‘My dear Campion, how nice to hear from you. What can I do?’
Campion gave Belle’s message simply and without excuse.
There was silence from the other end of the wire until he had finished. Then a soft, affected laugh reached him.
‘My dear fellow,’ said Max Fustian, ‘must you mix yourself up in that musty business? It’s really a matter for experts, don’t you think?’
‘I don’t know that I have any opinion,’ said Campion cautiously. ‘I only know that I have been commissioned by Mrs Lafcadio to prevent the pictures leaving the country.’
‘Such a charming, stupid woman,’ sighed the voice over the wire. ‘I suppose that in your new capacity you take up the same uncompromising attitude that she affects?’
‘Yes,’ said Campion, adding with unnecessary deliberation, ‘over my dead body.’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘I say you take them out of England over my dead body.’
There was an infinitesimal pause. Then the gentle laugh reached him again.
‘How conscientious, Campion. We must meet.’
‘I should like it.’
‘Of course. Well, we shall see each other at the Cellini Society’s party tomorrow. We can fix something then.’
‘The Cellini Society?’ enquired Campion.
‘But of course – The cocktail party to celebrate the new life by Lady du Vallon. Urquhart has done the illustrations and the White Hart Press have turned out an exquisite book. Haven’t you had your card? I’ll send you one at once. I shall get there about six-thirty.’
‘Fine,’ said Campion, and added with intentional deliberation, ‘By the way, Fustian, you needn’t trouble about the Dacre drawing. The “Head of a Boy”, you know. I have one.’
‘Really?’ The voice was plainly cautious now and Campion persisted:
‘Yes. A most interesting little thing. A study for a big oil. There’s a sketch of the whole picture in the corner – a crowd round the Cross. I recognized it at once.’
‘I should like to see it.’
‘You shall,’ promised Campion airily. ‘You shall. See you tomorrow.’
CHAPTER 23
Night Out
–
CAMPION left the Inspector and went down to Brook Street for the cocktail party.
It had been in full swing for some time when he arrived, and it was a weary servant who led him up the marble stairs with the wrought-iron balustrade and jettisoned him into the green-panelled double drawing-room with the exquisite ceiling and the Georgian sconces.
The noise was terrific.
The theory that the art of conversation has died out in modern times is either a gross misrepresentation of the facts or an Olympian criticism of quality alone. Three-quarters of the gathering seemed to be talking loudly, not so much with the strain of one trying to capture an audience, but with the superb flow of the man who knows all creation is trying to hear him.
Lady du Vallon, a crisp little woman with sharp eyes and red elf locks, rustled across in her burnt sienna tea-gown to shake hands perfunctorily and pass him on with a murmur which might have been his name or a good-natured ‘Look after this’ to a lonely-looking man who happened to be standing near.
This individual did not speak at all, but contented himself by looking gratified and leading the way through the gesticulating throng to the cocktail bar.
Mr Campion accepted a dry martini from a scowling barman and looked about for Max. His guide, having accomplished his duty, had disappeared, and the next time Campion saw him he was at the entrance again, and it occurred to him that he was probably his host.
Fustian did not seem to have arrived, and he was looking about for a convenient corner in which to stand, for the eddying mass about him was a trifle tempestuous for a lone rock, when he saw Sir Gervaise Pelley, the Cellini authority, standing a few feet away behind a bank of famous stage folk.
The great man looked a little pensive, but his eye flickered as he sighted his acquaintance and they waded towards each other.
‘In an awful hole,’ he muttered as he came up. ‘Look.’
He half opened his hand, held surreptitiously low at his side, and Campion caught sight of a handkerchief loosely enwrapping a mass of sticky broken glass.
‘Ice-cream plate,’ he muttered. ‘Don’t know what to do with it.’
‘Put it in someone’s pocket,’ Campion suggested helpfully. Sir Gervaise looked round gloomily.
‘There seem to be only women near enough,’ he said.
