Maybrick--a Problem in Logic

[caz]

Good afternoon, Caz.

I didn't know I had any readers.

No, I have no evidence. This was just my interpretation of what Keith said, and I admit I may be mistaken. Keith holds the purse strings for this info, much as I suspect Anne once held the purse strings in Goldie Street.

If I assumed Anne was the late payer, would it be fundamentally more awful than you assuming Mike was? Do we really know who made the initial call to H. P. Bookfinders? (Asking for a friend).

Hi R.J,

Could you remind me ‘what Keith said’ to allow you to interpret his words in the way you did? And what ‘purse strings’ do you imagine he holds?

Admittedly, Mike’s affidavit from January 1995 tells us that Anne took the initiative and purchased the little red diary ‘roughly round about January, February 1990... through a firm [whose name Mike can’t remember] in the 1986 Writers Year Book’.

However, relying on Mike’s affidavit might not be such a good idea, because the letter from Martin Earl to Shirley Harrison, dated June 23^rd 1999, begins: ‘I can confirm we had an inquiry from a Mr Barrett who asked us to locate a Victorian Diary. We did locate such a diary for 1891 and that was supplied to Mr Barrett on March 26^th 1992.’

It’s up to you who you choose to believe: Mike in his sworn affidavit, which is quite specific about Anne making the purchase, or Martin Earl, whose records point to Mike Barrett making the initial inquiry.

The thing is, R.J, I don’t think I was ‘assuming’ anything. I was asking for your evidence that it was Anne who was ‘put down as a late payer’. As a matter of fact, it was Martin Earl who had Mike’s name highlighted in his records as a late payer.

Incidentally, Keith informs me that he sent you an email on July 30^th 2004 with all of this information – so now your own memory has been suitably refreshed, you can phone that friend, who I’m sure is just itching to know the answer and will be delighted, whether it confirms an assumption, corrects it, or still leaves room for further speculation - presumably that Anne may yet have made the enquiry, but using her husband's name. At least it should now be clear that it was NOT Anne whose name was put down as a late payer.

Hi Caz - I do have to run, but why was it up to Melvin to check with O & L? Wasn't anyone on Feldman's team investigating Barrett? Or by now were they so convinced they had an old document on their hands that they didn't bother? I can't call Harrison, nor Gray incompetent---that's your word. At least they gave it the old college try.

You can't drag the lake after it has been cemented over, as I am sure Keith has discovered by now--he did say something about re-checking with O & L this past winter.

I am rather surprised that HP Bookfinder sent the 1891 appointment book to Goldie Street before receiving their 25 quid. I'd think they would have demanded payment up front. I've never bought a book in my life without forking out in advance. Did the check (be it signed 'Barrett' or 'Williams' bounce, or what?)

I don't recall if Lord Orsam addressed this point, or can say whether this was standard procedure in 1992. It makes me wonder if there was something more going on than mere 'late payer.' In the U.S. we print "In God We Trust" on all folding money. In other words, we trust Allah, Krishna, Jehovah, etc., but us humanoids must place cash on the barrelhead.

P.S. "my readers," all three of them, had the intelligence to know that I was recreating a speculative dialogue between Barrett and the bookseller. 'Williams' was speculation based on other events. I've seen you engage is this sort of thing on these threads many a-time, and everyone knows it was fantasy and speculation and nothing to do with reality. But thanks for asking and clarifying this point for my three readers. Cheers.

I suppose if they had 'late payers,' the must have allowed purchases to be made on credit. Quite a liberal system, but I guess they 'know where you live'

May I ever so humbly suggest, R.J, that you now go back and do some reading to remind yourself of dates and the relationship between Melvin Harris and Paul Feldman. That was one of the main reasons we wrote ‘Ripper Diary’, to try and present an accurate chronology of the events. Why not also listen again to the taped conversation between Alan Gray and Mike Barrett when they were outside O&L on November 7^th 1994? Mike was intent on going in to check their records, but Gray felt the time was not right, telling Mike they would need ‘some pretty heavy guns’. He said it had to be done professionally, and Mike appeared to be in no fit state on that occasion. If Gray ever did make an official approach to O&L, I don’t think I have seen any record of it. Keith did follow this up, when he finally got to hear the story, but drew a blank. Even though he has been told that no records are now held, he still plans a return visit to O&L, as and when the world gets back to some semblance of normality.

