by Alan Hunter
‘So there’s my man, this X, becoming infatuated with Shirley. In her he sees a conductor between his dream and its realization. She is the symbol and the path; through her, he can rise to his full stature. First with her the dream becomes fact, but after her, with all the world. Oh, I know it’s a common psychological pattern — but here we are dealing with a critical intensity.
‘Now to go back to the other side of the equation, to Shirley Johnson and her peculiar repressions. She wasn’t obsessed by any delusions of grandeur — hers all belonged to quite a different category. She was homosexual, of that I’m certain, but she didn’t happen to possess the courage of her secretions; instead she compelled herself to associate with men — not to bed with them, necessarily, but to dominate and tantalize them.
‘She liked to be the queen in a circle of men. She liked to rule their roost, to have favourites, to settle disputes. She plotted and intrigued between the two jealous factions, while remaining herself securely perched upon the fence.
‘Could our X have possibly chosen a less amenable subject? My dear fellow, our equation was dynamite from the beginning! We may suppose that to start with she smiled upon his advances — flattered them, teased them, brought his dreams to a pitch of madness. Then he began — isn’t it probable? — to propose taking his dreams in earnest. He might want to throw up his job and to have our Shirley run away with him. You can guess her reaction — she would have slapped him down with a bang; she would have used that scathing tongue of hers, scattered his dream house to the winds…
‘Isn’t it an amusing supposition to indulge in over some sherry? By and large it fits the facts — at least, while I’m playing the Superintendent!’
He drank, and Gently drank; it had the air of an unexpressed toast. Mallows turned his glass by the stem to display its exquisite spiral filaments.
‘Lace twist… these are a pair. I’m rather fond of a bit of glass. I picked these up in that shop in Lynton — you know the place? He stung me a fiver.’
‘Am I still playing at being the suspect?’
‘Yes, of course. Until we’ve finished our drink.’
‘There’s a question you forgot to ask me.’
‘Don’t tell me! Is Stephen Aymas our X?’
Gently nodded, at the same time reaching for the sketching block. He was rather surprised, then, to find what Mallows had been making of him. Other people had sketched Gently at one time or other, but, allowing for different techniques, they had shown a unanimity in their portrayals. Mallows had found something different, something the others had missed. He had shown Gently looking younger and with a wondering expression in his eyes. Yet it wasn’t youthfulness either, but some sort of inner illumination; he had done it by lightening all the tones, by smudging and thumbing away the charcoal.
‘So what is your answer going to be to that one?’
‘I don’t quite know. I don’t think it would be Aymas.’
‘Too much of an extrovert — yes, I agree. An ambitious soul, mind you, but quite a healthy little monad. He would tell the world his wrongs rather than simmer them over in private.’
‘You have your own suspicions, of course?’
‘If I have, I don’t tell my suspects. Don’t forget one important point — you were the last person to see Shirley alive.’
‘Yes.’ Gently laid the sketch down on the bench, undecided whether or not he found it flattering. Twice, now, Mallows had recurred to that point… why did he feel the need to emphasize it so much?
‘If you like I’ll go on with my interrogation — this is a game that ought to be popular at parties! Now consider this carefully: you’ve been cagey about the meeting. There was more going on there than you admitted to, wasn’t there?’
‘A good deal more… there was a row between Aymas and Mrs Johnson. To be frank, it got to the stage where he was calling her a liar. There was such a row down there that it interfered with a darts match in the bar — and it went on for about an hour. It should have been quite a memorable set-to.’
‘You are right, quite right — it should have been indeed.’ Mallows showed no surprise at the extent of Gently’s information.
‘On that basis, perhaps, you could make some suggestions?’
‘Don’t hurry me, man! I’m on the point of putting some to you. Let me see…’ He did a miming of intense concentration. ‘You admitted, I remember, that the Palette Group had suffered a split. On the one side stood the traditionalists (of whom you yourself are a prominent member), and on the other the modernists, and all that sort of flim-flam.
‘Shirley Johnson, you tell me, had a foot in either camp, and by her pictures you couldn’t discover if she were biased in a particular direction. Both sides had a claim to her and supplied her with favourites.
‘Now, I put it to you that you can tell me what happened that evening.’
Gently slowly nodded. ‘I could hazard a guess, I think! It seems to fit that she dropped her neutrality and committed herself, that evening…’
‘Which is exactly what I suspected: she committed herself to the modernists. It was done in a fit of temper, you can bet your last sou on that. Something had happened to upset Shirley before she ever arrived at that meeting, so she picked a quarrel with Aymas, and after him, with the rest of the tribe.’
‘She picked it with him because, being her favourite…’
‘Just so. He was the one she could hurt the most. It was never a question of artistic conviction, just a wicked talent for finding the rawest spot.’
‘And what would you make of her breaking out like that?’
‘Ah! The first time, too, after she’d ridden the fence for years. But you mustn’t try to quiz a Superintendent, you know — you must leave him alone to add his two and two together. By the bye… do you think you could use me at Scotland Yard?’
It may have been the result of the sherry, but they both suddenly found themselves laughing — Mallows, indeed, doubled up with mirth, and had to wipe the tears out of his eyes.