In the end it was Campion who took the handkerchief and handed it to the barman in exchange for a couple of cocktails.
Disembarrassed, Sir Gervaise became his old truculent self again.
‘Don’t know who everybody is,’ he said, staring with unconscious offence at the nearest celebrity. ‘This isn’t much like the usual Cellini show. Very difficult. I want to see a copy of the book, by the way, and I hear there are some very fine exhibits downstairs. Shall we go along?’
Campion excused himself on the plea that he was waiting for Fustian, and the announcement seemed to dismiss for ever any claims he might have had to Sir Gervaise’s interest.
Once more he was left alone. He observed several acquaintances in the crowd, but did not go out of his way to speak to them, since he was concentrating on the interview ahead.
The talk continued at fever pitch all round him. Old Brigadier-General Fyvie was bellowing his latest mot, which seemed to be something about a daring escape from the British Legion; and a little rhyme, ‘God in His loving arms enfold us – Contrary to the belief of the Huxleys, Julian and Aldous,’ was going the rounds.
A dirty little thought concerning Hitler and the great Duke of Marlborough wafted across the smoke-laden air to him, and above all came the monotonous and slightly alcoholic pleadings of a very young dramatist to be allowed to depict someone’s life for Auntie Kay to do in the spring.
No one seemed to be mentioning the book and he never discovered its title, but he saw at least two famous publishers and one rather sad-looking critic.
Unexpectedly he came upon Rosa-Rosa clinging to the arm of a very famous painter whose tongue was quite as much paragraphed as his brush. He was exhibiting the girl as though she had been an unusual type of pet and obtaining the same sort of notice for her. She did not see Campion, but swept on, large-eyed and strange-looking in her bright clothes.
The amount of energy, vivacity, and sheer personal force discharged in a single room impressed Campion again, as it always did at these functions, and he wondered idly how long the walls and ceiling and battered carpets would tingle after everyone had gone.
He found himself waiting for Max in very much the same mood as one waits for a train to an unknown destination; with doubts, and impatience. There was too much gin in the cocktails, he decided, and reflected that the fault was a common one among unprofessional mixers, the outcome, no doubt, of a horror of appearing economical.
It was very late, and although one or two people seemed to be leaving they did not keep pace with the late arrivals, and the crowd was growing thicker than ever.
Max came at last, pausing to speak to the servant in the passage so that he should make his entrance alone and not in the midstream of a file of guests.
He stood for a moment framed by the great doorway with its beautiful moulding and sculptured cornice.
A number of people turned to look at him, and for an instant something like a hush swept that portion of the room. If it was not quite the silence of delighted or respectful recognition, at least it showed a momentary interest and curiosity, for he was a picturesque figure.
Campion, who had taken up a position by the far window where he could command the door, had a clear view of him.
He was wearing a grey lounge suit, rather light for the season, and a new and dazzling waistcoat. The Macdonald tartan in silk, a little faded, mercifully, but still brave and gay enough in all conscience, was fastened across Mr Fu
stian’s slender middle with onyx buttons. His dark face, long hair, and mercurial bearing saved him, perhaps, from looking an ordinary bounder, but they increased his oddity considerably.
His hostess recognized him and fluttered over, and Max, enjoying his little sensation, made the most of it.
Their conversation seemed to be common property, and Campion listened, as did most other people within earshot.
Lady du Vallon had not struck him as being a fool when he first saw her, and now as she went up to Max, hand outstretched, he had no reason to change his opinion. Only the informed seemed to take Max seriously.
‘How very, very nice of you to come,’ she said, allowing him to kiss her hand without embarrassment.
‘Absurd, my dear Erica.’ Max waved away her gratitude self-consciously and added with the air of one announcing a delightful surprise: ‘I’ve read the book!’
The lady’s expression was suitably humble and shyly glad.
‘Really? Oh, Mr Fustian, that’s too nice of you. I really didn’t expect that. I do hope you weren’t too disappointed.’
