THE HANDS OF ESAU
(A GeeGee Dapple mystery}

Charles George Gordon Dapple—GeeGee to his friends, and the Tall Terror to generations of copyboys on the Lincolnshire Reflector—was singing happily, to a tune of his own devising, what he liked to think of as “The Editor’s Hymn:”

“I stand a wreck on Error’s shore,
da-dum, da-dum, da-dum . . . .”

 He gathered up the contents of his letterbox and marched toward the kitchen, where morning tea—a ritual of his solitary retirement from the newspaper to the village of Silk Willoughby—was waiting.

“Where is the promise of my years,
Once written on my brow?
Da-dum, da . . . . ” Hullo, what’s this?

The song broke off as GeeGee weighed on his right palm an envelope with the London return address of The Literary England Poetry Annual. The envelope was lighter and thinner, he noticed with surprise, than the one containing five poems that he had posted five months ago, in answer to an advertisement. He opened it with slightly more haste than usual and took out two rejected poems and a letter.

“Congratulations, Mr. Dapple,” the letter began. “The editors of Literary England are pleased to inform you that three of your poems—“Silk Willoughby Summer,” “February Evening,” and “Nightscape”—have been accepted for publication in the next Annual. You will receive . . . .”

A veil of discretion should be drawn over the scene of a poet’s first acceptance, especially when the poet is a retired newspaper editor of more than 60 winters, with a reputation in Lincolnshire journalism for skepticism, sobriety, and scholarly calm. Let it be said that GeeGee recovered more quickly than some. Within minutes he was able to finish reading the letter from Hubert Arthur, editor of Literary England.

“You will receive a complimentary copy of the magazine,” it said. “Your presence is also requested in the magazine’s chambers, Great Russell Street, at 7 o’clock on the evening of June 17, during which it is hoped you will read one of your accepted poems. A prize of 100 pounds will be presented to the author of the best contribution to the Annual.”

So it was that on a balmy June evening, GeeGee found himself in a dusty, first-floor hall in London, on a low dais behind a standing microphone, facing the predicament of anyone six feet or taller who has ever followed a five-foot-tall speaker to the platform. Twenty seconds of battle with a balky adjusting ring brought the microphone to the neighborhood of GeeGee’s chin, and he heard himself reading:

Nightscape
 
Great constellations riding on the night
are anchored in our failing human view.
Our reckonings err, by a parsec or two;
our eyes confuse the new and ancient light.
So we make neighbours of two stars that keep
cool distance in the universal deep . . . .

When he had finished, GeeGee sat down amid warm applause from his 20 fellow poets. He was followed to the platform by a short and tubercular youth wearing a primrose boutonniere, and a second Battle of the Microphone was fought. Other readers came and went, until at last Mr. Hubert Arthur, rotund and beaming, stepped forward to announce that the anonymous but distinguished jurors had awarded the Grand Prize of 100 pounds to Lady Hyllerie Thomas for “Swallows.”

The applause this time was more than warm. Lady Hyllerie, whose name GeeGee vaguely recalled, had been a sensation from the moment the audience glimpsed her mane of auburn hair, Grecian features, and snowy shoulders rising from the perianth of an aquamarine evening gown. Now she inclined her tall beauty above the fortunate Mr. Arthur, accepted the magazine’s cheque, and said a few soft words, lost to everyone beyond the first row of chairs. A camera flashed, and the evening dissolved into the rattle of teacups and literary chat. It was, GeeGee reflected later as he prepared for bed in his hotel, a little world of its own and a long way from Silk Willougby.

Yet not such a long way, he discovered two days later upon opening his Reflector. Also on the night of June 17, he read, thieves had broken into the home of Lord Edmund Thomas on the north edge of Lincoln and had stolen a wall safe containing nearly a million pounds worth of jewelry, including the Star of Madras diamond. The theft had occurred while Lord Edmund and Lady Hyllerie were in London attending, respectively, a meeting of his company’s directors and a literary reception.

The thieves had entered through a window, cutting the glass expertly to avoid an alarm. They then had removed the small safe in its entirety from the wall behind a sliding mirror. The break-in had been discovered the next morning by Lady Hyllerie’s personal secretary, who had helped the Thomases board the train to London the previous day. The jewelry was fully insured, the story concluded.

GeeGee considered the incident as he drank his morning tea at the kitchen table. He now clearly recalled Lord Edmund and Lady Hyllerie—a handsome young couple whose names and pictures appeared from time to time in the Reflector.

Something stirred faintly in GeeGee’s memory. He reached for the telephone on the worktop, rang a Sleaford number, and waited for his sister to make her slow progress to the telephone under the stairs. At 89, GeeGee reflected, Vicki might be England’s last unalloyed Victorian. Her name, Victoria Regina Dapple, matched the décor of her home and the moral convictions forged during 30 years as headmistress of a girls’ school. She had raised the four orphaned Dapple boys; one reason GeeGee had stayed in Silk Willoughby after his wife’s death was to be next door to Sleaford, without being quite next door to Vicki.

That voice that finally said “Yes?” somehow conveyed in that syllable a disdain encompassing not only the telephone but the whole of the modern world.

