Silence Observed

by Michael Innes

  “It sounds as if it were a horrid little love nest.”

  “Don’t be absurd. I keep a special sort of copper for investigating that. This looks like being something rather curious.”

  “All right, John. Can do.” Judith was mollified. “But hadn’t I better be put in the picture?”

  “The picture? Well, there certainly is a picture. By Toulouse-Lautrec.”

  “John, what on earth are you talking about?”

  “Toulouse-Lautrec. I’ve just met a man who recently bought one – or believes he did. And he authenticated it by going to this Rose Cottage, Winterbourne Crucis, and interviewing Lautrec’s sitter. Does that sound like nonsense?”

  “I don’t know.” Judith was properly cautious. “Is he supposed to have painted this person down there?”

  “No. Probably in London. It was of a girl who befriended him in his last years, and who came to England again later. It couldn’t, I think, be later than 1897 or 1898.”

  “I’ve got a book about Lautrec. What was the girl’s name?”

  “Armandine de la Gallette. What do you think of that?”

  Judith’s laughter crackled in the receiver.

  “It must be some sort of hoax, John. The Moulin de la Gallette was one of the early cabarets in Montmartre. That would be Lautrec’s real tie-up with the name.”

  “Quite so. It rang that sort of bell in my head at once. And the chap believes himself to have obtained a relic of Lautrec actually in the museum at Albi! But this business is more than a hoax, I think. It looks like large-scale fraud – and perhaps something else as well. So discover what you can.”

  “All right. But hadn’t I better know who is supposed to be perpetrating this fraud?”

  “I’ve nothing but a wild suspicion at the moment, I’m afraid. But it has just occurred to me–” Appleby broke off, realizing that somebody was about to enter the telephone room. “No good,” he said. “We’ll have it all out at dinnertime.” And he rang off.

  Five minutes later, Judith Appleby was making a telephone call of her own.

  “I hate to be a nuisance,” she said. “But do you remember borrowing a book about Toulouse-Lautrec a couple of months ago?”

  “But of course I do!” The voice at the other end was enthusiastic. “It was intensely interesting. And have I hung on to it? But how unforgivable of me. I am most terribly sorry. Let me bring it round at once.”

  “Certainly not!” Judith was emphatic. “I feel bad about bothering you. It’s just that I have occasion to look something up in it. Listen. I’m running down to the New Forest, to a place called Winterbourne Crucis. I’ll be passing your way in ten minutes. Do you mind if I stop and pick it up?”

  “But of course. I’ll have it ready for you.”

  “Thank you so much. That’s fine.”

  “Indeed it is,” the voice said. “And so nice of you to ring up first.”

  Appleby had gone upstairs to the great drawing room. It was the place in which his more genuinely leisured fellow members tended to forgather. Time itself seemed to take on a richer amplitude in this august chamber.

  But Appleby himself had a good deal of work on hand. He couldn’t afford to draw too many blanks. Well, there in a corner by himself, lost in reflection and seeming far from approachable, was Lord Mountmerton. He was the biggest of the lot. If he left his pictures to the Tate – and he was an old man now – the Tate would have to let itself out at the seams. Appleby walked across the room and sat down beside Lord Mountmerton. Lord Mountmerton greeted him with extreme courtesy. It was the old boy’s way of showing as much surprise as it was admissible for one member to show on being thus accosted by another, much his junior.

  “Henry James,” Appleby said, easily and vaguely. “I’ve just discovered that we have a constable in the police force called Henry James. It struck me as odd.”

  “Two perfectly common English names.” Lord Mountmerton, not altogether unnaturally, was unimpressed. “The odd thing is that he should be an Irishman.”

  “My constable?”

  “No, no – the novelist. As so many Americans are. His people, you know, came from County Cavan.”

  “I didn’t know that.” Appleby managed to sound like one who has been usefully instructed. “Did you ever meet him?”

