The Mysterious Commission (10 page)

‘Yes, I am. And it was high-handed. Irregular, in fact. I wouldn’t dispute it for a moment. Still, Mr Honeybath, it looks as if you and I have more serious things to think about.’

‘That seems to be perfectly true.’ Honeybath considered it politic to respond at once to this note of reason.

‘Now, when they picked you up–’

‘Picked me up?’ Honeybath was offended again.

‘Ah, not in that sense. I don’t suggest for a moment that they ran you to earth. One of them simply picked you up in a patrol car. You had put yourself in his way.’

‘You can call it that, if you like.’ Honeybath again didn’t much care for Keybird’s command of ambiguity. ‘As for the money, there was more of it, as a matter of fact. May I ask whether you have judged yourself empowered to rifle my private possessions in this studio?’

‘We have done nothing not, in our judgement, directly necessary to the business of elucidating the crime.’ Keybird said this quite stiffly.

‘That drawer in the desk, for instance.’ Honeybath pointed. ‘Has it been broken open by the robbers? Or have you picked the lock?’

‘Most certainly not. It’s untouched, so far as I can see.’

‘Then here is the key.’ Honeybath walked over to the chimneypiece and fished behind a clock. ‘Be so good as to open the drawer and find what you can in it. Be careful, though. Fingerprints, and so forth.’

‘Thank you.’ Keybird didn’t seem amused by this kindly piece of advice. ‘A further thousand pounds,’ he said presently.

‘Quite so. And, as your rural colleagues would say: well, well, well. It was too late to get it into the bank, of course, that day a fortnight ago. Which means, come to think of it, that the thieves’ haul was diminished by that amount. A gratifying thought, Mr Keybird.’

‘Very true, sir.’ Keybird’s smile was again not reassuring. Perhaps he felt things were going well when he edged people into turning a bit cocky. Honeybath decided to stick to a cautious note. ‘So it appears,’ Keybird went on, ‘that the total may be called two thousand guineas. They were prepared to go to that figure as an inducement to clear out. Imaginative, wouldn’t you say?’

‘I don’t know what you mean by imaginative. The sum is certainly in excess of my usual fee.’

‘For smoothing the way of bank robbers?’ It was impossible to be certain whether this from Keybird was an outrage or a joke. Honeybath decided to ignore it.

‘In fact,’ he said, ‘it is nearly double my usual fee. I felt entitled to push up the figure, simply because the proposal was such an extraordinary one.’

‘A proposal made to you professionally as a portrait-painter?’

‘Of course. And by a man calling himself Peach, and representing himself as a rather mysterious agent or go-between. He handed over just under half of the stipulated sum, there and then. You’ve just removed it from that drawer.’

‘I see. You are quite right that it will interest the fingerprint people. And that reminds me to give you a receipt.’ Keybird produced a small, official-looking form and scribbled on it. He thus owned, Honeybath thought, to the same book of rules as the rural sergeant. Then he paused and gazed at Honeybath in a brooding sort of way. It was hard not to feel that he was trying to make up his mind as to whether the cock-and-bull story this rascally artist would put up could be the least worth listening to. ‘Mr Honeybath,’ he then said politely, ‘I shall be most grateful if you can provide me – more or less as a sustained narrative – with whatever information you feel may be useful.’

‘Very well – and I’ll begin at the beginning.’ Honeybath checked himself. ‘But – do you know? – I won’t. I’ll begin, as long as I remember it, with what strikes me as the oddest part of the whole affair. The place, so to speak, where the emphasis should lie.’

‘A sensible plan, sir.’

‘It’s about the money. What you found in that drawer, they
had
to pay. There would have been no deal without it. But the second instalment – what was taken off me in that confounded country police station – they paid me, under no compulsion at all, that I can see, just before chucking me out.’

‘Chucking you out?’

‘It came to that. I was driven away from a totally unknown house and locality, tricked into getting out of the car, and then simply left by the roadside. And yet I was given the balance of my fee. Don’t you think that odd?’

‘A little confusing, no doubt.’ Keybird was looking hard at Honeybath. ‘Honour among thieves, perhaps?’ Keybird smiled again. ‘But, of course, I express that badly. And now, sir, your story. By the way, I have a tape recorder here. You won’t mind if I switch it on?’