My understanding, which you may be able to confirm or correct, is that Gray was in close contact with Melvin Harris, not Feldman or Shirley, in which case Mike’s O&L story, and other physical evidence he was using to support his forgery claims, such as his Sphere book, was being fed mainly to one side of the investigation, and ended up in his affidavit the following January. As far as I am aware, there is no evidence that anyone on the ‘other side’, including Anne, was aware of what was going on, let alone the finer details of what Mike was going to claim next, until after he’d gone and done it. And the dates he gave were not exactly helpful to either side, were they? If the first reference to the red diary was in that affidavit, and Feldman knew nothing about it before then, only learning of its existence from Anne, when she heard that Mike had referred to it, it’s difficult to see how it could have been investigated any sooner than it was.

Anyway, the cheque didn’t bounce. It was signed by Anne, as I’m pretty certain Mike had no bank account in May 1992. She rang Keith in November 1995 to say the bank had just sent her a photocopy of it, which she would send to him along with her cheque book. They arrived on November 16^th. Keith recalls this as the starting point for being able to trace Martin Earl, as the cheque carried the stamp mark of where it had been paid in.

In that context, can you be sure that Mike was being truthful when he claimed that Anne had asked for the red diary ‘specifically recently’ when he saw her at her home address? How recently, I wonder? Because if she didn’t know he was planning to make a sworn statement, using the red diary she had paid for to implicate her in forgery, why would she be asking Mike for it? And, more to the point, if Mike knew he had the red diary and could use it against her, why would he have agreed to hand it over, giving away yet another bit of his forgery jigsaw puzzle, after his sister had relieved him of the writing materials and supposedly destroyed them for his protection? And if he didn’t bring the red diary with him on the day he visited Anne, he must have retrieved it for her even more ‘specifically recently’. Did she offer to collect it from where he was living, or did he make a return visit to her home specially? Maybe their relationship was not in such a mess after all. Or up one minute, down the next? We do have Mike’s affidavit, in which he claims that around the first week of December 1994, Anne had visited him and she ‘was all over me and we even made love’, but it was all very odd because just as quickly ‘she threatened me and returned to her old self...’.

This reminds me of some of the most disturbing dreams I had around the time of my divorce in 2013. My ex would be there with me, and then change in an instant from nice to nasty. I’d wake up with a feeling of dread, quickly followed by relief that it was only a very bad dream. But then, I wasn’t pouring gallons of booze down my neck, so I could tell the difference and wasn’t suffering from ‘altered awareness’ or anything of the sort.

The first week of December 1994 was an interesting and eventful one for the Barretts. I wonder which day they fitted in their steamy love making session. On Tuesday 6^th, Mike went to his solicitor’s office, where he was finally able to hand over a copy of the Sphere book to Alan Gray, to be used to incriminate himself in his affidavit the following month. On Wednesday 7^th, Anne’s divorce from Mike came through. And then on Thursday 8^th, the Evening Standard quoted Melvin Harris: ‘There is now no doubt whatsoever that they [the diary] are a recent fake...The identities of the three people involved in the forgery will soon be made known.’

Of course, these events may have been totally unrelated, and I may be seeing a pattern – aside from the sex – that is not really there. But I can’t see the Christmas decorations and for the life of me I don’t know why not.

Finally for now, dear reader, I invite you to compare and contrast the following:

An interesting aspect of the transaction is that Graham was put down as a late payer. She delayed paying for the diary for quite a long time. Does this mean that she was initially refusing to cooperate with Barrett's little scheme, or was she deliberately and rather cleverly trying to diminish the paper trail by making it look like the red diary hadn't been purchased until after the 'Maybrick' journal had already been made public?

