Bohemian Girl, The (25 page)

‘We’re doing what they call “casting”. Theatrical term. My pal, the one who owns the camera, worked for Dan Leno,
he
calls it casting - like casting about. Trolling for pike, more or less. Thinking of hiring Cohan as a Boer.’

‘How’s the housemaid?’

Atkins made a rude noise. ‘Getting full of herself. Wants her young man to be hired for the soldier. Says she won’t kiss anybody else. Her young man looks a bit like a rat and is about the size of a kid just out of skirts. I told her if she didn’t shut it I’d hire the parlourmaid from Number 17 instead, who’s her worst enemy.’ He shook his head. ‘Not the walk in the park I thought it’d be. You going out?’

‘To talk to that painter, Wenzli. Sent him a note; he, at least, answered.’

‘Sounds a bit rum. Pushing for a knighthood, they say.’

‘Who says?’

‘Gossip in “Society Talk”.’ This was a column in the new magazine that Frank Harris was editing. Denton suggested it was odd reading for Atkins.

‘Learning from my betters.’

Wenzli wasn’t Augustus John’s sort of artist, certainly. He lived in Melbury Road in Kensington - ‘the artistic environs of the late President of the Royal Academy, Lord Leighton’ as
Pearson’s
had it - but kept a studio in St John’s Wood that had been ‘at one time the artistic demesne of Mr Bourke’, which meant nothing to Denton, but once inside it he thought he understood: it was a studio for an artist who wanted to live like a stockbroker.

Wenzli was already there, in fact was waiting for him. He hadn’t been working - there was no paint on him, no smock, no paint-loaded palette. He was wearing a grey sack coat and waistcoat, rather too-light fawn trousers, a high collar, had somewhat the air of a dandified military officer in mufti. Bearded, moustached, he gave the sense of having just been let go by the regimental barber, who might be still snapping his cloth out of sight somewhere.

A butler had opened the door, ushered Denton into a building in the style called Queen Anne, and up to a first-floor studio the size of a provincial city’s railway station. The ceiling was more than twice his own height away; carpets covered the floor; a fireplace with a Gothick chimney-piece big enough to have parked a cab in took up part of one wall; easy chairs stood here and there; and, on a marble-topped table that could have sat twelve, the tools of the trade were set out, as if to prove that in fact an artist was here somewhere. Near it stood an easel ten feet tall, on it a six-by-four canvas filled mostly by two young girls and a dog. The artist himself stood in front of it as if prepared to defend it.

‘I’m Denton.’

‘Yes. Yes. You wrote for an appointment.’

Actually, Denton had mailed his card, with ‘Re: Mary Thomason’ pencilled on the back; Wenzli had sent him a note telling him to see him at his studio, not his home.

‘Your house and your studio are at different places.’

‘I must be free of distractions.’ Wenzli exhaled and relaxed the abdomen he had been holding in, now proved a rather soft-looking man, his belly slack but pouty, well-filled - not a nun for art. Denton said, ‘Mary Thomason.’

‘That was written on your card, yes.’

‘You know the name.’

‘Why, yes. She was my model once or twice. She had an interesting ambience.’

‘She’s disappeared.’

‘Ah. Oh.’ He seemed unsure whether to be surprised. ‘Yes.’

‘You knew that she had disappeared?’

‘I heard something or other.’

‘Where?’

‘Why do you ask?’

Denton studied the man’s face. There was an expression at the sides of the nose and around the eyes as if he might weep easily. There was also a hint of fear. Denton said, ‘What was your relationship with Mary Thomason?’

‘There was no “relationship”! What an improper question!’ Wenzli tried to straighten his back to assume the military pose again, but he stayed several inches shorter than Denton. ‘What are you driving at, sir?’

‘Before she disappeared, Mary Thomason wrote me a letter. She said she was afraid of somebody.’

