Portrait of a Murderer

by Martin Edwards

  Ruth frowned when she heard of his decision. “Must you, Miles?” she asked distastefully.

  “You may be sure I shouldn’t, if any other alternative remained to me. It’s the most expensive luxury I know. I once had a client, a lady, who had to employ an agent to track down an unfaithful husband. Her account was enormous, the gentleman being fond of foreign travel. When she saw it, she said ruefully, ‘I doubt if Henry has spent as much as this on his mistress, and he’s had a lot of fun for his money, and I’ve had none.’ It’s the last refuge of the desperate.”

  Carr, the man whom Miles eventually employed, also visited Fulham, and wrung from an unwilling Sophy the admission that Brand had gone abroad—to Paris, she said, but she didn’t know his address.

  So Carr went to Paris, that part of Paris where the artists forgather, where money is scarce, hopes high, and a thousand tragi-comedies are enacted in a month. He went in and out of the tall, grey houses with his persistent question, without result; he saw numberless landladies, students, and maids-of-all-work. He traversed first those streets where Brand had been known in the days before his marriage, but here all recollection of him had departed. It was so long ago, and the population of these houses changes and shifts perpetually. No man stays here long; some sink to the discomfort of the garret, with its nightly candle, its few sous’ worth of vegetables, its rags and destitution; others forsake the world of art and enter business; or they marry and become successful husbands and fathers and only remember their past when they buy brushes and tubes of paint for their young sons and daughters; and of the various men whom Carr traced, some had no recollection at all of the one insignificant unit in that moving heterogeneous crowd; some remembered him merely as a name; and even those who had known him best had heard nothing of him for years. He had completely dropped out of the circle where he had once moved, abandoned now by them as years ago they had been (albeit reluctantly) abandoned by him.

  In and out of the inscrutable houses went Carr, in and out of cafés and music-halls and studios, inventing a hundred reasons for the search, but never the true one, lest Brand hear of the pursuit and evade him. He discovered among the women of the quarter the models and cocottes who shared the artist’s lives and pursued his search among them. This type of woman, he had found, frequently put a thread into a man’s hand, from motives either of jealousy or curiosity, or from sheer stupidity. But neither from these could he learn anything.

  Eventually he ran his quarry to earth by pure chance. He had turned into a newspaper shop to ask for an English paper. He was told that only one remained, and that was reserved for an English gentleman who came each morning. Yes, the monsieur might arrive at any moment. Even while they spoke, Brand came in. He had done nothing to alter his appearance; he looked thin and under-nourished and he had not yet shaved. The woman at the desk handed him his paper, saying that this monsieur, indicating Carr, had wanted to deprive him of it.

  Brand looked up with instant suspicion. “There are other paper-sellers,” he remarked offensively, and walked out.

  Carr, not altogether convinced of his identity, followed at a discreet pace on the other side of the road. He saw Brand enter a café, fling himself down at the small circular table, and open the journal. He did not lift his head to give his order, but continued reading. He was, apparently, exploring the paper for some particular paragraph. His swift eye examined the columns methodically, page by page; as he turned each sheet he discarded it, allowing it to sag to the floor. Presently his attention was arrested; he let his coffee grow cold; his expression changed, becoming bold, resolute, ruthless. After a moment he flung the paper aside and walked out of the café. Carr darted up, snatched the sheet Brand had just discarded, and followed him into the road. A little later he saw him mount the steps of a house not a hundred yards from a terrace where he had pursued his patient enquiries two days earlier. Brand had gone straight in, so clearly he was at home here; Carr pressed the bell and learned from a garrulous landlady that the English gentleman for whom he asked, a M. Brett, was not lodging there; her only English gentleman was an artist, a M. Gray, who occupied a room at the top of her house; he received no letters and saw no friends. All day he painted, painted, painted. No one visited him but the model—a male model, mon Dieu.

  She flung up her hands.

