From London Far

by Michael Innes

  ‘They were attacked?’

  ‘On the following morning there was nothing but a crater, bomb fragments, four bodies, and a lot of archaeological debris.’

  ‘God bless my soul!’ Meredith was horrified. ‘But those things did fall just anywhere.’

  ‘That is what everybody said. But just consider. That one of the beastly things should land not only just there but just there on that particular night is a very big coincidence. And why the bodies of four men – two of whom were never identified? It was a pretty hectic month that, one way and another, and I don’t know that the technical check-up on the incident was particularly thorough. Anyway, I had to come back south and hadn’t much time to think about it. But when I did think I saw more and more clearly that it was queer, and I wrote once or twice to the people who had been in on it. They had managed to collect quite a lot of interesting stuff from the rubble, but when I saw finally that these remains were far more scanty than was natural I definitely began to view the thing as a crime – a very ruthless and horrible crime planned by people with exceptional resources. Faking the death of four people by a particularly violent form of enemy action–’

  ‘But why four?’ Meredith found himself as absorbed as he was horrified by this further new world that was swimming into his ken. ‘There must have been visitors–’

  ‘Not a bit of it. You see, it wasn’t just a matter of blowing up the hut straight away. Our men had to be overpowered, and all the best things removed, and then the incident had to be faked. Well, our men were armed, as I said. And, despite being taken by surprise, they gave a good account of themselves – which is why four bodies were finally involved… When I had eventually got all this sorted out in my mind I thought it was about time to go to the police.’

  Meredith nodded. ‘It most certainly was.’

  ‘But I didn’t. I went north again to scout round. You see, I was coming to think of it as my mystery. Just as now I’m coming to think of it as ours.’

  ‘I see.’ Meredith frowned into the fire and then turned to look soberly at the girl. ‘Into what dangers would you lead me, Cassius,’ he quoted, ‘That you would have me seek into myself For that which is not in me?’

  ‘Good Brutus, be prepared to hear.’ Jean Halliwell had leant forward earnestly. ‘I, your glass–’ She hesitated.

  ‘Will modestly discover to yourself That of yourself which you yet know not of.’ He shook his head. ‘A few hours ago I had nothing more momentous in front of me than a quiet journey to a great house in Yorkshire. Now you are beckoning me heaven knows where – say out of Anthony Trollope into John Buchan. But proceed. You went north.’

  ‘I went north and presently discovered a good many things. The nearest inhabited spot to the scene of the dig was a tiny village in a fold of the Pentlands, and, although it was nearly a year ago, the folk there remembered the night in question well enough. One of them told me in an incidental way that it was the night the furniture van had broken down just past the church. I was on to that in a jiffy, you may be sure. And it appeared that a great covered removal van had pulled up with engine trouble outside the village, and that the driver and his mate had been tinkering with it until after dark, and that the next morning it was gone. Nobody had thought anything of it. It had been labelled with the name of a familiar Edinburgh firm.

  ‘Well, of course I hurried off to those people – they were a big Princes Street shop – and I said that my grandmother’s favourite Aberdeen terrier had been killed on the road on that particular night, and that my grandmother was a little weak in the head and believed that one of the firm’s vans was responsible, and that for months I had been trying to dissuade her from going to law–’

  ‘God bless my soul!’ Meredith looked at the girl in astonishment. ‘For one whose profession is penetrating to the truth in a very difficult historical field, you appear to have a quite remarkable command of fibs. It is clear that private detection might be your métier equally with classical archaeology.’

  ‘Thank you very much. Well, I said various things of that sort and then the removal people obligingly looked up their books and showed me that none of their vans had been within ten miles of the place. I said that would cook grandmama’s goose all right, and left. And it was just as I left that I was tipped the black spot.’

  ‘You were threatened?’