  “I think not. He went out a great deal, one reads. But not among the right people. That is apparent from his books. He moved among snobs.”

  “Didn’t he move among artists?”

  “Very indifferently. Very indifferently, indeed. You no doubt know that strangest of his productions, The Golden Bowl. An American of enormous wealth is represented as devoted to art. He forms a great collection, proposing to present it to some obscure provincial city in the United States. But his passion never takes him within hail of a living artist. He simply frequents dealers, and buys the work of painters long dead. That is not, to my mind, to fulfil the duties of a patron of the arts.”

  “Your own personal acquaintance with artists must stretch pretty far back?”

  “I knew Monet, Degas and Renoir.”

  “And Manet?”

  “I am not Methuselah, my dear sir. Manet died in 1883.”

  Appleby was suitably abashed.

  “However,” Lord Mountmerton continued courteously, “my father once had some conversation with Manet. Manet was something of a dandy, it seems, but civil enough.”

  Appleby laughed.

  “I can imagine,” he said, “Cosimo de’ Medici saying something like that about Michelozzo. And adding that the fellow had built him a very decent library.”

  Lord Mountmerton sat up. He seemed for the first time to be really emerging from abstraction.

  “Why,” he asked, “do you come across and rally me like this – an old man as I am, with matters to reflect on which are important to myself?”

  This was intimidating. But now Appleby had to go ahead.

  “Because,” he said, “I am, like the youngest Henry James, a policeman–”

  “Yes, yes – I am aware of that. You appear to control, if I may say so, a very respectable body of men.”

  “Thank you. And I am minded to make an appeal to you. Perhaps you have heard of the death of Sir Gabriel Gulliver?”

  “Dear me, no.”

  “He was shot dead in his office this morning.”

  “I am sorry to hear it. He was a very considerable authority in his field. A scholar, in fact.” Lord Mountmerton made this acknowledge-ment with gravity. “But my acquaintance with him was slight. It is scarcely to be conceived that I can be of assistance to you.”

  “I think it possible that you can. Gulliver’s death appears to have taken place on the fringes of some very considerable fraudulent operation in the field of connoisseurship and art collecting.”

  “Fraud?” Lord Mountmerton raised his eyebrows. “You can hardly suppose anything of that sort to come my way.”

  “Of course not. What I really want is the benefit of your experience in the business of authenticating works of art created – or supposed to have been created – round about the turn of the century. When it is a question of Old Masters, I know, it is nowadays largely a matter for scientists–”

  “That is mostly nonsense, my dear sir.” It was clear from Lord Mountmerton’s tone that Appleby had decidedly put a foot wrong here. “In such matters there is no substitute for sound connoisseur-ship – no substitute whatever. Competent expertise is still based on the work of Morelli in the 1870s, not on infra-red photography and all the rest of it. The elements remain what they were. How did Bramantino model the lobe of an ear? How did Lorenzo Costa paint a cuticle? It is upon the fine discrimination of such minutiae that the whole fabric of our knowledge rests.”

  “I see,” Appleby said. He was rather wishing that he had gone strai
ght back to Scotland Yard. There might be news by now of where Jimmy Heffer had headed for after his uncomfortable lunch. Appleby was putting a good deal of hope in that.

  “But of course with the modern masters,” Lord Mountmerton was saying, “our problem is less one of attribution than of authentication. I am in agreement with you there. It is all a matter of provenance.”

  “Just so,” Appleby said. His interest was quickening again. “I imagine you have often bought pictures direct from the studios of Renoir and the rest of them?”

  “Dear me, yes.”

  “And from the heirs and executors, and so forth, of similar painters not long dead?”

  “Certainly, certainly.”

  “You would feel fairly secure in dealing with a widow, or a son. But there must have been marginal cases? I mean, you at times have been offered paintings vouched for as genuine by persons rather uncertainly related to the artist?”

  “Possibly so, possibly so.” Lord Mountmerton’s expression, if observed upon features less august, would have been described as going cagey. “Yes – possibly so.”

