The Mysterious Commission Read online

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  The Mysterious Commission

  First published in 1974

  © Michael Innes Literary Management Ltd.; House of Stratus 1974-2011

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

  The right of Michael Innes to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted.

  This edition published in 2011 by House of Stratus, an imprint of

  Stratus Books Ltd., Lisandra House, Fore Street, Looe,

  Cornwall, PL13 1AD, UK.

  Typeset by House of Stratus.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library and the Library of Congress.

  ISBN: 0755121058 EAN: 9780755121052

  This is a fictional work and all characters are drawn from the author’s imagination.

  Any resemblance or similarities to persons either living or dead are entirely coincidental.

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  About the Author

  Michael Innes is the pseudonym of John Innes Mackintosh Stewart, who was born in Edinburgh in 1906. His father was Director of Education and as was fitting the young Stewart attended Edinburgh Academy before going up to Oriel, Oxford where he obtained a first class degree in English.

  After a short interlude travelling with AJP Taylor in Austria, he embarked on an edition of Florio’s translation of Montaigne’s Essays and also took up a post teaching English at Leeds University.

  By 1935 he was married, Professor of English at the University of Adelaide in Australia, and had completed his first detective novel, Death at the President’s Lodging. This was an immediate success and part of a long running series centred on his character Inspector Appleby. A second novel, Hamlet Revenge, soon followed and overall he managed over fifty under the Innes banner during his career.

  After returning to the UK in 1946 he took up a post with Queen’s University, Belfast before finally settling as Tutor in English at Christ Church, Oxford. His writing continued and he published a series of novels under his own name, along with short stories and some major academic contributions, including a major section on modern writers for the Oxford History of English Literature.

  Whilst not wanting to leave his beloved Oxford permanently, he managed to fit in to his busy schedule a visiting Professorship at the University of Washington and was also honoured by other Universities in the UK.

  His wife Margaret, whom he had met and married whilst at Leeds in 1932, had practised medicine in Australia and later in Oxford, died in 1979. They had five children, one of whom (Angus) is also a writer. Stewart himself died in November 1994 in a nursing home in Surrey.

  PART ONE

  PORTRAIT OF AN UNKNOWN GENTLEMAN

  1

  Charles Honeybath stood in his big north window and surveyed the London street. There was much in the scene which might have been expected to interest him. The plane-trees over the way were intricately peeled and pied. The pavement they shaded was still faintly moist from a recent shower, and here and there an oblique sunlight struck from its surface a glint as from some scattering of microscopic gems. A side-street coming in slantwise on the left recalled, through some mere accident of relative heights in its receding façades, one of those exquisitely sophisticated trick perspectives which it had once amused Andrea Palladio to build into the celebrated theatre in his native Vicenza. Odd things happened to the apparent stature of humans, or bulk of buses, as these perambulated or lumbered towards or away from Honeybath’s well-appointed studio. Even in their familiarity as a daily spectacle, these appearances might have been expected, we repeat, to bring a glint of absorbed attention to the painter’s eye.

  But Honeybath’s gaze was dull. ‘Lacklustre’ would perhaps have been the word chosen to describe it by an observer of somewhat literary inclination. Honeybath was a portrait-painter, and it was a long time since he had been anything else. If he had done quite well – and scores of boardrooms in the City of London, dozens of senatorial chambers in provincial universities, even numerous dining-halls amid the superior sanctities of Cambridge and Oxford, attested the fact that he had so done – the achievement had been at the cost of a high degree of professional concentration within this comparatively narrow, if interesting, department of artistic achievement. Until people had faces – and few of those in the street before him appeared to run quite to that – they didn’t much interest Honeybath. A psychologist, indeed, might have been able to devise amusing experiments proving that Honeybath had simply ceased to see faceless people. He was a devoted man.

  At the moment (as for several weeks past) no object of this devotion was in sight. Trade was slack. This is something which may at any time befall even the eminent. What Honeybath read about in his newspaper as the stagnant state of the economy was no doubt the cause. Prosperous as he had been for a long time, it yet mightn’t be long (he was positively coming to feel) before he began to experience the proverbial emptiness, or at least lightness, of the artist’s purse. He had several times of late thought of sending out for one tiresome model or another, and adding to the world’s existing treasury of art a beggar or a chef or an acrobat or a Chelsea Pensioner. But who would put up any money for that? Speculative labours were always disheartening. Honeybath was glum.

  An unremarkable if prosperous-looking car was coming down the street. It passed the bakery invisible on Honeybath’s left. It slowed before the bank next door. It swerved towards the kerb and drew to a halt – yes, drew to a halt – before what was undoubtedly Honeybath’s own front door. A faint expectancy, almost certain to be cheated, came into the painter’s eye.

