The Mysterious Commission

by Michael Innes

  Just what he thought of this was not clear to Honeybath, but his immediate action was to move to one of the windows. Rather in the fashion he had employed when the involuntary guest of Mr Basil Arbuthnot, he slipped behind a curtain and peered out. Or, to be more exact, he thought to peer out, and was arrested by the disconcerting circumstance that interposed between himself and the external world there was something less vulnerable than a mere pane of glass. There was a fine steel lattice as well. He was in a prison. Or if he wasn’t in a prison he was in a fortress. There seemed to he no means of telling which.

  He let the torch play round the hall again. It was furnished with a restrained elegance wholly inapposite in the light of this grim discovery. On the floor lay a couple of Persian rugs which would certainly realize in a saleroom enough to stock several large cellars with the kind of claret with which he had been regaled at dinner. The few pieces of furniture had begun life in France some centuries ago. On delicate pedestals round the walls stood small bronzes which at once spoke to his trained sense of the Italy of the cinquecento. The place was certainly no thieves’ kitchen. Honeybath was astonished that he hadn’t become aware of its respectable opulence before. He wondered fleetingly whether one of those falling bricks hadn’t hit him on the head. He must certainly have been in a fairly witless condition earlier that night.

  And this thought had an almost immediate physical effect. He had gone back to the door that wasn’t a door, and was playing the torch anew on its blank surface, when a momentary giddiness overtook him. He put out a hand to steady himself, and became aware to his horror that he had grasped one of the delicate bronzes. It moved and was almost certainly going to fall with a crash to the floor. Only it didn’t fall; it simply twisted oddly in his grasp. And at once the smooth sheet of white-painted steel moved silently sideways and vanished.

  There was a dark corridor in front of him.

  In fact, the place was a fortress – that rather than a simple fort. Stronghold within stronghold was the principle upon which it had been constructed. It was probably a much more efficient and imaginatively resourceful job than that confounded London bank.

  Charles Honeybath had a momentary sense (which may be excused him) of having drastically misestimated his situation. In the environment that bad been disclosing itself to him during the past few minutes the fearsome and unfamiliar weapon in his pocket (which he had only the most general notion of how to discharge at an adversary) shrank in potential effectiveness to the dimensions of a pea-shooter. If at any moment lights snapped on and some challenge rang out it would probably be as the prelude to a burst of automatic fire of the kind that riddles one with bullets in two seconds flat. He possessed only hazy notions of organized crime. But he knew that it existed in England on a scale undreamed of a generation or even a decade ago, and that it had its High Commands as certainly as had the armed forces of the Crown. And this was the headquarters of one of them. It was to be likened to one of those comfortable chateaux from which, in the great European wars of the present century, invisible armies had been directed by generals drawing inspiration from claret even better than that commanded by Admiral Mariner. The Admiral was such a general. Mr Basil Arbuthnot was another – and on the opposing side.

  Honeybath recognized as he stood that this was a highly coloured and indeed almost apocalyptic vision. But he hadn’t a doubt of its validity. The only question was what he himself could now do about it. What he did was to draw the revolver from his pocket, direct the beam of his torch straight down the corridor, and march ahead at a brisk pace. The gesture might have been called Honeybath’s Reply.

  He was in another square hall. It was much larger than the one behind him, but much barer as well. The original architect, indeed, had thought a little to soften the bleakly rectangular effect by creating in each corner niches apparently designed for the reception of life-size statues of one sort or another. But the niches stood empty, and were thus somehow of curiously sinister effect. The only furnishing consisted of a couple of large but shallow cupboards ranged against two of the walls. He strode over to one of these and pulled open a door. What was revealed was a row of rifles of some sort in a rack. There was a wicked gleam to them which was wholly displeasing, and he shut the door again abruptly. He understood that he was in an armoury. He understood, too, the significance of the cupboard’s being unlocked. The house itself was an impenetrable stronghold, so that no further security was needed. Only it was a security which had been breached. By Charles Honeybath RA. And a strange possibility occurred to him. The remaining secrets of the place might well be disposed on, so to speak, an open-access principle. He had only to poke around, and all would be revealed to him.

  If, of course, his investigations were suffered to proceed uninterrupted. Was the house a mere depository, and untenanted at least by night? Were the Mariners in their contiguous dwelling its only guardians? This would be a rash bet. As in a museum or picture gallery there would surely be some nocturnal patrol: a watchman, or watchmen, charged with the duty of perambulating the building and systematically checking up.

  He supposed that he could retreat. He could return through that ominous steel valve, manipulate the bronze that would seal it anew, creep back to his room, and hope in the morning to break out from the damnable place, if necessary at the point of his suddenly flourished pistol. This would be his rational course. The house could not be at all that distance from other human habitation. Just get to a telephone, and it would be all up with his enemies. Or might he, here and now, find a telephone and dial that attractive 999? But then he had no notion where he was – so how could the forces of the law be rapidly brought to his aid? What about trying to burn the place down? A really hearty conflagration would probably bring along a fire brigade in no time at all.

