A Private View

by Michael Innes

  ‘But I ought to be–’

  Cadover had leant forward in the darkness, picked up an instrument and begun to speak into it. She supposed it to be some sort of radio. Perhaps he was talking to the people in the second car – or perhaps he was telling Liverpool that he judged it of no more importance than Fishguard. She sat back, feeling helpless. But now he was again addressing her. ‘Of course, I hope you’ll come to the Yard too. No reason why you shouldn’t be with Miss Arrow if you care to. And we’ll be back there within half an hour. Just a bit of a detour to make first.’

  ‘Thank you. I’ll certainly come… Do you think my husband may be there, Inspector?’

  ‘Sir John hasn’t been in to the Yard, Lady Appleby. And he hasn’t contacted any police station tonight. But if he does so now – anywhere in the country – I shall know within ten minutes.’

  ‘I see.’ In the darkness Judith looked straight at this news. ‘John is still terribly fond of having a go on his own.’

  ‘To be sure, Lady Appleby. And I don’t blame him.’ Cadover spoke rather in the fashion of an indulgent parent. ‘Dreary work, sitting at a desk.’ He paused, as if seeking to amplify this statement. ‘All work and no play, makes Jack a dull boy… Not, of course’ – he seemed anxious that no wrong interpretation should be set on this remark – ‘that Sir John ever gets precisely dull. Far from it… But here we are. If you don’t mind just waiting for ten minutes in the car–’

  ‘Where are we?’

  ‘Steptoe’s junk shop, Lady Appleby.’

  ‘I’m coming in.’

  ‘If you don’t mind, ma’am–’

  But this time Judith resolved to dig in her heels. ‘Moe’s an old acquaintance of mine, Inspector. I might help. I’m coming in.’

  Old Moe Steptoe was not in very good trim for receiving visitors. He lay on an ancient horsehair sofa with three legs – like a study in sordid realism, Judith thought, that the painter had disposed at some modish tilt in relation to the main planes of his picture. And the horsehair itself, exuding through half a dozen rents in the sofa, gave him an inhuman appearance, as of some exotic creature oddly patched with curly excrescences. It was clear that one of Cadover’s conveyor belts had already reached his shop, for a police sergeant and a constable were brooding over Moe in marked perplexity, one at his head and one at his heels. The total effect was reminiscent of a grotesque heraldic device. There ought – Judith rather wildly thought – to be a motto underneath. It would have to be a Latin pun on old Moe’s name – something like that. ‘Is he hurt?’ she asked.

  ‘Something shocking.’ The sergeant shook his head gravely. ‘’Orrible savagery, marm.’ And he turned to Cadover. ‘I didn’t think, sir, there was a gang left in London that did this sort of thing. And the shop – well, you’ll ’ave seen for yourself, sir, as you came through. Reminds me of the old doodle-bug days, it does. Grave and malicious damage to property, they’ll bring that in. Like a bull in a china shop, in a manner of speaking. That’s what I said to the constable ’ere, as soon as we stepped through the door. Like a bull in a china shop.’

  Cadover received this with an unflattering growl. ‘It’s a junk shop, man, not a china shop. And most of the damage was done to the stuff fifty years ago. Still’ – and Cadover could be seen bringing a massive fair-mindedness into play – ‘it’s a remarkable sight, I quite agree… And what’s the matter with him?’ He pointed with marked lack of sympathy at Steptoe. ‘Shot?’

  ‘No, sir. It’s contusions. Multiple contusions on the ’ead. We found him lying by his telephone. Banged about, you might say, by a whole ’orde of savages. The surgeon’s been sent for.’

  ‘Very proper. But while we wait for him we can get on with our business well enough. The man’s conscious, sergeant. He’s been making a fool of you. Now then’ – and Cadover gave old Moe a brisk shake – ‘you’re not on your deathbed, my man, and you know it. So you can sit up and give an account of yourself.’

  Steptoe stirred and gave a faint groan.

  ‘We’ve no time for theatricals. Somebody get a bucket of water and send it over him. That should bring his wits back.’

  Steptoe groaned again – but this time much more loudly. ‘Got it, sergeant? Right over his head.’

  With ludicrous abruptness, old Moe sat up. ‘It’s assault,’ he said. ‘Where’s my lawyer? I’ll have damages.’

