A Private View

by Michael Innes

  And probably she was being thoroughly foolish. If the Aquarium had really gone back to old Moe Steptoe, by this time it was almost certainly safe in the hands of the police. John would have seen to that. And now her quarry had made yet another turn. Three right-angled turns. He could be doing nothing, then, but filling in time. The likelihood was that she had merely put herself on the trail of some innocent amour or vulgar intrigue. This was a most disagreeable reflection, and at the corner she stopped, doubtful about continuing the chase. Before her was another quiet and deserted road, and she scarcely saw how she could continue undetected. Peering down it after the retreating form of the man, she got the impression that it must be a blind alley. An obscure knowledge stirred in her. Her glance went back to the corner, sought and found a street sign. Her whole body stiffened. Gas Street. Gavin Limbert’s studio was in Gas Street. In Gas Street he had been killed.

  It was, of course, a blind alley – she had been told that. On the right was a line of narrow-fronted houses; on the left, a succession of lower and irregular buildings which had once been stables and now served to house the cars of the more substantial dwellers opposite; ahead, nothing but a brick wall. The Thomas Carlyle lay just beyond that, but whatever back entrance the club possessed did not give on Gas Street. These were observations swiftly made, but Judith had scarcely concluded them when the man in front of her disappeared. He had walked to the bottom of the street and turned straight into the last house. Judith drew a long breath. There was a link between Limbert and this man. It could no longer be doubted.

  She wished that she could get John on the telephone. She wondered whether she should try to get Cadover. She might wait until the man appeared again – if he did appear – and then endeavour to follow him to wherever it appeared likely that he could be picked up next morning. But she was pretty sure that for this her technique as a sleuth would be insufficient. She could, however, go on and investigate a little further.

  Gas Street was deserted. Its farther end looked indefinably uninviting. Although not given to facile alarms, she knew that to take many steps more was to come up against an unknown situation that might be dangerous. And she was not free to flirt with danger. That did not mean, though, that she must be positively panicky. And Judith walked on. The upper end of Gas Street, at least, looked enormously respectable. She would only, she felt, have to give a sufficiently convincing scream to have whole cohorts of the gentlemen of England piling in to her rescue.

  It was possibly this pleasing vision that now prompted Judith to a course of action quite as rash as any that – all unknown to her – her husband was more or less simultaneously committing himself to. When she reached the last house in Gas Street and found that the door was open – that it looked, indeed, the sort of door nobody ever shuts – she walked straight in. She would poke about. If challenged, she would claim to be looking for a Miss Arrow. And as Miss Arrow had disappeared on the morrow of Gavin Limbert’s death, no positive embarrassment could result. It was true that if she was confronted by the man she had followed, and he recollected having remarked her outside the Thomas Carlyle, a certain awkwardness might ensue. But she could always give that scream.

  There was a narrow hall, and a staircase uncertainly lit by gas. Somebody had done a mural on the triangle of wall where the stair mounted. In the air hung a smell of improvised cooking, turpentine, and wet clay stored in bulk. These were all things very familiar to Judith, and she advanced with a new confidence. The sound of voices came through a half-open door on the left. It occurred to her that the man she had been following might be one of the two remaining tenants of the place, either the painter Boxer or the sculptor Zhitkov. If she could verify that, her job for the night would be done. It wouldn’t be much of a discovery, but at least it would be something. She advanced to the open door – at any moment she could start inquiring for Mary Arrow – and looked in. Her man was there. The back of his close-cropped head, and his square shoulders, formed a sort of repoussoir to the farther recesses of the room. It was, as she had expected, a studio. In the middle of the floor a drawing-board, propped on an easel, showed a rapidly sketched nude, folded up like a concertina so as to yield a rectangular mass, two by one by one. Somebody interested in the possibilities of the double cube. At the far side of the room a massive girl was sitting by a small open fire, stolidly darning a red sock with bright yellow wool. Judith’s man was evidently in the position of a caller asking questions. He was being answered with some impatience by another man, at present invisible.

