The Metaphor Thief

Fergus MacLeod wrote crime novels the way some men build ships in bottles: slowly, privately and with a faint contempt for anyone who did it faster. In twenty years he had published nine books about Inspector Ruth Gillis of the Halifax police, and while none of them had made him rich, all of them had been praised for what one reviewer called "prose as salty and weathered as the harbor it describes". Fergus had the review framed. It hung above his desk, slightly crooked, like a medal he pretended not to care about.

So it was with mounting disbelief that he sat in a bookshop on Spring Garden Road one wet afternoon in March and read the opening chapter of Dark Water, the debut thriller by a young writer called Nadia Kwan, which had spent eleven weeks on the bestseller list. On page three, the fog came into the harbor "like a debt collector, patient and certain of being paid". On page nine, a guilty man's smile was "a door held open a second too long". On page fourteen, the city at dawn "wore its streetlights like yesterday's jewelry".

Fergus knew those lines. He knew them the way you know your own handwriting. Two were in the notebook he was working from; one had appeared, almost word for word, in his sixth novel, which had sold, by his publisher's tactful estimate, rather modestly. He bought the book, carried it home as though it were evidence, and spent the night going through it with a red pen. By morning he had marked twenty-three phrases that he was prepared to swear, in any court in Nova Scotia, were his.

His first instinct was to call a lawyer. His second, more characteristic, was to brood. He paced his kitchen constructing theories, each more baroque than the last. Had someone broken into his apartment and photographed his notebooks? Was his editor, a woman he had never entirely trusted, feeding his material to a younger, more marketable author? He even, in a low moment around four in the morning, wondered whether he had read Nadia Kwan's work somewhere years ago and absorbed it himself, which was the most frightening theory of all, because it would make him the thief.

In the end he did what Inspector Gillis would have done. He found out where the suspect drank her coffee. It took no great detective work: Nadia Kwan mentioned in every interview that she wrote each morning at the Lighthouse Cafe on the waterfront, at the table by the window. Fergus nearly choked on his toast. The Lighthouse was his cafe. He had written there, at the corner table by the radiator, every weekday for fifteen years.

He went the next morning and found her exactly where the interviews had promised, typing furiously, a pot of tea going cold at her elbow. He had prepared a speech, cold and devastating, full of the sort of measured menace his villains specialized in. What came out instead, as he dropped the marked copy of Dark Water on her table, was: "Where did you get the debt collector?"

She looked at the book, then at him, and her face went through several expressions before settling on one he had not anticipated, which was recognition. "You're Fergus MacLeod," she said. "I've read all your books." Then, before he could decide whether this was a confession, she frowned at the page. "The fog line? I got that from Walter."

Fergus sat down without being invited. Everyone at the Lighthouse knew Walter. He was eighty-seven, a retired harbor pilot who had guided ships in and out of Halifax for half a century and who now occupied the stool at the end of the counter from opening time until lunch. He talked to whoever would listen, and to many who would not, about tides and weather and the follies of the city council. Fergus had long since learned to tune him out, the way you tune out the sound of the sea.

Except, it turned out, he had not tuned him out at all. Sitting there with Nadia, going through the red marks one by one, they reconstructed it together. The debt collector was Walter on fog. The door held open too long was Walter describing a harbor master he had disliked in 1971. The streetlights like yesterday's jewelry were what he said every single morning as the lamps went off along the waterfront. For fifteen years Fergus had been sitting six feet away from the old man, half listening, writing down what he believed were his own inspirations. Nadia had done exactly the same, only more recently and, she admitted, with a notebook open on her lap.

"So we're both thieves," she said. Fergus considered this. It was not a pleasant thought, but it had the unmistakable ring of truth, which in his experience was rarely pleasant. "The difference," he said slowly, "is that you knew where you were stealing from." Nadia laughed. "I had an advantage," she said. "I'm new here. I was still listening."

They went to the counter together. Walter, informed that his remarks had appeared in eleven books and a bestseller, was neither flattered nor offended. He seemed mildly puzzled that anyone had needed to write them down. "Fog's always been like a debt collector," he said. "Ask anyone who's waited for it to lift." Then he went back to his newspaper.

Fergus's tenth novel, published the following year, carried a dedication that reviewers found unusually generous for a man known as a recluse: "For Walter, who said it first." Nadia's second book bore an almost identical one. They still write at the Lighthouse, at opposite ends of the room, and when the old man starts talking, they both put down their pens and, for once, simply listen.