  In a second café, where he ordered a bock, Carr examined the single sheet he had stuffed into his pocket. Tucked away in a corner he found a paragraph headed:

  king’s poplars murder trial

  The trial of Eustace Moore for the murder of his father-in-law, Mr. Adrian Gray, has been definitely fixed for March 8th (i.e. the day after to-morrow). The death of Mr. Gray in mysterious circumstances, on Christmas Day, attracted a great deal of attention. Mr. Moore is Chairman of [here followed a list of practically derelict companies].

  “So that’s what Gray saw, presumably what he’s been looking for since he got here. Are they on his trail? Is there any suggestion of substituting another man for the one at present under arrest? Is he himself mentioned, either as witness or suspect?”

  He felt a certain resentment at having, at this stage, to relinquish the case to Miles, after this intriguing search. Moreover, he was only imperfectly in his employer’s confidence, and puzzled his brains to know what counter-evidence Miles could bring. Anyway—who wanted Moore to get off?

  4

  Miles received Carr’s cable in time to catch the night boat. Ruth had learned early in her married life the inadvisability of attempting to alter her husband’s plans; nevertheless, on this occasion she did her utmost to impede him.

  “Do you want me to miss the boat?” he demanded, concealing pardonable exasperation under a smiling manner.

  “It wouldn’t be any use really, I suppose. You’d only take the next one.”

  “Why are you so dead set against my going?”

  She faced him, white and desperate. “Don’t you realise what you’re doing? Brand has killed one man and you’ve found him out. That means he knows his life is forfeit, and do you suppose he’ll let it make any difference to him whether he hangs for one murder or two? Besides, with you out of the way, who’s to know the facts?”

  “That, I admit, hadn’t occurred to me,” Miles acknowledged. “About going headlong into danger, I mean. But if you’re going to base your life on security, you’re not going to get far. I won’t run any unnecessary risks, sweetheart, but this job’s got to be put through.”

  ***

  Brand’s studio was an enormous room at the top of the tall brownstone house. Light entered through a long casement in the north wall, that extended from floor to ceiling. In another corner an unmade bed was visible behind a soiled red curtain; water stood in a cheap white china basin; on a round table that reflected the cold northern light stood a lamp, a cup, and a plate of apples.

  Miles thought, “He’s not going in for still life? Not Brand?” For to his cool and inartistic nature there had always appeared something slightly emasculate about a full-blooded adult “messing about with a dead duck and a vase of cornflowers.”

  Brand was in the room as he softly opened the door, but he was engrossed in his canvas and heard nothing. So Miles stood where he was, tranquilly surveying his surroundings. Brand had his back to him; on the model stand was a young man also with his back to the room. He wore a blue suit and his dark head dropped towards the floor. His arms, with clenched fists, hung at his sides. The pose suggested a great energy shocked and arrested by the unforeseen event. The air of the room was tense with some inward urgency, as though some desperate race against time were in progress.

  Miles, fascinated and intent, waited motionless for Brand to discover him. He might have preserved that pose indefinitely had his attention not been distracted by a sheet of paper that, catching a draught, floated silently to the floor. Instinctively, Miles stooped to retrieve it, but not until he had it under his hand did he real
ise that this was the coping-stone of the edifice against the artist that he had laboriously built up during the past weeks. The drawing in his hand represented a head, one of those self-portraits certain painters frequently affect. It was displayed in the framework of a mirror, of French workmanship and unusual design. Miles knew at a glance where the original of that mirror hung. At the foot of the page was Brand’s elaborate monogram, and a date—December 25th…

  Miles drew a deep sigh. No jury, he thought, could evade the implications of such a piece of evidence as this.

  As though that sigh roused him from his mood of intentness, Brand turned abruptly. Miles thought that he saw and recognised him, though he displayed no surprise at his presence there. Probably, decided the lawyer, he was not yet sufficiently aware of his environment to experience such an emotion. The vision that had held him through the morning still enchained his imagination and his purpose. But when he spoke his voice sounded normal enough.