  ‘I tell you, I don’t know. And who are you, anyway, and what do you want with him? Does the poor devil owe you money?’

  ‘My name is Cherry.’ Judith’s man answered in a voice so unnaturally soft as to suggest either an excessive desire to mollify or the presence of markedly psychopathic personality. ‘I am a friend of his – of Zhitkov’s.’

  ‘Then I’d like to feel your bumps.’ The invisible man laughed boisterously at this primitive witticism.

  ‘My bumps?’ Mr Cherry spoke as if his sex were being mistaken. He was possibly a foreigner and a little at sea with the language.

  ‘Not that I believe a word of it. Zhitkov never had a friend in his life. Not even a shifty, maggot-faced, snooping crawler like Dash Cherry Esquire, who is about to experience the sensation of going through a door on his ear.’ The architect of this laboriously robust speech now advanced into view, and Judith saw an unshaven man in a blue blouse. He was carrying an empty beer flagon in a posture of studied belligerence. She supposed that he was rather drunk. ‘First,’ he continued, ‘Grace as a cube goes bust. Then in comes old Inspector Corpse, bringing a ruddy commissionaire in a bowler hat. And now you. Well, you may be Cherry. But no tart would look at you.’

  ‘Let him be, Boxer.’ The massive girl by the fire spoke out of what seemed a species of stupor. ‘He only asked a civil question.’

  ‘No more than that, I assure you.’ Cherry’s voice was even softer than before, but Judith now sensed that it was malignant. ‘Mr Zhitkov made an appointment with me, and then failed to come. So I have come to him. And I only ask when he is likely to be in.’

  ‘You can go and wait for him,’ the girl said. ‘He never locks up.’

  ‘That’s right – go and wait for him.’ The man called Boxer appeared suddenly to have forgotten his animosity. He was staring at his sketch in deep gloom. ‘Knees to chest and heels to bottom,’ he said bitterly. ‘Gives you nothing but curves. It would do for a dirty magazine. Pitiful.’ He turned to his visitor and waved his arms – quite mildly, as if shooing out a cat. ‘Off you go.’ he said. ‘No need to take two bites at a Cherry. No need to give him the raspberry.’ But the gentleness of this advance must have been deceptive. Judith became aware that Cherry was either bundling himself or being bundled rapidly out of the room. Her own retreat had to be precipitate, and was made in decidedly poor order.

  Judith, in fact, scurried – and moreover scurried in the wrong direction. There was an open door before her, but it was not the outer door of the house. Through it came a flicker of firelight, and she sensed an empty room. At the same moment she heard Cherry recovering his balance in the hall behind her. It became suddenly overwhelmingly important to her that she should not be seen. The feeling, irrational and unexpected, took her through the doorway in a flash. It was another studio – Zhitkov’s, of course. In the middle of it she could distinguish in blurred outline a large sculptural mass. She remembered the Venus upon which, to its creator’s indignation, there had dripped the blood of Gavin Limbert. Only a few feet above where she now stood, Limbert had been murdered. And from only a few feet above that again, Mary Arrow had disappeared. Was Mary Arrow now a hunted woman – as Crowe or Crabbe or Crewe had been a hunted man? Judith recalled what it was absurd in this moment to have forgotten. She was now a hunted woman herself.

  And this ground was dangerous. The mysterious forces that had struck here ten days ago were still potentially active and might strike at her too. So
mething about the man calling himself Cherry had told her that. And Cherry was on her heels now. In a moment he would have come in to wait for Zhitkov. What would happen if – here in the near-darkness – she had to explain herself as waiting for Zhitkov too? There was a step in the passage. The whole place was on so small a scale that everything in it seemed to happen very swiftly. Judith strained her eyes to pierce the gloom of the unfamiliar place. Suddenly they distinguished, not two paces away, an inner door. Perhaps it led to a bedroom. She put out her hand, opened it and slipped through. As she closed the door softly upon herself she was aware of a close, oppressive darkness, and of a queer smell. She guessed that she had shut herself up in what was no more than a large cupboard. Her only companionship was with the depressing knowledge that she had been uncommonly silly.