‘Not at all.’ The Fustian drawl had reached the point of becoming indistinct. ‘I found it quite adequate. Even more – dignified. I congratulate you. You have only to work to be a second Vasari. I think I may say that.’
‘Vasari? The historian? Er – do you think so?’
For a moment something approaching polite bewilderment flickered in Lady du Vallon’s bright grey eyes.
‘I’ve said so,’ said Max grandly.
The conceit of the man was never more apparent, and someone who felt it must be intentionally exaggerated laughed audibly, only to look uncomfortable when no one else smiled.
Lady du Vallon, who knew that she had only written a monograph on the goldsmith to knit fifty or sixty wood-cuts into a book, clearly felt a little at sea, but she was a woman of courage.
‘I always saw you in that role, Mr Fustian,’ she said, taking the bull by the horns. ‘As Vasari, you know.’
‘I? Oh no, dear lady. Not Vasari.’ Max smiled.
In his tartan waistcoat the man looked like a barrel-organ monkey, Campion reflected.
‘I see myself more as a patron of the arts – a Medici, shall we say. Lorenzo de Medici.’
He laughed, and his embarrassed audience were glad to join in with him and turn back to their own more human and more interesting conversations.
‘And yet the dam’ feller gets away with it!’ muttered old Fyvie to Campion as he passed. ‘Can’t understand it. Something fishy somewhere.’
Max was still chattering to his hostess with a wealth of gesture but in a lower tone and not so publicly as before, while a thin, shy young man had joined the group. This was Urquhart, the cutter of the woods, and Max was evidently much employed.
As Campion waited he watched the exotic little figure and considered him.
He was puny, ridiculously dressed, insufferably or laughably conceited according to one’s temper, and yet there was hardly a soul in the crowded room who would willingly offend him. Moreover, he had murdered two human beings in the past three months; one impulsively in an insane fit of hatred, and one in cold blood after considerable preparation. Also he had got clean away with both crimes. Looking at him now it seemed quite impossible.
Mr Campion considered murder.
The chief deterrent to private killing, he reflected, was probably the ingrained superstitious fear of the responsibility of ending a human life, but in a man of Max’s inordinate conceit this objection could no doubt be swept away by being decided a necessity.
Then, nearly if not quite as strong a deterrent was the fear of apprehension, but here again sufficient conceit and belief in one’s powers might easily make one insensible to this second terror also.
The third difficulty, of course, was the practical side of the business.
Concerning the murder of Dacre, Mr Campion was inclined to think that the astonishing luck attending that affair was one of those tragic chances whose results are even more far-reaching than might be at first supposed. If ever a beginner received encouragement, he thought grimly, Max had certainly not lacked it. The impulsive stab in the dark had come off with fantastic ease, and in the consequent enquiries not even suspicion had ever really touched the killer.
Fustian’s second essay, on the other hand, the murder of Mrs Potter, had been ingeniously carried through, ruthlessly and without a slip, but, Campion realized suddenly, the actual details had been no more neat and ingenious than those of a hundred delicate business intrigues which Max must have carried out in his time.
In fact, once the two main objections to murder had been overcome the rest required merely that subtlety and lightness of touch of which Max was admittedly a master.
Campion frowned. As a possible third victim he found the subject extraordinarily interesting.
It was at this moment that he noticed that Max had left his hostess. He went over to join him.
Fustian greeted him effusively.
‘My dear fellow,’ he murmured. ‘My dear fellow, what an impossible crush! No room to breathe or move or talk. Why do we come to these herdings of the little brains!’
He spoke affably and loud enough to be heard by all his more immediate neighbours, who shot him resentful or contemptuous glances according to their humour.
At the same time he was forging through the throng. Mr Campion partook of another cocktail while Max demanded sherry, and after some little delay and trouble all round obtained it.
He was in excellent spirits, chatting and nodding graciously to everybody, whether he knew them or not. Mr Campion got the impression that he must be almost universally disliked. His affectations seemed to have broadened to the point of farce, and there were people about who laughed at him openly.
