Last Nocturne

by Marjorie Eccles

  This was a man capable of wishing to portray the darkest depths of the human soul. Yet, much as Lamb disliked the man, and despite his arrogance, the originality of his pronunciations on art in the newspapers and elsewhere, which were always interesting but sometimes didn’t make much sense, he felt that as an artist Sickert knew what he was talking about. And for all his adroit and clever talk, it was plain to see that he was moved by young Benton’s death.

  ‘Tell me about this exhibition at the Pontifex.’

  ‘What do you want to know? It was arranged some time ago, before Eliot Martagon, the owner, died. Theo was included because he was by way of being a protégé of his. They’d met in Austria, Vienna, I believe.’

  Lamb’s interest sharpened. ‘What did you know of him?’

  ‘Who, Martagon? He had a flair for knowing what to buy, and what would sell, what was going to be the coming thing – but he had artistic judgement, as well, which isn’t always the same thing.’ His eyes roamed the studio. ‘Theo had recently been working on some small canvases, landscapes. Did Ireton – the man who’s taken over the exhibition at the Pontifex – take them?’

  ‘As to that, I couldn’t say. I’m only a policeman and one picture’s very much like another to me,’ said Lamb blandly, and changed the subject. ‘Vienna, you said. Do you know why Benton went there?’

  ‘Searching for something, as usual. Revolutions aren’t only concerned with overturning governments, you know. They occur in the art world, too, from time to time. It’s happening now – on the Continent, especially in France, and even here, to a certain extent, though we’re a little chary of revolutions, we British, ever since the last one, when we chopped off the head of our king.’ He smiled sardonically. ‘There’s a chap over there in Vienna – Klimt – who’s making a name for himself with this New Art style in decoration and architecture, this Art Nouveau…Jugendstil, the Germans call it. I believe Theo had some crazy idea he might try his hand at that. He came back saying he’d wasted his time. I could have told him before he went that he never ought to have gone. He was a painter. Not a decorator,’ he said, contempt in the last word. ‘But something happened to him there. He came back a changed man.’

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘He began working like one possessed, for one thing. The stuff that’s in the exhibition, I suppose. But he was also trying something different. His work began to have a dark quality it had never possessed before and was all the better for it.’

  ‘Is that what you were expecting to find?’

  ‘I had hoped, yes, but it appears not. Painted over, like the rest, I suspect.’

  Before he left, Lamb asked his opinion of the portrait of the little girl.

  Sickert threw it a cursory glance. ‘I’ve never known Theo to do portrait work. Bread and butter work, obviously.’ Then he gave it a closer look, and said slowly, ‘Maybe that’s a little harsh…there’s more to this than mere competence. Love, even? Or – pity.’

  ‘Pity?’

  ‘This little girl is unhappy and the painter – Theo? How very astonishing – saw her unhappiness. Can you not see it in her eyes? The way she clutches the chair? See how she holds the doll, dangling by one arm – as though someone’s handed it to her as a prop. I don’t think Theo painted this, but if nobody else wants it,’ he finished abruptly, ‘let me know, and I’ll have it.’

  Cogan arrived in a lather, shaking raindrops from his hat. ‘Sorry I’m late. Confounded suffragettes! It’s a madhouse out there! At least God in His wisdom’s seen fit to let the heavens open. That ought to damp their ardour.’

  Lamb remembered that this miserable, rainy day was May Day, the day designated for a local women’s suffrage demonstration. Only a moderate affair, not quite on the lines of the national one held last year, when all roads to Hyde Park had been jammed with intending protestors, on foot, bicycle or any other means, and special trains had run from all over the country. A march through the streets in the absence of any sizeable open space to gather was all these militant women could hope for here, but that wouldn’t stop them. Never mind the weather, the streets would be packed on this May morning, omnibuses and trams crammed with those come to cheer and support, or simply to see the fun of women being dragged by their feet or their hair into police vans. Increasing militancy was losing the women support and the police were going to be kept busy today. Yet too many women were being injured, thought Lamb, who had more than a sneaking sympathy with their aims, but kept quiet about it at the station. And today, he and Cogan had more to think about than women’s rights.

