Lictor and Linnet

by John Dryden, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

The Ledger has printed a cryptic crossword on its back page every week since 1952, and for twenty-seven years two people set it turn and turn about. Their real names were never printed. They signed as Lictor and Linnet, and most of the people who solved them for a quarter of a century could not have told you whether either was a man or a woman, or alive, or one person with two moods.

Lictor was Dennis Aspinall, who had taught Latin and Greek at a grammar school in Shrewsbury for thirty-four years and had set his first puzzle for the Ledger in 1988, the year the school stopped teaching Greek. Linnet was Maureen Pask, who had been a theatre sister at the Royal Infirmary in Hull and had sent in a sample puzzle in 1999 on the back of a Christmas card, with a note saying she had been solving Lictor for ten years and thought she could do as well, or at any rate as differently. They were paid a hundred and forty pounds a puzzle, the same rate, and had been since 2011.

Isobel Garrod had edited the crossword since 2007, along with the letters page, the corrections column, and anything else on the magazine that was small, weekly and liable to complaint. On a Tuesday in October Tom Faulds, who had been managing editor for eight months and had come from a company that published trade magazines for the haulage industry, asked her into his office and closed the door, which in the Ledger's offices above a dentist in Lamb's Conduit Street meant that the dentist's drill was a little quieter.

"I need forty thousand off next year," he said. "Most of it's the print contract. Some of it's you, I'm afraid. Not you. The crossword."

"You're stopping the crossword."

"God, no. I've seen the letters." He turned his screen towards her. It was the letters log, which Isobel kept, and which she had not known he read. "We go to one setter from January. Every week, same person. Saves three thousand six hundred and forty a year, and it's simpler for the readers, apparently. Somebody told me readers like to know who they're getting." He scrolled. "I'd keep Linnet. Two hundred and twelve letters in five years against nineteen for the other one. But you know them. Your call. Friday?"

---

To state it fairly, the choice was not between a good setter and a bad one, and Isobel did not pretend to herself that it was. She took the last ten puzzles of each home to Walthamstow that night, laid them out in two rows on the kitchen table, and solved all twenty again, which took her until a quarter past one and most of a bottle of Rioja; and since she did, in effect, set them side by side, I will do the same.

Lictor's puzzles were correct. That is the first thing anyone who knew the trade would say of them, and the last thing they would need to. Every clue had a definition at one end and wordplay at the other, and nothing in between that did not earn its place. If he told you to reverse a word, the word was on the page, and so was the instruction. In thirty-eight years he had never once required a solver to know something that was not in Chambers, and he had never once used a word in a sense Chambers did not give. Isobel had queried him four times in nineteen years, and each time she had been wrong. His clues were built the way a good wall is built, and they had about as much to say. Killer whale and difficult fruit garden (7). ORC and HARD: ORCHARD. A solver who set it down felt the small click of a thing that fitted, and nothing else at all, because the sentence on the surface — the whale, the fruit garden — meant nothing and was not meant to.

Linnet's puzzles were alive, and they were not always correct. She wrote clues that read like the first line of a story you would want to hear the rest of, and then she cheated, a little, to make them come out. She would scramble a word that was not on the page but only implied by one that was. She would use a homophone that worked in Hull and nowhere south of the Humber. Her most famous clue, which was quoted to Isobel at parties by people who did not know she edited it, was Vacant lot? (5,7), to which the answer was EMPTY NESTERS; and the week it appeared the Ledger had forty-one letters, thirty-six of them from mothers, and five of them from men who solved crosswords for the Times and wished to point out that it was not a clue, it was a joke with a number after it.

So the one was the more correct setter, and the other was the greater wit; and if that were all, Isobel would not have needed the Rioja. She had to find the column in which her favourite lost. She knew perfectly well which was her favourite.

