Silence Observed Read Free Page A

don’t you know , God help you? – Geoffrey Manallace died in 1922.”
    Appleby – although not precisely slow-witted even in what he had come to think of as his declining years – took a second to get at this. When he did, he once more couldn’t help laughing.
    “I congratulate you again,” he said presently. “Here is a completely new category of rarities. You and your fellow collectors have bumped up the value of Manallace’s forgeries to the point at which it becomes worth some ingenious person’s while to forge some. A forged forgery! I declare, I’ve never heard of such a thing before. Positively, my dear Gribble, it ought to be the pride of your collection.”
    But Charles Gribble refused to see the joke. Appleby was confirmed in the view that he had paid quite a lot of money for what he’d thought was Manallace’s Meredith. And its turning out to be – as one might say – X ’s Manallace’s Meredith was upsetting him correspondingly.
    Still, the money couldn’t mean much to Gribble. It was his vanity – his specialized collector’s vanity – and not his pocket that had received the really severe blow. Hadn’t he been declaring, rather noisily, that he’d never been swindled in his life? Well, now he had been. And – what was worse – he’d slipped up in a humiliatingly elementary way. Not to have scanned every inch of those papers for watermarks before putting down his cheque was a beginner’s error in this particular game.
    “Well, well,” Appleby said comfortingly, “I suppose you can take the matter up with your dealer, whoever he was. If you’re an important customer of his, he won’t be disposed to stand by the principle of caveat emptor . He’ll cancel the deal – and keep quiet about it, too.”
    Gribble was now looking puzzled as well as angry.
    “That’s no doubt true,” he said. “He’s a little fellow with whom I’ve done a good many deals. And entirely reliable in what he tells you about the provenance and so forth of what you buy.”
    “But he doesn’t always tell you a great deal?”
    “Oh, exactly. These fellows often have to be very discreet. And that makes it correspondingly important that one should be able to trust their word absolutely. Otherwise one may find oneself embarrassingly mixed up in questions of legal title and so on. This little chap has a high reputation. And when he explained to me that there had been a lady involved – a lady very decidedly in Geoffrey Manallace’s confidence who was equally decidedly not Geoffrey Manallace’s wife – I was perfectly willing to leave it at that. But now I must take it up with him. I’m confident he hasn’t been consciously cheating me. It’s he who’s been had.”
    “At least in the first instance,” Appleby said. “But, even if you’ve been had too, mayn’t you be on to something rather interesting? This forger of forgeries may operate in quite a big way – and he’s clearly up to the standards of Manallace himself. Moreover, you are at this moment the only person to have tumbled to his existence. Go after him. Study the finer points of his technique – and then look around for more of him in the light of that knowledge. You might manage a virtual corner in him. The situation, to my mind, is full of promise.”
    Gribble brightened. If he recognised irony in this, he didn’t resent it.
    “Perhaps there’s something in what you say,” he admitted. “Yes, there’s something in it.” He looked more cheerfully at his sheaf of papers, and then thrust them into a pocket. “And I’ll start by having a word with my little chap. Share a cab? Bloomsbury’s my direction.”
    Appleby shook his head, and watched Gribble out of the room. Gribble, it occurred to him, had shown the true collector’s instinctive caginess in failing to mention the little chap’s name. And Appleby glanced at the notice above the chimney piece. It fitted, he thought. That sort of acquisitive world is one in which,