‘I’ve told you everything — everything — haven’t I? Everything you were going to ask me! That’s the silliest interrogation — and the best — you’ve ever done!’
‘There were one or two other points…’
‘You devil, Gently! But not before lunch, I shan’t permit it. We’ve had quite enough of cops and suspects — damn it, man, I haven’t shown you a single picture.’
There was no calling Mallows to order even if Gently had wanted to, but the academician had already given him more to chew on than he had expected. What was more, and this was rare with Gently, he felt an affinity with the man; Mallows had charm and more than charm — one felt at home with him in a moment.
‘These are things I’ve done for myself, all the ones you see stored in the racks, and there are one or two early canvases which I didn’t sell at the time. One day, I’m going to build a gallery. I want to see them all set out. Some artists can’t stand their own pictures — avec raison, you’ll say, of some contemporaries.’
‘Wouldn’t you find it a bit… overpowering?’
‘Not a whit. I’ve got the devil’s own ego. Then it’s nice to be able to see the subjects that you’ve got rid of — you won’t have to paint that again, or these, or those. You can’t guess what a satisfactory feeling it gives you.’
‘Don’t you enjoy painting, then?’
‘It’s a bed of thorns, my dear fellow. An artist is the most tormented devil alive. He loathes the sight of a blank canvas and yet he’s always standing in front of one — he sees a vision which gets on his nerves, and somehow then he has to get rid of it. Until that’s done, he can’t live with himself. He’s like a prophet with a gag in his mouth. You’ve heard me say it before, and I’ll say it again: either you paint for someone, or else you’re not an artist; and that goes for every other art under the sun.’
While he spoke he was pulling out one canvas after another, bewildering Gently by the succession of subjects. Unlike most o
f his contemporaries Mallows scorned to specialize, and his astonishing talents seemed to embrace the entire cosmos. Landscape, seascape, portraiture, still life, each one had come to be conquered by that luminous, rich brush; crowd scenes, architecture, horses, snowscapes, even historical reconstructions; there seemed nothing that he hadn’t attempted.
‘Do you see what it is I’m trying to do? Good lord, what a period this is for an artist! For years I’ve been telling people where they stand with art, and might as well have shouted it up a chimney. We’ve changed our whole footing, that’s the point of departure. Without noticing it, we’ve crashed through a spiritual sound barrier. There’s a curtain pulled, Gently, across the centuries preceding us, and it’s cut off the old sun to leave us blinded by the new.
‘Do you know what engendered art, and society, and everything else? It was fear, plain fear, nothing bigger or nobler than that. Fear of life, fear of death, fear of all the great Unknown: it drove men to get together, to search for a meaning, to increase their stature.
‘Just as it did our old friend, X! This was his tragedy, historically foreshadowed. A race of X’s were driven together, to glorify themselves and to tame their universe. They insisted that it should be significant and they set up gods who understood it; and then, by pomp and rank and circumstance, they added divinity to man.
‘Which was where art came into the picture — its job was to gild the ersatz lily. It had to inject mere nature with significance, and to exhibit man as larger than life. And that, my dear fellow, it was doing, up and down the painful centuries; until a handful of decades ago, art had no other aim at all.’
‘But now…?’ Gently pressed him hesitantly, painfully conscious of his threadbare ignorance.
‘Ah! There’s the question which vexes the age — the flywheel has dropped off, and the machine has flown to pieces.
‘It happened, as it was bound to, that man came to his senses. It was a long time stirring but it came to a head in the last century. He was in fact growing up, he was throwing away his baubles; he had begun to grasp his universe and himself, and how things worked. So he could do without the gilt, having trampled on the lily. There was scarcely any need for the sublime any longer. The arts, which had always purveyed it, were rapidly stranded high and dry; they had lost their raison d’etre and they were left with the bleak, flat truth.
‘A desperate state of affairs indeed! No wonder it presented a scene of chaos. The tradition of a thousand years was dead, and man was left without a precedent…’
‘And so you got all this… hocus-pocus?’
‘Yes. It was every man for himself. Theories, slogans, cranks and abuse — art became a bedlam of heroes and panic. And now, to cap it, there’s the “New Criticism”, to prove that a couple of blacks make a white.
‘If you are faced with an art which is meaningless, why, you proclaim that art shouldn’t have a meaning…’
At that stage they had returned to the doctrine, and it lasted until Withers called them to lunch; once Mallows had fairly got into the subject he pressed it along like a yacht under full sail.
‘My dear fellow, I can lecture all day…’
Gently’s acknowledging shrug was rueful. But he hadn’t been bored during that enthusiastic monologue, and all the while, round the corner, lurked the prospect of fried chicken…
But this, unhappily, he was destined never to eat; he was called away to the phone before he had even finished his soup. It wasn’t Stephens but Hansom who had made a call so untimely, and there was a mocking ring in the Chief Inspector’s voice.
‘I thought you’d like to hear how the Johnson boyo was doing. You know, he always struck me as a restless sort of character.’
‘How do you mean…?’
‘He’s done a skip act — bolted — skedaddled out of town. He cleared his bank account at eleven, and that’s the last that anyone’s seen of him.’
