The Mysterious Commission

by Michael Innes

  But he could hardly tell this fellow that he had changed his mind, and that all he wanted was useful advice on how to get himself back to London in comfort. He sat back in the little van to consider his problem. The result was immediately alarming: nothing less than something warm and wet curling itself round his throat. He produced a yell – a half-strangled yell, because of the nature of this embrace – and managed to turn round a little in his seat. An enormous and slavering Alsatian dog was gazing at him reproachfully – clearly hurt in its mind that a demonstration of affection had been misinterpreted.

  ‘Don’t mind Radar, sir,’ the constable said soothingly. ‘It’s only villains Radar has it in for. He won’t harm you.’

  ‘Radar?’ Honeybath said stupidly. He had been absurdly discomposed. ‘Is that dog called Radar?’

  ‘Called Radar?’ The constable, like the dog, seemed hurt in his mind. ‘That is Radar.’

  ‘I see.’ Honeybath wasn’t entirely clear about the distinction. ‘A very good name for a police dog,’ he added judicially – and perhaps with some intention of ingratiating himself with Radar as well as with Radar’s handler. He saw that his nerves were bad. For some time ahead, he was going to be easily upset.

  But at least the drive was quite short, and he presently found himself inside a police station. There seemed to be not much more than a single stuffy little room; it was furnished with a bench, and with a counter behind which a second officer, apparently a sergeant, was shuffling some papers in a dispirited way.

  ‘Gentleman has a complaint,’ the first policeman said. He might have been a hospital clerk propelling the next out-patient before a doctor.

  ‘Yes, sir. Name, please?’ The sergeant scarcely looked up. He sounded extremely bored. It was improbable, Honeybath thought, that an insignificant station like this was manned all night. These two fellows – not to speak of Radar – were no doubt thinking of packing up and going home. They wouldn’t care for his odd recital at all. Perhaps it was just as well – and perhaps, indeed, he had better abandon the notion of delivering himself of it. He’d simply explain that there had been a hitch in transport, and ask them to whistle up something to get him home. And then he could do a little thinking as to whether he wanted to have any dealings with the police after all.

  ‘Name, please?’ the sergeant repeated. He had reached listlessly for a large diary or register, and was poising a pen over it.

  ‘My name’s Honeybath.’

  ‘Charles Honeybath?’ The sergeant had straightened up abruptly, and his free hand went out to grab a file from a corner of the counter.

  ‘Certainly. Charles Honeybath.’ Honeybath was impressed and pleased. The sergeant, despite appearances to the contrary, must take an informed interest in contemporary art. ‘The painter,’ he added. ‘As you’ve guessed.’

  ‘Quite so, sir.’ The sergeant paused, much as if verifying his facts in the dossier now before him. When he looked up, there was something slightly devious (it might have been maintained) about the movement of his head. Could the first constable (Honeybath’s rescuer, as Honeybath thought of him) have taken this for a signal or a sign? He had been standing gloomily warming himself before a small cheerlessly black stove; now he made his way casually to a position in front of the door. So did Radar. And Radar at once began to make disagreeable panting noises. It was almost as if the sagacious brute discerned a villain in the offing. ‘Would you oblige me, sir,’ the sergeant went on, ‘by turning out your pockets?’

  ‘What the devil do you mean?’ Strange things had been said to Charles Honeybath during the past fortnight, but surely this was the most outrageous of the lot.

  ‘Now, now – I think we understand each other very well.’ The sergeant’s tone had suddenly become almost benevolently indulgent. ‘Just routine, wouldn’t you say? Here on the counter, you remember – and you get a receipt at once. Keep your handkerchief. And any 5p bits. They’re useful to get coffee out of the machine at headquarters. Or tea or cocoa, for that matter. Very comfortable they make you there, nowadays.’

  ‘Good God, officer!’ Honeybath’s indignation was extreme. ‘Are you taking me for some habitual criminal?’

  ‘Now, now – no need to jump to conclusions. Just the contents of your pockets.’

  It came to Honeybath that he was in the clutches of an extremely stupid man – the kind of policeman that private detectives make rings round in romances of crime. And it was almost worse than being in the clutches of extremely clever men – which he suspected to have been his case until a couple of hours before. It came to him too, and with much greater force, that the noises now being made by Radar were very horrid indeed. He turned out his pockets.

  The sergeant wrote everything down, so the effect was of some fatuously conducted pencil-and-paper game. Not perhaps unnaturally, he was particularly interested in the £20 notes.

  ‘Well, well. Well, well, well!’ The sergeant’s voice, as he finished counting all this highly negotiable wealth, was constrained to a note as of reluctant admiration. ‘Just think of that,’ he said to the constable.

