Last Nocturne

by Marjorie Eccles

  ‘It’s a long story. I’ll do my best to explain, if you’ll have the patience to hear me out.’

  ‘If it goes anywhere at all towards clearing up the situation, please do.’

  Lamb paused to gather his thoughts. They already knew the bare facts of Eliot’s murder. Difficult enough to communicate, painful to accept. But the rest of it – what Carrington had said about Miriam Koppel’s death and the rest of his written confession – not to mention Viktor Franck’s part in it all – that was going to be even more tricky.

  I am sorry about Theo, Carrington had written in the cursive, artistic handwriting that showed no hint of stress in the flowing loops and firm uprights. His death was in the end a necessity, though there was no premeditation. (Nor had there been with Martagon, Lamb had thought cynically.) There was no intention of killing him when I waited in the street for him to return that night. But an overwhelming compulsion to find out exactly what it was that this young man knew had been with me for weeks, and I hadn’t gone unprepared, since I had a good idea it would not be easy to get a satisfactory answer from him without some assistance. I slipped the brandy into my pocket to loosen his tongue before I recalled having heard somewhere that Theo was almost teetotal. I still had in my possession, however, the tincture of laudanum I had – not without a cautionary admonition – taken from Isobel when I found she was using it to help her sleep after Eliot’s death. A stealthy drop or two of that would relax Theo, release his inhibitions.

  I waited patiently for him to return home, and heard him whistling under his breath as he approached the door. The whistling stopped when he saw me. Although he was patently astonished to see me, he invited me up to the hovel he called his studio readily enough when I told him I had a proposition to make over some of his paintings. He brought out a few to show me; I congratulated him and held up the brandy bottle. ‘Thanks, but I’d rather have tea,’ he said. He casually rinsed out a couple of filthy enamelled mugs at the sink before making it and offering me one. I wondered if I could bring myself to drink it. ‘Have you any more work I haven’t seen?’ I asked. Though clearly still puzzled at this late night visit, he turned away to flip through his canvases, giving me the opportunity to slip a dose of the laudanum into his drink. I had warned Isobel of the dangers of taking too much of the drug, while not knowing myself just how much that was. Two drops, twenty? I had to make sure. It was soon evident, however, how very little was needed, and that I might have seriously overdone it. Theo’s speech quickly became slurred and he slumped sideways across the bed he was sitting on. I was shocked, and reached out a hand to feel for his pulse. I could detect none. At first I panicked. I had killed a man – and for what? Now I would never know what Theo had known – or suspected.

  Then he stirred, moaning. At first it seemed like a reprieve, but then I knew I could not let him live to tell the tale. Yet it must not look like murder. For a moment my brain refused to work, then suddenly, quite clearly, I saw what I must do. I uncorked the brandy and tried to force it down his throat. I was clumsy and spilt a good deal over his clothes, and Theo, some corner of his mind still sapient, began to struggle and claw at me, at first wildly, then gradually with diminishing intensity, until he finally lay quiet. This time, a quiet from which he would not wake. I attempted to force the remainder of the brandy down his throat, but only succeeding in spilling more; then I dragged his body to the window, and heaved him over the sill, tipped him out like a sack of coal – a not inconsiderable feat, I might say, for a man no longer in his first youth. I turned away, still breathing heavily. I was sorry, believe me, that Theo was dead, and a sudden blinding rage at what I had been forced to do took hold of me. The current canvas was on the easel. Another pot-boiler, I had thought with contempt when I first came in, and saw no reason to change my opinion now. Before I knew what I was doing, I had squeezed vermilion onto a brush and slashed paint from corner to corner. It was childish, I knew, but it satisfied my fury and frustration. Afterwards, I was calm enough to clean the brush and then remove any other traces of my presence from the studio. I did not look at the place where Theo’s body lay as I left the house.

  When Lamb had first read this, he had been shaken by an almost superstitious thrill at how similar it was to his own interpretation of what might have occurred. When he had put forward his theory to Cogan, the sergeant had clearly thought it so far into the realms of fantasy that Lamb hadn’t pressed it, but it had turned out to be uncannily correct. He had seen what happened as vividly as if he had been there.

