A Private View Read online

  ‘Did you discover his name?’

  ‘He was called Crabbe. Or perhaps Crowe or Crewe. At any rate, something completely appropriate.’ Twist drank another glass of the spurious champagne. ‘Well, they talked for a bit, and then Gavin went away. He only came in here once in a way, and simply to pick up ideas. He didn’t drink – not anything to speak of. And when he was going out – just back to his studio, I suppose – he passed by the table where I was sitting. I said something about this Crabbe or Crowe or Crewe looking as if he’d been finding life a bit grim. “Life is grim,” Gavin said – and out he went.’

  Judith watched Twist refill his glass. ‘And what happened to Crabbe?’

  ‘He sat for a time at a table by himself drumming with his fingers, and glancing first at one door and then the other, and sometimes looking at his watch. He might have been waiting for somebody who had failed to keep an appointment. Sometimes in disgusting places like this you see a man behaving in that way about a girl. Perhaps this really was no more than that. My imagination may have run away with me about that hunted man stuff. My brain is primarily critical and analytic, as you know, dear Judith. But it is powerfully imaginative as well.’

  ‘A wonderful combination.’ Judith looked doubtfully at her entertainer, who was now far advanced in inebriety. A more unreliable informant it would be hard to conceive. But it was no doubt true that on the evening of his death Limbert had been here in the Thomas Carlyle, and had stumbled upon somebody he knew. The incident might well prove to have no significance at all. But John, she knew, would investigate it thoroughly when he got to hear of it. There would have to be questions all round the club. She could scarcely embark upon these herself now, but she must certainly see if there was anything more to be got out of Twist. ‘And afterwards?’ she prompted. ‘Did anybody turn up on Crabbe?’

  ‘Crabbe?’ Twist appeared to be sinking into a state of somnolence. ‘A delightful poet. So divinely dreary.’

  ‘Not that Crabbe. The one Limbert met.’

  ‘You mean Crewe – or was it Crowe? I really stopped keeping any sort of eye on him. His turn, although séduisant, was a shade on the monotonous side. I remember a bunch of people coming in – all men – and his looking up at them sharply, so that I thought they might be what he was waiting for. But when I looked again he had disappeared. And it can have been only a few minutes after that, I suppose, that all those terrible great police arrived. Would you care to dance?’

  Judith turned round. The gaunt girl had disappeared and her place had been taken by a band the members of which were disguised as eminent Victorians. Florence Nightingale was at the piano, Cardinal Manning discoursed upon a saxophone, Dr Arnold fiddled, and General Gordon operated a battery of drums. Judith, who found this spectacle markedly unfunny, was about to declare that she didn’t care to dance, when she found that this was unnecessary. Mervyn Twist had fallen asleep.

  To be invited out and then slept on in this fashion, Judith felt, was mortifying to all that is most ineradicable in female vanity. There seemed nothing more to be learnt from Twist, and for wishing him awake rather than asleep she had no rational ground whatever. Nevertheless she found that she was both mildly enraged and slightly at a loss. To slip away seemed ungracious; to lean forward and shake Twist, undignified; to hack at his shins under the table, a shade brutal. She decided on quitting the room for the purpose of powdering her nose. If Twist was still asleep when she came back, she would call it a day and go home.

  It was while crossing the room with this programme in view that Judith’s eye fell upon a female figure seated alone near the door. It was an odd figure, and, ought to have been wholly unfamiliar. For although Judith enjoyed the acquaintance of numerous elderly matrons of ample proportions and stately presence, none of them wore a large and obvious red wig or went about at night in outsize dark glasses. Nevertheless she realized instantly that she knew this person very well, and in a moment she had advanced and put a name to her. ‘Hullo, Lady Clancarron–’

  ‘Hist!’ Lady Clancarron extended a monumental arm and drew Judith to a chair beside her. ‘I am disguised. And recognition would be fatal.’

  ‘I see. And I’m so sorry. But I don’t think anybody heard.’

  Lady Clancarron shook her head – cautiously, since she was unused to balancing a wig on it. ‘In a place like this,’ she said, ‘the very walls can hear. If rumour has indeed a thousand tongues’ – she paused impressively – ‘Vice has a thousand ears.’

  This was a proposition the force of which Judith couldn’t quite see. She contrived, however, to resist any impulse to a ribald reply. ‘You think the Thomas Carlyle very bad? I thought the police had investigated it for you, and found it fairly innocent.’

  ‘The police!’ Lady Clancarron snorted with contempt. ‘It’s my belief that they are all in the pockets of the Big Interests.’

  ‘Really? My husband tells me quite a lot about his work, but he has never mentioned that.’

  ‘He is an honourable exception – like the Bishop of London.’

  Judith was perplexed. ‘I don’t know that John is at all like the Bishop of London.’