Wenzli flushed. ‘I was kindness itself to the girl. When I saw her, which was only - two or three times—’

Denton looked around the studio. ‘This is a private spot. Very private.’ He turned back to the painter. ‘She came here?’

‘I
work
here!’

‘You put down a deposit on a painting at Geddys’s in Burlington Arcade. Where Mary Thomason worked.’

‘What can you be getting at?’

‘And then let the painting and the deposit go - immediately after she disappeared. Why did you do that, Mr Wenzli?’

Wenzli started to pull in his belly again and gave it up. He managed to look stern, nonetheless. ‘I have work to do. You will have to leave.’

‘Did Miss Thomason model in the nude?’

‘There spake the voice of Mrs Grundy! And of ignorance; few real artists need the nude model. No, she did not. What you imply is libellous.’

‘Slanderous, I think.’ Denton picked up one of the brushes and spread the bristles with a thumb.

‘That’s an expensive brush!’

Denton put it down and leaned back against the marble table. ‘You didn’t ask what I do or what I am, Mr Wenzli, so I assume you know. Did Mary Thomason ever mention my name?’

Wenzli started to say something, hesitated. ‘She might have said something. Your articles on travel were very popular just then.’ He meant the articles about the motor car adventure, which Denton had turned into the book.

‘“The former American lawman”.’

‘That’s the reputation you have, I suppose. I really don’t see what this is in aid of.’

‘So that if you saw that Mary Thomason had written to me asking for protection, you’d know she was serious.’

‘Ah—why—What’s the point of all this? You must go, really—!’

Denton went and stood quite close to him. ‘Her letter, in an envelope addressed to me, was in the back of the painting you were going to buy. There’s no question but that she put it there herself. There’s really only one reason for her to have done that that I can see, Mr Wenzli. She wanted you to find it.’

‘This is madness.’

‘You’d know my name; you’d read that she was afraid somebody was going to hurt her; you’d know she was serious. It was a warning. ’

‘But I never found it! I never found such a damned thing!’

‘Were you going to hurt her, Mr Wenzli?’

‘Certainly not!’

‘Had things got to a certain point, Mr Wenzli? Despite yourself? Did you kiss her?’

‘This is infamous!’ Wenzli went to a bell-pull that hung beside the vast chimney-piece; it was heavy enough to have rung changes on cathedral bells.

Denton said, ‘The police have been told about her disappearance.’ He paused an instant; so did Wenzli. ‘I think you’d do better to talk to me than to Detective Sergeant Guillam. He’s a right bastard.’

Wenzli looked more than ever as if he might weep, but he was actually tougher than he looked. He said in a testy voice, ‘I’ll have you thrown out if you won’t leave.’

‘You and that butler couldn’t throw me out between you.’ Denton crossed his arms. ‘It’s the police or me.’ He walked down the studio to look at the portrait of the two young girls, then addressed them rather than Wenzli. ‘Did you kiss her? Was there more than that - touching—?’

‘Get out!’

‘You won’t get a knighthood by lying to me, Wenzli. Did you touch her or didn’t you?’

‘There was nothing between us!’

‘I think there was. You did kiss her, didn’t you. And then there was more - she didn’t discourage you - she wouldn’t undress for you but she’d do certain things - with her hands, was it, Wenzli? Or her mouth?’

‘Stop it, stop it! This is disgusting!’

‘You could take me to court. But I don’t think you will. I think that those things happened and then—’ Denton could see it. He knew how it went. He knew how he had done it himself, once upon a time. ‘And then you got a bit rough. And you frightened her.’

Wenzli was red-faced. He had moved away from the bell-pull and had, perhaps unconsciously, taken up a mahlstick, the padded stick that he used to support his painting hand when he was working on fine detail. It wasn’t much of a weapon, but it told Denton that he’d touched a spot. And he realized that Wenzli was capable of frightening a woman, even with his softness and his apparent weakness. He was arrogant, and frustration made him angry, a potent combination. Wenzli might well be capable of hurting a small woman. ‘You frightened her, Wenzli.’