But she began, to be fair to herself, with the other column, and with the nineteen. She knew most of them by heart, because there were so few. Ten were from people who had found a misprint, which was never his. Four were from people who wanted to know who Lictor was, and had been told, as everyone was told, that the Ledger did not say. The other five, one every January for the five years of the log and for a good many years before it, were from a Mr R. Flett of Kirkwall, in Orkney, who solved Lictor in ink on the day the magazine reached him, which was the Saturday, and wrote once a year to give his times for the twelve months: fastest, slowest, and the mean. His slowest that year had been fifty-two minutes. He never said that he enjoyed the puzzles, or that he did not. He said, every year, in the last line, that he had not yet been obliged to use a pencil; and Isobel, who had once been sent a photograph of a completed grid by him, had looked at the ink and seen that he had not.

Linnet had nobody like that. Linnet's solvers used pencils, and rubbed out, and wrote in about it.

The column in which Linnet lost was not hard to find, and Isobel had always known where it was. In April 2014 Linnet's seventeen across had two answers. The clue would bear either BRINE or BRINY, the last letter was unchecked, and the prize, by long custom, went to the first correct entry drawn from the bag, which was BRINY, which was not what Linnet had meant. The Ledger had sent a dictionary to the man who had drawn BRINY and a dictionary to the woman who had been drawn second with BRINE, and for six weeks the letters page was nothing else. Lictor had never done anything of the kind. Lictor could not have done anything of the kind; a clue of his with two answers would have been like a sum of his that came out two ways.

There was one other paper in the pile that was not a puzzle. It was a letter, which Isobel had taken out of the file because she had remembered it was there. Dennis Aspinall had written to the Ledger once in thirty-eight years to complain about anything, and it had been in November 1999, about Linnet's third puzzle, which Isobel had not edited, being then a student in Leeds. The clue he objected to was Hear it scrambled, saying nothing (6). HEAR gives LISTEN; LISTEN scrambled gives SILENT. It was neat, and it was quick, and it was wrong. Dennis had written, in a hand that had marked thirty years of Latin prose:

One may not scramble a word that is not on the page. The solver is entitled to see what he is to work with. If he must first guess the word and then rearrange it, he is not solving a clue; he is reading the setter's mind, and that is a different and less respectable entertainment. I should be grateful if you would pass this on to your new contributor, with my compliments on an otherwise very promising start.

The editor of the day had passed it on. Linnet had gone on scrambling words that were not on the page for twenty-seven years, though less often, and Isobel had once heard her say on the phone that she had a biscuit tin.

At a quarter past one Isobel put the cork back in the bottle and the puzzles in two piles, and went to bed without having decided anything; and woke at six having decided it, which is how these things are generally done.

---

She rang Dennis first, on the Wednesday, because she owed it to him to be first. He answered on the second ring, as he always did, as though he had been sitting beside the telephone with nothing else to do, which at eighty-one he very possibly had.

"Miss Garrod."

She told him. She told it plainly, the forty thousand and the print contract and the three thousand six hundred and forty, and the letters log, which she did not need to mention and mentioned anyway, because she found she did not want him to think it was her taste alone. He let her finish. When she had finished there was a pause on the line, long enough that she could hear a clock in his house.

"It's the right decision," he said.

"I'm not sure it is."

"No. That's why it's the right one. If you had been sure, you would have chosen me." He cleared his throat. "Mrs Pask is the better setter. I am the better clue-writer. They have never been the same trade, though people talk as if they were. A crossword is not a set of clues. It is something to do on a Sunday that a person looks forward to on a Thursday, and nobody in thirty-eight years has looked forward to me on a Thursday. They have looked forward to finishing me. It's not the same."

"People write to say they've finished you."

"Nineteen of them, you said, in five years. More than I'd have guessed." He seemed pleased to have the figure, as a man is pleased to have the bill. "You have the seventeenth of December. That leaves the thirty-first. It isn't finished."

"There's no hurry."

"There's every hurry. I'm eighty-one. I'll post it on Friday." And then, as she was about to say something she had prepared and was glad, afterwards, not to have said: "Does she know?"

"Not yet. I'm ringing her this afternoon."

"Tell her I said she's to be careful with the Christmas one. People do them in company. They show each other the clues."