  ‘Carrington still hoped it would be seen as suicide, of course, which at first it was.’

  Guy got up, walked across the room and came back. ‘This is true? Carrington killed Theo Benton, as well as my father? Was he insane?’

  Lamb said nothing for some time. ‘I like a nice painting,’ he said at last, ‘though I’d be the first to confess I know nothing of art. You glance at a picture and you think very nice, very pretty, I’ll buy that. But anyone who does understand it – a connoisseur, an artist, he really looks. And sometimes he sees into it something that makes it stand out from the rest – some inner meaning, maybe, what the artist was trying to get at. Do you understand what I mean?’ He coughed apologetically. ‘I’m not altogether sure I know what I’m talking about, myself, really—’

  ‘Oh, but I do,’ said Dulcie shyly.

  ‘Yes, indeed, Miss Martagon. As another artist, you certainly would.’ Miss Dart – to whose opinions he was prepared to accord some respect – had spoken of the girl’s artistic leanings and her ambition, and unlike her mother did not underrate either her talent or her determination. Lamb looked kindly on her, suspecting that the shocking news about the way her father had met his death had affected her more deeply than any of this family. The possibility had, after all, always been at the back of the son’s mind, if unacknowledged. As for Mrs Martagon, he thought that apart from natural shock, it was more the woman’s pride which had been hurt by the circumstances than anything else. Dulcie blushed with pleasure at being acknowledged as an artist, but said nothing more, and he continued.

  ‘Theo had been working on a series of paintings – nocturnes, he called them. They were similar only in that they were all painted towards dusk – but in each one he painted what to the casual eye is nothing but a shadow. The experts I’ve spoken to are of one mind about them: they are better than anything else he had ever painted – though they were of different opinions as to what the shadow was meant to represent. A human form? Some kind of mystical vision, an aspiration Theo was reaching out for? Whatever it was, I have to admit that if you look at them long enough, really study them, you can just about discern what might be a human shape. What’s more, as the series progresses, the one shape begins to seem more like two. That’s what the experts say, anyway,’ he finished, faintly apologetic. ‘At any rate, when your father brought Carrington home that night to look at one of those pictures, Carrington was convinced that, like himself, he too had seen its significance, or that sooner or later he would become curious about the series and begin to suspect. Mr Martagon was a knowledgeable man about art and artists, after all.’

  ‘Significance? You’re surely not saying my father was killed for some idea in a picture?’ Guy folded his arms across his chest and looked disbelieving and slightly affronted.

  ‘Not just any picture.’ Lamb paused. ‘But let me continue. It all goes back to a night in Vienna when a woman named Miriam Koppel died.’ He saw Mrs Martagon start and knew she was thinking of those letters to her husband which she had found and handed over to Lamb. He knew precisely what she had suspected. It had taken courage to surrender them and in return he was glad he was going to be able to reassure her. ‘We have the police report on Mrs Koppel’s death from Vienna,’ he went on, ‘and we have a statement from the man Franck who stabbed Julian Carrington, and we have Carrington’s own account. It will make things clearer if I read the report out to you first. It’s not very long.’

  After doing so
, there was a small silence. He returned the paper to his wallet, then briefly related Carrington’s own account of the events, as it had been told to him that last night, in Carrington’s office at Lombard Street.

  He thought it more than likely the banker had persuaded himself that was indeed the way it had happened, to the extent where he actually believed it: that Miriam Koppel had slipped on the snow, albeit because she was surprised by Carrington, and that she had recovered sufficiently to stagger away, only to collapse further along the adjoining street, lose consciousness and lie where she fell until she died. It was theoretically possible. That Carrington had left her to her own devices was reprehensible beyond doubt, but it didn’t mean murder.