  ‘I got on a tram along with several other people. A couple of stops later, one of them – a man got up in the purest spirit of melodrama with dark glasses and a beard – brushed past me on the way out and hissed, “Keep out of it or it will be the worse for you.” After that you can’t blame me for rather feeling that I owned a real mystery of my own. And I told you I had been warned. In fact, I went on pushing in where it clearly wasn’t healthy – which makes me feel that I must take a sporting view of the uncomfortable things which happened later.’ Jean Halliwell paused. ‘I’m like you,’ she continued presently. ‘If those people didn’t have, besides a great deal of efficiency, a rich vein of sheer muddle I should be worms’ meat at this moment.’ She uncurled her legs from under her, stretched them out before the fire as if for Meredith’s contemplation and her own, and nodded. ‘Worms’ meat,’ she repeated. ‘But I anticipate. And, really, the yarn is stretching out interminably.

  ‘So let me hurry on. The problem was to get a fresh line on the criminals, since the scent of the Pentlands affair was a bit cold. Now, it could hardly have been an isolated enterprise. For simply to come by an eighth-century pirate hoard would not be at all an easy road to wealth unless one had an extensive connexion in the whole trade – the whole trade of illicit trafficking in works of art, that is to say. You probably know that there has always been such a trade and that the war produced quite a boom in it. Well, here were fairly large-scale operators, and they had a distinctive technique. Could I come on any trace of it elsewhere? Suddenly I remembered an extraordinary story that had been told me by a man in the AMPC here in town. It was about Horton House.’

  Meredith sat up. ‘And the Venus?’

  ‘Well, yes – in a way. Some months before the house received a direct hit and was destroyed there was a very queer false alarm immediately after a heavy raid. A time-bomb had been located just between the house and the river, all the appropriate personnel turned up, and there was the regular evacuation – which meant, it seems, just the old Duke and a few servants. Everything looked quite as it should do when the Duke went off in a taxi – but when he got tired of sitting in his club and decided to go back and see if his Town house was still in existence he found that the whole circus had just faded out. Being an intelligent old person, he had decided within ten minutes that the affair was an elaborately planned screen for robbery. So he hurried about the house – a great barn of a place it must have been – and was astounded to find that nothing was missing. He even went down to a deep cellar where he had stowed his Titian. But here the lady was – vulnerable to attack, you might say, but safe and sound, nevertheless. Or so he thought. And of course he had to decide that his shrewd notion of a robbery was fallacious, after all, and that there had just been a glorious muddle. So he held his peace, feeling that to clamour for an investigation would merely be getting in the way. Now, what do you think of that? It struck me at once as a coup of a very high-class order indeed. There must have been masses of valuable stuff to lift for the asking. But nothing was actually taken except one extremely valuable painting – of which a copy had been prepared, at least good enough to stand the scrutiny of an old gentleman in a cellar. I don’t doubt that the Duke knew the lady’s every curve and dimple, but the light would be bad and the circumstances agitating.’

  Jean Halliwell paused, perhaps to observe the effect of this sally on a respectable student of Juvenal and Martial. ‘I don’t know what happened when Horton House was really bombed, but I believe it is supposed that the Titian escaped. By that time, however, the real Titian was in
hiding while awaiting disposal. And you and I are the only honest people who know its whereabouts – or its whereabouts three hours ago.

  ‘So here was a not altogether dissimilar affair. At Horton House there had been another concealing of theft under cloak of a hazard of war. And these people were equally pleased with one of the world’s greatest paintings or a collection of Viking helmets and Iberian bronzes. In other words, they were in business on a grand scale. And with uncomfortably large tracts of Europe in no end of a mess they were probably doing quite nicely too.’

  Jean Halliwell stretched sleepily and yawned. ‘But all this is just something I remembered and chewed over while sitting in a bedroom in the Caledonian Hotel and squinting up through a thick Edinburgh fog at the Castle. It didn’t really give me a line… What was I saying?’

