Page:Zangwill-King of schnorrers.djvu/216

202 O'Donovan was not to be seen. I passed through the Buying Department, where the employees were beating down the prices of "kind remembrances," and through the Hire Department, where the clerks were turning up their noses at the old memories that had been pledged so often, into the Amnesia Agency. There I found the great organiser peering curiously at a sensitised plate.

"Oh," he said, "is that you? Here's a curiosity."

"What is it?" I asked.

"The memory of a murder. The patient paid well to have it off his mind, but I am afraid I shall miss the usual second profit, for who will buy it again? "

"I will!" I cried, with a sudden inspiration. "Oh! what a fool I have been. I should have been your best customer. I ought to have bought up all sorts of memories, and written the most veracious novel the world has seen. I haven't got a murder in my new book, but I'll work one in at once. Eureka!"

"Stash that!" he said revengefully. "You can have the memory with pleasure. I couldn't think of charging an old friend like you, whose moving from an address, which I've sold, to 22, Albert Flats, Victoria Square, Westminster, made my fortune."

That was how I came to write the only true murder ever written. It appears that the seller, a poor labourer, had murdered a friend in Epping Forest, just to rob him of half- a-crown, and calmly hid him under some tangled brushwood. A few months afterwards, having unexpectedly come into a fortune, he thought it well to break entirely with his past, and so had the memory extracted at the Agency. This, of course, I did not mention, but I described the murder and the subsequent feelings of the assassin, and launched the book on the world with a feeling of exultant expectation.