P.S. "my readers," all three of them, had the intelligence to know that I was recreating a speculative dialogue between Barrett and the bookseller. 'Williams' was speculation based on other events. I've seen you engage is this sort of thing on these threads many a-time, and everyone knows it was fantasy and speculation and nothing to do with reality. But thanks for asking and clarifying this point for my three readers. Cheers.

I do wonder if R.J actually knows the difference between stating something as fact and indulging in ‘fantasy and speculation’ that has nothing to do with reality. If he doesn’t, I’m not sure how his three readers are expected to do so. Moreover, the question I actually asked, and the point I wanted clarified, was his statement about Anne Graham being put down as the late payer. R.J knew this because he freely admitted he had no such evidence for it, but then I read his curious P.S, whereby he manages to make it appear that I had actually asked him for evidence of an imagined conversation between Mike and the bookseller.

So while I don’t suggest he deliberately engages in ‘this sort of thing’ on a regular basis, it might be more worrying if it happened by accident.

Love,

Caz
X

[rjpalmer]

Hi Caz - I do have to run, but why was it up to Melvin to check with O & L? Wasn't anyone on Feldman's team investigating Barrett? Or by now were they so convinced they had an old document on their hands that they didn't bother? I can't call Harrison, nor Gray incompetent---that's your word. At least they gave it the old college try.

You can't drag the lake after it has been cemented over, as I am sure Keith has discovered by now--he did say something about re-checking with O & L this past winter.

I am rather surprised that HP Bookfinder sent the 1891 appointment book to Goldie Street before receiving their 25 quid. I'd think they would have demanded payment up front. I've never bought a book in my life without forking out in advance. Did the check (be it signed 'Barrett' or 'Williams' bounce, or what?)

I don't recall if Lord Orsam addressed this point, or can say whether this was standard procedure in 1992. It makes me wonder if there was something more going on than mere 'late payer.' In the U.S. we print "In God We Trust" on all folding money. In other words, we trust Allah, Krishna, Jehovah, etc., but us humanoids must place cash on the barrelhead.

P.S. "my readers," all three of them, had the intelligence to know that I was recreating a speculative dialogue between Barrett and the bookseller. 'Williams' was speculation based on other events. I've seen you engage is this sort of thing on these threads many a-time, and everyone knows it was fantasy and speculation and nothing to do with reality. But thanks for asking and clarifying this point for my three readers. Cheers.

I suppose if they had 'late payers,' the must have allowed purchases to be made on credit. Quite a liberal system, but I guess they 'know where you live'

[caz]

Evidently Keith called H.P. Bookfinders and confirmed the late payer was 'Barrett,' but I haven't seen his documentation.

So in other words, R.J, it is pure speculation on your part that the name Williams or Mrs. Barrett was ever used in connection with the enquiry for a Victorian diary, or that Anne made the enquiry herself and gave her husband's name. I'm sure your readers will be grateful to you for the clarification.

What irritates me is that at some point it must have been blindingly obvious that if Barrett's purchase of red diary was 'worthless' the scrapbook must have been bought later, but no one checked the correct dates with O & L. Alan Gray tried to inspect their books, but was turned away. However, I won't use the unkind word 'incompetent' that you use on the other thread. I'd say it was more a matter of impotence, or, at worst, a lack of any sense of urgency. Keith and Shirley and Gray and Harris didn't have the power of the police, so their 'failure' to unravel the mystery to your remarkably high standards of evidence is what it is. They couldn't subpoena, etc., and since Smith never filed a complaint, no thorough police investigation of the Barretts could ever happen, despite your insistence that it did.