  ‘You’ll need your lawyer, all right. And he’ll have to be a smart one.’ Cadover looked grimly at the revived antique dealer. ‘Now then, what’s been happening here? Who attacked you?’

  ‘That was the police too. A brutal and unprovoked attack upon a respectable trader. And damage to a valuable stock-in-trade. And bringing a high-class and old-established business into notoriety and disrepute.’

  ‘This is a very serious allegation – and not at all likely to lighten your load of troubles. Will you be good enough to tell me what police officer you charge with assaulting you in this way?’ Cadover was breathing hard. ‘And would you undertake to identify him?’

  ‘Of course I would. I’ve seen his photograph a dozen times. Your boss – that’s what he is. Name of Appleby. Sir Bloody-something-or-other Appleby.’

  Could old Moe, in the present depressed posture of his affairs, have taken any pleasure in producing a sensation, that pleasure would undoubtedly have been his. The several officers of the police grouped around him registered various degrees of indignation and shock. Cadover took a step backwards and eyed him narrowly. And Judith Appleby cried out, ‘John – my husband? What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean what I say – see? Appleby tried to murder me. And that’s a serious thing. For no reason at all, it was. Or none to speak of.’ Old Moe looked suddenly sulky and wary. ‘It may be that something had come innocently into my hands that had been acquired by others in an irregular manner. That’s a worry you’re always up against in my line of business. The police know it’s been an anxiety to me – a great anxiety – for years.’

  ‘The police know a good deal more than that.’ Cadover’s glance was now distinctly baleful. ‘And if Sir John had to put you out of the way of doing mischief for a time, I’ve no doubt he had good reason. You attacked him, I suppose?’

  ‘Nothing of the sort.’

  ‘And it would be with a firearm. You wouldn’t be fit for it any other way. It sounds like attempted murder, Steptoe, if you ask me. And there’s murder proper in the offing in this case. You know that as well as I do. You’ve got out of your depth, my man. You’ve been concerned in the theft of a painting worth tens of thousands of pounds. But now you’re much deeper in than that. And now I want the truth out of you. It won’t help you much, but it may help a little.’

  Steptoe, who was now sitting bolt upright on the sofa, gave an uncomfortable wriggle. ‘There may be something in what you say. But I’ve been a tool. Business has been bad, sir – very bad indeed. And I was tempted. For no more than fifty pounds, sir. It’s painful to think of, I’m sure you’ll agree. A respectable trader losing his honour for the promise of a mere fifty quid. I explained all this to your boss. Made a clean breast of it, I did, having seen the error of my ways and being anxious that justice should obtain. And then’ – old Moe’s voice went quite maudlin with self-pity – ‘he made this brutal and unprovoked–’

  ‘That will do. We’re beginning to get at the truth, and we’re not going to go back and waste our time on nonsense. You admit that you have had this stolen painting – the work of an artist called Jan Vermeer of Delft – in your possession?’

  There was a short silence. Old Moe looked piteously at Judith, as if hoping that her womanly tenderness might prompt her to some dramatic intervention on his behalf. ‘Yes – I do.’

  ‘Knowing it to be the property of the Duke of Horton?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You parted with that picture, and another known to you to come from the same source, to an artist called Gavin Limbert?’

  ‘I didn’t know who he was. He used to c
ome in here from time to time.’

  ‘That may be so, Mr Steptoe. But either you, or your associates, subsequently traced Limbert to his studio, and you endeavoured to get the picture back?’

  ‘I put it to him that he’d taken advantage of me, when Gow and Fox were nosing about. It was the sort of dirty trick you might expect an artist to play on you. But this Limbert wasn’t an artist, he was a gentleman.’ Old Moe appeared genuinely aggrieved. ‘I told him I was surprised at his doing so mean a thing. You’d have felt the same in my place. Particularly with times being so hard for us that’s in the luxury trades.’

  ‘This afternoon’ – Cadover glanced at his watch – ‘yesterday afternoon you succeeded in abstracting the Vermeer from the premises of a Mr Brown?’

  ‘You can’t pin that on me.’

  ‘Possibly not. But however that may be, the Vermeer was back here in your shop, and later in the evening Sir John Appleby came to make inquiries about it?’

