, time-consuming and frustrating, depending as they often did more on good luck than good detection. As he made his way down the ramp to the underground car-park he glanced at his watch. In three-quarters of an hour he would be on his way. But first there was unfulfilled business at his publisher’s.

3
    The lift at Messrs. Herne & Illingworth in Bedford Square was almost as ancient as the house itself, a monument both to the firm’s obstinate adherence to a bygone elegance and to a slightly eccentric inefficiency behind which a more thrustful policy was taking shape. As he was borne upwards in a series of disconcerting jerks, Dalgliesh reflected that success, although admittedly more agreeable than failure, has its concomitant disadvantages. One of them, in the person of Bill Costello, Publicity Director, was waiting for him in the claustrophobic fourth-floor office above.
    The change in his own poetic fortunes had coincided with changes in the firm. Herne & Illingworth still existed insofar as their names were printed or embossed on book covers under the firm’s ancient and elegant colophon, but the house was now part of a multinational corporation which had recently added books to canned goods, sugar and textiles. Old Sebastian Herne had sold one of London’s few remaining individual publishing houses for eight and a half million and had promptly married an extremely pretty publicity assistant, who was only waiting forthe deal to be concluded before, with some misgivings but a prudent regard for her future, relinquishing the status of newly acquired mistress for that of wife. Herne had died within three months, provoking much ribald comment but few regrets. Throughout his life Sebastian Herne had been a cautious, conventional man who reserved eccentricity, imagination and occasional risk-taking for his publishing. For thirty years he had lived as a faithful, if unimaginative, husband, and Dalgliesh reflected that, if a man lives for nearly seventy years in comparatively blameless conventionality, that is probably what his nature requires. Herne had died less of sexual exhaustion—assuming that to be as medically credible as puritans would like to believe—than from a fatal exposure to the contagion of fashionable sexual morality.
    The new management promoted their poets vigorously, perhaps seeing the poetry list as a valuable balance to the vulgarity and soft pornography of their bestselling novelists, whom they packaged with immense care and some distinction, as if the elegance of the jacket and the quality of the print could elevate highly commercial banality into literature. Bill Costello, appointed the previous year as Publicity Director, didn’t see why Faber and Faber should have a monopoly when it came to the imaginative publicizing of poetry, and was successful in promoting the poetry list despite the rumour that he never himself read a line of modern verse. His only known interest in verse was his presidency of the McGonagall Club, whose members met on the first Tuesday of every month at a City pub to eat the landlady’s famous steak-and-kidney pudding, put down an impressive amount of drink and recite to each other the more