  He waited until the sergeant had wiped his face, sat down and caught his breath, then he slid the autopsy report from his inside pocket and handed it over, waiting in silence while it was read. Halfway through, Cogan looked up, his lips pursed in a soundless whistle.

  ‘Laudanum, as well as brandy, before he jumped! That takes some believing.’

  That had been Lamb’s first impression, too. The very idea of Theo’s suicide had been hard enough for him to accept – and now, they were expected to swallow the extraordinary fact that before deciding to end it all, he’d apparently taken a cocktail of substances likely to render him insensible, rather than give him the stimulus needed to jump to his death.

  ‘Someone wanted to make sure he was well and truly out of it, Sergeant.’

  ‘Someone? Not sure I understand you, sir.’

  ‘You haven’t read the rest of the report yet. Go on and you’ll see there was dried blood under his fingernails.’

  ‘Was there, by Jove?’

  Further tests might identify the blood type. Only a few years ago, this wouldn’t have been possible, but the forward steps which forensic science had taken in the last years meant it could now be done. And then, if they were lucky, they might be able to match it with the blood of a suspect. If they had a suspect – and one, moreover with scratches on him. ‘It seems someone helped him out of the window, but not without a struggle. Apart from the blood, there were bruises on his upper arms. He’d been roughly manhandled.’

  It had all suddenly made much more sense to Lamb. He worked with facts, but did not dismiss intuition, and he’d never been comfortable from the first with the notion of Theo taking his own life.

  Cogan whistled soundlessly. ‘Must have been someone with a fair bit of strength, then. He might not have been tall, but he was no weakling. Heaving him onto the sill in that state couldn’t have been any picnic.’

  ‘Maybe not as difficult as all that. Dragged to the window, propped up and then levered out by grasping his legs and tipping him out, using the sill as a fulcrum.’

  Theo’s inert body had fallen heavily from the window. His head had struck one of the railings, causing a comminuted fracture, and the spike of the railing on which he had been impaled had penetrated his spleen, either or both of which injuries might have caused severe bleeding and immediate death – had he not been dead before he hit the railings. ‘They say the cause of death was due to an overdose of laudanum, tincture of opium, in other words.’

  ‘What about the brandy? He stank of it.’

  ‘His clothing may have done. He’d drunk hardly any, apparently. For the sake of argument, let’s say this was how it happened. After he returns home that night he has a visitor. They drink tea, or coffee, and the killer doctors Theo’s with laudanum and waits until he’s drowsy enough to drag to the window. Since he wants it to look like a suicide when the victim was too drunk to know what he was doing, he attempts to force brandy down his throat. Unfortunately he had overdone the laudanum and Theo was already too far gone to be forced to swallow more than a mouthful or two. But he struggled, scratching the killer in the process, and the brandy bottle was upset over his clothing, intentionally or accidentally, but all to the good – when he was found, reeking of spirits, it would automatically be assumed he’d been drunk before he fell. Unlikely a pathologist would look too closely for anything else, after finding the brandy. Only we happened to get Haversham, more
of a stickler than most. My guess is that the killer overdid the laudanum – if it was intended to look like suicide he wouldn’t have wanted it proved he was dead before he hit the pavement.’

  ‘Ye-es. Any medicine’s potentially toxic, it all depends on the dose, don’t it? But mightn’t Benton have taken the laudanum himself? Didn’t he say he wanted a good night’s sleep?’

  ‘If he’d wanted to start work early, even a few drops wouldn’t have been such a good idea. I fancy it’s more likely to have you waking heavy-eyed and bleary. Let’s just say the killer did administer it – knowing Theo couldn’t have been persuaded to take the brandy willingly.’

  Lamb took out a pristine handkerchief and picked the brandy bottle up from the floor, then walked over to the sink and placed it next to the stained enamelled tin mugs. ‘Now that we know it isn’t suicide, we’d better start collecting the props, though I suspect the only prints left will be Theo’s.’

  Cogan cleared his throat. ‘Begging your pardon but – isn’t it all a bit…far-fetched?’