  ‘That it didn’t really give you a line.’ Meredith was wondering whether he ought to ring for Mrs Martin and have this young person tucked up in bed. ‘I’m afraid you must feel–’

  ‘Not a line – just that. Well, it looked as if I were at a dead end. It was true that the gang – I had come to think of it as that – seemed to have a permanent representative in Edinburgh, and that he had got wind of my unhealthy curiosity quickly enough. But the Pentlands affair had been a single isolated operation, and it wasn’t likely that there would be much more in the way of traces in – in what’s it called?’ – again Jean Halliwell yawned – ‘in Midlothian. The best thing would probably be to pack up and come to Town. But – unexpectedly enough – that was done for me… How comfortable this sofa is. Warm, too, with your lovely fire.’

  ‘I think, perhaps–’

  ‘And now, after boring you a great deal, I come to the exciting part of my story. There I was… I was sitting in my hotel bedroom…and somebody…and somebody knocked at the door. Somebody–’

  Jean Halliwell was asleep.

  VII

  But to Meredith himself sleep did not come for several hours. He lay awake listening to the ebbing of the slender traffic in those quiet squares, rehearsing what he had in the latter part of this day experienced, speculating on what lay before him on the morrow. The girl belonged to his own world; at the same time, if not an adventuress, she was decidedly an adventurer. She had plunged into danger, and he could clearly read the fact that she proposed to plunge in again. Men of that sort, for all his retired life in colleges and libraries, Meredith had met in plenty. Such men had a daemon and must always be testing themselves in a tight corner, a strait place. But a female of this species was something new and required adjusting to; not the less so because there appeared no atom of the mannish in her composition. Jean Halliwell was for seeing her adventure through without help from the big armies of order and law. This, although she had but hinted it, he could discern. And he himself Fate had made a partner in her enterprise – unless he behaved at once in a sensible way.

  Yet he had scarcely begun sensibly. It was altogether absurd to cast fragments of Augustan poetry at a tobacconist, even in Bloomsbury. It was ridiculous to walk into a parlour to which the spider was under some palpable misapprehension inviting one. It was entirely indecorous to bring two bloodhounds and a girl home for the night… Meredith turned over in bed and listened. Through his open window and from somewhere below came a faint and comfortable slavering noise, from which it was to be inferred that either Giotto or Titian was enjoying toothsome dreams. Yes, his conduct had been high-fantastical – and never more so than in the crazy impersonation into which he had been precipitated.

  Meredith reviewed his brief career as Vogelsang. And as he went over the queer scene he detected (he thought) a tentative stirring of vanity within him. Really, he had brought it off not ill. Moreover, quite a new Meredith had come to birth in the affair – and it is pleasant – intriguing, as the young people say – in the later forties to turn a corner and come upon an alternative self.

  Descrying this in his conscience Meredith endeavoured to harden his heart against adventure. But the unknown and problematical called to him, much as it often did from some ancient codex awaiting palaeographical elucidation. Consignment 99… Marsden’s lot…the Mykonos Marbles. The phrases knocked at Meredith’s brain as mysteriously as the unknown hand had done upon the girl’s bedroom door at the moment when she had broken off in her narrative. Moila… Properjohn… Chicago’s going. Could Chicago go? – Meredith wondered as he felt the first approaches of sleep at last. Could he go…go to Moila?

  For who would leave, unbrib’d, Hibernia’s land,

  Or change the rocks of Scotland for the Strand?

  Must he change the Strand – and Gower Street and Mecklenburg Square – for the rocks of Scotland?

  Resolved at length, from vice and London far,

  To breathe in distant fields a purer air…

  Could Mrs Martin really have suspected him of vice?… Meredith, too, was asleep.

  And in the morning, pouring tea in a brocaded dressing gown which he had years before discarded as a vanity, Jean Halliwell told the rest of her story. The Times was propped before her on the hot-water jug and on her left a Bradshaw jostled with the marmalade. Meredith looked in some surprise at the newspaper – simply because he had never, in that room, seen it propped in front of another person before. At the time-table he glanced with apprehension, conscious of a decision yet unmade. And then he looked at the girl.

