Gently With the Painters (4 page)

Strong meat for the prosecution … even stronger for the defence!

‘How many years had you been married?’

‘It would have been seven in September. At first I rented a house at Kimbolton, then I bought one on the Goldington road. Her papa used to live at Goldington. He was a dry old stick who raised prize chrysanthemums.’

‘Did you used to get on, at first?’

‘It depends what you mean by “get on”, cocker.’

‘Was the marriage consummated?’

‘Good show! Oh yes, it was. I want to give Shirley her
due – she put on a pretty good act, to begin with. You couldn’t accuse her of being enthusiastic, but she gritted her teeth and went ahead with the exercise.’

‘Would you describe her as being frigid?’

‘It’s a funny thing, but I can’t answer that. As far as I was concerned she was frigid enough, but I always had the impression that there might have been more to her.’

‘What gave you that impression?’

‘Sorry, cocker. Don’t know.’

‘Was she friendly with other men?’

‘Not to the extent of going to bed with them.’

‘And what about women?’

‘Aha.’ Johnson looked knowing. ‘I’ve had my doubts about that, but I could never nail her down. She had some girlfriends back at Bedford who I wouldn’t have trusted far, but I’ve got no positive evidence. It could be my filthy mind.’

‘Was there anything like that up here?’

Johnson slowly shook his head.

‘For the last three years I haven’t kept an eye on her, we’ve slept in separate rooms, eaten apart, avoided each other. She could have gone to the devil for all I’d have known about it, though to be fair, I never heard any scandal regarding her. About the last thing we did together was to bury her father. She took on a bit then, and it seemed we might be going to start afresh. But it only lasted a week, and then things were worse than ever; it seemed to set a seal on it, cocker. After that there was no going back.’

‘Didn’t it occur to either of you to get a divorce?’

‘Too true it did – it occurred to me.’

‘You suggested it to her?’

‘I offered to give her the grounds for it. Only Shirley wasn’t the type to let a husband off the hook.’

From his chair near a filing cabinet Stephens was trying to catch his senior’s eye. In his urgent, jiffling impatience he reminded Gently of a schoolboy.

‘Inspector Stephens has something to ask you.’

Stephens was actually clearing his throat! Johnson, breathing out smoke like a grampus, half turned to appraise this threat on his flank.

‘Fire away.’

‘It’s about the Palette Group … I suppose you never attended a meeting?’

‘Di-dah-di-dah!’ Johnson grimaced his contempt. ‘Do I look the sort of bloke who would hold hands with that lot?’

‘I was wondering if you were acquainted with any of the members.’

‘As it happens I am, though only in the way of business. My bank manager fancies himself as an artist, and I sold a piece of property for their chairman, St John Mallows.’

‘A piece of property! When would that have been?’

‘Does it matter, or something? I sold it in January.’

Stephens’s dark eyes were gleaming and he had edged his chair forward. His next question was rapped out in Superintendental style:

‘Did your wife introduce him to you?’

‘Did she firkin! He came through the bank. He asked Farrer to recommend him an agent, and Farrer put him on to me.’

‘The property – it was valuable?’

‘A couple of cottages out Herling way. The rents didn’t
cover the outgoings on them, and my commission on the sale only just squared the advertising.’

‘Did your wife ever mention St John Mallows to you?’

‘I thought I’d made it plain that we didn’t exchange small talk.’

‘Now about her estate, sir. Was it around what you expected?’

‘Yes – the proceeds from her papa’s house, plus a hundred or so which she’d saved from her allowance.’

It was all rather discouraging, and Stephens couldn’t help looking crestfallen. To make it worse, Johnson was watching him with a sort of quizzical amusement. To cover his embarrassment the young Inspector pulled out his pipe; but even this chanced to be unemptied, and he was reduced to sucking it cold.

‘And those are the only members of the Group with whom you are personally acquainted …?’

Johnson returned his attention to the other side of the room.

‘I said so, didn’t I? Actually, they belong to the same golf club … I may have seen some of the others, but I’ve never met them to talk to.’

‘So you can’t tell us anything about your wife’s relations with them?’

‘Not a sausage, old sport. She might have gone to bed with the lot of them.’

Gently folded the map and stowed it in one of his pockets.

‘Are you busy this afternoon? … I’d like to see over your wife’s belongings.’

Johnson drove them there himself in his snarling red MG – a car that fascinated Gently, fresh from his somewhat
passé
Riley. It was a luscious piece of machinery, sharp with response and explosive power. Johnson, driving it with his fingertips, moved up through the traffic with a
surgeon-like
precision. Surely, now that one was a Super, and on the Metropolitan scale …?

The flat was situated in Baker’s Court, a short cul-de-sac off Viscount Road. As Hansom had told them, it was an area of office blocks, and the flat itself surmounted the branch of an insurance firm. Cars were parked in relays on all sides of the court, and office workers kept up a perpetual coming and going. Through a dozen or more of the wide-open windows one could hear the clicking and tinkle of hard-worked typewriters.

