“The last month or so,” Annie said, “two things about our man Fletcher have been driving me a little crazy.”
“These are associated with him leading you to the Meg Grantham memoir?”
“Entirely independent of it, I’m positive.”
“You’ve got no beef with Fletcher on that score?”
“I’m deliriously happy and eternally thankful.”
“But there are these two irritations, which are what?”
Annie took a deep breath, then said in a small rush, “Fletcher has halitosis, and he’s nursing a small crush on yours truly.”
“A crush? How do you define a small one as opposed to the kind composers once wrote song lyrics about?”
“In Fletcher’s case,” Annie said, “he stands so close to me, he’s invading my space, and he praises what he calls my entrancing beauty. My shell-like ears. The nobility of my cheekbones. The soft swell of my breasts.”
“Breasts?” I said. “When breasts get mentioned, it’s usually a prelude to hitting on the woman.”
“Crang, my darling, coming from Fletcher, his lines sound like he memorized a teenage boys’ guide to romancing adolescent girls.”
“Is this an insecurity thing of some brand that Fletcher’s labouring under?”
“Obviously,” Annie said. “But not often found in a man of sixty or more.”
“Maybe if he cleaned up the halitosis, his problem with women would fade.”
“Forget the halitosis. I’m beginning to feel sorry I mentioned it.”
“But if he’s standing in your space, the bad breath must be an annoying factor.”
“Criticizing his mouth odours sounds too much like I’m belittling the man, which is the last thing I want to do.”
“Okay, the halitosis is off the boards.”
“Besides, as everybody knows, it’s a minor health problem that’s easily remedied.”
“Somebody should tell Fletcher.”
“I agree with all my heart,” Annie said. “But the somebody isn’t going to be me.”
I fiddled in the bowl of unsalted nuts, looking for cashews. I found two and ate both of them.
“Honestly, sweetie,” Annie said, reaching across the table for my hand, “don’t be hurt by what I told you about Fletcher and his weird brand of romance.”
“Surely, my dear,” I said, affecting a deep Sam Elliott voice, “you’ve taken note of how studly I am in all manner of personal relations?”
“Except when you get a bee in your bonnet.”
“You think I’m going to get obsessed about Fletcher and his crush?”
“Heavens, no, but you’ve got a bee about the forged Elizabeth Barrett Browning poetry.”
“There’s that.”
“And in my view it’s going to lead nowhere except trouble.”
“Trouble?”
Annie held up a hand in to signal stop. “Don’t say it!”
“Say what?”
“‘Trouble is my middle name.’”
“You just beat me to it. But it’s one of my mantras, so I’ll say it again.”
“Please don’t,” Annie said.
I thought about it, and in the end the line didn’t cross my lips again, but given my past experiences with bizarre cases, I couldn’t help thinking it was a line that accurately reflected part of my work-a-day life.
Chapter Eight
The John P. Robarts Research Library at the University of Toronto went up forty years ago when the brutalist style in architecture was all the rage in some influential Toronto circles. The university happened to be one of those circles, and Robarts was erected, massive and aggressively uninviting in the brutalist manner. But Annie told me if I cut to the left halfway up the broad sweep of cement stairs leading to the front doors, I’d find architectural relief in an adjunct to Robarts called the Thomas Fisher Rare Books Library. She also said that someone at the Fisher could no doubt enlighten me further about the world of antiquarian book forgeries.
The bearded guy in denim at the Fisher’s reception desk said Ms. Berrigan was the likeliest person to solve puzzles on the subject in question. He spoke in a voice somewhere between a whisper and a hush, telling me to step past his desk and into the library while he summoned Ms. Berrigan.
Inside, an atrium soared through five open storeys of shelved books. The look was both majestic and serene. No wonder the bearded guy spoke softly. It was a natural reaction to so much peace and calm. No hint of brutalism in these tranquil surroundings. I could have heard a pin drop if I had one to drop. The Fisher was making me feel light-headed, an effect I didn’t mind at all.
In the midst of my musing, the woman I took to be Ms. Berrigan approached.
“You’re Mr. Crang, the criminal lawyer who wants to know about forged antiquarian books?” she said.
I allowed that I was.
“I’m Kate Berrigan,” she said.
Ms. Berrigan was in her fifties. She spoke softly and had the sort of peaches-and-cream complexion you saw on actresses in old English films on Netflix, Deborah Kerr for one, Greer Garson for another.
“Why don’t you tell me how widely you’re already informed?” Ms. Berrigan said.
“Harry Buxton Forman and Thomas James Wise aren’t total strangers to me.”
“They’re a classic case,” Ms. Berrigan said. “Greed combined with cunning.”
“Tell me about the cunning.”
We settled down at a long table behind the reception desk, and Ms. Berrigan began what seemed to be a practised dissertation. She described how Forman and Wise had devoted years to priming the market for a supposed earlier edition of Barrett Browning’s Portuguese Sonnets before the two fraudsters reached the actual selling stage. This was a part of the forgery story Fletcher hadn’t told me. As Ms. Berrigan explained, Forman and Wise planted announcements of the existence of the early Portuguese Sonnets in obscure literary journals; they arranged for its listing in a Barrett Browning bibliography; and they conned a much-respected critic of the day named Edmund Gosse into writing an elaborate explanation for why the sonnets were produced in Reading in 1847. Once Forman and Wise had established this past history of the earlier edition of the Portuguese poems, phony as it all was, they allowed a copy of the Reading Sonnets to come up for sale at an auction in 1901.
“It brought a very substantial four hundred and forty dollars,” Ms. Berrigan said to me.
“And the money kept rolling in from other copies of the Reading Sonnets?”
Ms. Berrigan nodded. “Not to mention the profits from their forgeries of other poets. Tennyson, Matthew Arnold, and so on.”
“The two scamps prospered?”
“Wise particularly because he outlived Forman by twenty years.”
“And,” I said, getting to the issue that was more to the immediate point, as far as my assignment from Fletcher was concerned, “their legacy lives on in a sense?”
Ms. Berrigan let a bit of time go by before she tried to answer my question.
Then