  He spoke to the model. “You can go now. It’s finished.” There wasn’t a quiver of feeling in his voice, but Miles felt suddenly reminded of another occasion when a similar expression had been employed. “It is finished.” Something so magnificent that it transcended speech. Brand, too, seemed to have changed, to have matured and developed into the personality that had always been his but had hitherto been stunted and repressed. As the model took up a soft brown hat, and swept past the stranger without a glance, Miles got a full-face view of his brother-in-law. And he felt a new embarrassment. This was not the embarrassment he had anticipated, the shame of admitting his share in what now appeared an act of cowardly treachery, but the embarrassment a small man feels in the presence of a superior. Miles could not have explained precisely where the change lay, but he felt guilty of an impertinence in coming to warn this stranger of what lay ahead, in a sense of dictating to him a course of action that now he could scarcely contemplate.

  “I wasn’t expecting you,” said Brand, and Miles saw that under the composure and the purpose in that unforgettable face was a new strength to accept whatever circumstance might be offering him. “Is anything wrong?”

  “I’ve been looking for you,” said Miles inanely.

  “Complimentary of you. But why?” But he knew the answer to that question, and Miles knew that he knew it. He had, in the depths of his mind, realised that at any moment this shock might be sprung upon him, and these weeks that had intervened since his father’s death had made him able to endure any consummation, even the one that already he saw approaching him.

  “Have you forgotten that the trial starts to-morrow?”

  “Does that interest me? I’ve nothing fresh to say.”

  “Are you sure, Brand?” And then, because he could not endure this indignity either for himself or for his companion, he added quickly, “Believe me, it’s no good. We know too much. I could demonstrate to you exactly what you did—how you forged both cheques, the one for your own advantage and the other as a means of self-defence; how you burnt Eustace’s handkerchief…”

  Brand started a little. “Eustace’s handkerchief?”

  “Yes. Isobel remembers twitting you about it. Oh, it’s true enough. I shouldn’t have come over here to warn you if I hadn’t been sure of my ground.”

  “No,” agreed Brand slowly. “I don’t suppose you would. And yet I thought I safeguarded myself so well.”

  “You did,” Miles reassured him. “But chance was against you. You can’t always make allowances for that.”

  “Chance,” repeated Brand, “the one element that can’t be squared. When you said you came to warn me, what did you mean?”

  “That they may be on your track now, for all I know.”

  Brand regarded him curiously. “You’re a peculiar sort of lawyer, aren’t you? Frustrating the ends of justice. Doesn’t this sort of thing make you an accessory after the fact?”

  “Possibly it does,” Miles agreed. “But, as a matter of fact, justice isn’t going to suffer. The end, in effect…” But he stopped there. He could not voice the baldness of the truth.

  “And you’ll save the country five thousand pounds,” applauded Brand characteristically. “How did you find out?”

  Miles explained. “You couldn’t allow for being seen by the servant or for her coming to me in quite a different connection. It’s hardly reasonable to expect you to think of the finger-prints on the document. And as for this…” He held out the sheet of paper. “That must have been done in the library, after it happened, and before you left the room.” He regarded Brand with an odd expression, no longer contemptuous or horrified, but the look of a man who accepts another man’s standards without subscribing to them.

  “I called it ‘The Murderer,’” said Brand slowly.

  Miles allowed some of his suppressed feeling to escape in a sharp exclamation. “And it’s betrayed you.”

  “Betrayed me?” He could not fathom the meaning of Brand’s smile. “Betrayed me? Ah, no. That’s scarcely fair. That, at least, is an office I have performed for myself.” He motioned to his companion to approach the canvas.

  Miles, curiosity tempered by awe, crossed the room; but when he saw what the picture represented, he was stricken dumb. Brand had instantly forgotten him again.