‘The beauty of this place is that it’s quiet at night …’

Having squeezed in his car, Johnson conducted them across the court. Beside a blue-painted door was a framed card which bore his name, while on the door, with tips elevated, was screwed a chromium-plated horseshoe.

‘Another relic of the Service?’

‘Roger! … Got to keep the gremlins out.’

In the act of unlocking the door, he paused to finger the token of luck. At the top of the stairway inside they passed a Spitfire, poised on a pedestal, and this also he managed to touch, though with a sudden, furtive motion.

All in all Gently found the flat disappointing, though why it would have been difficult for him to say. He had not been expecting to make any grand discovery, coming three days late in the footsteps of Hansom. The victim’s belongings had already been checked. A few bits of
correspondence had been collected and read. There was a gloomy neatness in the rooms she had occupied, as though everything there had been pondered and put away.

‘Where did she used to do her painting?’

The pictures he soon grew tired of examining. They were monotones from beginning to end, all vaguely allegorical and in some way distasteful. A number of them were on phallic themes, and one or two were plainly sexual fantasies. Her behaviour towards Johnson may have suggested frigidity, but there had been no fetters on her flights of imagination.

‘She used to paint here in the bedroom, cocker.’

‘I wouldn’t have thought the light would have been very suitable.’

‘It didn’t matter a damn – she used to paint at night. I’ve seen the light under her door as late as two or three in the morning.’

‘How did you know that she was painting?’

‘You could smell it, that’s how. The place used to reek of turpentine and linseed. And you could hear her, too, when she was using a big brush – and there’d be her clutter of things in the sink in the morning.’

Pipe in mouth, Gently strolled to the metal-framed window, which looked down on some mews to the rear of the building. Beneath it, to the ground, stretched a smooth wall of glazed brick: the cream paint on the sill was in part worn and marked. He turned on his heel.

‘She had a door key, of course?’

‘That’s right – she didn’t need to go out through the window.’

‘Did you think that she might have?’

‘Not till a moment ago. But I’m not quite as dumb as I look, old sport.’

Gently nodded indefinitely and puffed once or twice. He had suddenly noticed that Johnson was sweating. For a second or two he seemed on the verge of a fresh question, then he motioned to Stephens, and picked up his hat.

A
LAZY BREEZE
tempered the warm afternoon, and Gently, ignoring the buses, elected to walk back along Viscount Road. He was suddenly in a mood for the early summer weather: it seemed exactly to suit his contemplative frame of mind.

Once more he had embarked on a case that intrigued him. During those last few moments with Johnson, he had felt the surge of the mysterious current. From being a collection of dead facts the case had sprung into vibrant life, he was getting it into his hands, beginning to sense a possible shape. Perhaps never before had he so relished the exercising of his powers. His spell of duty in the metropolis had done that for him, at least. In another way it had been a tall milestone in his career: it had pulled him up, made him see himself, confirmed the talent that was his …

‘Don’t you think, sir, that we can safely rule Johnson out of it?’

He had hardly been aware of Stephens, striding smartly along beside him. The sudden clarity of vision which his mood had induced had been extending itself to the busy
world passing about him. This city had always been the home of painters … at last, he thought he had hit on one of the reasons. There was a quality in the light here, a steady, glowing luminosity. Was it due to the dry, continental east wind?

‘I don’t know what your impressions were, sir, but I rather had the feeling that he was on the up-and-up. I admit that he struck me as being a little calculating, but I don’t think that one should be too influenced by that.’

‘What do you mean by being calculating?’

Gently mentally shrugged his shoulders – how these youngsters tried to reduce everything to an immaculate black and white!

‘Well, sir, he was making the best of his case. I think you’ll agree with me about that. He set himself to sound convincing by pretending to have nothing to hide.’

‘And you think that he succeeded?’

‘Quite frankly, sir, I do. He made a number of risky admissions which he might just as well have kept in the bag.’

‘Like his knowledge of the Group meeting?’

‘Yes, sir, particularly that. There was no need for him to have stuck his neck out so far. I realize that in theory it might be put down to cleverness, but in practice, sir, did you ever meet with cleverness of that kind?’

Gently grudgingly admitted it. ‘Only in defence
counsels
…! When your own neck is at stake, you don’t set puzzles of that kind. All the same, it would have been odd if he hadn’t known about the meeting.’

‘On the balance, sir, I think you must allow it’s in his favour.’

Which was to echo the shrewd Superintendent Walker, of course, not to mention handsome Hansom’s more rhapsodical judgements. Johnson had it in the balance: that was the general conclusion, though Hansom was inclined to give the scales a prejudiced nudge.

