Crowder looked from the card to Wimsey, and from Wimsey to the card a little reluctantly.
‘If you want to exhibit it, of course,’ said Lord Peter, ‘I should be delighted to leave it with you as long as you liked.’
‘Oh, it’s not that,’ said Crowder. ‘The fact is, I’m not altogether keen on the thing. I should like to – that is to say, it’s not really finished.’
‘My dear man, it’s a bally masterpiece.’
‘Oh, the painting’s all right. But it’s not altogether satisfactory as a likeness.’
‘What the devil does the likeness matter? I don’t know what the late Plant looked like, and I don’t care. As I look at the thing it’s a damn fine bit of brushwork, and if you tinker about with it you’ll spoil it. You know that as well as I do. What’s biting you? It isn’t the price, is it? You know I shan’t boggle about that. I can afford my modest pleasures, even in these thin and piping times. You don’t want me to have it? Come, now – what’s the real reason?’
‘There’s no reason at all why you shouldn’t have it if you really want it, I suppose,’ said the painter, still a little sullenly. ‘If it’s really the painting that interests you.’
‘What do you suppose it is? The notoriety? I can have all I want of that commodity, you know, for the asking or even without asking. Well, anyhow, think it over, and when you’ve decided, send me a line and name your price.’
Crowder nodded without speaking, and the photographer having by this time finished his job, the party took their leave.
As they left the building, they became involved in the stream of Crichton’s staff going out to lunch. A girl, who seemed to have been loitering in a semi-intentional way in the lower hall, caught them as the lift descended.
‘Are you the Evening Views people? Did you get your picture all right?’
‘Miss Twitterton?’ said Hardy interrogatively. ‘Yes, rather – thank you so much for giving us the tip. You’ll see it on the front page this evening.’
‘Oh, that’s splendid! I’m frightfully thrilled. It has made an excitement here – all this business. Do they know anything yet about who murdered Mr Plant? Or am I being horribly indiscreet?’
‘We’re expecting news of an arrest any minute now,’ said Hardy. ‘As a matter of fact, I shall have to buzz back to the office as fast as I can to sit with one ear glued to the telephone. You will excuse me, won’t you? And, look here – will you let me come round another day, when things aren’t so busy, and take you out to lunch?’
‘Of course. I should love to.’ Miss Twitterton giggled. ‘I do so want to hear about all the murder cases.’
‘Then here’s the man to tell you about them, Miss Twitterton,’ said Hardy, with mischief in his eye. ‘Allow me to introduce Lord Peter Wimsey.’
Miss Twitterton offered her hand in an ecstasy of excitement which almost robbed her of speech.
‘How do you do?’ said Wimsey. ‘As this blighter is in such a hurry to get back to his gossip-shop, what do you say to having a spot of lunch with me?’
‘Well, really—’ began Miss Twitterton.
‘He’s all right,’ said Hardy; ‘he won’t lure you into any gilded dens of infamy. If you look at him you will see he has a kind, innocent face.’
‘I’m sure I never thought of such a thing,’ said Miss Twitterton. ‘But, you know – really – I’ve only got my old things on. It’s no good wearing anything decent in this dusty old place.’
‘Oh, nonsense!’ said Wimsey. ‘You couldn’t possibly look nicer. It isn’t the frock that matters – it’s the person who wears it. That’s all right, then. See you later, Sally! Taxi! Where shall we go? What time do you have to be back, by the way?’
‘Two o’clock,’ said Miss Twitterton regretfully.
‘Then we’ll make the Savoy do,’ said Wimsey; ‘it’s reasonably handy.’
Miss Twitterton hopped into the waiting taxi with a little squeak of agitation.
‘Did you see Mr Crichton?’ she said. ‘He went by just as we were talking. However, I dare say he doesn’t really know me by sight. I hope not – or he’ll think I’m getting too grand to need a salary.’ She rooted in her handbag. ‘I’m sure my face is getting all shiny with excitement. What a silly taxi. It hasn’t got a mirror – and I’ve bust mine.’
Wimsey solemnly produced a small looking-glass from his pocket.
‘How wonderfully competent of you!’ exclaimed Miss Twitterton. ‘I’m afraid, Lord Peter, you are used to taking girls about.’