“Vicki,” GeeGee said, “I know you detest the telephone, and I try not to ring you oftener than once a month, but I have an odd question . . . .

“Charles.” The rusted murmur at the other end silenced him firmly. “You may forgo the tedious apologies. You ring me at least once a week, and I’m grateful. Also, no question of yours could possibly surprise me. You have been asking them since you were five years old and your brother Raglan put you up to asking me whether all things were possible to God, and, if so, whether He could make a stone bigger than He could lift.”

“As I recall, you successfully avoided answering,” GeeGee said, “but this question is easier. I seem to remember your saying something once about Lord Edmund Thomas’s wife Hyllerie. Something that happened when her grandparents were sending their children to your school.”

There was a long pause. “Yes, well.” Vicki’s voice was like a whisper from across the galaxy. “You must already have realized, Charles, that there is something very wrong with that business in the Reflector about the stolen jewelry. Hyllerie Thomas was a Millborough. The Millboroughs lied for each other. When I had Hyllerie’s mother as a student, she could lie like a bishop.”

GeeGee posed his own doubts the next day to an old friend, Inspector Wilfred Crabbe of the Lincoln police, who received them and GeeGee skeptically in his office. “Something peculiar about the robbery?” he repeated. “I hardly think so, old chum—although the insurance company would dearly love it if we could find something.”

“Unfortunately for the company, it all looks very straightforward. Nobody in the house. Housekeeper had been let go two months back. Lord and Lady Thomas turned on the window alarms and locked up before they left, and everything about the break-in itself was tickety-boo. Footprints under the window and all that. The safe was small, but it took metal torches to cut it loose from the steel wall moorings. Very professional. The insurance lads would like to show that the jewelry wasn’t properly protected, but that safe was proof against any amateur. Those gents cut it right out of the wall. It must have taken them half the night.”

 “You don’t suppose his Lordship might have hired some safecrackers and split the take with them, do you?” GeeGee suggested.

“Not bloody likely,” Crabbe replied. “Who’s going to turn over nine-tenths of a haul like that after doing all the work? And there would always be the threat of blackmail. Sorry, but this one looks like a straight heist.”

“And you’re sure the jewelry was actually in the safe?” GeeGee asked.

Crabbe sighed. “The secretary saw Lady Hyllerie put it in earlier in the day before they left for the station. Lady Hyllerie was showing her a weakened clasp that had finally broken. The jewels had been in the family for generations, and the secretary knew them as well as she knew her own bracelets. Anyway, one could hardly mistake the Star of Madras in that famous silver brooch.”

“And the secretary?” GeeGee persisted.

“Sixty-eight years old and a pillar of rectitude,” Crabbe replied. “She had worked for Lord Edmund’s mother, and Lady Hyllerie took her over after the mother’s death. Also, she had an airtight alibi. Twenty minutes after the train pulled out with the Thomases aboard, she was drinking tea at her daughter’s house, and she was with the daughter and family the whole night.”

“Somehow I suspect that Lord and Lady Thomas have equally good alibis,” GeeGee said.

 “They do,” Crabbe replied. “Lord Edmund met with the directors of his company early in the evening—they’re going through a bad patch right now, I’m told—and then about 10 p.m. he and Lady H. came back to their hotel, the Regency, where they’re well known. Room service took champagne up about midnight. Hyllerie had been at some sort of literary tea fight earlier, while her husband was at his meeting. We talked to the editor whose magazine threw the party, and he confirmed everything—even gave us a picture of Lady Hyllerie receiving an award.”

Crabbe rummaged through the welter of papers on his desk and produced a glossy print of a familiar scene—Lady Hyllerie accepting a check for 100 pounds from Hubert Arthur, the editor of Literary England. A sloppy photo, GeeGee thought, with the microphone obscuring her chin, though not her décolletage. A Reflector photographer would have done better, or he would have answered to Charles G.G. Dapple.

 “I don’t see how she could have a better alibi,” Crabbe concluded, “unless you were at the party and saw her yourself.”

“As a matter of fact,” GeeGee said glumly, “I was and I did.”

In the post next morning was GeeGee’s complimentary copy of The Literary England Poetry Annual. He read over his poems and those of Lady Hyllerie Thomas. Without the sensational gown, “Swallows” struck him as no more than ordinary.

 Two days later, GeeGee became a Literary Figure. His morning Reflector carried a headline, “Lincolnshire Poets Honored,” above a small, inside story about Lady Hyllerie’s award. Next to the story was the picture Crabbe had shown him, with a credit: “Photo by courtesy of Literary England.” There was nothing slow about the magazine’s publicity department.

The last paragraph read: “Charles G.G. Dapple, editor emeritus of the Reflector, also had poems chosen for inclusion in the Annual.” At the very moment, GeeGee thought wryly, some former colleague at the Reflector was probably tacking the cutting on the paper’s bulletin board and appending a bawdy comment.