He was standing, glass in hand, his head thrown back, surveying the throng and commenting on it as though he were watching it through a microscope, when Bee Birch, the militant painter of athletes, came up with fire in her eye and a magazine in her hand.
She was a picturesque figure herself in her puce stuff dress and outrageous sailor hat lying flat on her soft grey hair. The tales of her battles were many and her habit of never leaving a thought unsaid was the terror of her hostesses.
She descended upon Max like a very nice war-horse and thrust the open magazine at him.
‘Fustian, did you write this disgusting piece of effete snobbery?’ she demanded.
Campion, who was wedged in by the bar and Max himself, saw the magazine was the current issue of Life and Letters, and the article was headed ‘The Coarse in Paint, by Max Fustian.’ Moreover, there was a photograph of him, very dark and dramatic.
It seemed as if a certain amount of unpleasantness must ensue, but Max was unruffled.
‘Dear Miss Birch,’ he murmured. ‘Of course I shall be delighted.’
And then, before anyone realized quite what he was about, he had set down his glass and taken an enormous gold pencil from the pocket of his dreadful waistcoat, signed the photograph with a flourish, and handed the paper back to her with the hint of a bow.
Rendered completely speechless with indignation, Miss Birch stood silent, and, seizing Campion’s arm, Max made an unhurried but purposeful getaway.
‘We must discuss our business over dinner. I insist,’ he said as they came down the stairs together. ‘One can’t talk in a bear garden like that. I can’t drink a sherry these days without getting a crowd round me.’
Campion glanced at him sharply, but he was apparently perfectly serious.
‘We must drop in at my flat first,’ he went on. ‘Between ourselves, I want to change my waistcoat. Then we’ll go on to Savarini’s. I have a table there.’
Mr Campion did not demur. He wondered how Max was thinking of killing him. Savarini’s sounded safe enough.
The flat in Baker Street proved to be one of those luxury apartments on the top floor of a giant block.
The room into which Max conducted hi
m with a murmured apology for his absent man and a languid comment on the servant problem generally had much of the ascetic elegance of the Bond Street gallery: that is to say, it only just escaped being definitely bare. Its lovely stripped pine walls were decorated by a single Matisse over the fireplace, and the plain pale green carpet was reflected more ethereally still in the slightly domed ceiling.
Campion seated himself in one of the two chairs as big as Austin Sevens on either side of the hearth, while his host slid back a part of the panelling to reveal a small bottle cupboard.
‘If you don’t mind, my dear fellow, I’ll stick to sherry,’ he said, his fingers moving deftly among the paraphernalia of refreshment. ‘But I have an excellent cocktail here, my own invention. You must try it.’
Mr Campion felt a fool.
‘I don’t think I will, if you don’t mind,’ he said. ‘I’ve been drinking all the afternoon.’
‘Really? Oh, but I know you’ll change your mind. You needn’t be afraid. I know what these home-made concoctions are so often like, but I assure you I’m an expert. I shan’t give you the recipe. I guard that most – most jealously.’
On the last word he shook a few drops of poisonous-looking green stuff from a bitters bottle into a minute shaker and fastened it up.
‘There,’ he said a moment or so later as he filled a glass and poured out a sherry for himself.
Campion, leaning back in the gargantuan chair, wondered at himself and his host. The chances of a man poisoning one in his own flat were remote, of course, but in so serious an issue the most unlikely eventualities were worth considering.
Max was still talking. His drawl was less noticeable, his guest thought, and his languor had given place to vivacity.
‘Now the cherry,’ he said. ‘This is the one cocktail in the world in which the cherry is an integral part.’
‘I don’t like cherries,’ said Campion feebly.
‘You’ll adore this one. This cherry,’ said Max firmly and with an inflection which gave his guest an uncomfortable sensation, ‘is like no other you have ever tasted – or ever will.’
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