  Old Moe hesitated. He seemed to feel that the point had come at which he must find a line and stick to it. ‘Sir John certainly did come asking. Pretty well broke in, he did. Must have climbed into my back yard. It isn’t legal, that sort of thing – not in this country, it isn’t. The Gestapo were the people for–’

  ‘I said we weren’t going to listen to nonsense. When Sir John called, were any of your associates here in your shop, or in this office?’

  ‘Certainly not. I was quite alone, which is my habit of an evening.’

  ‘You haven’t yet told me if you had the picture here.’

  ‘Yes, I had.’

  ‘Is it here now?’

  ‘It ought to be.’ Old Moe licked his lips nervously. ‘If it isn’t, you can guess whose fault that is.’

  ‘Will you tell me just what you mean by that?’

  ‘Your Sir John Appleby must have made off with it, of course, after nearly murdering me. You’ve said what a painting like that is worth. Bloody thousands. Even a boss at Scotland Yard would–’

  Rather unexpectedly, Cadover broke into a short chuckle. ‘Come, come, Steptoe. It’s an ingenious line, but you know as well as I do that it won’t get you anywhere. The Vermeer is gone, I take it. Does that mean that some of your friends arrived while Sir John was here?’

  ‘It means what you bloody well care–’

  ‘I won’t have that sort of language in Lady Appleby’s presence.’ Almost equally unexpectedly, Cadover was suddenly thunderous. ‘Whether or not as a result of your contriving to summon them, did your criminal associates arrive and manage to get away with the painting?’

  ‘They came, all right. I got out a telephone message to them. And they’d have a van, and get away with the painting, I suppose.’

  ‘What do you mean – you suppose?’

  ‘Because I don’t know – see?’ Old Moe was stung into a snarl. ‘When your boss heard my pals down below, he came at me and knocked me out.’

  ‘Knocked you right out? You weren’t conscious of anything more?’

  ‘Before I fainted away’ – old Moe contrived to get much that was piteous into this expression – ‘I thought I heard him breaking up my shop.’

  ‘That’s hardly a likely activity, is it? Don’t you mean that you heard your friends attacking him?’

  ‘That wouldn’t have anything to do with me.’

  ‘Wouldn’t it?’ Cadover was becoming dangerously quiet. ‘I think you certainly do need that lawyer, Steptoe. And he’ll have to begin by painting you a pretty dark picture of your position. But now answer me this. If your friends got away with the Vermeer in that van – which you’ll have to describe to me in a minute – just where would they make for?’

  ‘I told you I’m just a tool. My job was to put a ground on the paintings so that they could finally be smuggled away. I was to do that a second time to the Vermeer – after the Vermeer had become a Limbert, as you might say. But they didn’t tell me anything about their plans.’

  ‘You’ve no idea of where that van is likely to be now?’

  ‘None whatever.’

  ‘Or of where Sir John Appleby is now?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Steptoe’s snarl returned with new violence. ‘And I couldn’t care less.’

  Judith’s heart sank. This part of old Moe’s story seemed to her reasonable enough. And she watched Cadover – as if to mark his own sense that here, momentarily, was a dead end – turn and pace to the farther end of the littered and dirty little room.

  He had stooped and picked up something from the floor. Now he strode back to Steptoe with an open palm extended before him. ‘I thought I caught a whiff of powder, Steptoe. And now here’s the bullet. Have a look at it.’

  Steptoe looked sulkily at the small, flattened piece of lead. The sergeant looked at it too. ‘The light bulb was shattered, sir, when we entered this room. We had to bring another from downstairs. That would be the shooting, I’d say.’

  Cadover nodded. ‘Likely enough… Ugly, isn’t it, Steptoe? Brings home to you just what you might be facing.’

  Old Moe’s complexion, which was already an ugly one, took on a yet more displeasing mottle. ‘It went off in the air,’ he muttered. ‘I wasn’t going to fire it – just show it by way of defending myself. And then Appleby hit it out of my hand.’

  ‘Did Limbert try to hit it out of your hand too – and was he less quick about it?’

  ‘I had nothing to do with that.’ Steptoe was trembling all over. ‘None of us had. We talked a lot about how to get the paintings back, but none of us ever thought of that way. We’ve never committed violence. I swear we haven’t.’

