Printer's Error by Gladys Mitchell

Author:Gladys Mitchell [Mitchell, Gladys]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781477868805
Publisher: Thomas & Mercer
Published: 2013-12-31T08:00:00+00:00

• CHAPTER 8 •

The Nudist Sanctuary

“‘… we have seen strange things to-day, but stranger still remain.’”

•1•

“Another visit to Mrs. Saxant is indicated, I suppose,” said Bassin.

“Oh, lor!” said Carey, who did not like her very much. This opinion seemed to be shared by his aunt, who announced that she was not going to visit Mrs. Saxant that afternoon, but proposed to combine business with pleasure and see whether she could obtain permission to carry out an experiment in psychoanalysis at a large nudist colony which she understood existed in the neighbourhood.

“Nothing to do with the murders?” Carey enquired.

“Time alone will determine that,” she replied, with a hearty cackle.

“Well, I think I’d better call on Mrs. Saxant,” said Bassin. “I’ll let you both know how I get on.”

“And I,” said Carey, “am going to dig out Mr. Simplon and find out what he thinks he’s up to, setting fire to Saxant’s printing press.”

Bassin had been visited by one of those simple, profound ideas which always seem exciting, and often sustain the touchstone of being put actually to the test. He returned to the “Lion” with the others, changed his collar, took the uncorrected proofs out of the drawer, and carried them with him to the House on the Ridge.

Here, as he had supposed would be the case, he found Geoffrey Saxant. The senior partner was in a deck-chair smoking a pipe. He was looking at a magazine, flipping the pages idly, and lacking interest, it seemed, in his occupation; for he looked up the moment that Bassin began to walk across the lawn, although he could not have heard him.

“Good morning, Mr. Saxant,” said Bassin. “My name’s Bassin, of Bassin, Lillibud and Bassin, solicitors to the late Fortinbras Carn. Don’t get up, sir, please. I’ve come over to know whether you’d do me a favour.”

“With pleasure,” Geoffrey Saxant, a large man with a luxuriant moustache and piercing eyes—the whole face and embellishments singularly reminiscent, Bassin thought, of the late Lord Kitchener, of whom he had seen several photographs—got up out of the deck-chair ponderously and with unusual care, and, nipping the creases of his elegant trousers between finger and thumb, waggled them into shape before bestowing his full attention upon his visitor.

“It’s like this,” Bassin said. “Our late client, as you know, was expecting to have a book come out from your press, a thing called—”

“The Open-Bellied Mountain. Quite right. He was.”

“He never suggested to you that the order might be cancelled?”

“Good lord, no! He was fearfully keen on the thing. Talked about making it a bestseller. Under pressure from Senss, I always thought, although nothing was ever said about that to me.”

“Your partner did not want to print the book? He would have preferred to have another firm handle it?”

“Oh, Senss didn’t mind the book. His idea was to buy the copyright, and run off thirty thousand of the thing. Absolute nonsense, with the kind of plant we’ve got, and so I told him. Lyle’s might tackle it; they’re a

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