  Footsteps crossed the studio; she heard the scrape of a match; the door concealing her became faintly outlined in streaks of yellow. Cherry had made himself sufficiently free with Zhitkov’s quarters to light the gas. A moment later she heard him stir the fire, draw up a chair. She realized with dismay that he was settling in for a long wait. Zhitkov might well have irregular nocturnal habits and not be back for hours. She herself might be stuck in this abominable cupboard for hours. She might even – Judith checked herself. On a rational view there were, after all, limits to the prospect of alarm. She had left John a note that she was going to the Thomas Carlyle. Did she fail to return at a reasonable hour, he would certainly lose no time in making inquiries. Nor would he be long in wondering whether she had, perhaps, made a freakish descent upon the scene of the Limbert mystery. In the darkness Judith smiled wryly. There were advantages in being pretty thoroughly understood. If she had really got into a mess John would certainly fetch her out of it.

  Meantime, she was afraid to move. The space about her was impenetrably black; she sensed it as confined; if she stirred she might bring down anything – tools, plaster casts, Zhitkov’s pots and pans. For a little while it was rather fun in its breathless fashion; it recalled the keyed-up, trembling state of some form of hide-and-seek in childhood. Quite soon, though, it would become nervously intolerable.

  Judith waited. Nothing happened. She went through a phase of idiotic terror – again like a child, a child who feels that the bolt may have slipped into place on the chest, that a passing servant may have turned the key in the cupboard, that the house – familiar and safe only minutes before – is now empty and that no one will ever come back. The feeling passed, but it left her with an enhanced sense of her own grown-up folly. She knew suddenly that it was due to herself to stop feeling an ass, and that the means to that was stepping out of this absurd lurking-place and confronting Cherry composedly and boldly. She also knew – and with an equal sense of abrupt revelation – that she could do this. The gentlemen of England were up the road and ready to come to her rescue. But, being a lady of England, she was likely to manage a very sufficient rescue of herself.

  Buoyed up by this new and exalted view of things, Judith put her hand on the door before her and pushed. Or rather she had given the first hint of pushing when a wholly freakish train of association betrayed her. The ladies of England do not inhabit cupboards. But in Sweden – What Judith had recalled was that appealing female character of Strindberg’s who lived in a cupboard and believed herself to be a parrot. To Judith in her present situation this suddenly presented itself as being irresistibly funny. She was on the point of laughing aloud – which might have been the best conceivable way of achieving the sudden overthrow of the unsuspecting Cherry – when she heard the door of the studio open. And a new voice said flatly: ‘Oh – so it’s you.’

  9

  Hilarity drained abruptly from Judith Appleby. For the deadpan voice had added: ‘What did it feel like – killing Crabbe?’

  ‘Quiet, you fool! Those people across the passage–’

  ‘Boxer?’ The new voice was still inexpressive; nevertheless it could be distinguished as foreign, cultivated, precise. ‘He’s drunk. And his packing-case of a model is too stupid to count. But I’ll shut the door. There. And now I ask you again, Cherry, how did it feel killing Crabbe?’

  ‘Fine.’ The soft voice of Cherry was almost caressing. ‘Almost as fine, Zhitkov, as it felt slugging you.’

  Zhitkov laughed harshly. ‘You didn’t get much out of it, damn you. And now you think we might talk business, eh? Well, there may be something in that.’

  ‘Then why didn’t you come to that club as you said?’

  ‘Because, my friend, I didn’t choose to. I’m on top, and I mean you to remember it.’

  ‘It seems to me that somebody else is on top of both of us. And that’s why I think we had better join forces.’

  Again Zhitkov laughed. ‘Cherry, you’re a fool. You’re also a nuisance, it’s true, and I might consider buying you off. But don’t think we break equal on this. We may both have been left looking silly. But I know things and you don’t. And at any moment I’m going to know more. See?’