‘I didn’t do anything of the kind.’

‘So she wrote the note for you to find, but I believe you that you never found it - or you’d have destroyed it. But she disappeared, and you heard that she’d gone - or maybe she just didn’t come back, didn’t keep an appointment - and then
you
were frightened. You wanted to erase your relationship with her. You never went back to Geddys’s. You wrote him you didn’t want the painting. You let him keep the deposit.’

Wenzli tapped the mahlstick against his thigh, then threw it towards the marble table; it hit and bounced off and thudded on the carpet.

Denton kept pushing. ‘What was so important about the painting? ’

‘I decided I didn’t like it.’

‘No, there was more than that. What?’ He waited. He said, ‘I really don’t want to bring the police into it, Wenzli. They won’t pursue her disappearance unless I stir it up for them. They’re busy men; they have more important cases. She’s been gone a long time. But if I lay it all out for them, they’ll come to question you. Do you want it in the cheap papers - “Noted Artist Questioned in Girl’s Disappearance”?’ He waited. ‘Does your wife want that?’

‘You
shit
!’

‘What was the Wesselons to her?’

Wenzli threw himself into one of the armchairs. ‘She wanted it. I said I’d buy it for her.’

‘A present.’

Wenzli nodded.

‘Pretty nice present for somebody who modelled a few times.’ Wenzli waved a hand. He put his forehead on the fingers of the other hand, elbow on the carved chair arm. ‘She was a greedy little thing. I gave her money - small amounts. I - I didn’t want her to go without.’

‘You bribed her, but you never got her.’

Wenzli shook his head without lifting it from his hand. ‘She was fascinating. Innocent, but—’ He shook his head again.

‘Did she blackmail you?’

Wenzli snorted. ‘Nothing happened that I could have been blackmailed for! I tell you, it was all innocent! I only wanted to give her things. To please her. Then when she didn’t come for an appointment, I thought - perhaps it was better. To stop seeing - employing her. Seen in that light, I thought giving her the painting was a mistake. So I wrote to Geddys.’

‘She missed an appointment to model?’

Wenzli nodded.

‘But she needed money?’

‘She always
wanted
money. She was greedy. But innocent. Like a child.’

‘And because she missed one appointment, you knew she was gone?’

Wenzli put his face in his hand. ‘She came every Tuesday and Thursday. She missed both days. Then I thought—I waited until the following week.’

‘It didn’t occur to you that something might have happened to her?’

Wenzli’s head moved back and forth on his hand. He said, in almost a groan, ‘I was
glad
she was gone - don’t you understand?’

Denton waited. There was nothing more. He found that he believed Wenzli. The man looked abject, worn out. By his admission, or by the infatuation that lay behind it? It was a new slant on Mary Thomason - an innocence that had the power to make a man like Wenzli risk a fall. The same innocence that had apparently infatuated Geddys.

Denton said that he would keep what had been said to himself, and he went out, Wenzli still sitting with his head on his hand, looking at nothing.

‘But it doesn’t hang together, Denton. Why did she run off if she wanted the painting so?’

‘Something more important happened.’

‘I can see her putting the letter in the back of the painting as a warning to him. But that would mean she really expected him to pick the painting up, pay for it and then handle it, or his man handles it, and the letter is found. And then he turns the painting over to her.’

‘Out of guilt, if nothing else. She didn’t mean to end it with the letter, I think. Just to warn him. Then he gives her the painting, and he’s warned, and he’ll behave. There may have been more to it - maybe she was going to deliver the painting to him, make sure he found the letter. But the point is, I don’t think Wenzli was responsible for her disappearance. I believe him.’

‘The type who’d hit a woman but not kill her?’

They were in her favourite Aerated Bread Company shop in Aldgate. She was saying goodbye to her former job; she’d taken the two women who had worked for her to tea and was going on to a dinner at a hotel with the well-to-do men and women who funded the Society.