'Blindingly obvious' to Alan Gray and Melvin Harris, I should think, because they were - initially in Gray's case - only too receptive to Mike's forgery claims. His O&L story, as far as I'm aware, did not materialise until the latter part of 1994, and Gray, followed by Harris, would have been the first to know about it. If Melvin Harris had had the slightest suspicion, when the red diary featured in Mike's January 1995 affidavit, that this had not been purchased until 1992, he would have been more than capable of badgering O&L until they agreed to search their records for the scrapbook right up until April 12th, but only if he could conceive of the Barretts being capable of turning it into the diary at that late stage, and he was very much of the opinion that neither actually penned the thing. But remind me, did Mike not claim in that affidavit that all the forgery action had taken place back in 1990, while Tony Devereux was alive? Wasn't this precisely why Shirley et al didn't think at the time to ask O&L to check their records for 1992? Might the investigators on both sides not have been similarly misled into assuming that Mike was either telling the truth and giving broadly accurate dates for the diary's creation process, or was inventing every detail? With hindsight, we can see that if anything in that affidavit was true, the dates he supplied were certainly not, making it difficult, if not impossible to get confirmation of anything until the relevant records may no longer have been available. And that would, of course, have depended on whether any confirmation existed in the first place. If Mike had said in 1995 that he didn't get the scrapbook until months after Tony had died [August 1991], and just days before showing it to Doreen [April 13th 1992], it would have been so easy to check with O&L and it would have been game over had their records confirmed it. Not even Feldman would have been in denial at that point. But how do you prove a negative - if Mike didn't obtain the scrapbook from O&L - unless you can prove where he did get it from? If O&L had failed to find any sign of it, would the goal posts not have shifted to allow for their incompetence? Or to allow for Mike to have been confused over which auction house it was? Or even to suggest that Mike may have bought the scrapbook years earlier, meaning to do something with it, and eventually came up with the bright idea to turn it into Jack the Ripper's diary?

Let me put it this way. If ten years from now, you still haven't nailed Fast Eddy for the Great Battlecrease Floorboard caper, and he's still roaming the streets freely calling you crazy, I promise not to call you and Keith incompetent. It's not like you can drag him down to the nick and beat a confession out of him! All you have is the power to persuade.

Have a jolly day.

Well thanks for that - I think. Are we not all in the same boat here? Using loopholes that allow for our speculation to be correct? An investigator is hardly incompetent if the evidence to form any firm conclusion either way is lacking. But if Barrett hoax believers want to claim the evidence is, or was there for their preferred conclusion, it would be nice to think they were not simply relying on the investigators to have screwed up by failing to produce it for them. That in no way means it must have been there for the finding.

Love,

Caz
X

[Al Bundy's Eyes]

Well, glad to have contributed. Admittedly, the idea of Mike nicking scrap is speculation on my part, for dramatic purposes. The rest I heard from a man in a pub, The Poste House or something similar?

[Joshua Rogan]

Good afternoon, Caz.

I didn't know I had any readers.

You've got at least one reader here, for your novella!

[rjpalmer]

Morning R.J,

Could you direct your readers to the evidence you found for Anne Graham being marked down as a late payer, not Michael Barrett?

Good afternoon, Caz.

I didn't know I had any readers.

No, I have no evidence. This was just my interpretation of what Keith said, and I admit I may be mistaken. Keith holds the purse strings for this info, much as I suspect Anne once held the purse strings in Goldie Street.

If I assumed Anne was the late payer, would it be fundamentally more awful than you assuming Mike was? Do we really know who made the initial call to H. P. Bookfinders? (Asking for a friend).

Enjoy your evening, I'll check back tomorrow. RP

(Note to self: write a short novella in the style of Gabriel García Márquez using the working title ‘Sophistry in the Time of Covid-19.” A drunken would-be journalist, known to have recently gone shopping for blank paper from the 1960s, comes forward with what proports to be the deathbed confessions of Lord Lucan, circa, 1968. The writing fails a simple ink solubility test, and the drunken journalist eventually confesses to his hoax, but, trapped in the crushing isolation of self-quarantine, and crazed from repeated silver nitrate consumption, our hero, Elmo Schopenhauer, slowly becomes convinced that Lord Lucan’s confessions are genuine, thus beginning a remarkable twenty-seven year odyssey to uncover the truth of Lucan’s final days in the slums of south eastern Los Angeles. He doesn’t find Lucan, but meets Juanita, in what turns into a tender and deeply moving love story).