  ‘Or the Postmaster-General. He is an honourable exception in the government, just as the Bishop is among the clergy. All the others have come to terms with the Monster.’

  ‘The Monster?’

  ‘The Moloch. The Web. The Great Conspiracy. The Minotaur of Immorality, bent upon devouring our Young.’ Lady Clancarron paused in this large rhetoric and leant forward accusingly. ‘And what,’ she asked, ‘are you doing here, my child?’

  ‘I certainly haven’t come to be devoured.’ Judith realized that the celebrated moral fanaticism of this old person had reached a stage at which it was overturning her wits. ‘And I can’t see that the Thomas Carlyle is all that dangerous.’

  ‘There are baths.’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’ Judith supposed that she had failed to hear correctly.

  ‘I have discovered that the place has two baths. Why should a haunt of mere dancers and drinkers have that?’

  Judith shook her head. ‘I didn’t know, I’m afraid, that baths are so very bad.’

  ‘They are an invariable concomitant, child, of the most desperate debauchery. Read Juvenal. Consider Boccaccio.’

  ‘Did the police inspect the baths during the raid?’

  ‘They did not. They mishandled the whole matter disgracefully. I watched them at it – from this very chair.’

  Judith was suddenly interested. ‘But you weren’t here, Lady Clancarron? John heard that you were with the inspector controlling the raid, in a police car on the Embankment.’

  For a moment Lady Clancarron was silent; from behind her fantastic dark glasses she appeared to be glancing warily about her. Then she leant forward and hissed conspiratorially in Judith’s ear. ‘A ruse de guerre, child. The person in the car was my maid. And the fool of a policeman didn’t know the difference.’

  ‘But that was magnificent.’ Judith was genuinely impressed.

  The old lady gave a high cackle of mirth that threatened to bring her wig down over one ear. ‘I was here all the time, and observed the disgraceful way in which the investigation was conducted. I am preparing a report on it – a sensational exposure – for the Home Secretary.’

  ‘But if the Home Secretary–’

  ‘I believe that the wretch’s days of power are numbered.’ A positively apocalyptic note came into Lady Clancarron’s voice. ‘It can only be a matter of weeks before the Prime Minister is bound to reorganize his government. And I have it on good authority that the Home Office is to go to the dear Postmaster-General.’ The old lady made one of her dramatic pauses. ‘And then the Augean stables will be cleansed.’

  ‘Won’t that mean you have to find another line?’

  ‘In part cleansed. There will always be abundant labour, never fear, for those resolved to combat the Great Pollution. The Sink. The Drain.’ Rather surprisingly, Lady Clancarron sat back abruptly and
reached for a glass. ‘Have you noticed, child, the abominable quality of the champagne?’

  ‘I certainly have. The drain or the sink is just the place for it.’

  ‘Nothing is more infallibly indicative of bad morals than bad champagne.’

  ‘Except, of course, baths.’

  ‘Precisely. I see that you are a very sensible young person. You must come on our committee.’

  ‘About the night of the police raid, Lady Clancarron.’ Judith’s interruption was made in some haste. ‘Did you see anybody who might be described as a hunted man?’

  ‘All men are hunted, child. By the Spectre of Vice.’

  ‘Of course. But I mean an actually hunted man – one who looked as if he were in actual danger from some – some physical pursuit and assault.’

  ‘Certainly I did.’ Lady Clancarron drained her glass almost as rapidly as Mervyn Twist had done, apparently regardless of the acute moral dangers involved. ‘But that would only be one of the spies.’

  ‘One of the spies?’ Judith was bewildered.

  ‘Or possibly one of the burglars. I have positive knowledge that spies and burglars make a haunt of this club. And, from time to time, there is a murderer as well. But they are not – are they? – our concern. Our quarry, child, is the Demon of Vice.’ Lady Clancarron raised a commanding hand. ‘Waiter,’ she called sharply, ‘another bottle.’

  Judith felt her head gently swim. The old woman was demented. But the mad often notice significant things that the sane ignore. ‘It doesn’t look much of a place for criminals,’ she said cautiously. ‘I’d call it bourgeois elements having a fling.’

  ‘On the night of the raid it was secret agents.’ Lady Clancarron was now matter-of-fact. ‘Whether you call them criminals is no doubt a matter of taste. I am told that they usually work for both sides indifferently – that to do so is the recognized professional procedure. And that, of course, makes moral judgement a matter of some difficulty. For my own part, I take no exception to secret agents. After a good deal of inquiry, I have satisfied myself that they are a hard working body of men, very little given to sexual depravity.’

  ‘I’m very glad to hear it.’ Judith glanced across the room and saw that Mervyn Twist was still asleep. ‘But aren’t there women spies, who are fearfully glamorous and who–’

  Lady Clancarron gave her snort of contempt. ‘That, child, is only in novels. And even such novels have virtually disappeared. Our Council stamped them out.’