‘One can’t always strike a balance …’

Here, again, he was making a discovery – he, in his approach to a case, had never drawn up accounts of this kind. They were a compromise with the truth and he had automatically distrusted them; his way was to assemble the facts and to hold them suspended in his mind, where, by a sort of alchemy, they eventually moved into a pattern.

‘Yes, sir, I agree. But one has to have a shot at it.’

‘It’s a process which is liable to error, Stephens.’

‘But you’ve got to have some method for treating the facts, sir.’

‘If you can see the facts clearly, there’s no need for a method.’

He could see he was puzzling Stephens, and suddenly he smiled at him paternally. He knew that it was no use trying to explain himself to the young man. It would take long years of experience, of persistent trial and error, before Stephens came to accept that detection was an art and not a science. Even Gently, at the top of his tree, had only just begun to see that …

‘We’ll take a look at the exhibition before we return to HQ. It’ll give us something to chat about when we put the painters through it.’

The way to the Castle Gardens, however, took them past the City Hall and its car park, and Gently hadn’t the heart to head his colleague off them again. As usual at that
hour, the park was jam-packed with lines of vehicles. An elderly attendant in a navy-blue uniform was doing his best to produce a semblance of order.

‘Superintendent Gently, CID. Are those the dustbins where the police found the body?’

This was also for Stephens’s benefit, since Gently could identify the site from the photographs. There were six of them standing in a well-dragooned row, heavy-quality, galvanized Corporation dustbins; than these it would have been hard to imagine a more innocent sequence of useful ironware. Nothing remained to suggest that a tragedy had been enacted. All traces of blood had been carefully erased. The terrace wall, against which the dustbins were ranged, marked the boundary of HQ’s section of the park.

‘He was a cheeky sort of chummie, sir … when you come to weigh it up!’

Gently nodded his agreement, his eye running round the open space. It was largely contained by the interior angle which was formed by the backs of the City Hall and Police HQ. Opposite to the City Hall were the blind ends and a brick wall, beside which ran a footway joining Chapel Street with St Saviour’s. The last-mentioned street made the fourth side of the square; it faced the car park with a number of small shops, and a lane.

‘It couldn’t have been altogether dark over here.’

Stephens was hard at it studying the angles of the site. Above it all, sanctifying the spot with civic dignity, rose the great tower of the City Hall with its clock face of gilt studs.

‘By half past ten … at this time of the year …’

‘I seem to remember that it was cloudy on Monday.’

‘All the same, there’s three lamps in the street over there, and a small one on the wall where you go out past HQ.’

Stephens paused to eye the police building with a touch of malevolence – this was certainly an unfortunate spot for a murder! There were about twenty yards, if it came to hard figures, which separated the dustbins from the windows of the canteen. But then, even police canteens ran to curtains.

‘Under the circumstances it could scarcely have been premeditated. Nobody but an idiot would plan a murder right here. Having got her here, he must have acted on impulse – he might have been carrying that paper knife in the locker of his car.’

‘Then you think it was bona fide, his offer of a lift?’

‘Well, sir, he might have planned to do it somewhere else. But then finding that it was quiet here, temptation got the better of him. He may have done it in his car – we might be able to find the traces.’

It was plain enough that Stephens was chafing for a bit of action. Unlike Dutt, he wasn’t used to Gently’s seeming-casual ways. The murderer would have had three days in which to clean or not clean his car, but the urgency of beginning a check sounded keenly in Stephens’s voice.

‘All right … cut along to Hansom and see if we can get those cars pulled in. Though I would like to have talked to the drivers before you started to put the wind up them.’

‘I don’t want to upset your plans, sir—’

‘That’s all right. You may be lucky. And don’t forget our friend Johnson’s MG – I’d put that right at the head of the list.’

He chuckled as Stephens went striding away – another improbability had just occurred to him. Unless the
murderer had happened to be left-handed, then he could hardly have done that job in his car. But the young Inspector wanted to be up and doing, and checking the cars was a chore which would have to be done. It might also do him good to work with Hansom for a spell … as an educating influence, the Chief Inspector had his points. Still chuckling, Gently continued on his way to the Castle Gardens.

There he had a stroke of luck, though it had not been unanticipated: he found the Palette Group’s illustrious chairman busy lionizing in the Gardens. With his natural flair for publicity he was exploiting the moment’s
sensation
, and long before Gently caught a glimpse of him he could hear the pontificating voice.

‘Art for art’s sake … that’s the purest piece of moonshine! So is Lawrence’s asinine assertion … doesn’t bear inspection for a moment. If art was for
his
sake, then why did he bother to publish? Why didn’t he burn his manuscript the moment after he’d finished scribbling …?