PPS. [gratuitous political message deleted - RP]

[rjpalmer]

Ike, old man, don’t go all metaphysical on me, because it isn’t convincing.

Any number of firms manufacture blank, bound pages knowing they will be turned into diaries. Do you really expect them to be sold with the handwriting already inside, so they live up to your hairsplitting definition?

If you want to call these blank objects caterpillars, do so, but they will be butterflies by the end of the story.

That is, once the ink hits the page. If you like, I can go down to the local bookshop right now and pick one up for you. They sell them by the dozens from a little shelf labeled “diaries and journals.” (I think it’s a sex difference thing. “Real Men Write Journals, not Diaries”—Clint Eastwood)

For your continued edification, below is a formerly blank book from 1888 which some German fellow named Bagley wrote in. He also had the generic word ‘diary’ stamped on the cover, but he added his own dates as he went along. Strange as it sounds, everyone is calling it a diary! (and they didn’t even need Schopenhauer or Hegel to work it out).

Anyway, the important element of Barrett’s request is not 1880-1890 (which, for all we know, is only Martin Earl’s interpretation of what Barrett was after, and not the precise instructions, which we will never know), the important element is that Barrett (be it Mike or Anne or both) needed at least TWENTY BLANK PAGES.
Ergo, it was the blank pages he/she/they were after. Blank. Unwritten upon. It’s not a smoking gun, it’s a howitzer, and no amount of metaphysical tap-dancing will change that fact.

But thanks for admitting that you have no explanation for Barrett’s highly unusual request. Your honesty is commendable, but I’m afraid it means that Chief Inspector Swanson has no choice but to demote you from the Bunco Squad back to light traffic duty.

[caz]

Not getting all philosophical, but does a diary only become a diary by virtue of someone using it as such? A blank book, Victorian or otherwise, is just that. A blank diary specifically has to have dates, a calendar, that's what makes it a diary. Anything else is a journal of sorts. It can be used as a diary, but it's not specifically a diary per se.

So if Mike "Bongo" Barrett set out to acquire a 'diary', was he thinking in terms of his intended use for a blank journal, as such, he somewhat absent mindedly asked for a diary, and on recieving said item, an actual diary, with dates, realised "bugger, I don't need a diary at all, I need a journal to make into a diary. What a pillock I am. Anne, can you lend me £25 until I've nicked some scrap? Oh, and by the way, we're going to be really pushed for time now". I mean, that ties in with the whole 'not the sharpest tool in the box' thing.

I agree, a Victorian bookmaker wouldn't necessarily date books because it limits their use and makes them unsaleable after a point. But a blank book is not a diary until it's used as such.

Or is that another Problem in Logic?

I don't think we should underestimate the potential significance of your observations, ABE.

This is a chicken and egg situation. Had Mike already seen the scrapbook - which appeared to have been used for Jack the Ripper's diary - when he made his enquiry for an actual Victorian diary? Or did he only manage to acquire the scrapbook - minus the diary - after the useless little 1891 diary turned up?

The diary as we know it is entirely undated apart from the final entry - May 3rd 1889. If the text was prepared in advance, and the only remaining task by March 1992 was to find something suitable to contain it and to write it out by hand, I think it might be reasonable to assume that the author had left all the other drafted entries undated, never had any intention of dating them, and therefore the last thing they would have wanted was an actual diary with dates printed in it to show its age, which would almost certainly have required a complete, last-minute rejig of the entire text.

