I walked up Charing2 Cross Road and turned into the maze3 of streets that twist their way betweenNew Oxford4 Street and Covent Garden. All sorts of unsuspected shops did business there, antiqueshops, a dolls’ hospital, ballet shoes, foreign delicatessen shops.
I resisted the lure5 of the dolls’ hospital with its various pairs of blue or brown glass eyes, andcame at last to my objective. It was a small dingy6 bookshop in a side street not far from the BritishMuseum. It had the usual trays of books outside. Ancient novels, old text books, odds7 and ends ofall kinds, labelled 3d., 6d., 1s., even some aristocrats8 which had nearly all their pages, andoccasionally even their binding9 intact.
I sidled through the doorway10. It was necessary to sidle since precariously11 arranged booksimpinged more and more every day on the passageway from the street. Inside, it was clear that thebooks owned the shop rather than the other way about. Everywhere they had run wild and takenpossession of their habitat, breeding and multiplying and clearly lacking any strong hand to keepthem down. The distance between bookshelves was so narrow that you could only get along withgreat difficulty. There were piles of books perched on every shelf or table. On a stool in a corner,hemmed in by books, was an old man in a pork-pie hat with a large flat face like a stuffed fish. Hehad the air of one who has given up an unequal struggle. He had attempted to master the books,but the books had obviously succeeded in mastering him. He was a kind of King Canute of thebook world, retreating before the advancing book tide. If he ordered it to retreat it would havebeen with the sure and hopeless certainty that it would not do so. This was Mr. Solomon,proprietor of the shop. He recognized me, his fishlike stare softened12 for a moment and he nodded.
“Got anything in my line?” I asked.
“You’ll have to go up and see, Mr. Lamb. Still on seaweeds and that stuff?”
“That’s right.”
“Well, you know where they are. Marine13 biology, fossils, Antarctica—second floor. I had a newparcel in day before yesterday. I started to unpack14 ’em but I haven’t got round to it properly yet.
You’ll find them in a corner up there.”
I nodded and sidled my way onwards to where a small rather rickety and very dirty staircase ledup from the back of the shop. On the first floor were Orientalia, art books, medicine, and Frenchclassics. In this room was a rather interesting little curtained corner not known to the generalpublic, but accessible to experts, where what is called “odd” or “curious” volumes reposed15. Ipassed them and went on up to the second floor.
Here archaeological, natural history, and other respectable volumes were rather inadequatelysorted into categories. I steered16 my way through students and elderly colonels and clergymen,passed round the angle of a bookcase, stepped over various gaping17 parcels of books on the floorand found my further progress barred by two students of opposite sexes lost to the world in aclosely knit embrace. They stood there swaying to and fro. I said:
“Excuse me,” pushed them firmly aside, raised a curtain which masked a door, and slipping akey from my pocket, turned it in the lock and passed through. I found myself incongruously in akind of vestibule with cleanly distempered walls hung with prints of Highland18 cattle, and a doorwith a highly polished knocker on it. I manipulated the knocker discreetly19 and the door wasopened by an elderly woman with grey hair, spectacles of a particularly old-fashioned kind, ablack skirt and a rather unexpected peppermint-striped jumper.
“It’s you, is it?” she said without any other form of greeting. “He was asking about you onlyyesterday. He wasn’t pleased.” She shook her head at me, rather as an elderly governess might doat a disappointing child. “You’ll have to try and do better,” she said.
“Oh, come off it, Nanny,” I said.
“And don’t call me Nanny,” said the lady. “It’s a cheek. I’ve told you so before.”
“It’s your fault,” I said. “You mustn’t talk to me as if I were a small boy.”
“Time you grew up. You’d better go in and get it over.”
She pressed a buzzer20, picked up a telephone from the desk, and said:
“Mr. Colin … Yes, I’m sending him in.” She put it down and nodded to me.
I went through a door at the end of the room into another room which was so full of cigarsmoke that it was difficult to see anything at all. After my smarting eyes had cleared, I beheld21 theample proportions of my chief sitting back in an aged22, derelict grandfather chair, by the arm ofwhich was an old-fashioned reading or writing desk on a swivel.
Colonel Beck took off his spectacles, pushed aside the reading desk on which was a vast tomeand looked disapprovingly23 at me.
“So it’s you at last?” he said.
“Yes, sir,” I said.
“Got anything?”
“No, sir.”
“Ah! Well, it won’t do, Colin, d’you hear? Won’t do. Crescents indeed!”
“I still think,” I began.
“All right. You still think. But we can’t wait forever while you’re thinking.”
“I’ll admit it was only a hunch24,” I said.
“No harm in that,” said Colonel Beck.
He was a contradictory25 man.
“Best jobs I’ve ever done have been hunches26. Only this hunch of yours doesn’t seem to beworking out. Finished with the pubs?”