  The car was chauffeur-driven – which was a promising detail. The chauffeur got out, opened a door for his passenger, and removed his peaked cap. This was more promising still. Honeybath surveyed with a sharpened attention the emerging object of such deference. He tried to make out whether the man had a face, bone structure, a skull, even just a complexion in which the slightest promise lurked. But the only judgement to come to him was that the man had something faintly wrong about him. This was disconcerting, and the more so because the effect was not readily analysable. Was there a minute discrepancy between the man’s clothes and something else about him? Honeybath didn’t know. And as for a face – well, the chap seemed notably unprovided with anything of the sort. ‘Nondescript’ would be the right word for him. There was even a suggestion – despite the car and the chauffeur – of something indeterminate about his social class. Not that his social class mattered a damn – Honeybath with a sudden robustness told himself – if he wanted to have hi
s portrait painted and was prepared to pay up.

  And now the doorbell rang. Charles Honeybath braced himself. At least he had a caller. There could be no doubt about that.

  ‘The name is Peach,’ the caller said.

  Honeybath made a courteous gesture towards a chair, but he wasn’t favourably impressed. English idiom forbids a member of the polite classes to say ‘The name is Peach’. ‘My name is Peach’ – yes. ‘The name is Peach’ – no. And Peach is an absurd name, anyway. It holds incongruous associations. A girl may be a peach – or could be one when Honeybath was young. But a man can only be a peach (it is to be supposed) if he peaches, and at Honeybath’s public school you had peached if you told tales. Honeybath began to look for something underhand in his visitor.

  ‘May I ask,’ he said smoothly, ‘to whom I am indebted for the introduction?’

  ‘It is entirely a matter of your reputation, Mr Honeybath. I must apologize if I have breached professional etiquette in any way. It must be my excuse that we have been advised on all hands that it is to you that we should apply.’

  ‘Not at all,’ Honeybath said – vaguely but now rather graciously. He was both puzzled and mollified. He was puzzled because this competence in address was somehow unexpected in Peach, and mollified by the civility of the expressions offered him. He had marked, moreover, that significant ‘we’. Peach was some sort of confidential person, he decided, who had been sent to negotiate on behalf of some other person or persons. He was a clever clerk who had got as far as being secretary to some substantial company, and his directors had despatched him to open talks about a possible portrait of their managing director or their chairman. And they had provided him, for better effect, with one of the company’s cars. Feeling that he was now seized of the situation, Honeybath accompanied his expression of civility with a cordial bow. ‘May I offer you a glass of sherry?’ he asked. ‘It seems a reasonable hour for something of the sort.’

  ‘I don’t mind if I do.’ Mr Peach (although back with another wholly inadmissible locution) made a small gesture which was entirely a gentleman’s. He might have been taking a correspondence course in the techniques of social elevation, Honeybath thought, and have got to about Lesson Six. The effect was amusing rather than offensive, Honeybath further thought, to one who, like himself, wasn’t in the least a snob. But what was it all in aid of? Honeybath poured his second-best sherry, and waited.

  ‘May I ask for a start,’ Peach said, ‘what they work out at?’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘Your usual line in that sort of thing.’ Peach was glancing easily round the walls of the studio, upon which several oil portraits happened at the time to hang. ‘Would twelve hundred guineas be near the mark?’

  Honeybath was startled. He was startled both by the unusual baldness of this inquiry and by the fact that twelve hundred guineas was near the mark: it had indeed been his precise figure for several years. He began to suspect that Peach, despite his intermittently odd manner, had been pretty well briefed about what to go for.

  ‘Well, no – I’m afraid not.’ It was much to his own surprise that Honeybath – at present unemployed as we have seen him to be – heard himself produce this reply. ‘Two thousand guineas is at present my fee for a portrait, Mr Peach. Unless, of course, some special circumstance or connexion suggests the propriety of a different figure.’

  ‘Thank you.’ Peach, who didn’t seem at all disconcerted, accompanied his words with a small bow suggesting that propriety was quite his thing too. They were back, so to speak, with Lesson Six again. ‘And may I ask,’ he continued, ‘if that includes hands?’

  ‘Certainly.’ Honeybath was impressed. Hands are usually an extra, and work out at a hundred guineas each. So here was further evidence that the fellow had been taught his onions. Behind Peach was somebody who knew his way around. And anybody who knew that would also know that two thousand guineas was a pretty stiff demand from Charles Honeybath. It was this thought that had thus prompted him to declare that he himself was in the generous habit of throwing in eight fingers and two thumbs gratis. ‘But robes, orders or decorations,’ he hastened to add urbanely, ‘are another matter. They can be very tricky, my dear sir. Particularly when they clash with the flesh tones. So anything of that kind has to be a matter of separate negotiation.’

  ‘There wouldn’t be anything of that kind.’ Peach appeared quite clear about this. ‘But I am instructed to say that, in general, any little pecuniary difficulty that turned up would be settled entirely at your discretion.’