What Mike [and/or Anne] would have really, really needed to see was just a plain old book of the right period - so manufactured at any time before 1888 - with enough blank, undated pages of a suitable size to contain all the undated entries prepared earlier. It wouldn't matter if the early part of this old book had been used as a diary, or for any other purpose, because those pages could be ripped out. But there would need to be enough unused pages, running consecutively, which really were blank, and the surface had to be suitable to write on with the pen and ink - also prepared earlier - for the final creation process to begin.

Not much to ask for, was it? Surely not beyond Anne's capabilities to fashion a request that might have more than a cat in hell's chance of bearing fruit? So if we assume it was Mike who made the enquiry, because dates were never his strong point, and it didn't dawn on him that a request for a Victorian diary might produce one with Victorian dates in it, he certainly pulled himself together and learned his lesson fast when the bloody thing arrived, if he then had to start from scratch and try to find precisely what he should have asked for. But miracles do happen, and so it came to pass that within just a couple of days of realising his mistake, Mike is supposed to have seen the scrapbook up for auction just before the calendar turned from March to April, and brought it home so Anne could whip out her writing materials, get the undated entries written up in the undated old book, and have it done and thoroughly dusted in time for its April 13th debut in London.

Just like that, as Tommy Cooper would have said.

Love,

Caz
X

[caz]

You are most welcome, c.d.

Some would not believe it, by my aim is to please.

Love,

Caz
X

[c.d.]

Even the electricians were in the dark [sorry!] about the significance of that date and the diary's very own double event.

That gave me a much needed laugh. Thank, Caz.

c.d.

[caz]

Thanks for clarifying that, Caz. So, he created a hoaxed diary of Jack the Ripper, was possibly handed the most smoky of guns, and yet declined to use it to support his hoax. Possibly - partly - as some kind of homage to his mate Tony D.? Hmmm. That's a hard one to get your head around. The world waited 35,000+ days for a record of the floorboards being lifted to appear and on that very same day Mike first signalled his hoax to the world, and yet he made no attempt to link the two in order to cement his confession (when it came)? I'm genuinely struggling to make sense of that.

And yet, it's such an obvious hoax written by Mike and Anne Barrett, isn't it?

Cheers,

Ike

Mike couldn't link the two events, Ike, if he never knew about any electrical work going on in Battlecrease on the same day that he phoned Doreen about the diary. He appeared to put two and two together the following Spring, when Paul Dodd revealed that some electrical work had been done, and to suspect he had been landed with hot property, but I don't think it ever dawned on him that it was so smoking hot that it had been half-inched that very morning.

In fact, I'm not sure anyone made the March 9th connection before Keith Skinner was shown the relevant time sheets.

Even the electricians were in the dark [sorry!] about the significance of that date and the diary's very own double event.

Love,

Caz
X

[caz]

Not getting all philosophical, but does a diary only become a diary by virtue of someone using it as such? A blank book, Victorian or otherwise, is just that. A blank diary specifically has to have dates, a calendar, that's what makes it a diary. Anything else is a journal of sorts. It can be used as a diary, but it's not specifically a diary per se.

So if Mike "Bongo" Barrett set out to acquire a 'diary', was he thinking in terms of his intended use for a blank journal, as such, he somewhat absent mindedly asked for a diary, and on recieving said item, an actual diary, with dates, realised "bugger, I don't need a diary at all, I need a journal to make into a diary. What a pillock I am. Anne, can you lend me £25 until I've nicked some scrap? Oh, and by the way, we're going to be really pushed for time now". I mean, that ties in with the whole 'not the sharpest tool in the box' thing.

I agree, a Victorian bookmaker wouldn't necessarily date books because it limits their use and makes them unsaleable after a point. But a blank book is not a diary until it's used as such.

Or is that another Problem in Logic?

I think I love you.

[Iconoclast]

The fact, Ike, that Mike's smoking gun, which would 'confirm' his hoax as real, was never used by him. Even when the golden opportunity arose, in 1993, to latch onto the rumours of the diary being found in Battlecrease by an electrician, he hotly denied it had come from the house and swore an affidavit to reinforce his claim that Tony Devereux had given him the diary with no explanation.