  ‘Christ!’ the constable said.

  ‘Christ!’ Radar said. (Or Honeybath thought Radar said this. But then he was by now becoming very confused indeed.)

  ‘And now, sir,’ the sergeant said, with recovered poise and broad irony, ‘I wonder whether you would just care to mention where you have been spending these last fourteen days?’

  ‘I haven’t the slightest idea.’

  ‘That’s very interesting, now. It would have been what they call magnesia, would it? Loss of memory, like?’

  ‘Nothing of the kind. I’ve never suffered from amnesia – which is the word you want – in my life. I don’t believe in such rubbish.’ Honeybath was now shouting wildly. ‘I was kidnapped. It’s what I came to tell you about – and you behave like bloody fools.’

  ‘Language, now, Mr Honeybath, language.’

  ‘Damn language. And I shall go in person to the Home Secretary.’

  ‘Yes, sir. It’s always a wise course. So you were kidnapped?’ The sergeant turned to his colleague. ‘It’s a story, all right,’ he said admiringly. ‘A deep one, he is. No wonder they’re after him bald-headed.’

  ‘I insist on telling you–’ Honeybath began.

  ‘Well, of course, sir. If you feel you must, that is. But I’d advise you to wait till they arrive.’ The sergeant had picked up a telephone. ‘They’ll be here within ten minutes, I’d say. And delighted to hear anything you have to offer. Smart fellows, you’ll find them.’

  ‘Who the devil are they?’

  ‘Regional Crime Squad for a start, Mr Honeybath. Detective Superintendent Keybird in charge, sir. Easy name to remember, wouldn’t you say? And don’t you bother about their ranks and titles. Just call them all Mister, same as you’ve always done.’

  ‘I’ve never encountered a person of that sort in my life.’

  ‘Well, well! Now – ’ But the sergeant’s call had gone through. ‘Honeybath,’ he said briefly into the instrument. ‘We’ve got him.’

  If the rural constabulary of heaven alone knew where had got him, the Regional Crime Squad carried him off in a rapidly definable direction – straight, in fact, to the metropolis. They did this at speed. The car was a very powerful car; there was another car ululating ahead of them; he had a dim persuasion that the cavalcade closed with a third car behind. Constables on motor-bicycles performed the function of outriders; they wove in and out waving other traffic more or less into the ditch. The police were doing no more than show the flag; it is wholesome that the populace (including any criminals who may be around) should be shown the terror of the law at work. Honeybath might have been what is called a high-security felon, being whisked, through some obscure necessity, from incarceration in one corner of the country to incarceration in another. A police officer sat on each side of Honeybath. They weren’t at all like the rural constables. They would have regarded bluff insult or grim silence as equally unac
ceptable. They offered polite conversation from time to time. This added a final touch of the bizarre to his incredible ride. And then suddenly the car had slowed beside Honeybath’s bank; had drawn to a halt before the door of Honeybath’s studio.

  ‘So we’ve got you safely home, sir,’ one of his gaolers pleasantly remarked.

  Mr – or Detective Superintendent – Keybird was exceedingly civil; he was only less civil than concentrated and alert. He barely had a face; his features were commonplace in the extreme; if Honeybath instantly felt that he wanted to set up a canvas before this high-ranking pig or dick it was because of the almost unbearable intensity of his pale blue eyes. They were the kind of eyes that pretty well said I God see you. Honeybath recalled eccentricities, conceivably illegal, in his extreme youth, and felt for some moments very frightened indeed.

  That Keybird received him, in the first instance, across the chasm added to his perturbation. Here was this appalling bloodhound from New Scotland Yard or whatever on one side of the gaping hole, and here was he – in his own studio – on the other. The studio had been bombed, or something like that. In a rational frame of mind, one would suppose that nothing more had happened than one of those more or less lethal explosions that trouble with a gas supply occasions from time to time. Or it could be one of those political things. Every now and then bits and pieces of London get blown up by persons anxious to propagate one or another enlightened reform of society. But why should the modest atelier of Charles Honeybath be chosen for such a demonstration? It didn’t make sense.

  ‘Mind your step, Mr Honeybath,’ Keybird said. The words may, or may not, have been double edged. ‘Perhaps you didn’t expect that it would be quite like this?’

  ‘I didn’t expect anything. I don’t know what you’re talking about. I’ve had a tiring day, and I want to go to bed.’ Honeybath quite surprised himself by the firmness with which he said this. ‘I can see there’s been some sort of accident. But, if you want to talk about it, I’ll be obliged if you’ll come back in the morning.’

  ‘You sleep here regularly, sir?’

  ‘No, I don’t. Only from time to time, when I have a press of work on hand.’