  There was a short silence – perhaps to be interpreted as an acknowledgement by Cherry that he did see. Judith could hear the throbbing of her own heart. The sound was so loud upon her inner ear that she expected both men to turn with one accord to discover what strange engine had begun to beat in the cupboard. There had been a man called Crabbe. And he had been hunted – hunted to a death which was now matter for hard-boiled talk between these two rival ruffians. For that was what Zhitkov and Cherry appeared to be. What she was listening to was a parley – the tentative and wary discussion of a possible armistice. But for what sort of forces did these men speak? How were they related to the people who had stolen the Vermeer and the Stubbs from Scamnum Court? If Cherry had indeed killed Limbert’s old schoolfellow Crabbe, how was that killing related to the killing of Limbert? And what did Zhitkov know that Cherry didn’t know? Judith felt these and a dozen other new questions pressing upon her with a sort of physical insistence exacerbated by the confinement in which she crouched.

  ‘Crabbe was clever.’

  ‘Clever – Crabbe?’

  ‘You killed Crabbe, but Crabbe was clever. Clever to the last – that was Crabbe.’

  Judith wondered if she was falling into the grip of hysteria. For it seemed to her that the voices of the unseen men were falling into a rhythm dictated by her own quickening pulse. Only curiosity, she thought, would enable her to keep her head. If she made an ass of herself now, she would never know. Conversely, if she kept her wits about her, a key to the whole mystery might be forged for her in the next half-dozen sentences that Zhitkov and Cherry spoke.

  ‘I can’t see Crabbe was all that clever.’

  ‘It’s your idea that Crabbe had nothing.’

  ‘Crabbe had nothing? Crabbe kept nothing. All I say is that Crabbe kept nothing. All down the drain.’

  ‘All down the drain? Cherry, you would think of a drain. You’ve got a natural nose for a drain.’

  ‘Look here, Zhitkov, this won’t do. We’ve got to make a deal.’

  ‘We’ve got to make a deal? I like that – we’ve got to make a deal!’

  Judith’s head was now swimming badly. And it wasn’t because of the talk – the bewilderment of this rapid crossfire in which it was difficult to follow which of the invisible men said what. And it wasn’t the darkness either. It wasn’t anything to do with either hearing or seeing. It was to do with smelling. The cupboard had a queer, sweet smell – a smell associated with nothing she could think of in an artist’s studio. When she discovered this, Judith discovered that she was going to faint. Or at least that she was swaying on her feet. She must put her hands out into the darkness and find something by which to support herself; she must do this regardless of any fatal bump or clatter it might occasion…

  For one thing, continuing like this was no good. Bodily sensation had got on top of her, and she had stopped being able to follow the sense of what the men were saying. She knew only that they were now talking about the Thomas Carlyle – about somethi
ng that had happened there, or that ought to have happened there, on that night – the night which was the occasion of all this present horror… Cautiously, without turning her shoulders, she let her right hand grope backwards behind her. Her fingers touched, clutched, moved on, clutched again. They were a sculptor’s fingers and she was accustomed to live through them… For a second her mind blacked out. Her first returning knowledge was simply that there was something enormously wrong. She was down on her knees, for one thing. And she must have made a row, coming down like that. Either the men knew, and were simply playing with her, or their dispute had reached such a point of concentration as to make them heedless of the outer world. But all that was unimportant… Her fingers were again out exploring. Her will had not the power to stop them. And again they brought her the same report. She had been brought to her knees among – among –

  Perhaps these were only the horrible imaginings of some sudden delirium. Judith tried to bring her mind back to the talk going on in the studio. But that too had gone crazy. Cherry was saying something about a bath. A picture of Lady Clancarron, with her wig crooked over one eye, swam up before Judith, and she had a confused notion that there was something which she ought to connect with something else. The cupboard in which she crouched no longer lay impenetrably dark around her. It was the scene of a queer sort of fireworks. These, she argued to herself, were occasioned by the queer smell. And that was occasioned… She thought she heard Zhitkov – or perhaps it was Lady Clancarron – telling her in a loud voice not to empty out the baby with the bath water. She remembered that only a few hours before, she had been bathing her own baby, had been living in a world of complete security and sanity. She must get back to it.