Challenge 10

Top Secret: For your eyes only

December Fourteenth, Nineteen Hundred and Two My time here in my library is drawing to a close, and I must record the truth of what happened here. My employer, Mr Rogers, was a kind and decent man who did not deserve for his ambitions to be thwarted, and I have always regretted what happened to him. I am not sure he ever fully recovered from the loss, and it was never my intention to cause him any pain. But my library is my life, and I could not bear to part with it. I tried so very hard to dissuade him from his plan to donate the collection to the City Library, reminding him of the work we had done together to acquire some of the rarest editions of the great American authors. To see those finely bound volumes side by side and to know that they were mine to care for is all that matters. While Mr Rogers liked the process of building the collection, I think it was always a game to him and that he never truly appreciated the treasures entrusted to us. I am sure the City would have cared for them, but I do not believe that they would have loved them as I do, and I could not allow them to be removed from their home in the Manor. Once I realised that he would not be dissuaded I decided I needed to act. While I had a small fund saved from my generous salary, it was nowhere near enough to offer to buy the whole collection from Mr Rogers, but it was sufficient to buy the services of a printer who was prepared to help me. Together we produced careful copies of some of the most valuable items in my Library intending to replace the originals. Each was flawed in some way that showed it could not have been the original work, and I intended to reveal this to Mr Rogers, hoping that he would then feel obliged to withdraw his offer to the City, rather than face the risk that the forgeries would be discovered. He had boasted of the value and quality of the books, and I believed that the potential loss of face would be too much to bear. Unfortunately my printer misunderstood my intentions, and offered the forgeries to his contact in England who he believed would offer the best price for the copies. I had no idea that he had done so, nor that he had arranged for poor Mr Isles to visit the library to see for himself the quality of the works. The death was accidental, though I blame myself for it. If I had not embarked on my scheme Mr Isles would still be alive. I found his body at the foot of the ladder clutching one of our best forgeries, The Gold Bug, and immediately realised that I was in serious danger. The police might well send the book for analysis and the forgery had been designed to be detectable. I was about to remove it when the housekeeper entered, and seeing the body let out a scream that woke everyone in the East Wing. It was too risky to take the book once she had seen it there and there was no opportunity to replace it. To my surprise and initial relief, the police quickly established that the death was an accident, and since nothing had apparently been stolen or damaged (apart from the broken library ladder of course) they dropped the investigation. My fear of discovery was alleviated, but now it did not seem wise to reveal the fact that the book was a forgery. To do so would open an investigation that might link the intruder to me via my printer friend, and so I prepared an alternative strategy: I would try to undermine Mr Rogers’ campaign for governor by suggesting that he might have been involved somehow in the death. I prepared a note that seemed to implicate him and hid it in the binding of the book, arranging for it to be discovered. I carefully prepared a trail of evidence linking Mr Rogers to the book sellers, hoping that this would cast enough shadow over his reputation that he would feel obliged to stand down from the election. After much persuading and, I must admit, hinting that I might be forced to publish the evidence if he did not agree, Mr Rogers assented to withdraw his offer and to maintain the collection at the Manor. I did not think I would ever be capable of such acts, and yet here I am a forger, conspiracist and blackmailer. But not a murderer. And so to my Library. I have loved it and cared for it for thirty years and. I have thought hard about how I could ensure its future. Miss Warne does not love it as I do and, as the Librarian rather than the legal owner, I had only one way to protect it. I have spent the last six years slowly replacing each and every book in the collection with a forgery. The originals I keep in a book depository in the city, with a small number of my favourite works on a hidden shelf behind the wood panelling in my rooms. Whatever Miss Warne decides to do with the books in her Library when I am gone, my Library will remain hidden, its collection intact. In my will I have made arrangements for the books to be fully reunited in the depository, and after a suitable interval (defined by the statute of limitations), to be sold. They are too precious to lock away for ever and far too valuable to return to a family that does not value them. There is a market for them and the collectors who vie for them will at least have demonstrated how much they care. For such a magnificent collection the proceeds should be substantial, and I have given instructions that money should be used to establish a trust fund dedicated to the education of librarians, teachers, and book binders. We cannot control the future, but we can at least try to shape it.