‘Not in the least.’ It came to Honeybath as a sudden and wonderful thing that he had nothing but truth to tell. It was possibly going to be rather dull for Keybird, whose
métier
was so clearly catching out liars. But he suspected that, to date, the Crime Squad or whatever it was called hadn’t made much progress with their investigation. He was their substantial hope. And he’d do his best for them. After all, running the robbers to earth appeared to offer the only possible chance of recovering
The Portrait of an Unknown Gentleman.

Half an hour later Keybird switched off the tape recorder.

‘What first strikes me about your story,’ he said easily, ‘is that it hangs together quite well.’

‘Thank you very much. But of course it may have been carefully rehearsed, may it not? Don’t be taken in, Mr Keybird, or in too much of a hurry.’

‘That’s a fair warning, would you say?’ Keybird had received this resentful and sarcastic speech as a mild whimsy. ‘On the other hand, it doesn’t ring a bell.’

‘Just what do you mean by that?’

‘Well, here’s a large-scale robbery – not twenty yards from where you and I are sitting now.
That
rings a bell, only a bell with a lesser
timbre
, so to speak.’ Keybird paused on this enigmatic remark. ‘I’ll tell you what quite often happens. A gang of burglars – for that’s what they are – scouts around until they find a bank, or some such promising prospect, next door to an uninhabited house or an untenanted shop. They gain entrance to house or shop unobtrusively, and then they go to work. In some respects the tunnelling technique is child’s play. You’d scarcely believe it, but half the banks in London have strong rooms or the like almost completely vulnerable from down below. Such folly’s enough to break a man’s heart, trust me.’ Keybird made one of his pauses on this sudden human note. ‘What is tricky, is the time factor. Tunnelling and boring, avoiding pipes and cables, shoring up weight-bearing areas, and all the rest of it: these things can’t be done in a hurry. Then again, really worthwhile targets with empty premises next door aren’t to be found in every street. So there’s a second technique. You actually take on a tenancy, and boldly appear to be setting up a new business, or moving into a new house. Very advantageous that can be, in some ways. You can move in a whole gang of navvies, and pretty well demolish what you please in full view of the world, and have the whole job finished before local authorities and the like begin to think of inquiring about permits and licences and planning permissions and the rest of it. Keep a line of pantechnicons in the street, if you care to. Slackness all round, you know. Heartbreak again. Ours can be an uphill job.’

‘I sympathize with you,’ Honeybath said.

‘I’m much obliged to you, I’m sure.’ Keybird’s smile came again. ‘But there’s a third technique. You do a deal with some seedy little man, known to be hard up, and hopefully none too scrupulous, whose shop or whatever–’

‘Whose studio, for instance.’

‘Why, yes.’ Keybird appeared innocently surprised. ‘A studio it might be. And you provide him with a colourable excuse for making himself scarce – say taking a fortnight at the sea to visit his old auntie. Of course the fellow’s accepting a certain risk. Eventually, awkward questions will be asked. So you have to make it well worth his while.’

‘Two thousand guineas.’

‘Well, no.’ Keybird was at his easiest. ‘Precisely
not
that. Not money of that order at all. So that’s where any bell of this sort doesn’t exactly ring true. But another thing. You mustn’t mistake me. These chaps who conveniently take themselves off are sometimes quite honest. Only, perhaps, a bit thick.’

‘Do I understand, Mr Keybird, that you’re prepared to be rather charitable, and lump me in with the thickies?’ Honeybath thought his employment of this demotic idiom rather neat.

‘Well, sir, the simplest reading of this affair is to accept it as more or less in that area. They got you away on this fool’s errand of a portrait commission. Only, the scale of the operation rather baffles me. This great house, and all that affluence, and parade of what you might call pomp and circumstance. I recognize that you’re a big man in your line, and that something fairly impressive – imposing, even – would have to be laid on. Still, what you describe remains a bit steep. And another thing. This Peach: was he a gentleman?’

‘No.’

‘But the man calling himself Arbuthnot?’

‘Yes. Decidedly yes.’

‘And the madman, or pretended madman, that they called Mr X, and who liked to be called
Mon Empereur
: what about him?’

