Triple Quest: A Bobby Owen Mystery

by E. R. Punshon

  “That was the last time you saw him before you phoned to make the appointment he didn’t keep though you told him it was urgent?”

  “That’s right,” Groan said.

  “You were intending to tell him you knew of his connection with Mrs. Bardolph?”

  “That’s right,” Groan said again. “To tell him we were quitting. The Groan Confidential Investigating Agency only handles divorce cases that are absolutely straight,” and, saying this, Mr. Groan positively oozed self-righteousness. “Not like some,” he added.

  “He may have guessed what you were going to say and not been particularly anxious to hear it,” Bobby remarked. “Have you got the postcard?”

  “Photo of a painting by Rembrandt,” Mr. Groan said, and dropped it carelessly on the table. “I saw a picture all about him once. Died bankrupt and now anything he did worth thousands. What’s the good of that to him in his grave?” And with this philosophic reflection Mr. Groan departed, leaving his picture postcard on the table, and Bobby studying it intently, with his own strange intensity of gaze that always seemed as if by sheer strength of will it could force all secrets to reveal themselves.

  CHAPTER II

  THE ‘GIRL PEELING APPLES’

  FOR SOME MINUTES Bobby remained in this state of entranced meditation. The photograph was that of the well-known Rembrandt ‘Girl Peeling Apples’, believed to be the only interior of that nature ever painted by him. More famous still for its fantastic history, and well deserving its fame, not for any such extraneous consideration but simply for itself on its own merit. The girl of the title is shown sitting aside in shadow while an old woman watching her stands in a contrasting ray of brilliant sunshine pouring in through an open window. Somehow—possibly Rembrandt himself never knew what effect he had produced, nor intended it—it is not the conventional contrast between youth and age that is suggested: age, all regret for past glorious youth; youth, avid for rich experience to come; but rather the contrast between the heavenly light to which that ancient woman is drawing near, and the dark, impending trials and ills of earthly existence the young girl will so soon have to face.

  Bobby had always kept up an interest in art matters, dating indeed from youthful days when he had vainly hoped that he himself might become a professional artist. That dream had not lasted long, though more than once in his career the knowledge he possessed of such things had proved useful. He was well acquainted, for instance, with the tale of the quest for, and final discovery of, this long-lost painting. On occasion, he had described it as a classic example of detective work in which at last success had been achieved by infinite patience and perseverance, those twin pillars of all detection, though certainly needing the aid of much luck as well as a modicum of that elusive quality known as ‘flair’.

  The very existence of the painting had remained unknown—it was not listed among those disposed of after Rembrandt’s death—till there had been found in an old letter written by a member of the Six family of Amsterdam a reference to a small painting by Rembrandt, representing a girl peeling apples and given by the artist to the writer of the letter during a visit to Rembrandt’s studio. Said the letter: “It is of but small value and with it the painter was himself but little satisfied, praying me, if I liked it not, as neither did he, to destroy it. Yet that I will not, for it pleaseth me, though it doth none other.”

  From this small starting point Mr. Atts had begun a search that had presently led him to the south of France. But there the trail had been lost and the quest abandoned. Atts, then a young and comparatively poor man, felt he could no longer afford the time and money such a search required. And then he had, as a matter of fact, given up hope, though this, in view of subsequent developments, he always most strenuously denied. The story had, however, become known. Atts had indeed made no secret of it and had even tried to borrow money to continue his efforts. Then a younger man, Walter Welton as he then was, took up the quest, hit on an independent line of inquiry, and found it also led him to France, though to a different neighbourhood, that around Pau. Hearing of this, Atts at once set off for the same district, believing now that certain hitherto obscure references in one or two of the documents he had consulted gave him the name of the French family to whom the painting had passed on leaving Holland.