  ‘There’s been nobody to miss you during the past fortnight?’

  ‘I don’t care a damn whether there has been or not. I just want to go to sleep. But, for what it’s worth, I left a note at my flat. For the woman who comes in and tidies up.’

  ‘So you went away of your own free will?’

  ‘Certainly I did. It’s complicated. But certainly I did.’

  ‘I understand you to have told the police when you contacted them that you had been kidnapped. Perhaps that was just a joke?’

  ‘It was nothing of the kind. But, for the moment, I simply decline to discuss the matter. My mind is confused.’

  ‘Perhaps you feel it would be prudent to talk only in the presence of your solicitor? That would be perfectly in order.’

  ‘I feel nothing of the kind. I simply want you to clear out, and to take all these men with you. Are you prepared to assert that I am under arrest? Do you hold a warrant entitling you to be on these premises without my permission?’

  ‘Mr Honeybath, I hope you will not wish to be too legalistic about this. I am simply asking for your assistance – your immediate assistance, despite your very understandable fatigue – in view of the fact that a major crime has been mounted from your studio.’

  ‘Mounted! What the devil do you mean?’

  ‘The bank next door has been robbed, in one form or another, of close on half a million pounds. And the operation’ – Keybird pointed to the chasm – ‘began there.’

  ‘Half a million pounds!’ As if from far away, Honeybath’s own voice came to him, stupidly repeating this sum. The chasm, the pit, was swimming before him. ‘That’s a lot of money.’

  ‘It is indeed, sir. Worth organizing for. Worth considerable preliminary outlay here and there.’

  ‘Yes – of course.’

  What was for some time to seem to Honeybath the truth of the matter presented itself to him in a flash. It was a humiliating truth. That portrait of Mr X – the best thing he had ever done – hadn’t really been wanted at all. The distinguished company in which he had been assured it was going to hang simply didn’t exist. Nobody had given a damn for the thing – or was giving the thing a damn now. By this time it had probably been stuffed into some furnace in that horrible house – just to help the central heating along. The vast mortification in this stunned Honeybath. But as well as mortified he was angry. A small glow of primitive rage – to be fateful for his future – was kindling somewhere in his stupefied mind. The vanity of the artist (which can be almost as devouring as the vanity of the writer) was already at work upon him. His painting had been held at nought.

  ‘Perhaps,’ Keybird was saying, ‘you had arranged to go off and work elsewhere? It would have been inconvenient for you – to have all this digging and delving and trucking and propping and steel-cutting going on under your nose as you pursued your own professional activities.’

  ‘Arranged to–?’ Unbelievingly, Honeybath picked up the operative words. ‘Do I understand you to be suggesting I have been in some collusive arrangement with these robbers?’

  ‘Not necessarily collusive, Mr Honeybath. But what may loosely be called an arrangement there certainly seems to have been.’

  9

  Keybird’s assertion was undeniable. A moment’s sober thought showed Honeybath that something which must be called an ‘arrangement’ had existed between himself on the one hand and the atrocious Arbuthnot and his associates on the other. Moreover he realized, with dawning misgiving, that he had an uncommonly tall story to tell.

  But at least his studio was now less like a movie set for some gangster film. Keybird’s assistants had withdrawn, whether for good or for a time. Faint noises coming through the tunnel (for there was, of course, a tunnel as well as a chasm) suggested that criminal investigation was still going forward in the bank. This prompted Honeybath to a question.

  ‘Would you mind telling me, Mr Keybird, just when this happened?’

  ‘Of course not.’ Keybird gave a faint smile which Honeybath didn’t at all like. It suggested awareness of the possibility – to put it no stronger than that – that Honeybath had produced a query to which he already knew the answer. Honeybath vaguely saw that there was, so to speak, no malice in this. It was Keybird’s business to harbour every possible sort of suspicion and to neglect no opportunity of rattling and panicking pretty well everybody he had to deal with. The obligation wasn’t calculated to conduce to tranquil and companionable chat. ‘Of course not,’ Keybird repeated. ‘The actual robbery happened in the small hours of this morning.’

  ‘Then they didn’t lose all that time in releasing me.’

  ‘Ah!’ The professional smile had appeared again on Keybird’s featureless face. It didn’t extend to those eyes. ‘The kidnapping – of course. Did they – whoever they are, and that’s what I have to find out – did they give you all that money, Mr Honeybath, in return for the inconvenience they’d put you to? Or do you always carry around something over a thousand pounds in cash?’

  ‘Of course I don’t.’ Honeybath was annoyed. ‘And I take you to be referring to the bundle of £20 notes those constables impounded in what was an uncommonly high-handed manner.’

  ‘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.’