  Honeybath began to feel that the situation sounded rather promising. At the same time, there remained something about Mr Peach that prompted caution. It was true that the early stages of arranging a portrait commission were sometimes oblique and even mysterious. For example, in both commercial and academic life the proposal to present a notability with his likeness can be pretty well a matter of handing him – as in Treasure Island – the Black Spot, and it may seem desirable that the plan should be far advanced before a breath of it reaches the chap who is thus to be railroaded out. It was a shade unusual, however, or so Honeybath thought, for pourparlers to be opened through a person of Mr Peach’s sort. In any case, it would be sound policy not to give the impression of jumping at what this clerkly person had been deputed to bring along.

  ‘Of course I shall be delighted,’ Honeybath said, ‘to discuss any proposal you have to make, and equally delighted to give you any disinterested advice or information you may seek. Frankly, it may turn out that you would do better to go to another man. For a portrait, Mr Peach, cannot be executed satisfactorily except upon the basis of an established personal relationship. And that can be – can it not? – a hit-or-miss affair. For this reason it is customary – on the whole, and if painter and sitter are not already friends or at least acquaintances – to arrange some informal meeting before any agreement is entered upon. And again, one likes to know a good deal more about one’s subject than the address of his tailor and the shape of his nose.’ Honeybath as he said this produced a well-practised whimsical smile. ‘One likes to read what one can about him. And even to pick up a little in the way of anecdote and gossip from his connexions – although in a discreet fashion, I need hardly add.’

  ‘Nothing of the kind would be possible in the present case.’ Peach finished his sherry, and glanced at Honeybath sharply and confidently, as if he had sensed that two thousand guineas was going to prove a potent bait. ‘In fact your sitter,’ he continued, ‘would be anonymous. I am instructed to refer to him as Mr X.’

  If Charles Honeybath wasn’t exactly staggered by this bizarre information, the reason was an almost fortuitous one. Not long before, he had heard from a fellow portrait-painter about something of just this kind happening. His colleague had been offered a really large sum of money – much more than was on the carpet now – to execute, under conditions of the utmost secrecy, the portrait of what proved to be an African gentleman of the most marked sophistication and intelligence. He had, it was clear, emerged from an emergent country, whether constitutionally or otherwise, as its President, Prime Minister, or Top Man. And while in London he had wanted a slap-up portrait of himself (which was a blameless and indeed honourable ambition) with no publicity and no cheques passing. This recollection now gave Honeybath pause. The flesh tones customary on the Niger, the Congo, or the Limpopo are undoubtedly very tricky indeed, and such as require much study in an artist accustomed to paint pallid provision-merchants, or pale-pink décolletée dowagers, or the refined but rosy progeny of the proprietary classes for the walls of the Royal Academy in Burlington House. Robes, orders or decorations are child’s play in the comparison. If this was the state of the case, the price could be pushed up quite a lot.

  ‘May I ask,’ he said, ‘whether your client is black?’ Having produced this question, Honeybath was conscious that it might have sounded a disparaging and even racialist note. ‘Of course black is beautiful,’ he added hastily. ‘Veronese is only on
e of those who did amazing things with negroes. And Carpaccio sometimes, too.’

  ‘A black?’ It was apparent that Mr Peach was uninterested in these aesthetic reflections. There was even a hint of indignation in his voice. ‘Nothing of the sort, Mr Honeybath. We have kept clear of anything of that kind, I am glad to say. Mr X is no blacker than you are, if it comes to that. Begging your pardon, that is.’ Peach had relapsed abruptly into his most distressingly plebeian idiom. ‘But I’ll tell you something at once. Quite straight, I will. He’s out of his mind.’

  This time, Honeybath was really astonished.

  ‘Do I understand,’ he asked dazedly, ‘that you are inviting me to execute the portrait of a lunatic?’

  ‘And why not, Mr Honeybath?’ This time, Peach spoke with spirit. ‘I don’t doubt that others have done it before you. Verynosey, Carpatchy, and all that lot.’

  ‘Possibly so.’ Honeybath dimly wondered whether his visitor was a student of Finnegans Wake. ‘But, if they were, they were undoubtedly constrained to it by tasteless patrons. It is a canon – an absolute canon of art, Mr Peach – that the sheerly pathological is unfit for the purposes of any sort of representative fiction.’ Honeybath spoke with dignity. He might have been Sir Joshua Reynolds pronouncing one of his celebrated Discourses. ‘The thought, sir, is abhorrent to me.’

  ‘But wouldn’t there be a good many mad folk, Mr Honeybath, in Shakespeare and the like? And even in the Bible, if I remember aright.’

  ‘The Bible isn’t art. It’s history.’ Honeybath would not have produced this imperfect reply had he not been a good deal staggered by all this cultural resource on Peach’s part. ‘And an anonymous zany! It’s out of the question. I have my reputation to consider.’