‘But what about the tail?’
‘Yeah.’ Hansom sounded a little sour. ‘He fell for the oldest gag in the book — Johnson went in at the front door and came out at the back. That’s why it’s taken so long to hear about it. Our dumb-bell stood waiting there over an hour. Then he did a quick tour of Johnson’s flat and office — all that, before he decided to let us know.’
‘You’ve got an alert going?’
‘Yep. Shoot him on sight. And that’s not as funny as you think it is, either. You want to know what the boyo was hoarding in his safe deposit? It was a souvenir Luger, with a belt full of ammo!’
Gently clamped down the receiver and swore, far from gently.
CHAPTER NINE
Johnson’s red MG was parked blatantly in front of the bank, which was a branch in a street only a stone’s throw from his office. A constable stood by it with the self-conscious air of picketed constables. A police car, Hansom’s, was jammed in behind Johnson’s.
‘The Chief Inspector is with the manager, sir.’
Gently nodded and strode on in. Behind their counter with its barricades of varnished mahogany the clerks glanced quickly, deprecatingly towards him.
‘Superintendent Gently…’
‘This way, sir, please.’
A counter flap was lifted for him, and he was led down an aisle of desks.
In the office he found Stephens as well as Hansom. The young Inspector avoided his eye; he had an awkward, apologetic look.
Hansom quickly took Gently aside:
‘This geezer knows more than he’s letting on! There’s only one back way out of here, and it goes through the private hall of the bank house…’
‘What does he say about it?’
‘Says that Johnson was a friend of his.’
The manager was, as Gently had realized, the man he had met in the George III. His smile had now become a little less cordial, but he was still making an effort to keep it in place.
‘So… we meet again, Superintendent!’ He made a wan attempt to sound facetious. ‘I didn’t imagine that it would have been quite so soon…’
Like Stephens, he had an apology in the way he carried himself, but unlike the detective he suffered from no trace of awkwardness. As a senior bank official he understood the airs and graces: he made a slight, ingratiating movement as he felt Gently’s deliberate scrutiny.
‘Perhaps you’d like to tell me exactly what happened?’
‘Certainly, Superintendent. I’ve just been telling these gentlemen.’
‘You’re James Farrer, aren’t you?’
‘Yes, that’s my name… as you know, I am one of the Palette Group members.’
Gently grunted, his mind switching momentarily to the exhibition. Now he remembered one of the bank manager’s pictures — a rather commonplace affair, a still life of roses.
‘Johnson was shown in here at eleven or thereabouts. I should tell you that I know him socially, that’s to say, he belongs to my club. He informed me that he wanted to close both his accounts — he was in some sort of a crisis; I understood it to be financial.’
‘Did he say it was financial?’
‘No.’ Farrer whipped up his smile. ‘But in a bank manager’s office one rarely hears of any other kind. In any case, I understood him so… I even offered to give him advice. However, he only wanted his money, and it was not my place to question him.’
‘Didn’t it strike you as being just a little bit queer?’ Hansom weighed in with his heavy sarcasm.
‘It did cross my mind, I have to admit… but then, you fellows didn’t seem to be worrying about him.’
‘You could have stalled him and got on the phone!’
‘I’m sorry.’ Farrer shrugged his shoulders politely. ‘I would certainly have done so had I known he was wanted, but of course, in my eyes, he was still a free agent.’
Gently inquired: ‘How much did you let him have?’
Farrer consulted a memo which lay on his desk.
‘From his current account, seven hundred pounds… and another six hundred against his d
eposits. That was the best I could do at a moment’s notice. In cash, I mean. He wanted small notes.’
‘What about his safe deposit?’
‘He emptied his box. Naturally, I’m not supposed to know what was in it. Since I advised him about his investments, however… if you insist, I can give you a fairly good guess.’
‘It might be useful.’
‘Well… ten or eleven thousand… bearer bonds, preference… some government stock.’
‘And a Luger pistol?’
‘Yes, that… he once showed it to me.’
‘Did he show you his licence?’
Farrer shrugged again, smiling thinly.
‘All right — how long was he occupied by these transactions?’
‘Not more than half an hour. He was in a hurry — did I say?’
‘And then?’
‘Well, then he left, after shaking my hand.’
‘By the back door — through your hall?’
‘It’s the quickest way into Shadwell Street.’
‘And of course — you were friends!’ Hansom bit in again. ‘And of course, you didn’t ask him why he was scuttling out at the back! And of course he didn’t mention that there was a detective watching the front — when we’re all so damned polite we don’t talk about these things!’
Farrer winced under the attack, but clung to the shreds of his official smile. Too clearly he was a man who couldn’t be bullied out of his composure.
‘He asked to use that way out as a favour, as he had done once or twice before. It happens to be nearer for his office. I am very sorry if it discommoded you.’
‘Yeah, I’ll bet you are!’ Hansom could detect the delicate taunt. ‘But don’t think we’re so dumb as people make us out, either. There’s a little misdemeanour called “obstructing the police”, and I wouldn’t like to say that we couldn’t pin it on you.’
‘Always supposing that you had evidence to support it, Inspector.’