‘Moderately so,’ said Wimsey. He did not think it necessary to mention that the last time he had used that mirror it had been to examine the back teeth of a murdered man.
‘Of course,’ said Miss Twitterton, ‘they had to say he was popular with his colleagues. Haven’t you noticed that murdered people are always well dressed and popular?’
‘They have to be,’ said Wimsey. ‘It makes it more mysterious and pathetic. Just as girls who disappear are always bright and home-loving, and have no men friends.’
‘Silly, isn’t it?’ said Miss Twitterton, with her mouth full of roast duck and green peas. ‘I should think everybody was only too glad to get rid of Plant – nasty, rude creature. So mean, too, always taking credit for other people’s work. All those poor things in the studio, with all the spirit squashed out of them. I always say, Lord Peter, you can tell if a head of a department’s fitted for his job by noticing the atmosphere of the place as you go into it. Take the copy-room, now. We’re all as cheerful and friendly as you like, though I must say the language that goes on there is something awful, but these writing fellows are like that, and they don’t mean anything by it. But then, Mr Ormerod is a real gentleman – that’s our copy-chief, you know – and he makes them all take an interest in the work, for all they grumble about the cheese-bills and the department-store bilge they have to turn out. But it’s quite different in the studio. A sort of dead-and-alive feeling about it, if you understand what I mean. We girls notice things like that more than some of the high-up people think. Of course, I’m very sensitive to these feelings – almost psychic, I’ve been told.’
Lord Peter said there was nobody like a woman for sizing up character at a glance. Women, he thought, were remarkably intuitive.
‘That’s a fact,’ said Miss Twitterton. ‘I’ve often said, if I could have a few frank words with Mr Crichton, I could tell him a thing or two. There are wheels within wheels beneath the surface of a place like this that these brass-hats have no idea of.’
Lord Peter said he felt sure of it.
‘The way Mr Plant treated people he thought were beneath him,’ went on Miss Twitterton, ‘I’m sure it was enough to make your blood boil. I’m sure, if Mr Ormerod sent me with a message to him, I was glad to get out of the room again. Humiliating, it was, the way he’d speak to you. I don’t care if he’s dead or not; being dead doesn’t make a person’s past behaviour any better, Lord Peter. It wasn’t so much the rude things he said. There’s Mr Birkett, for example; he’s rude enough, but nobody minds him. He’s just like a big, blundering puppy – rather a lamb, really. It was Mr Plant’s nasty sneering way we all hated so. And he was always running people down.’
‘How about this portrait?’ asked Wimsey. ‘Was it like him at all?’
‘It was a lot too like him,’ said Miss Twitterton emphatically. ‘That’s why he hated it so. He didn’t like Crowder, either. But, of course, he knew he could paint, and he made him do it because he thought he’d be getting a valuable thing cheap. And Crowder couldn’t very well refuse or Plant would have got him sacked.’
‘I shouldn’t have thought that would have mattered much to a man of Crowder’s ability.’
‘Poor Mr Crowder! I don’t think he’s ever had much luck. Good artists don’t always seem able to sell their pictures. And I know he wanted to get married – otherwise he’d never have taken up this commercial work. He’s told me a good bit about himself. I don’t know why – but I’m one of t
he people men seem to tell things to.’
Lord Peter filled Miss Twitterton’s glass.
‘Oh, please! No, really! Not a drop more! I’m talking a lot too much as it is. I don’t know what Mr Ormerod will say when I go in to take his letters. I shall be writing down all kinds of funny things. Ooh! I really must be getting back. Just look at the time!’
‘It’s not really late. Have a black coffee – just as a corrective.’ Wimsey smiled. ‘You haven’t been talking at all too much. I’ve enjoyed your picture of office life enormously. You have a very vivid way of putting things, you know. I see now why Mr Plant was not altogether a popular character.’
‘Not in the office, anyway – whatever he may have been elsewhere,’ said Miss Twitterton darkly.
‘Oh?’