  Sleep had recruited her as rapidly as it might recruit a sick child, with the result that one was less aware of her good looks – which were there, nevertheless – than of an abounding well-being and vitality. Jean Halliwell would have been best described as hearty if there had not been a subdued play of sensibility over her features, discernible to the attentive eye. If obliged to define her briefly, Meredith decided, he would record her as a mature young woman in excellent fleece. No doubt this would be regarded as inadequate by an expert in such inventories, but it was as far as he could get without what he felt would be an impertinent appraisal of her charms… Meredith sat down before what Mrs Martin had provided, contrived with a momentary effort to fall into his customary abstracted inspection of the plane trees in the gardens outside, and prepared to hear what more the girl chose to tell.

  ‘I suppose you have met Higbed?’ she asked unexpectedly.

  ‘The psychiatrist – or perhaps I ought to say the polymath?’ Meredith chuckled. ‘My own attitude to knowledge is very old-fashioned, I fear. Everything about something and something about everything is my generation’s prescription – and although only the second part is nowadays at all feasible it is the first that is the more important. Providence, I sometimes think, has made the human span just long enough for the tolerable mastering of a single field. So the Higbeds, who are so fortunate as to know the greater part of everything, a little disconcert me, I confess. They are the modern Sophists, are they not? Only we on our side unfortunately entirely lack our Socrates. Or would you say that Whitehead fitted the role – or Dewey?’ Meredith paused speculatively – and in doing so caught himself up. ‘Dear me, what a lot of blather! Yes, I know Higbed. But surely he does not come into your tale?’

  ‘Quite definitely. In fact, it was he who knocked on the door of my hotel bedroom that afternoon in Edinburgh. It was quite an accident; he had lost his own room and was going very cautiously to work finding it again. But as it happened I had met him in a casual way shortly before, and he recognized me at once. It’s always gratifying to be taken notice of by a celebrity–’

  ‘My dear, I think you should really have snubbed him. His views are unsound and his conduct at least questionable. I cannot believe that you would find his conversation improving.’ Meredith delivered himself of this speech very firmly and reached for the marmalade.

  Jean Halliwell looked at him with a sort of comical gravity. ‘I’m afraid I didn’t think of it like that. We went down and had a drink – which is worse and worse, I fear – and he talk
ed a great deal. At first he talked just like one of his books, which was entertaining enough – though unsound, no doubt. But I could see that he had something else on his mind, and that he had collared me and was being fascinating only because he felt that was how the great big male Higbed should move about the world.’ Jean Halliwell looked candidly at Meredith. ‘Picking up superior girls in good hotels.’

  ‘My dear Jean!’ Meredith was startled into this address. ‘Pray come to what he had on his mind.’

  ‘Pantechnicons.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Just that. Big furniture-removing vans. Mighty forms that do not live. Like living things moved slowly through his mind by day, and were a trouble to his dreams… You can’t say that my conversation isn’t improving. It is replete with apposite references to the great monuments of our culture. But there’s the fact. The all-learned Higbed was scared of removal vans. They kept on following him round. Or so he had managed to convince himself.’

  Meredith looked at Jean in perplexity. ‘However did he come to make you this extraordinary confidence?’

  ‘Quite suddenly. He was talking away about mandates, or micro-chemistry, or mysticism in Mandalay, and at the same time conscientiously eyeing my knees in a very lascivious way–’ Jean paused. ‘I’m terribly sorry. It’s the fathering business that tempts me to say these things. Anyway, Higbed was jawing away like that when he suddenly did a sort of breakdown. Rather startling in one whose profession is breaking up breakdowns, in a manner speaking. What happened was this. Mandalay or microchemistry incontinently died away on his lips, and he leant forward and whispered agitatedly: “Have you noticed what a lot of furniture vans have been about recently?”