Calamity in Kent, A British Library Crime Classic by John Rowland

have little difficulty in having a view of the flat soon; I didn’t quite know what Shelley would think about what I was doing: he would probably think it strictly unethical; that, however, didn’t matter.
    The great thing was that I was getting in, and I was now managing to acquire confidential information that would be of the greatest value in my work for The Daily Wire.
    Within five minutes, indeed, I was in Tilsley’s apartment. This was on the fourth floor, at the back of the building. It was an unpretentious flat—probably one of the cheapest in the building, I thought. But if Tilsley was actually involved in some black market racket it was highly probable that he would live in a comparatively unostentatious way. The super-spiv, driving a Rolls-Royce and wearing a fur coat, is for the most part a figure of fiction. The man who is living on the wrong side of the law is usually a man who is anxious not to attract undue attention to himself.
    Certainly John Tilsley was a man who lived in a quiet, comparatively inexpensive way. His flat consisted of a living-room, with a gas-cooker hidden by a curtain in an alcove, and a bedroom. Neither of the rooms was big, and they were furnished with a quiet simplicity that spoke eloquently of the taste of the man who had bought the furniture.
    â€œAre these flats let furnished?” I asked the porter, who had followed me into the room.
    â€œNo,” he said. “This is Tilsley’s furniture that you can see here, guv’nor.”
    I was impressed, I must admit. Somehow I had thought of the late lamented Mr. Tilsley as a rather flashy type. And the way in which this pleasant little sitting-room was furnished showed clearly enough that, whatever might have been his faults, a lack of taste was quite certainly not one of them.
    I glanced around. It was no good to think of doing the orthodox things in searching. The police would have done all those things. First of all I did what I always do when I come into a strange room—I looked at the bookshelf. This was a tall, narrow piece of early Victorian mahogany. It had six shelves, crammed tightly with books. I glanced idly at them. They were, at first sight, the miscellaneous stuff that most vaguely literary people accumulate. There were a few novels—P. G. Wodehouse, Edgar Wallace, Aldous Huxley, George Orwell. A very mixed batch. I did not spend much time over these, however. My job was not to investigate the late Mr. Tilsley’s literary taste.
    The non-fiction shelves interested me more. There were a batch of text-books of chemistry. Not the ordinary school text-books, however, such as one finds in most households where books are not quickly disposed of when not any longer of use. These were advanced text-books, some dealing, I noticed with a feeling of some excitement, with oils and petroleums. There was even a book of the purification of petroleum and gasoline. There were also books on the alkaloids. It looked as if there might be something in Shelley’s hunch that Tilsley was in the petrol black market. He was certainly interested in the chemical background of petrol and oil in a way which was, to say the least, unusual.
    Actually, these text-books were the only indication of anything unusual. The other books, as I have said when I wrote of the novels, were a perfectly normal assortment of works, such as one found in any household of ordinary people.
    But wait! I pulled myself up as I glimpsed a little black notebook. It was pushed down at the end of a shelf. I fished in my pocket. The book which I had found in Tilsley’s pocket at Broadgate (and which I had kept to myself, thus, I suppose, not playing quite fair with Shelley) was an exact twin. And the scribbles in the Broadgate book had all been obviously written in some sort of code which I had, as yet, had no chance to try to decipher. I had carefully kept the original notebook in the background, and I now thought that in this new