  Cadover pounced. ‘Then we’ve got rid of this rubbish about your being an ignorant tool? You’ve been in on the whole thing – in fact an important member of the gang from the start?’

  Steptoe was silent. His eye was still uneasily on the spent bullet.

  ‘Do I understand that, apart from your call on Limbert the day he died, you made no attempt to recover the Vermeer from him until the affair at the Da Vinci yesterday afternoon?’

  Steptoe nodded emphatically, and at the same time vigorously sniffed. It looked as if he were preparing to weep. ‘That’s the God’s truth, I swear. It took me a long time to trace Limbert at all. And by the next morning he was dead, and there were police all over the place. Then his studio was pretty well sealed up, and we knew we’d have to wait.

  The trouble was the Stubbs. I’d always said the Stubbs was a mistake. If somebody spotted the Stubbs among Limbert’s things, and started asking questions, it would be connected up with what had happened at Scamnum, and the police might think to go over all Limbert’s canvases carefully.

  Otherwise things didn’t look too bad. The Vermeer was either still a blank, like I had left it, or Limbert had painted something on it before he died. It didn’t look like being worth much more, or being more regarded, the one way or the other. We looked to pick it up when his stuff was sold off – if we didn’t have a chance of just clearing out with it earlier.’

  ‘It seems we’re beginning to get some sense out of you at last.’ Something almost benevolent had come into Cadover’s tone. ‘As things turned out, how did you know which was the picture you wanted?’

  ‘The dimensions, sir – we knew the dimensions. We had a man of ours giving a hand at the Da Vinci.’

  ‘I see. No doubt it was very annoying of this Mr Brown to make a fuss over Limbert’s work, and hold a memorial exhibition, and set fancy prices on the things. But why did you risk stealing the picture again yesterday afternoon? Why not just buy it, and avoid piling risk on risk.’

  ‘We couldn’t afford to.’

  ‘That must be nonsense, Inspector.’ It was Judith who interrupted. ‘The Da Vinci was probably asking two or three hundred guineas. But these people know quite enough about picture-dealing to realize that they need pay no more than fifty. And it’s clear that their resources wouldn’t be strained by that.’

  Cadover nodded and turned to Steptoe. �
��Well, my man, what have you to say to that?’

  ‘Nothing at all.’

  ‘There must have been a reason for your deciding to take a grab at the picture, and not risking attempting to buy. What was it?’

  ‘You know very well what it was, and you’ve no call to torment me over it.’ Steptoe at this point evinced what appeared to be a genuine sense of being unfairly treated. ‘You were on to it, weren’t you?’

  Cadover, Judith noticed, took a fraction of a second to consider this. ‘You felt that the police were on the track of the Vermeer?’

  ‘The chap we’d smuggled into the Da Vinci told us – only yesterday morning, just before the show opened. About somebody snooping round the gallery asking rum questions. And with a camera too, and asking Braunkopf – or Brown, if you like – whether he might photograph the thing.’ Steptoe paused resentfully. ‘Probably wanted to dust it for fingerprints as well. That was the bogies, wasn’t it? If we hadn’t acted quick, they’d have had a report in to your boss, and he’d have sent along and impounded the picture – and in a few days it would have been cleaned up and back at Scamnum. We had to make a grab at it yesterday afternoon, or you and your bogies would have been in on it before us.’ Steptoe paused again. ‘Why, this Appleby was there himself making sure of the thing. And we lifted it from under his blood – from under his bleeding nose. The van was outside and waiting. It was his coming in hot on the trail that gave us the green light to go ahead.’

  Cadover received this communication with his most wooden face. But Judith was unable to repress a gasp. ‘You mean to say,’ she demanded, ‘that if I hadn’t – that if my husband hadn’t entered the Da Vinci yesterday afternoon the Vermeer would be there now?’

  ‘It might be. We might have risked waiting a day or two and seeing if we could fix something with Braunkopf. But we couldn’t risk that – not with the bogies poking around.’

  Cadover was looking at his watch. ‘If by the bogies you mean the police,’ he said, ‘you’ve been barking up the wrong tree.’ He looked hard at Steptoe. ‘Do you mean to tell me you don’t know there’s been another gang after the Vermeer?’