  Lamb, however, felt certain that what the child, Sophie, had seen was likely to be a truer interpretation of events, although there would never be any way of proving this. She had at last been liberated from the fear which had paralyzed her ever since being involved in the turbulent happenings of that fateful night. And perhaps another kind of fear which had also kept her silent, of being afraid to tell Isobel that it was Carrington, her trusted friend, whom she had seen attacking her mother. Carrington had assumed, correctly that, as a child, Sophie’s evidence would never be admissible in a court of law, which was, of course, as it should be, thought Lamb, and Miriam Koppel might never be avenged, a life for a life. But if ever Carrington recovered sufficiently to stand trial, he would hang, for one or other of the murders he had committed.

  There was a grave silence when Lamb had finished the story. ‘I still don’t see where my father comes into all this,’ said Guy. ‘Unless – unless he was there that night?’

  ‘No, he was not.’ Lamb looked directly at Mrs Martagon as he said this. She made no sound, but closed her eyes briefly and then lifted and held a scrap of lace handkerchief to her mouth. ‘However, Theo Benton was there, as you heard in the report. He was the one who found Sophie, Mrs Koppel’s young daughter, who had been sleepwalking and wandered outside. She had seen what was happening to her mother, but she was too shocked to be able to talk about it, then or afterwards. However, we know now from Viktor Franck that Theo also caught a glimpse of what he later, in the light of subsequent events, interpreted as a struggle going on at the end of the lane. At the same time, the child was terrified and frozen and his first priority had to be to snatch her up and get her inside. After she’d been attended to, he went out again but fresh snow was falling and already there were no clear traces. The next morning Miriam Koppel’s body was found – though some distance away. Bruno Franck was arrested. He had no alibi – he and his brother had spoken for each other, for what that was worth, swearing neither had left the house all night. He subsequently hanged himself, as you’ve heard, because, rightly or wrongly, he absolutely believed himself already condemned in the eyes of the police. Theo left Vienna almost immediately afterwards.’

  ‘And then—?’

  ‘He eventually came back to London. He became obsessed with making that series of paintings, the same subject returned to over and over again, maybe to free himself of the memory, maybe to convince himself he was right, or even wrong, who knows? Carrington was, after all, used to looking at paintings in minute detail and presumably searching for their underlying meaning, and it must have seemed that Theo was saying through them what he couldn’t – or was afraid to – express in any other way. To him, the paintings weren’t mysterious at all, he was sure that Theo must indeed have seen him struggling with Miriam Koppel. And when he saw one of them lying on your father’s desk, he assumed their meaning was crystal clear to him, too.’

  ‘But he couldn’t have known that,’ Guy said. ‘And dash it, a painting – especially one as nebulous as that – it’s no proof of anything, let alone a murder. It’s all in the mind of the beholder, after all.’ Were people really expected to believe this sort of tosh? It summed up everything he disliked about the art world, and was one of the reasons he could never have followed in his father’s footsteps.

  ‘But, Guy, if Carrington believed Theo knew,’ Grace said, ‘wouldn’t he also believe there was the danger that he might, sooner or later, tell what he knew?’

  ‘If the case was closed, and if he was technically innocent – and Mr Lamb seems to believe he was – then he’d nothing to fear.’

  ‘Except for the loss of his reputation, his highly respected name being dragged through the mire,’ Lamb said. ‘To a man like Carrington, that would mean everything. If it was brought to the attention of the police – even if it came to nothing and the case was not reopened – it would look bad for him, show that he’d played a less than heroic part in Miriam Koppel’s demise. Especially would it affect his future plans with regard to Mrs Amberley.’

  He paused. ‘Only, Carrington got one thing wrong, you see. It wasn’t Carrington Theo thought he’d seen struggling with Miriam, but Viktor Franck. He and Carrington are remarkably similar in build, and, in any case, Theo had no reason at that time to believe Carrington was in Vienna. He confronted Viktor, and Viktor, of course, denied it. Theo had nothing to prove what he’d seen, only what he believed. The case seemed closed, over and done with. Theo left Vienna. Then, recently, he wrote to Franck and apologised, told him he had been wrong, that the man he’d seen wasn’t Viktor, but Carrington. Viktor came over here, they talked and Viktor decided to take his own revenge for his brother, and perhaps for Miriam Koppel, too.’