‘Oh, he was a one!’ said Miss Twitterton. ‘He certainly was a one. Some friends of mine met him one evening up in the West End, and they came back with some nice stories. It was quite a joke in the office – old Plant and his rosebuds, you know. Mr Cowley – he’s the Cowley, you know, who rides in the motor-cycle races – he always said he knew what to think of Mr Plant and his motor tours. That time Mr Plant pretended he’d gone touring in Wales, Mr Cowley was asking him about the roads, and he didn’t know a thing about them. Because Mr Cowley really had been touring there, and he knew quite well Mr Plant hadn’t been where he said he had; and, as a matter of fact, Mr Cowley knew he’d been staying the whole time in a hotel at Aberystwyth, in very attractive company.’
Miss Twitterton finished her coffee, and slapped the cup down defiantly.
‘And now I really must run away, or I shall be most dreadfully late. And thank you ever so much.’
‘Hullo!’ said Inspector Winterbottom. ‘You’ve bought that portrait, then?’
‘Yes’, said Wimsey: ‘It’s a fine bit of work.’ He gazed thoughtfully at the canvas. ‘Sit down, Inspector; I want to tell you a story.’
‘And I want to tell you a story,’ replied the Inspector.
‘Let’s have yours first,’ said Wimsey, with an air of flattering eagerness.
‘No, no, my lord. You take precedence. Go ahead.’ He snuggled down with a chuckle into his armchair.
‘Well,’ said Wimsey. ‘Mine’s a sort of a fairy-story. And, mind you, I haven’t verified it.’
‘Go ahead, my lord, go ahead.’
‘Once upon a time,’ said Wimsey sighing.
‘That’s the good old-fashioned way to begin a fairy-story,’ said Inspector Winterbottom.
‘Once upon a time,’ repeated Wimsey, ‘there was a painter. He was a good painter, but the bad fairy of Financial Success had not been asked to his christening – what?’
‘That’s often the way with painters,’ agreed the Inspector.
‘So he had to take up a job as a commercial artist, because nobody would buy his pictures and, like so many people in fairy-tales, he wanted to marry a goose-girl.’
‘There’s many people want to do the same,’ said the Inspector.
‘The head of his department,’ went on Wimsey, ‘was a man with a mean, sneering soul. He wasn’t even really good at his job, but he had been pushed into authority during the war, when better men went to the Front. Mind you, I’m rather sorry for the man. He suffered from an inferiority complex’ – the Inspector snorted – ‘and he thought the only way to keep his end up was to keep other people’s end down. So he became a little tin tyrant and a bully. He took all the credit for the work of the men under his charge, and he sneered and harassed them till they got inferiority complexes even worse than his own.’
‘I’ve known that sort,’ said the Inspector, ‘and the marvel to me is how they get away with it.’
‘Just so,’ said Wimsey. ‘Well, I dare say this man would have gone on getting away with it all right if he hadn’t thought of getting this painter to paint his portrait.’
‘Damn silly thing to do,’ said the Inspector. ‘It was only making the painter fellow conceited with himself.’
‘True. But, you see, this tin tyrant person had a fascinating female in tow, and he wanted the portrait for the lady. He thought that, by making the painter do it, he would get a good portrait at starvation price. But unhappily he’d forgotten that, however much an artist will put up with in the ordinary way, he is bound to be sincere with his art. That’s the one thing a genuine artist won’t muck about with.’
‘I dare say,’ said the Inspector. ‘I don’t know much about artists.’
‘Well, you can take it from me. So the painter painted the portrait as he saw it, and he put the man’s whole creeping, sneering, paltry soul on the canvas for everybody to see.’
Inspector Winterbottom stared at the portrait, and the portrait sneered back at him.
‘It’s not what you’d call a flattering picture, certainly,’ he admitted.
‘Now, when a painter paints a portrait of anybody,’ went on Wimsey, ‘that person’s face is never the same to him again. It’s like – what shall I say? Well, it’s like the way a gunner, say, looks at a landscape where he happens to be posted. He doesn’t see it as a landscape. He doesn’t see it as a thing of magic beauty, full of sweeping lines and lovely colour. He sees it as so much cover, so many landmarks to aim by, so many gun-emplacements. And when the war is over and he goes back to it, he will still see it as cover and landmarks and gun-emplacements. It isn’t a landscape any more. It’s a war map.’
‘I know that,’ said Inspector Winterbottom. ‘I was a gunner myself.’