“Yes, sir. As I told you I’ve started on Crescents. Houses in crescents is what I mean.”
“I didn’t suppose you meant bakers’ shops with French rolls in them, though, come to think ofit, there’s no reason why not. Some of these places make an absolute fetish of producing Frenchcroissants that aren’t really French. Keep ’em in a deep freeze nowadays like everything else.
That’s why nothing tastes of anything nowadays.”
I waited to see whether the old boy would enlarge upon this topic. It was a favourite one of his.
But seeing that I was expecting him to do so, Colonel Beck refrained.
“Wash out all round?” he demanded.
“Almost. I’ve still got a little way to go.”
“You want more time, is that it?”
“I want more time, yes,” I said. “But I don’t want to move on to another place this minute.
There’s been a kind of coincidence and it might—only might—mean something.”
“Don’t waffle. Give me facts.”
“Subject of investigation27, Wilbraham Crescent.”
“And you drew a blank! Or didn’t you?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Define yourself, define yourself, boy.”
“The coincidence is that a man was murdered in Wilbraham Crescent.”
“Who was murdered?”
“As yet he’s unknown. Had a card with a name and address in his pocket, but that was bogus.”
“Hm. Yes. Suggestive. Tie up in any way?”
“I can’t see that it does, sir, but all the same….”
“I know, I know. All the same … Well, what have you come for? Come for permission to go onnosing about Wilbraham Crescent—wherever that absurd-sounding place is?”
“It’s a place called Crowdean. Ten miles from Portlebury.”
“Yes, yes. Very good locality. But what are you here for? You don’t usually ask permission.
You go your own pigheaded way, don’t you?”
“That’s right, sir, I’m afraid I do.”
“Well, then, what is it?”
“There are a couple of people I want vetted28.”
With a sigh Colonel Beck drew his reading desk back into position, took a ball-pen from hispocket, blew on it and looked at me.
“Well?”
“House called Diana Lodge29. Actually, 20, Wilbraham Crescent. Woman called Mrs. Hemmingand about eighteen cats live there.”
“Diana? Hm,” said Colonel Beck. “Moon goddess! Diana Lodge. Right. What does she do, thisMrs. Hemming30?”
“Nothing,” I said, “she’s absorbed in her cats.”
“Damned good cover, I dare say,” said Beck appreciatively. “Certainly could be. Is that all?”
“No,” I said. “There’s a man called Ramsay. Lives at 62, Wilbraham Crescent. Said to be aconstruction engineer, whatever that is. Goes abroad a good deal.”
“I like the sound of that,” said Colonel Beck. “I like the sound of that very much. You want toknow about him, do you? All right.”
“He’s got a wife,” I said. “Quite a nice wife, and two obstreperous31 children—boys.”
“Well, he might have,” said Colonel Beck. “It has been known. You remember Pendleton? Hehad a wife and children. Very nice wife. Stupidest woman I’ve ever come across. No idea in herhead that her husband wasn’t a pillar of respectability in oriental book dealing32. Come to think of it,now I remember, Pendleton had a German wife as well, and a couple of daughters. And he alsohad a wife in Switzerland. I don’t know what the wives were — his private excesses or justcamouflage. He’d say of course that they were camouflage33. Well, anyway, you want to knowabout Mr. Ramsay. Anything else?”
“I’m not sure. There’s a couple at 63. Retired34 professor. McNaughton by name. Scottish.
Elderly. Spends his time gardening. No reason to think he and his wife are not all right—but—”
“All right. We’ll check. We’ll put ’em through the machine to make sure. What are all thesepeople, by the way?”
“They’re people whose gardens verge35 on or touch the garden of the house where the murderwas committed.”
“Sounds like a French exercise,” said Beck. “Where is the dead body of my uncle? In thegarden of the cousin of my aunt. What about Number 19 itself?”
“A blind woman, a former school teacher, lives there. She works in an institute for the blind andshe’s been thoroughly36 investigated by the local police.”
“Live by herself?”
“Yes.”
“And what is your idea about all these other people?”
“My idea is,” I said, “that if a murder was committed by any of these other people in any ofthese other houses that I have mentioned to you, it would be perfectly37 easy, though risky38, toconvey the dead body into Number 19 at a suitable time of day. It’s a mere39 possibility, that’s all.
And there’s something I’d like to show you. This.”
Beck took the earthstained coin I held out to him.
“A Czech Haller? Where did you find it?”
“I didn’t. But it was found in the back garden of Number 19.”
“Interesting. You may have something after all in your persistent40 fixation on crescents andrising moons.” He added thoughtfully, “There’s a pub called The Rising Moon in the next street tothis. Why don’t you go and try your luck there?”
“I’ve been there already,” I said.