  He was too late. He arrived at a small farmhouse occupied by a direct descendant of the first French owner of the painting, only to find that Welton had been there the day before, had discovered it hanging in the kitchen almost indistinguishable under a coating of soot and dirt, had learned that the farmer was intending to throw it away to make room for an enlarged photograph of himself, had thereon bought it for a few francs, and was already on his way home. Arrived, he had blazoned forth his success, had not thought it necessary to mention Mr. Atts’s efforts, and presently, after re-cleaning, had sold the picture in America for £10,000.

  Now young Mr. Welton was Sir Walter, Director of the famous South Bank Art Gallery, where also to-day hangs ‘Girl Peeling Apples’, occupying a place of pride even among the other great works by other world-famous artists shown there for the enlightenment and enjoyment of a largely indifferent public. Under the terms of the will of the original American purchaser the picture had been lent, with option to purchase, to the South Bank Gallery ‘in consideration of the fact’, said the will, ‘that but for the activities of its director the painting would have been for ever lost’.

  It cannot be said that to all this Mr. Atts’s reaction was any display of Christian resignation. It was in fact loud, frequent, and violent—and useless. There were stories that the two men had come to blows when the picture was first shown at the South Bank Gallery, immediately after its recovery and return from the cleaning operation that had restored it to its pristine condition. It was even said that they had had to be separated by one of the attendants there and the picture saved by his intervention from an imminent risk of having a foot thrust through it. Since then the two men had remained on the worst of terms, Sir Walter Welton snug in his influential and well-paid job as Director of the South Bank Gallery, and Mr. Atts, a familiar figure in every household in the land by virtue of his television and broadcasting success. For in those two spheres Sir Walter, squat of figure and squeaky of voice, could not rival him. But this success did nothing to alleviate Mr. Atts’s sense of grievance, especially as Sir Walter preserved a discreet silence on the matter and was never known to make any other comment than: “He didn’t. I did.” And what answer is there to that?

  All this Bobby was remembering as he stared so long and thoughtfully at the picture postcard in his hand. Now he glanced at his wrist watch and was startled to make the twin discoveries that it was lunch time and he was hungry. He determined firmly to remain hungry. Well, possibly a sandwich and a cup of coffee in the canteen. Nothing more. For a great fear was slowly growing at the back of Bobby’s mind—the fear of the coming of the middle-age spread. It had to be fought at all costs. He decided to spend the lunch hour in a brisk walk across the river as far as the South Bank Gallery and have a look at the ‘Girl Peeling Apples’, which, as he remembered well, had moved him strangely when he first saw it. Nor was there any thought in his mind of the excellent lunch served there in the celebrated Painted Chamber in the Gallery and not unworthy of attention even by those who had come to feast their eyes on the adjacent marvels of British and foreign art. Indeed why should not the stomach feast as well as the soul?

  In the room in which it hung he sat down before it, ready to be once more caught up in that deep tumult of emotion no other painting had ever had the power to arouse in him—and not in him alone. For others had remarked that though neither in composition nor in colour, nor in the technique of the brushwork, nor even in his characteristic use of chiaroscuro, was this painting representative of the artist at his best, yet none the less in many people, though not in all, it produced a spiritual effect comparable to that experienced by many—though not by all—when listening to great music.

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sp; He told himself disappointedly that it might not be the same painting, that somehow virtue had gone out of it. Ruefully enough, he reflected soon that more probably it was not the picture but the man that had changed. Natural that with the passing of the years the shades of the prison house should draw ever nearer. Necessarily with experience, sensibility diminished. One could not always see with the bright, clear, wondering eyes of youth. A little depressed by this reflection, Bobby got to his feet; and now he noticed that an attendant was standing near, watching him curiously, even uneasily indeed, or so it seemed.

  An unusual, even striking-looking man, this attendant. Very tall, very thin, with a long, cadaverous face and a nose like an eagle’s beak, flanked on each side by heavily lidded, half-closed eyes that seemed to peer out mistrustfully on the outside world. A small, pursed-up mouth, tightly closed, gave the idea that only reluctantly did it ever allow words to escape, while the ears, very large, set at almost right angles to the head, gave equally the idea that never could they hear enough. Evidently this man had noticed Bobby’s prolonged inspection of the ‘Girl Peeling Apples’ and had wondered at it. A little vexed, for it seemed he must have been showing his feelings too freely, Bobby remarked:

  “A wonderful bit of work. One of the chief attractions here, isn’t it?”