---

Maureen Pask did not answer on the second ring. She answered on the ninth, out of breath, from the garden, and when Isobel told her she said, "Oh," and then, "Oh, hell," and then nothing for so long that Isobel asked whether she was still there.

"Does Dennis know?"

"I've just spoken to him."

"What did he say?"

Isobel told her some of it. She left out the Thursday and the finishing, and kept in that Mrs Pask was the better setter, because he had said it and it was true and it would cost him nothing that he had not already paid.

"He would say that," said Maureen. "He'd say it in a way that made you feel you'd been marked, wouldn't he. Seven out of ten, see me." She laughed, not much. "He's written to me, you know. Every time. Every time I've cheated in twenty-seven years, there's been a letter, Shrewsbury postmark, two days after. Never to the magazine, after the first one. To me. Three lines. Your twelve across scrambles a word that is not on the page. I enjoyed it very much. Yours, D. A." She was quiet again. "I've a tin full. Who's going to tell me now?"

"I will."

"You won't, love. You'll let them through. You always did. I could tell, because he'd write and you wouldn't."

---

On the Friday she told Tom Faulds, who said, "Told you," and then, since she did not go, looked up.

"One thing," she said. "The thirty-first of December. I want a line under it saying it's his last. His name, his real one, and the years."

"We've never printed their names."

"No."

He considered it in the way he considered everything, which was as a cost; and since it cost one line of eight-point type on a page that was set already, he could not find much against it. "Will anyone care?"

"About nineteen people," said Isobel. "One of them in Orkney."

"Fine." He went back to his screen, and then, as she reached the door: "Is she going to be all right on her own? Every week? It's twice the work."

It was the first question he had asked about either of them that was not about money, and she gave him the true answer, which was that she did not know. Maureen Pask would set fifty-two puzzles a year, where she had set twenty-six, and there would be weeks when the cheats came quicker because the clues did; and nobody in Shrewsbury would write to say so.

"She'll be fine," she said.

---

The puzzle came on the Monday, in the brown envelope he always used, addressed in the same hand as the letter of 1999: the grid ruled out on squared paper, the black squares inked solid, the clues typed on a typewriter whose lower-case e had been filling in its own eye since before Isobel came to the Ledger. She took it to her desk and set the kettle going on the windowsill and did what she had done with nearly five hundred puzzles of his before: she covered the solution sheet with a folded copy of last week's Ledger and solved it cold, with a pencil, timing herself, querying anything that would not come.

Nothing would not come. Fifteen across was a reversal with every part of it on the page. Twenty-one across was a hidden word which, when she found it, she found she had been looking straight at for a minute. The surfaces meant as little as they ever had; she noticed, with something she would not have called sentiment, that two of them were about Shrewsbury. It took her thirty-one minutes, which was about his average, and at the end she had the whole grid filled but for the last clue, twenty-six down, four letters, in the bottom right-hand corner, where the across answers had given her an S and an O.

She read the clue.

Leave off mixing mail (4).

STOP. It came at once, as his never did, and that was why she read it twice more, as she would have read anyone's, and with the pencil she did to it what she would have done to anyone's: she bracketed leave off, which was the definition, and underlined mixing, which told the solver to rearrange, and drew a ring round mail, which was the word to be rearranged, and which had four letters, and which was not STOP in any order. MAIL would not make STOP. POST would make STOP. MAIL gave you POST, and POST scrambled gave you STOP, and the solver had to guess the word that was not on the page before he could rearrange it.

Isobel put the pencil down. She drank some of the tea, which had gone cold while she was solving, and picked the telephone up, because that was what she did when a clue did not work, and it was the first time in nineteen years she had done it for one of his and been right.

She had dialled the 01743 before she put it down again.

Then she took the red pen out of the jar, the one she used for proofs, and wrote in the margin beside twenty-six down, small, in the place where she would ordinarily have written query and a question mark, the Latin he would have used, which means only let it stand:

stet.

She initialled it, and put it in the folder for the thirty-first of December.

THE END

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem sextum Nōnās Octōbrēs (2 October 2026), ā Iōanne Drȳdenō per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

John Dryden, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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