  ‘So far-fetched it might actually be true. The truth is rarely plain and never simple, as somebody before me has said. But where, Cogan, if Benton had dosed himself with the laudanum, is the bottle? And there’s the blood…he didn’t cut himself shaving.’

  It wasn’t the sort of murder they were used to, Cogan was thinking: a body found knifed in a back alley, a wife battered to death by a drunken husband, a prostitute brutally and obscenely slaughtered. With an obvious suspect, more often than not, who was sooner or later brought to book, a process needing nothing more than good, steady police work. This looked like being the work of a different kind of murderer altogether. He felt a headache coming on.

  Lamb said, ‘I want you to check again with those friends he was out with – make sure they didn’t come back with him, that this wasn’t some sort of lark gone wrong. I don’t think that’s likely, but it wouldn’t be the first time that sort of thing’s happened. All the same, as a planned murder, this is just too damned awkward for my liking. Too clumsy by half. Fraught with difficulties. Why not simply have cut his throat with the razor left nearby?’

  ‘Too much blood – the killer would have been covered in it, wouldn’t he?’

  ‘Well then, he could have shot him and left the gun in his hand.’

  ‘The noise?’

  ‘There’s nobody living on the floor below at the moment, and the landlady sleeps at the back downstairs. Well, we shall no doubt find out why.’

  Cogan picked up his waterproof, wishing he felt as certain. ‘Right, sir, I’ll see those two again, but it don’t sound right to me. They’d had a drop, but I don’t reckon they were up to playing games. He was all right, Theo, as far as they were concerned.’

  Left alone, Lamb worried about what Joseph Benton was going to make of these latest facts about his son’s death. He’d barely had time to accommodate the shock of Theo’s suicide. Was it worse for a man to hear that his son had been murdered than to face the fact that he had taken his own life?

  When he arrived, he was barely recognisable as the robust and forceful man Lamb had occasionally met before. He was clearly still in a state of shock; the unfairness of life which had deprived him of a son – wrong in the nature of things and wrong in the manner of it – had made an old man of him overnight.

  ‘Murder?’ His voice sounded rusty, as though it didn’t belong to him. He cleared his throat. ‘Why should anyone want to murder Theo?’

  ‘I’m sorry to have to deliver such appalling news, Mr Benton. To give you such a shock.’

  Benton shook his head as if to clear it. ‘Murdered – Theo?’ he repeated brokenly. Lamb clasped a hand on the other man’s shoulder, then walked to the window to give him time to recover himself.

  In a moment or two, Benton joined him and they stood looking down at the rain falling steadily over the public gardens where two girls had played a lighthearted game of tennis a week ago. ‘It’s almost a relief,’ Benton said unexpectedly. ‘Do you understand me?’

  Lamb thought he probably did. Suicide had meant to Benton that somewhere along the line he, Theo’s father, must have failed him somehow. It implied an inherent weakness of character, a fatal flaw in the son’s make up for which the father must be responsible; an indication of the extent of their separation, the depth of their misunderstanding. The evil of murder was preferable to the shame of suicide.

  ‘But who could have hated him so much to do such a thing?’

  Hate? In Lamb’s experience, hate in itself was rarely a motive for murder, unless it was coupled with some other overriding emotion – such as greed, jealousy, or fear. And to all intents and purposes Theo had been amiable and universally popular, impressions which bore out his own recollections of that admittedly brief encounter with him, when he was still only a boy. The general view of Theo by his fellow artists was that he was a good sort, a little mad where his art was concerned, but harmless. You wondered how anyone could have even thought of killing him. Such details did not suggest this was going to be an easy investigation.

  ‘How long is it since you saw Theo, Mr Benton?’

  ‘Three weeks. He came to visit us about once a month. That was less of him than either his mother or I would have liked. But he came, on the understanding that we kept off the subject of his painting which, to be frank, I could neither appreciate nor sympathise with.’

  ‘Not an uncommon reaction, I fancy,’ Lamb murmured.