Thanks for clarifying that, Caz. So, he created a hoaxed diary of Jack the Ripper, was possibly handed the most smoky of guns, and yet declined to use it to support his hoax. Possibly - partly - as some kind of homage to his mate Tony D.? Hmmm. That's a hard one to get your head around. The world waited 35,000+ days for a record of the floorboards being lifted to appear and on that very same day Mike first signalled his hoax to the world, and yet he made no attempt to link the two in order to cement his confession (when it came)? I'm genuinely struggling to make sense of that.

And yet, it's such an obvious hoax written by Mike and Anne Barrett, isn't it?

Cheers,

Ike

[caz]

Caz, as someone who knew her, can you tell us if Anne has ever made any public comment regarding the Diary since she started her new life? I suppose I mean her life after she co-authored with Shirley Harrison.

Graham

As Ike said, Graham, I think you meant Carol Emmas?

I'm not sure Anne has made any public comment since then, if you don't count the interview she agreed to do with Keith, Seth and I for Ripper Diary, around 2002, when she said that would be the last time she would give anyone an interview on the subject of the diary. IIRC we were in The Liffey on Renshaw Street at the time, which displayed the following notice by the bar: NO TRACK SUITS AFTER SIX-THIRTY.

Luckily for all four of us, we wound up the interview earlier than that.

Love,

Caz
X

[caz]

Hi Caz,

I was thinking last evening along similar lines - that, to make a case for the hoax, March 9 1992 is a pivotal day. On that day, I also figured, some magic dust happened in The Saddle. An electrician mentions to Mike Barrett that he'd been working at Battlecrease House and the floorboards had been raised for the first time in a century. "They were in good nick for their age, mind", he says innocently. Mike Barrett has been compiling the Maybrick hoax since the centenary year (1989) and has it all typed-up on his PC at home. Suddenly, he realises that he has just been handed a smoking gun which would 'confirm' his hoax as real. So he races home, contacts Pan Books, they recommend Doreen Montgomery, so he 'phones her and says "Are you interested in the diary of Jack the Ripper?" and she says "Yes, how about you come to London with it on April 13 (?)". "Not a problem" replies Mike, slightly disingenuously.

Mike then has a month to source a Victorian document for Anne (or some other) to transcribe the typed-up text into. It doesn't matter how he gets his hands on the Victorian scrapbook, he just does. It doesn't matter if they have 30 days or 11 days to write the hoaxed account into the scrapbook, they just do.

And off Mike goes to London with his suitcase and his diary, and the rest is history. He has instantly become the greatest actor and greatest forger in history, and boy is the world about to know it.

Now, obviously I don't believe this account to be the truth of the matter. But - in deference to those who do - what possible argument against it is there?

Ike
Devil's Advocate Ltd.

The fact, Ike, that Mike's smoking gun, which would 'confirm' his hoax as real, was never used by him. Even when the golden opportunity arose, in 1993, to latch onto the rumours of the diary being found in Battlecrease by an electrician, he hotly denied it had come from the house and swore an affidavit to reinforce his claim that Tony Devereux had given him the diary with no explanation. He didn't have the wit to say that Tony could have got it from the Battlecrease electrician who lived in the same street and drank in the same pub! That would have put Mike in the clear, and if Paul Dodd had then claimed his 5%, it would have been small beer compared with the damage he inflicted on his future whisky tokens just a year later. There must have been a very compelling reason why Mike was so angry with the electrician who had handed him this smoking golden gun, and spent the rest of his life pouring cold water on it. What if Mike - shock, horror - was lying, when denying that the diary came from the house? What if he couldn't bear to cut out the middle man - his late mate - and admit that the diary had come to him direct from the electrician, not in 1991 but in March 1992?

And does the electrician with the golden gun have a third nipple? I think we need to know.

Love,

Caz
X