‘A painter gets just the same feeling of deadly familiarity with every line of a face he’s once painted,’ pursued Wimsey. ‘And, if it’s a face he hates, he hates it with a new and more irritable hatred. It’s like a defective barrel organ, everlastingly grinding out the same old maddening tune, and making the same damned awful wrong note every time the barrel goes round.’
‘Lord, how you can talk!’ ejaculated the Inspector.
‘That was the way the painter felt about this man’s hateful face. All day and every day he had to see it. He couldn’t get away because he was tied to his job, you see.’
‘He ought to have cut loose,’ said the Inspector. ‘It’s no good going on like that, trying to work with uncongenial people.’
‘Well, anyway, he said to himself, he could escape for a bit during his holidays. There was a beautiful little quiet spot he knew on the West Coast where nobody ever came. He’d been there before and painted it. Oh, by the way, that reminds me – I’ve got another picture to show you.’
He went to a bureau and extracted a small panel in oils from a drawer.
‘I saw that two years ago at a show in Manchester, and I happened to remember the name of the dealer who bought it.’
Inspector Winterbottom gaped at the panel. ‘But that’s East Felpham!’ he exclaimed.
‘Yes. It’s only signed T.C., but the technique is rather unmistakable, don’t you think?’
The Inspector knew little about technique, but initials he understood. He looked from the portrait to the panel, and back at Lord Peter.
‘The painter—’
‘Crowder?’
‘If it’s all the same to you, I’d rather go on calling him the painter. He packed up his traps on his push-bike carrier, and took his tormented nerves down to this beloved and secret spot for a quiet weekend. He stayed at a quiet little hotel in the neighbourhood, and each morning he cycled off to this lovely little beach to bathe. He never told anybody at the hotel where he went, because it was his place, and he didn’t want other people to find it out.’
Inspector Winterbottom set the panel down on the table, and helped himself to whisky.
‘One morning – it happened to be the Monday morning’ – Wimsey’s voice became slower and more reluctant – ‘he went down as usual. The tide was not yet fully in, but he ran out over the rocks to where he knew there was a deep bathing pool. He plunged in and swam about, and let the small noise of his jangling troubles be swallowed up in t
he innumerable laughter of the sea.’
‘Eh?’
‘κυμάτων ανήριθμον γέλασμα – quotation from the classics. Some people say it means the dimpled surface of the waves in the sunlight – but how could Prometheus, bound upon his rock, have seen it? Surely it was the chuckle of the incoming tide among the stones that came up to his ears on the lonely peak where the vulture fretted at his heart. I remember arguing about it with old Philpotts in class, and getting rapped over the knuckles for contradicting him. I didn’t know at the time that he was engaged in producing a translation on his own account, or doubtless I should have contradicted him more rudely, and been told to take my trousers down. Dear old Philpotts!’
‘I don’t know anything about that,’ said the Inspector.
‘I beg your pardon. Shocking way I have of wandering. The painter – well, he swam round the end of the rocks, for the tide was nearly in by that time; and, as he came up from the sea he saw a man standing on the beach – that beloved beach, remember, which he thought was his own sacred haven of peace. He came wading towards it, cursing the Bank Holiday rabble who must needs swarm about everywhere with their cigarette-packets and their kodaks and their gramophones – and then he saw that it was a face he knew. He knew every hated line in it, on that clear, sunny morning. And, early as it was, the heat was coming up over the sea like a haze.’
‘It was a hot weekend,’ said the Inspector.
‘And then the man hailed him, in his smug, mincing voice. “Hullo!” he said. “You here? How did you find my little bathing-place?” And that was too much for the painter. He felt as if his last sanctuary had been invaded. He leapt at the lean throat – it’s rather a stringy one, you may notice, with a prominent Adam’s apple – an irritating throat. The water chuckled round their feet as they swayed to and fro. He felt his thumbs sink into the flesh he had painted. He saw, and laughed to see, the hateful familiarity of the features change and swell into an unrecognisable purple. He watched the sunken eyes bulge out, and the thin mouth distort itself as the blackened tongue thrust through it – I am not unnerving you, I hope?’
Murder in Midsummer Page 8