  ‘Quite. But we’d succeeded in burying our differences – at least to the extent where we respected each other’s right to have them. There was no bad blood between us of late, for which I can only be thankful now – though I made no secret of the fact that I didn’t approve of his chosen way of life – how could I?’ He gestured round the sordid attic room Theo had called his studio. The first sight of it had rendered him speechless. But shock had released feelings this strict, somewhat limited man would never have expressed had he not been under great strain. ‘He’d rejected other decent, straightforward courses he could have followed and taken to – this. Why?’

  Lamb knew that Joseph Benton had started his business as a watchmaker and jeweller in a small way, and that he’d expanded until he now owned a small chain of jewellery shops, managed by others but kept firmly under his eye and his direction. He was hard-headed in business, nonconformist in his beliefs, had a narrow outlook on life and opinions that would not be shifted, but he was a good man, according to his own lights – simply bewildered in a world where children defied their parents and went their own way. Nevertheless, he hadn’t disowned his errant son; Theo had been his child, no matter how it pained him that he should have chosen to live his life according to ambitions and principles his father couldn’t begin to understand. And that, in Lamb’s book, marked several points in his favour.

  ‘I only met Theo once, Mr Benton, at his sister’s engagement party.’

  ‘I recall the occasion.’

  ‘I spoke with him there – the only time I ever did – but I was impressed by the force of his ambition.’

  ‘Were you? It wasn’t something I found easy to understand, but for his mother’s sake, I agreed to a sort of – truce, you might call it. I told him I would support him until he established himself. I was still supporting him when he died. Even when he lived abroad.’

  ‘That was in Vienna, I understand?’

  ‘Paris, Vienna, Paris again. Much to his mother’s disapproval. Thank God she’s never seen this place – or these,’ he added, his face drawn into a mask of incomprehension as he contemplated what was left of the canvases, stacked in the wooden racks. ‘They call this art? Not as far as I know it, and I’m not entirely the Philistine my son thought me. I’ve had my wife and daughter – as you know, Mr Lamb, not an ill-looking pair, if I do say it myself – painted together by none other than Mr John Singer Sargent. Now there’s an artist! There’s realism, if you like!’

  Lamb, who knew that Mrs Benton was a grey-haired and wrink
led lady tending somewhat to stoutness, and that Berenice, though sweet-natured, took after her father too much ever to be regarded as a beauty, inclined his head, but said nothing. Sargent, like other men, had his living to make, after all, and moreover knew how to go about it very well, with his brilliant and exquisite portraits of society women – or anyone else with the money to buy his services. Having his wife and daughter painted by him must have set Benton back a tidy sum.

  ‘How much do you know about the exhibition at the Pontifex Gallery where Theo was showing his work?’

  ‘The Pontifex? Enough to say that if this – this – is a sample of the work being shown there, I’m ashamed that Theo saw fit to call himself one of their number.’

  Lamb thought it very likely Benton had never actually seen any of his son’s work before. He flipped over the pictures with scarcely concealed distaste until he came to the framed painting of the little girl. This brought him up short, and for a long time he said nothing, peering to look for the signature as if there must be some mistake, as indeed Lamb himself had done. ‘He could paint like this – and yet he painted those?’ he exclaimed, his words almost precisely echoing those of Cogan before him. ‘Now this I will take. I believe my dear wife would be more than glad to have it. Unless, or until, it is found to belong to someone else?’

  ‘No one has claimed it so far.’ Lamb thought it an unnecessary complication at this juncture to tell him there were doubts about its authenticity. ‘Tell me, Mr Benton, was Theo happy about this exhibition?’

  Benton thought, then said carefully, ‘Not as happy at the prospect as I would have imagined. In fact, since he came back from Vienna there were times when his mood was – what I can only describe as…well, sombre.’

  The impression Sickert had also gained of Theo’s paintings. Dark. Sombre. What Lamb himself had felt about those little nocturnes.

  Benton was shaking his head sadly. ‘I asked him if he had got himself into debt, or anything like that, but he said not. His mother thought there might have been a girl in Vienna, a romance that hadn’t turned out well. She was probably right, she usually is.’