 Ah, well, what did they know, the Philistines? Doomed to labor in the muck of daily journalism, what could they understand of the creative air in which the contributors to Literary England lived and moved and had their being? GeeGee thought of those contributors as a lonely and rather brave band, toiling in isolation until the magazine brought them together from across England. Even then, he thought, they might have remained almost strangers had not Mr. Hubert Arthur bustled about, praising their work, introducing them to each other, and posing them for the photographer. And of course the stunning Lady Hyllerie had thrown everyone else into the shade.

GeeGee examined the Reflector’s picture again. It was an excellent likeness of Lady Hyllerie, even to the mole on her right cheek. GeeGee had noticed it during the reception: the only blemish on an otherwise perfect face. He would have liked to have seen the whole face again, with that perfect Grecian chin . . . .

At that moment, GeeGee knew, with awful clarity, that he had been a fool, and that no matter what his former colleagues were scrawling across the cutting on the bulletin board, it was no more than he deserved. He rang inspector Crabbe and spoke earnestly and confessionally with him. Crabbe was decent enough not to laugh, at least until he got off the phone. When the inspector called back two days later, his tone was matter of fact.

 “You were quite right, GeeGee,” he said, “but how did you happen to notice the microphone? Nobody notices things like that. It’s just part of the background—or foreground, in this case.”

 “You damn well notice it when you’re 6-foot-4 and can’t even say thank you without adjusting the thing,” GeeGee replied. “Hubert Arthur had just announced the check presentation, and he’s a short, round little chap. When Lady Hyllerie came up to accept, she didn’t use the microphone, because it was too low for her. And when she spoke, nobody could hear her.

“But in the photo, the microphone was level with her chin. So the photo couldn’t have been of the actual presentation.”

Crabbed cleared his throat with a sound like a lorry shifting gears and described his interview with Lady Hyllerie. “She’s an accomplished liar,” he said, “and she gave us the full treatment. How dare you suggest such a thing about us of the upper classes, and all that. As though she hadn’t grown up as a butcher’s daughter in Grantham.

 “She caved in, though, when we showed her the blow-ups of the picture Hubert Arthur gave to us and to the newspaper, and of the same shot taken by the photographer at the reception. Arthur squealed on the photographer, who was quite happy top give us his undeveloped reception film.

 “The difference in microphone heights stuck out, of course, but there were some other differences—a few age lines makeup couldn’t hide and a little difference in the cheekbones. The mother is more classically beautiful than Lady Hyllerie, although they did their best to look exactly alike, even to the mother’s putting on a mole to match Hyllerie’s.

“The disguise was quite good enough to fool the Regency staff. Lord Edmund and his mother-in-law were drinking champagne to celebrate the success of the scheme about the time Hyllerie was finishing lifting the safe at the house.”

“Genesis 27:22,” GeeGee said. “The oldest con—the voice is Jacob’s but the hands are Esau’s. That explains why the mother didn’t use the microphone.”

He paused a moment before adding, “But didn’t you say the robbery was a professional job?”

 “It was, very nearly,” Crabbe replied. “Lord and Lady Thomas had been working on the safe supports with torches for weeks—ever since they sacked the housekeeper—and covering the work with quick-drying plaster during the day. All Hyllerie had to do was cut the last quarter-inch and drag the safe to her car. Then it was off to a fence who could dispose of the safe and get the jewelry to the buyer. The cash plus the insurance settlement would have just about saved Lord Edmund’s business.”

“You’ve got to hand it to them for nerve,” Crabbe added. “A year of planning. Soliciting poems and printing an issue of a phony magazine. Sending out the publicity picture of the real Hyllerie getting the check. Drawing everyone’s attention to ‘Lady Hyllerie’s’ smashing gown and having the real Hyllerie walk around outside the house in men’s shoes. They were cool customers.”

 “But who in the world was Hubert Arthur?” GeeGee asked.

“A professional actor and a cousin of the mother’s,” Crabbe replied. “The photographer knew something was up when he shot the scene in the empty hall with Arthur and Lady Hyllerie—then came back and shot an identical scene a week later at the party. But they paid him well, and Arthur seems to have had something on him about phony passport photos.”

GeeGee looked wistfully across the kitchen table at his copy of a very rare publication. “It seems a lot of trouble to go to,” he said, “and someone could have tripped them up at any time.”

“Yes,” Crabbe said, “but the important thing was to make the lie big enough—to have an alibi no one would even think of questioning. They didn’t want us or the insurance company to begin doubting.”

“And you know these struggling literary sorts,” Crabbe added. “Desperate to get published, touchingly grateful when they are, not inclined to ask questions.” There was the faintest ghost of a chuckle as the inspector hung up.

GeeGee picked up The Literary England Poetry Annual and slipped it into a drawer. A scrap of song flitted through his head once more:

Where is the promise of my years,
once written on my brow . . . .

He remembered that the lines were by Adah Isaacs Menken, an actress known mostly for appearing on stage half nude and strapped to the back of a horse. She also wrote poetry.

“Nightscape” wasn’t half bad, GeeGee decided, and it hadn’t really been published. It might be just the thing for Pumpernickel: A Poetic Potpourri. He turned to his typewriter and began to type and hum.

©2009 William Bridges