  “Well, sir, I don’t know that I would quite say that,” came the slow thoughtful answer. “All our best things are in the Long Room.” He indicated as he spoke another room from which this one opened, one Bobby had walked through somewhat hurriedly. “We’ve one there by the same artist much more generally admired—‘Elijah and the Ravens’. People say you can almost hear the ravens croak and then, of course, it’s much bigger than this,” and he gave the small unpretentious ‘Girl Peeling Apples’ an almost contemptuous glance.

  “Well, I think I would rather have this to live with,” observed Bobby, slightly amused, though he did not show it, at this estimating of a painting by size.

  “There’s some feel that way,” admitted the attendant. “There was one gentleman who seemed as if he couldn’t stay away, he came so often. I got to know him quite well and now it’s in the papers he’s gone away without saying where. I began to feel uneasy, thinking there might be something in the wind—perhaps a try at stealing it, it being smaller than most of what we have.”

  “Stealing it?” Bobby repeated, a little startled now. “But I suppose you take proper precautions?”

  “Oh yes, very particular we are,” agreed the other, “and when I mentioned it to the Director I got laughed at for my pains, especially for not knowing who it was. Said I ought to if anyone did, seeing it was Mr. Atts, as I had to walk out of the Gallery once when he was creating a disturbance. It got about there had been blows, but that was only talk, shouting and shaking his fist, but no more; and the painting there they were arguing about knocked over on the floor between them. If I hadn’t picked it up in a hurry it might easy have got trodden on. Luckily it’s done on a panel—mahogany, good strong wood—so it wasn’t damaged at all.”

  “Just as well it wasn’t,” Bobby said, interested to hear this first-hand account of the incident from which the current legend had developed.

  “We kept it out of the papers,” the attendant went on, “but it got about all the same the way things do. Only the other day there was a visitor knew about it and asked questions. I told him there was a bureau of information in the entrance hall and he went off grumbling. Told me he didn’t rate the picture worth fighting about, not worth a pennorth of peanuts, he said.”

  “Oh well, perhaps it wasn’t to him,” observed Bobby, remembering that this ‘pennorth of peanuts’ expression had been used by ‘Private Eye’ Mr. Groan, and telling himself that this visit tended to confirm his impression that Groan knew more than he had thought fit to tell.

  “If you’ll excuse me saying so, sir,” the attendant continued, “I got a bit worried what with the papers all full of Mr. Atts not turning up to give his lecture, and his being here so often and examining the picture as if his life depended on it—magnifying glass and all—and that visitor the other day I didn’t much like the looks of, first asking was it really worth £10,000, and then saying he wouldn’t give a pennorth of peanuts for it—almost like trying to put us off our guard.”

  “Most likely it would fetch twice as much to-day,” Bobby remarked. “Well, take care of it; it wouldn’t do to lose a national treasure like that.”

  “Oh, we will, sir,” the attendant assured him. “Take a smart man to get away with any of our pictures. But we take every precaution. Better safe than sorry, as my old aunt used to say.”

  CHAPTER III

  THE GALLERY DIRECTOR

  BOBBY EXPRESSED HIS warm agreement with this wise and ancient saw and then wandered away into the Long Room. Glancing back as he went, he saw the attendant stooping down from his great height—he must have topped Bobby’s six feet by four or five inches—over the ‘Girl Peeling Apples’ with a curiously mingled air of pride, protection, and mistrust.