  The canvas was a large one, and displayed a man in a blue suit, with his back to the spectator, staring at a figure lying at his feet. The face of the recumbent man was turned away, yet even that foreshortened profile was unmistakable. Miles halted, aghast, humbled, astounded. Now he could fit that vivid pencil-sketch into the whole scheme. For on the painted wall of the canvas hung the mirror, whose original Miles had seen in Adrian Gray’s library a few weeks ago. And in the painted mirror was reflected the young man’s face, a face so striking, so distinguished, so fired with some quality of nobility that he could not diagnose, that it shook the lawyer’s heart. Here at last was the true man none of them had hitherto been permitted to see. So keen was the face, so eager and so proud, so marked the sense of domination, that it compelled attention from the most lukewarm observer. It belonged to a man whom it would be impossible to ignore. The force of that ardent personality filled the room.

  Miles turned to speak to Brand, but paused, silenced by the flesh-and-blood reality. Brand was looking at his own picture, absorbing it, exhausted by it. All his vitality had gone to its making, and he seemed drained of desire, as of fear. Miles was reminded of a very powerful study he had once seen of an early Latin saint; he had been struck by the fanatical abandonment of self that that drawing had displayed. And here, for the second time in his life, he encountered a similar absorption in an object, greater than the individual who planned it, yet a concrete expression of his personality. Brand to-day was unaware of his danger as he was unaware of himself. And, thought Miles, watching him sensitively, if all his peril could be expressed in tangible symptoms, laid out before him on a table, he would have been oblivious to their intent. He was possessed and devoured by this indescribable force. And Miles turned back, his words frozen on his lips.

  He was not, perhaps, a great judge of pictures, but this overwhelmed him, not merely by its power but by its technical excellence. In the drab futility of the dead man, in the energy of purpose of the murderer, Brand had achieved a masterpiece. Every detail—the light thrown back from the polished table, the edge of the brass weight, the sheen of the blue leather cushion in the winged arm-chair, the dead ash of the fire, the dull surface of a terra-cotta curtain drooping near the dead man’s head—in all these he detected perfection. The effect of the whole, even on one to whom it had no peculiar significance, must be terrific. The white heat at which the crime had been committed was here surpassed by the white heat inspiring the painting.

  “Well?” said Brand softly, emerging at last from his long reverie.

  Miles said in an abrupt voice, “You do realise what you’ve done? What other people would say? That it’s the act of a
madman. What on earth possessed you to do anything so crazy?”

  Repeating the interview later to his wife, Miles said, “He seemed in those last few minutes to have undergone some startling change. I couldn’t get near him. No words can express the sheer magnificence of the man.”

  This transfigured Brand, leaning forward from the edge of the table, where he had seated himself, replied, “I wish I knew the answer to that last remark of yours. The act of a madman, you said? But how can you say such a thing? How much do you or anyone else actually know? And what’s normality for that matter? Is it, in any event, worth the tremendous price—the sacrifice of originality, idealism, ambition—that we’re asked to pay for it? I suppose no one could supply a satisfactory answer. Perhaps it doesn’t even matter very much. When I was painting that, it occurred to me it might be its own explanation, but now it’s finished I feel less assured. Probably we can’t get any nearer than to say that we’re bound—morally bound—to accomplish the work that is ours to do, without questioning or refusing. If it comes to that”—he smiled, sweetly, gravely, with a tender understanding of a situation that Miles was finding intolerable—“I daresay you wouldn’t have chosen to hound me down. But some things are inevitable. In a sense, they don’t even involve free will. I could no more not have painted that canvas than you could have kept quiet and stayed in St. John’s Wood, and let Eustace hang. There comes a stage when consequences simply don’t count. A picture may lead one man to the Academy and another, it seems, to the gallows. That isn’t significant, though, not if you’ve got your values right. I think all artists feel the same. I suppose to the author the important thing is writing his book, quite apart from publication. Publication, after all, is only a sop to his vanity—except where it’s his living; and most of us don’t make enough for it to be that. What matters actually to him, if he’s worth anything, is the quality of his work. When that’s done, his essential job is over. That’s the only answer I’ve been able to puzzle out for myself during these weeks. All our experience is fused to one point—that we may adequately produce our own harvest. And I suppose,” he added reflectively, “if we were satisfied with anything less, it wouldn’t be worth going on at all.”