  For some seconds Honeybath stood immobile but not irresolute – like the Homeric hero hither and thither dividing the swift mind. He asked himself in what interest he had really embarked on his hare-brained expedition. The answer was that confounded portrait. He wanted the portrait – more badly than almost anything he had ever wanted before. If what he had achieved had been to penetrate into the genuine Imlac House there would be an outside chance of its being within his grasp. But there was not the slightest reason to suppose that it had found a resting-place in this house, or that the obscure purposes for which it had been commissioned had anything whatever to do with the so-called Mariners. It was Mr X himself in whom, for some reason, they were interested, and not the masterpiece which Charles Honeybath had achieved by setting up his canvas before him. So the Mariners and their mysterious criminal empire were a side-issue, so far as he was concerned. A single honest look at himself told him that he had no genuine passion for simply apprehending crooks. Still, he wanted to know. So he wasn’t turning back before taking, at least, a further look round.

  Two corridors, several doors, a handsome staircase: he could take his choice. If there were people sleeping in the house it would presumably be on an upper storey. So perhaps he ought to go upstairs first, and find cautious means to satisfy himself on this point. He could creep from door to door, listening for the faint suspirations of slumbering persons and then peering into every room in turn. The result, if wholly negative, might relieve his mind and encourage him to explore this ground floor at leisure. But such a choice would surely be laborious, time-consuming, and hazardous. It would be better boldly to tackle his immediate surroundings first. Deciding thus, Honeybath advanced to the nearest door and opened it.

  ‘Turn off that bloody light!’

  The words had come to him out of the darkness ahead in a hiss at once so apprehensive and commanding that Honeybath snapped off his torch at once. The injunction had been surprising, if only because it was precisely not a challenge. But, whatever it portended, momentary darkness was his best resource. A man with a blazing torch in his hand is a sitting target, after all.

  ‘There are three of them up there tonight, you flaming fool.’ The voice now
came not from complete obscurity but from a region in which there could just be distinguished a dull red glow. Here, in fact, was another prowler, and one more discreetly accommodated with an aid to vision. The glow brightened a very little, as if upon the cautious manipulation of a shutter upon what might be called a very dark lantern indeed. ‘Where are the rest of you?’ the voice hissed. ‘All safe inside yet?’

  ‘Not yet.’ Honeybath found that he had summoned up a hoarse whisper. ‘One at a time – that’s the order. Do you think we all want to risk falling into a bloody trap at once? We’re trusting you just as far as we have to, aren’t we? What do you take us for, mate?’

  To this speech, certainly the most brilliant he had ever uttered, Honeybath had been assisted by another Homeric reference. The man in the darkness was Sinon, and he himself was the first Greek to emerge from the Trojan Horse. Roughly, the situation was that. But only, perhaps, very roughly. Put it, rather, that the Mariners’ fortress was under siege; that here was a fifth-column character who had been suborned to open the gate; and that he, Honeybath, had talked himself into the role of the vanguard of the invading force. Unfortunately it was necessary to believe that there was an invading force, and that it was due to turn up at any time. Just how long had he got for manoeuvre before this occurred? Honeybath had barely formulated the unspoken question before it was miraculously answered.

  ‘The bloody synchronization’s haywire,’ the voice from the darkness said. ‘Another twenty minutes, it should be, before you bastards turn up. I’ve still got my trip-wires to set.’

  ‘Have you, indeed?’ As his eyes accommodated themselves to the faint light, Honeybath began to distinguish the figure and features of the false Sinon. He was between young and very young, he was weedy, and it was possible to sense that he was acutely apprehensive as well. It would probably pay off to take a bold line with the chap. ‘Then get on with it,’ he said briskly, ‘and don’t waste any more of my time. Careful about it, too. If I hear you make a sound, I’ll come and throttle you.’

  ‘OK, OK.’ The young man was at once sullen and alarmed. ‘No need to get nasty.’

  ‘Then get cracking. But one moment! Which is the room with those bloody records?’

  ‘The files, you mean?’ The young man seemed puzzled. ‘All that dossier stuff?’

  ‘You know very well what I mean. It’s part of what we’re here for, isn’t it?’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re here for.’ The young man was sulky. ‘But I know there will be blue murder if it goes wrong. And what you seem to be after is in the next room. But I reckon most of it will be in the safe they have in there. A six-hour job. I’d say that would be.’

  ‘I’m not interested in what’d you’d say. Clear out, son – see?’

  19

  It had been as easy as that, Honeybath told himself. He was alone in the next room. The weedy youth had departed to his trip-wires – which were presumably to constitute some booby-trap when the night’s work really got going. Why were the self-denominated Mariners and the small bunch of thugs they appeared to keep in this house going to be robbed or raided or massacred or whatever it was? Honeybath hadn’t a clue. And then – suddenly – he had a clue. It was because the Mariners were entertaining (or had kidnapped) Charles Honeybath RA. Arbuthnot and Co. (who so clearly constituted the rival gang) knew that this coup had brought about some crisis. And to this crisis they proposed, within the next twenty minutes, to produce a violent and devastating response.