  From the Long Room Bobby went on down the main stairway, past the Painted Chamber, whence into the ambient air there floated a faint but savoury smell, and so on to the entrance lobby where he knew the Head Attendant was generally to be found in a little cubby-hole he occupied. From him Bobby inquired if Sir Walter Welton was in and was informed that he had gone out to lunch but would probably not be long. The word ‘lunch’ seemed to awake dim, ancestral memories in Bobby’s mind and presently he found himself, without quite knowing how he had got there, sitting at a table in the Painted Chamber and studying the menu card promptly handed to him by a brisk little waitress. So as he was there he decided he had better make the best of it. After all, every morning, wet or fine, snow or sun, he did a run round the park. At a very respectable speed, too, even if not at a Roger Bannister level. That, he reflected, ought to keep the middle-age spread at a distance. So he devoted his full attention to the menu, chose with care, enjoyed the result, and then returned to seek the Head Attendant in his cubby-hole. There he was informed that the Director had now returned and would the gentleman please step this way.

  This accordingly Bobby did and found himself introduced into a large pleasant room on the first floor with a fine view north over the Thames and the great imperial city beyond, and adorned, too, by such paintings as even the richest could hardly afford to surround themselves with. For though under the trustee deeds it was forbidden to lend or sell, or allow in any way any painting or other work of art to leave the Gallery for any purpose whatsoever, there was nothing to dictate in what particular room of the building they should be displayed.

  “Better here than in the cellars,” Sir Walter used to say smilingly, surveying as he spoke the masterpieces displayed on the walls of his room; and indeed in the labyrinth underground, where it was even possible to lose one’s way, there were some cellars that had not been opened for years, of which the contents had never been properly catalogued, for the administration until Sir Walter took over had been notoriously slack. Indeed in one or two cases the key to these cellars had been lost.

  Now on Bobby’s entrance there rose from behind a fine, ornate Louis Seize library table, wangled on loan from another famous museum, Sir Walter Welton, Director of the South Bank Gallery and a power in the world of art. A rather odd-looking little man, Bobby thought him, with his short, squat frame, legs slightly crooked, and a head too big for his body—a contradictory head, too. For the upper half with its high, broad forehead, its fine eyes, spaced wide apart, its well-shaped Grecian nose was that of a thinker and a scholar. But the lower portion, with the wide mouth seldom completely closed, the thick lips, the fleshy chops, seemed to suggest the sensualist. An inner conflict, perhaps, between two innate tendencies; and this, Bobby thought, might explain why Sir Walter had made himself prominent as an active supporter of one of those societies which denounce the modern tolerance of what, in the polite language of the day, are described as ‘extra marital relations’.
A struggle between his own two natures, it might be, of which he was hardly conscious himself, but that, equally without conscious knowledge, he tried to resolve by joining in the similar struggle in society.

  It was an effusive welcome that was offered Bobby as he entered, one Bobby was not much accustomed to receive on his official visits. But this was soon explained when it appeared that he had been mistaken for a representative of one of the national newspapers. For Sir Walter was of those who know that the Press is a great god among all modern gods, able to give or to withhold all the blessings of publicity, able to strike from afar with thunderbolts such as Jove of old never knew, able equally to hold up the shield of oblivion for its own erring servants and emissaries.

  The fact that Bobby merely represented the mundane and comparatively obscure authority of Scotland Yard was evidently a disappointment, but all the same the customary cigarette was produced—from a lovely early Georgian silver box—and Sir Walter was soon once more all his usual urbane self as he reseated himself behind that magnificent Louis Seize table Bobby was admiring less than its merits deserved. But then he had never had any great liking for the Baroque.

  “Your visit hasn’t anything to do with all this fuss being made about Atts, I hope,” Sir Walter was saying. “I’ve had reporters pestering me all day. As if I knew anything about Atts’s movements or cared either. Of course, I had to be civil—one has to be civil to the Press. But I’m a busy man, and really, you know, I’m not interested in the tricks publicity-hunting charlatans may indulge in, or indeed in what happens if it doesn’t all work out quite as expected. If I’m going to have a succession of police officers, too, I’m afraid I may get a bit snappy with them as well,” but this was said with such a beaming smile, such an apologetic wave of the hands, as to make it clear Bobby at least had no reason to fear any such development.