  “I assure you,” Appleby said, “that this is a serious enquiry, made in the interest of justice. Has there been any occasion within recent years in which you have made a purchase in this way – that is, through some personal connection of the painter’s, and more or less confidentially – upon which you have later come to look back with any misgiving?”

  “Meaning,” Lord Mountmerton said, “with some suspicion that I had been duped? It wouldn’t be easy, you know. I am old. I do not suppose myself to be a man of very high intelligence, such as my father was. But I have a great deal of experience. It would not be easy to dupe me in an art deal.”

  “That might make it all the more exciting to try. The fascination of what’s difficult, as some poet says.”

  Lord Mountmerton frowned.

  “Do criminals,” he asked, “court risks in a sporting spirit?”

  “Indeed they do. Their temperament is often close to that of the gambler – particularly in what may be called the higher reaches of crime. It would be fun to sell a fake to Lord Mountmerton.”

  “I suppose it would.” Lord Mountmerton said this with something less than his accustomed austerity. He had been tickled by this vision of himself as a sort of Mount Everest among victims of criminal guile. “But I cannot be confident,” he added, “that it has ever happened to me.”

  “Can you be confident that it has not?”

  “That is a different question.”

  “Do you, at this moment, possess any picture, acquired in the manner we have been considering, about which you now feel any doubts?”

  Tackled point-blank in this way, Lord Mountmerton was silent for a moment. Once more, Appleby was faced with the instinct to clam up which is so tiresome an element in the collector’s psychology. But then Lord Mountmerton spoke.

  “I have to confess,” he said, “to a certain element of doubt about my last Van Gogh.”

  Appleby took a quick glance around him. There were still a few men lingering in what the club called its drawing-room. But the vastness of the place was such that this conversation couldn’t possibly be overheard.

  “You heard of this Van Gogh,” he asked cautiously, “through some private source connected with the painter himself?”

  “I bought it from such a source. Vincent Van Gogh, as you must know, fought a losing battle against insanity, and made away with himself in 1900, at the age of thirty-seven. He had only once or twice succeeded in selling a picture – and this in spite of the fact that his brother, Théo Van Gogh, was manager of a gallery in the Boulevard Montmartre. A few months after Vincent’s death, Théo went mad in his turn. He was taken back to Holland, and died a few weeks later in an asylum at Utrecht. On the Continent, as in England, it had been a tragic generation for the arts. That, however, is not our present concern. The morals of all these people were not as yours or mine. It seems that, as a very young man, Théo Van Gogh had formed a liaison with an improper female.”

  “Ah,” Appleby said.

  “There was a son of this irregular union. He remained in France, took the respectable name of Bontemps, and became a moderately prosperous notary in Autun. He inherited from his father – by will, as it had to be – a number of his uncle’s miscellaneous effects. These passed to his only daughter, who had married a grocer, bookseller and stationer called Borange, also of Autun. There was nothing of much importance – with one single exception. That exception was a large canvas, painted at Arles.”

  “And you bought it from this Mme Borange?”

  “Precisely.”

  “In circumstances of some confidence?”

  “Certainly.” Lord Mountmerton paused. “I need not, perhaps, assure you that there was no question of buying quietly an article the full value of which was not known to the owner. Mme Borange knew what she possessed, and she was as shrewd at driving a bargain as was her husband, the petit épicier. But she wanted no ‘publicity’, as the current phrase has it. Artistic connections, it seems, are not regarded as advantageous in the ambiance of the Boranges of Autun. A connection in the Institut, indeed, might be one thing. But two mad brothers – Dutchmen at that – only a couple of generations back was quite another. Mme Borange made her conditions.”

  “You were not to seek her out again, and you were not to send others to do so?”

  Lord Mountmerton was silent for a moment.

  “The tenor of our conversation has been such,” he said presently, “that I cannot affect to be surprised by your final question.”