  But what did Arbuthnot know that the bogus Admiral must by now have extracted from Honeybath? Could it be the tie-up with Peach-Crumble and the bank raid? Could it be the mere existence and location of the Arbuthnot headquarters at Imlac House? Could it be another mere existence: the mere existence of Mr X? This last was the best guess, Honeybath told himself. But it still wasn’t quite good enough.

  The lunacy of Mr X. Not his existence, but his lunacy. That was it. He had already seen that that was it, but in a dark and cloudy fashion. The point was clear to him now. Because the Mariners knew that Mr X was hopelessly non compos mentis the Arbuthnots had lost a trick. They were about to play their next card.

  Honeybath turned on the light and switched off his torch. He had no time for groping around; anything that was to be discovered must be discovered now. Moreover he was gaining in confidence. Irrationally perhaps, he saw himself as a kind of third force – or even as what the learned would call a tertius gaudens, meaning a chap who nips in and does both contending sides down. It was no doubt a sober possibility that the contending sides would combine together for long enough to do him down. But he would take a gamble on that.

  If the hall had been bleak, this room was bleaker. It might have been described as a cross between an office and a laboratory. The illumination he had switched on came from long tubes sited near the ceiling and so disposed as to cast a cold shadowless glare. There were desks and benches, and a great many chests and cupboards all of which proved to be locked. The safe looked very aggressively safe, and of course it was locked too. So much for his notion that, within the fortress, there would be no internal security.

  The whole place, moreover, was depressingly tidy, swept, and ungarnished. No exotic cigarette-stubs in ashtrays, no revelatory photographs on walls. Everything put away. Or everything except a single litter of books and papers on a small table in a corner. He moved over to this. It didn’t take him long to recognize something. In fact he found himself looking at one of his own sketches of Mr X. It was in part dusted over with a fine grey powder.

  Charles Honeybath (seasoned private investigator) hadn’t a moment’s doubt about the significance of this. It didn’t even surprise him. He remembered how Peach had jumped at the fact that there would be preparatory sketches of Mr X, and had made sure that Mr X would be let handle them and retain them. Mr X had so done, before firmly sitting on the things as a preliminary to depositing them in the imperial archives. They must have the poor old chap’s fingerprints all over them. And these fingerprints somebody had been industriously recovering.

  What did surprise Honeybath was the two fat volumes that lay open on the desk. They were like outsize family photograph albums. They were photograph albums, and both were open upon a face Honeybath knew well. It was a face that had changed a good deal since either of these photographs was taken. The Mr X here commemorated was a much younger man. What presumably hadn’t changed were his fingerprints. And there they – or rather his thumb-prints were: a pair to each photograph, and very neatly done. A professional job, in fact. So here was a different kind of archive: not imperial, but criminological. They must have just this sort of thing filed away by the thousand in that place at New Scotland Yard. It seemed crooks kept such records too.

  But that wasn’t all. Each of the photographs appeared on the left-hand side of an opening. On the right-hand side was a closely typed dossier. Honeybath knew at a glance that it could be nothing but that. Unfortunately there was little more to be learnt from it. Both dossiers were in some sort of code. But not entirely. Each concluded with what appeared to be a hastily scribbled pencil annotation. Under the first he read:

  Old B. Oct. 1956

  and under the second:

  Pensioned Valparaiso Jan. 1957.

  Cautiously – first in the one album and then in the other – Honeybath turned over a page or two. At every opening, the same general appearance. Rogues and their histories. As the sergeant in that rural police station would have said: Well, well, well. He turned back to his familiar acquaintance. Pensioned Valparaiso Jan. 1957 seemed self-explanatory, more or less. No doubt you got honourably rid of an unwanted confederate in that considerate way. But what about Old B. Oct. 1956? An explanation started up in Honeybath’s mind like a creation. Old B. stood for Old Bailey. In that month of that year one of Her Majesty’s Judges had dealt faithfully with Mr X – that much younger Mr X – in that dreaded citadel of the criminal law.

  But it didn’t make sense. A crook whose career clos
ed on such a note one autumnal day in 1956 would be in no position to depart for South America on a winter day three months later. Honeybath considered this enigma – the two photographs, the two sets of thumbprints – resolutely at leisure. He had ceased to be bothered by the fact that twenty minutes is a brief space of time, and that now the final grains must pretty well be trickling through the glass.

  It was only when he had solved the mystery – or at least glimpsed the large splendid outline of it – that he glanced at his watch.

  What he had to do now was simply to get out. He hadn’t found his portrait. But he felt his mission to be accomplished, all the same. And somewhere in this house the false Sinon had opened a door. And through a door by which many men might presently enter it ought to be possible for one man first to depart. Puzzle find the door, Honeybath said to himself – and walked back into the hall. It was in darkness. There wasn’t even the weedy youth’s silly little red lamp. Nevertheless Honeybath knew – having achieved some mysterious hyperacuity of sense – that the hall was full of men. Arbuthnot and Co. had arrived. All possibility of easy escape was over. Honeybath fished out the revolver – obscurely wondering whether it was at all legal, or even moral, to sell his life dearly. And then, suddenly, the hall was brilliantly illuminated.