“You’ve always got an answer, haven’t you?” said Colonel Beck. “Have a cigar?”
I shook my head. “Thank you—no time today.”
“Going back to Crowdean?”
“Yes. There’s the inquest to attend.”
“It will only be adjourned41. Sure it’s not some girl you’re running after in Crowdean?”
“Certainly not,” I said sharply.
Colonel Beck began to chuckle42 unexpectedly.
“You mind your step, my boy! Sex rearing its ugly head as usual. How long have you knownher?”
“There isn’t any—I mean—well—there was a girl who discovered the body.”
“What did she do when she discovered it?”
“Screamed.”
“Very nice too,” said the colonel. “She rushed to you, cried on your shoulder and told you aboutit. Is that it?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said coldly. “Have a look at these.”
I gave him a selection of the police photographs.
“Who’s this?” demanded Colonel Beck.
“The dead man.”
“Ten to one this girl you’re so keen about killed him. The whole story sounds very fishy43 to me.”
“You haven’t even heard it yet,” I said. “I haven’t told it to you.”
“I don’t need telling,” Colonel Beck waved his cigar. “Go away to your inquest, my boy, andlook out for that girl. Is her name Diana, or Artemis, or anything crescenty or moonlike?”
“No, it isn’t.”
“Well, remember that it might be!”
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收听单词发音
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1
narrative
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| n.叙述，故事；adj.叙事的，故事体的 | |
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charing
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| n.炭化v.把…烧成炭，把…烧焦( char的现在分词 )；烧成炭，烧焦；做杂役女佣 | |
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maze
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| n.迷宫，八阵图，混乱，迷惑 | |
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Oxford
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| n.牛津（英国城市） | |
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lure
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| n.吸引人的东西，诱惑物；vt.引诱，吸引 | |
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dingy
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| adj.昏暗的，肮脏的 | |
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odds
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| n.让步，机率，可能性，比率；胜败优劣之别 | |
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aristocrats
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| n.贵族( aristocrat的名词复数 ) | |
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binding
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| 有约束力的，有效的，应遵守的 | |
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doorway
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| n.门口，(喻)入门；门路，途径 | |
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precariously
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| adv.不安全地；危险地；碰机会地；不稳定地 | |
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softened
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| （使）变软( soften的过去式和过去分词 )； 缓解打击； 缓和； 安慰 | |
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marine
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| adj.海的；海生的；航海的；海事的；n.水兵 | |
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14
unpack
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| vt.打开包裹（或行李），卸货 | |
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reposed
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| v.将（手臂等）靠在某人（某物）上( repose的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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steered
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| v.驾驶( steer的过去式和过去分词 )；操纵；控制；引导 | |
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17
gaping
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| adj.口的；张口的；敞口的；多洞穴的v.目瞪口呆地凝视( gape的现在分词 )；张开，张大 | |
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highland
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| n.(pl.)高地，山地 | |
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discreetly
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| ad.(言行)审慎地，慎重地 | |
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buzzer
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| n.蜂鸣器；汽笛 | |
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21
beheld
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| v.看，注视( behold的过去式和过去分词 )；瞧；看呀；（叙述中用于引出某人意外的出现）哎哟 | |
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aged
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| adj.年老的，陈年的 | |
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disapprovingly
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| adv.不以为然地，不赞成地，非难地 | |
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24
hunch
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| n.预感，直觉 | |
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contradictory
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| adj.反驳的，反对的，抗辩的；n.正反对，矛盾对立 | |
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hunches
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| 预感，直觉( hunch的名词复数 ) | |
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investigation
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| n.调查，调查研究 | |
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vetted
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| v.审查（某人过去的记录、资格等）( vet的过去式和过去分词 )；调查；检查；诊疗 | |
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lodge
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| v.临时住宿，寄宿，寄存，容纳；n.传达室，小旅馆 | |
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hemming
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| 卷边 | |
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31
obstreperous
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| adj.喧闹的，不守秩序的 | |
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32
dealing
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| n.经商方法，待人态度 | |
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33
camouflage
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| n./v.掩饰，伪装 | |
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retired
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| adj.隐退的，退休的，退役的 | |
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verge
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| n.边，边缘；v.接近，濒临 | |
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thoroughly
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| adv.完全地，彻底地，十足地 | |
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perfectly
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| adv.完美地，无可非议地，彻底地 | |
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risky
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| adj.有风险的，冒险的 | |
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mere
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| adj.纯粹的；仅仅，只不过 | |
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persistent
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| adj.坚持不懈的，执意的；持续的 | |
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41
adjourned
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| （使）休会， （使）休庭( adjourn的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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42
chuckle
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| vi.／n.轻声笑，咯咯笑 | |
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43
fishy
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| adj. 值得怀疑的 | |
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