  ‘What happened to make Benton change his mind?’

  ‘That’s something we still have to find out, Miss Thurley.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ Dulcie intervened suddenly, ‘continually painting the scene like that triggered his memory. It’s not like relying on a photograph to record what’s there. You’re right, Mr Lamb. You have to look, and look, and remember what you’ve seen, and the more you concentrate, the more you do remember.’

  ‘I think it more than likely that was what happened.’

  ‘What’s going to happen to Franck?’ Guy asked.

  ‘If Carrington dies, he’ll be charged with murder. If he doesn’t, Franck will in any case be staying in this country for a long time. He committed a serious offence, stabbing Carrington with every intention of murdering him. He shows no remorse for this, he is more concerned with trying to make us believe the only reason he wanted to see Sophie was to make sure it was really Carrington she and Theo had seen.’

  ‘And this little Sophie really is Miriam Koppel’s child?’ The look Mrs Martagon and her son exchanged, then turned on Lamb, was peculiarly intense.

  ‘And Viktor’s, too, or so he believes. I understand that’s debatable. Although there was a portrait, very likely of her, in Theo’s studio and having seen them both, I would not rule out the possibility entirely.’

  Isobel, at her sitting room window, would have known the young man walking down the street towards her house anywhere, even had he not been accompanied by his sister, whom she recognised: Eliot’s daughter, the young girl she had met with him in the park. His firm stride was just like his father’s, as his handwriting had been, as was his tall, strong figure. There were three of them: Guy, Dulcie and a young woman. He was carrying a bulky parcel.

  The meeting did not promise well, despite the biscuits, the good coffee she had herself prepared, until Guy, evidently feeling the same way – that small talk between them would be impossible – took the initiative and plunged in, breaking the ice by indicating the parcel he had leant against the wall. ‘It is good of you to see us, Mrs Amberley. We have brought you something we feel you might appreciate.’

  He handed the parcel to her and she began to undo the string but her trembling fingers made her fumble. ‘Here, let me,’ he said, his features relaxing. His eyes were his father’s, too, silvery grey and thickly lashed. This is the woman who caused all the trouble, she thought they were saying, mistakenly, for Guy was in fact a little unnerved to find that she was not the predatory harpy he had sometimes envisaged, but a stylish woman, elegant and collected, with a smile which, i
f presently wary, promised warmth. How could he have imagined his father being attracted to someone less? Older than he had thought, with grey silvering the crown of her dark hair. She could not hold a candle to his mother for looks and presence, but there was something about her that, despite his reservation, would have disposed him to like her, had the situation been different. He unwrapped the brown paper.

  ‘Sophie’s portrait! Where did you come by this?’

  ‘It was found in Theo Benton’s studio, after he died. His father was going to take it, but then Chief Inspector Lamb had an idea it was the little girl who lives with you.’

  ‘It is.’

  ‘Mr Benton wishes you to have it.’

  Joseph Benton had been only too happy to hand over the portrait when it had been explained to him who the little girl was and that it had largely been the work of some other artist, and not Theo. Deciding to keep it had in any case been a mistake, he said. Anything of Theo’s could only be an unbearably painful reminder to his mother of how and where it had been acquired.

  ‘Sophie will be pleased to have this, though perhaps I will not let her see it, just yet. She and Theo were such friends, it might upset her.’ She had a faint but unmistakable French accent. ‘Though it was not all Theo’s work, you know. It was finished by Viktor Franck.’

  The name brought a chill into the air, a subject none of them wished to talk about. Viktor, who was still languishing in police custody. One had to believe his stated reasons for wanting to see Sophie was the truth, that taking Sophie back to live with him could surely have formed no part of the dark path of revenge he had plotted for himself. She would never live with him now.

  The stilted conversation lurched on while they finished their coffee, and Isobel puzzled over the motive behind this strange, uncomfortable visit. The portrait could have been sent to her. There had been no special need to bring it in person. ‘What do you want of me?’ she asked suddenly in a low voice.