‘Well, yes. And then some of the men I told you I heard and glimpsed as they left their meeting. They weren’t what I’d myself think of as convincing big-time East End crooks.’

‘Then it grows more and more puzzling. I know of more than one gang that could mount a robbery like this. But not with that kind of background or hinterland. It makes me feel we have a long way to go.’

There was a silence. Honeybath no longer felt he simply wanted to tumble into bed. But he did feel he wanted a drink.

‘There ought to be some whisky around,’ he said. ‘Except that I’ve been told burglars commonly polish off anything of the kind. Do you mind if I look?’

‘Far from it, sir.’

Whisky proved, in fact, to be available.

‘Will you join me, Mr Keybird?’ Honeybath asked. He had a notion that even the higher ranks of the police were obliged austerely to decline such refreshment when on the job.

‘That’s very kind of you. Neat.’

They drank. Honeybath reflected that the last man with whom he had indulged in such compotation had been the treacherous Mr Basil Arbuthnot. He wasn’t altogether clear that Detective Superintendent Keybird need be beyond certain treacheries himself. One felt him to be not at his least dangerous, certainly, when he was being most amiable.

‘A long way to go?’ he said. ‘You can track down that house, I suppose.’

‘And find an empty shell.’ There was a hint of what Honeybath felt to be the dogmatic in this reply. ‘It remains important, of course.’

‘If my story isn’t moonshine, and the place does really exist.’

‘But I think we have to begin at this end.’ Keybird had ignored the consideration just advanced. ‘That’s how we’ll recover all that money.’

What Honeybath wanted to recover was his picture. But he didn’t advance this fact. And now Keybird went off at a tangent.

‘Talking of money, sir. Has it occurred to you to wonder about the present legal ownership of that two thousand guineas?’

‘No, it has not.’ This was an honest reply. ‘It hasn’t entered my head. Only I’m very sure that
I
don’t own it.’

‘The point could be a tricky one.’ Keybird appeared genuinely interested. ‘Wouldn’t you say that, whatever its source, it has come to you as a return upon the legitimate exercise of your professional skill?’

‘Of course it has – in a sense. But it is corrupt money, passed in the prosecution of fraud and crime. I should hope for legal opinion to the effect that the bargain is therefore void. What remains my property, therefore, is the portrait.’ Honeybath had got this out, after all.

‘It’s an interesting point of view.’ Keybird was looking at Honeybath with a fresh curiosity. ‘It was a success, your portrait of Mr X?’

‘In my judgement, decidedly yes.’

‘Even although executed in what must have been very taxing circumstances?’

‘Certainly, Mr Keybird. These things can be quite as mysterious as any bank robbery. And I want to recover my portrait.’

‘Yes, of course. Most natural, I’m sure.’

Charles Honeybath was offended, for he had detected a perfunctory note in this response. It was a moment from which, although neither man was aware of it, momentous consequences were to proceed.

One of these, indeed, arose before the night was out. It didn’t seem possible to sleep in the studio. There was that uncomfortably gaping hole, for one thing; and for another, the whole place (which consisted only of one big room and two little ones) appeared to have been pretty well taken over by the police. In this matter Honeybath simply didn’t know what his rights were. The assumption seemed to be that, as a law-abiding citizen and loyal subject, it was up to him to put up with whatever came along. But at least the police couldn’t camp in his flat, which clearly had nothing to do with the case, and he allowed himself, gratefully enough, to be transported there in the same car that had brought him back to London.

It was in the last half-minute of this short drive that he recalled a curious fact. He had given Keybird a very full account of his adventures and misadventures over the past fortnight, and without the slightest consciousness of holding anything back. But he
had
held something back. When he had said to Keybird ‘You can track down that house, I suppose’, he had failed to add just how Keybird could start in on the job. This, he now saw, had been because Keybird had immediately suggested a certain lack of interest in that aspect of his case, or at least a sense that it was less pressing than other matters.

But wasn’t it almost certain that, if Keybird had been told about the train saying
Swansea
and the clock that habitually went wrong on the ninth stroke of an hour, vigorous investigation would be set going at once? And Keybird had given a very positive impression that in affairs of this sort time was a factor of enormous importance: you got somewhere before the trail went cold, or perhaps you didn’t get anywhere at all.