  “In fact, Lord Mountmerton, you were had?”

  “Had?” Lord Mountmerton appeared to consider this brutal colloquialism fairly. “I am dissatisfied with the picture. I have not hung it.”

  “But you haven’t thought to go back to Autun and investigate?”

  “Certainly not. I gave this grocer’s wife my word.”

  “I see.” Appleby was staring hard at Lord Mountmerton. If you are one of the wealthiest men in England, he thought, it’s open to you to carry a point of honour to the farthest extreme. Or was it conceivable that, rather than expose himself as having been successfully duped, Lord Mountmerton had been prepared to cut his losses and forget the matter? Thirty thousand pounds had become a sort of standard figure for deals of this sort – the deals that you might rate as of secondary or tertiary importance. It would be something of that order that the lady calling herself Mme Borange had got away with. You could mount quite a show in return for that much, and still have a very pretty profit at the end of it.

  “It’s most kind of you to tell me this,” Appleby said. “And I shall, of course, regard it as entirely confidential. But, as you may guess, there is one other question I want to ask you. How did you hear of Mme Borange in the first place?”

  This time it was Lord Mountmerton who looked round the room.

  “There,” he said, “we come to another difficulty I should have faced in pursuing my misgivings. The person who gave me, as they say, a ‘line’ on Mme Borange was of the most unchallengeable standing in the art world.”

  “Was it–” Appleby checked himself. It wasn’t his habit to prompt people.

  “It was somebody I shall never question now. My informant was Gabriel Gulliver.”

  13

  As Appleby came down the steps of the club he saw that his own car was standing at the kerb. There could be only one explanation of that. He stepped into it, flicked a switch, and was instantly listening to the impassive voice of Parker.

  “You there, sir? I thought I’d better get you this way. It’s moving.”

  “Is it, indeed?” Appleby spoke to the air at large. “Then I’ll get moving too.”

  “Cornhill for a start, sir.”

  Appleby leant forward and spoke to hi
s chauffeur.

  “Cornhill,” he said. “But don’t kill anybody. We’re not on the telly yet.”

  “No, sir.” The man was inured to the Commissioner’s primitive sense of humour. The car glided off in the direction of Trafalgar Square. Appleby closed a window, and the noise of traffic faded to a murmur.

  “Well?” he said.

  “It looks as if it paid off, sir.” Parker’s voice was judiciously admiring. “Letting Heffer have his head, I mean. Of course we had a man waiting to trail him when he left your club. Straight from the telly, he was. You’d have placed him a mile away.”

  Appleby laughed.

  “Child’s play, Parker. And then?”

  “Heffer walked up to Piccadilly Circus and put in some nice work in the subway. Our man was baffled. Heffer’s last glimpse of him must have been very comforting. Standing by the Gents and looking anxiously in the wrong direction… Leadenhall Street.”

  “Leadenhall Street,” Appleby said to the chauffeur. “And then?”

  “Heffer made for the bombed site just off Cambridge Circus. That’s where he keeps his car during the day. I’d discovered that already – so Heffer had a little trouble in getting out. Somebody else had parked far too close to him.”

  “Excellent,” Appleby said. It would have been uncharitable to seem unacceptive of these unnecessary details. “Your second man had no difficulty in following him there?”

  “None at all. And I made it just as Heffer drove out. I’m in the greengrocer’s van… Aldgate High Street.”

  “Aldgate High Street? It sounds as if he’s going out the Mile End Road.”

  “Yes, sir. Hullo! He’s stopped. Telephone kiosk. Going to make a call. Tricky bit for us. No – we’ve pulled in behind a stationary lorry.”

  “Can you spare somebody to get out and trace the call, Parker?”

  “Yes, sir. Three of us here. Telephone Exchange will get the answer to the Yard, and the Yard will get it back to me in the van. All before Heffer’s made another couple of miles – if he’s going as far as that.”