‘No, there is nothing here that will describe the creative process. Those who view art from a selfish standpoint haven’t learnt their A B C …’

Characteristically, Mallows was expounding his artistic credo, the man himself almost lost to sight in the centre of his knot of admirers. It was the first time that Gently had seen the great man in the flesh, though pictures of him were commonplace in the papers and illustrated weeklies. According to your viewpoint he was a Philistine or a prophet. Of later years opinion had been swinging more towards the latter role.

‘The first lesson in art is that art is a transitive term. It is a communication that takes place between one person and his fellows. The artist has a vision, a revelation of the truth, and this he needs to express, not to himself, but to other people …’

To get a better view of him, Gently climbed a few steps up the Mound. Mallows had a short and stocky figure which was easily hidden in a crowd. His features were thick and rather coarsened, but from a distance, very distinguished; he had a lavish head of iron-grey hair, locks of which were heaped over his forehead.

‘In art, one distinguishes three pillars …’

His audience, Gently noticed, was largely of women. They were mostly well dressed in the provincial way, and hung upon every word he was uttering. Some of them were young, dressed in jeans and sloppy jumpers, and these were probably students from the flourishing Art School. But the majority were serious, middle-aged women, or women arrived at a certain age.

On the outskirts of the group stood one or two men with bored expressions. They stared about them while Mallows was talking, and stole occasional looks at the exhibits. These, displayed on scaffolds beneath canvas awnings, were being well patronized by a steady stream of viewers. The group of stands stood in a crescent along the foot of the steep Mound, shaded partly by the giant elms which were rooted in the bank above.

‘These pillars are Vision, Expression and Reception. For the past fifty years or so the last pillar has been forgotten. The artists grew proud, they broke the law that gave them being. As a result we have witnessed anarchy, sterility and
decadence, and an impudent arraignment of the public with whom the artists had broken faith …’

This was the doctrine which Mallows had been hammering for the last three decades, the doctrine that art was for someone, or that else it wasn’t art. In the late twenties and early thirties it had raised storms of abuse and mockery, but as aesthetic mysticism had begun to decline, so had the storms died away to murmuring. A little, perhaps, of the truth had been with this upstart provincial shake-canvas …

But now Mallows had said his piece and was stalking across to the attendant’s booth, leaving to break out behind him a cooing and animated conversation. Gently climbed down the steps again and also made his way to the booth. With the young man who sat at the table, Mallows was checking the sales of the pictures.

‘May I have a word with you, sir …?’

A pair of fierce grey-blue eyes rose to stare into his. Mallows had thick, up-brushed eyebrows ending in Mephistophelian points, and his jaw, one noticed, had an uncompromising jut to it.

‘Damn it, you’re not a reporter, are you?’

Gently modestly presented his credentials.

‘Aha – so you’re a policeman! I thought you had the professional approach. Now what can I do for you – do you want to buy a picture?’

‘As yet, I haven’t seen them—’

‘Well, we’ll soon take care of that. Nobody gets away from here without exposing themselves to our talent – put your notebook away, my dear fellow. You’d better come along with me.’

It was a novel situation, being required to ‘go along with’ someone, and Mallows supplied additional point to it by grasping Gently’s arm. He led him past the first few stands, at which a number of people were clustered, and steered him into a booth in which were displayed some quaint fish pictures.

‘There you are – what do you think of these? I read in the paper that you were an angler.’

Gently wondered whether to be frank and decided that he might as well be.

‘They aren’t the sort of fish I catch.’

‘Ah! You’re another one who doesn’t like Wimbush. And yet the poor fellow keeps painting these fish, as though they were the be-all and end-all of life. Do you think he’s a bit of a case?’

‘I don’t know … perhaps angling would help him.’

‘Now you disappoint me, Superintendent. I was hoping you would quote me a snatch of Freud.’

Mallows quizzed him for a few moments from the depths of his five feet seven; then he darted a look round the booth, to establish the non-proximity of Wimbush lovers.

‘Now – what do you want to see me about?’

‘First, a question about your car …’

‘It’s a 1957 Daimler.’

‘Where did you park it on Monday night, sir?’

‘Hum.’ Mallows cocked an eyebrow at him. ‘Now it’s really come to business, hasn’t it? I suppose that if I’d parked it by a certain set of dustbins, you’d pull a rope out of your pocket and hang me from the next tree.’

‘Did you park it there, then?’

‘No, no, not I! In any case, you wouldn’t park a Daimler by the dustbins.’

‘Then where did you park it, sir?’

‘On the Haymarket, as always. And since you’re not going to believe me, I’ve got a witness who will prove it.’

His witness, it turned out, was an old-age pensioner, a self-appointed attendant at the Haymarket parking space. In return for small tips he kept an eye on the cars, and had some undisclosed method for keeping places for his regulars.

‘Old George’ll see me clear without applying for habeas corpus – unless you hold that I bribe him when I buy him a drink. And he’ll vouch for Farrer too – he’s another contributory parker – and Farrer and I will vouch for each other. What are you going to do about that?’