  ‘However did it manage that?’

  ‘We found that most romances turning upon the activities of seductive women in the pay of foreign powers were the work of elderly spinsters whose vile scribblings scarcely preserved them from the direst penury. So we contacted other charitable bodies and got them places – in homes for aged governesses, and that sort of thing. The result has been the removal of the Shadow of Vice from the spy story. I speak only of this side of the Atlantic, I need hardly say.’

  ‘That was very clever.’ Judith had begun to lose interest in the fantasies of this ancient crusader. She would scribble a note bidding Twist good night, and then go home.

  ‘Nevertheless, secret agents tend to haunt the same underworld as the Vicious and the Corrupt. I have thus come in the course of my own work to know a good many of them by sight, as well as to recognize the type at a glance. Your hunted man was somebody new. If I had seen him before I should have remembered him. He had a twisted lip.’

  Judith sat up with a jerk. ‘Did he appear to be waiting for somebody?’

  ‘Certainly he did. He spent some time talking to a young man whom I judge to have been an artist. But he was uneasy and restless. He hoped for a rendezvous but he feared pursuit or apprehension. Eventually three men entered the room in a group.’

  ‘Secret agents?’

  ‘Assuredly. I could not possibly be mistaken about them. Your hunted man looked across at them sharply. He was deciding whether they were on his side.’

  ‘But I thought you said, Lady Clancarron, that those people are always on both sides.’

  ‘Not necessarily at once. They change about. And your hunted man was no doubt deciding whether the newcomers were on his side or the other then. His conclusion was plainly adverse. For he got to his feet and bolted out by the other door.’

  ‘Looking upset?’

  ‘Naturally.’ Lady Clancarron was surprised. ‘He was as pale as death, and so on. No doubt they all went somewhere else and fell to killing each other. The incidence of violent death among secret agents is high. It is one of the things that keep their minds off Sex.’

  ‘That is satisfactory, of course. But it is disturbing to think of so much slaughter.’

  ‘At least they did not annihilate one another on the evening in question.’

  Judith looked sharply at Lady Clancarron. ‘You have seen one of those people since?’

  ‘One of your hunted man’s pursuers – if they are to be called that – has been here this evening.’ From behind her dark glasses Lady Clancarron swept the room. ‘That is he – just going out now.’

  8

  The Thomas Carlyle, Judith decided as she bolted out of it, was not hard to place. It was an ordinary second-rate nightclub, providing persons of uncertain sophistication and moderate resources with occasional nocturnal amusement more or less on the cheap. It’s improprieties were probably seldom either immoralities or illegalities. If it pleased people to dance to the music of a saxophonist disguised as a Prince of the Church, they were free to do so. Perhaps it was up to date. Or perhaps it was very much what another Prince of the Church, as Victorian as Manning and even more Eminent, had described as an uncouth imitation of polished ungodliness. The bees buzzing in Lady Clancarron’s bonnet were almost certainly – so far as the Thomas Carlyle went – illusory bees; the Spectre of Vice was here spectral and no more. And so, no doubt, with her burglars and murderers, her spies or secret agents. Through her dark glasses she had decidedly been seeing things.

  Yet there had been in the old lady’s fantasy one demonstrably substantial element. She had seen what Mervyn Twist had seen: a man with a twisted lip, having the air of a fugitive, impatient about some appointment, and linked – however slightly – to Gavin Limbert. A number of men had come in, and the hunted man – it had been both Twist’s phrase and Lady Clancarron’s – had looked at them sharply. And there, more or less, the record ended. Only, Lady Clancarron had pointed to one of the men concerned. Judith was hurrying after him now. On the spur of the moment she had turned detective in earnest. She had a hunted man of her own.

  He was as yet no more than a close-cropped head of hair, square shoulders in the dark cloth of what was presumably a dinner jacket, and a raincoat which he was about to put on before leaving the club. His features were hidden from her, and were he to vanish for five seconds she could not be confident of her ability to recognize him again. Perhaps she ought to confine her ambition to getting a good view of him, so that she would be able to identify him if necessary. Only that seemed a little dull. It would be much more satisfactory to track him down. She doubted whether John would give any large measure of approval to such a project. But one cannot, after all, live in one’s husband’s pocket all the time.

  There was a few seconds’ delay in getting her cloak, so that she thought her quarry must elude her at the start. But the man had paused on the pavement immediately outside the club, with an appearance of irresolution. It is the way one behaves – Judith thought – when wondering whether one has waited long enough for a tardy friend. She moved forward so that she could see his face, and then stood by the kerb, as if looking without urgency for a taxi. He was a middle-aged man with small eyes in a round, pale face. It would be possible to feel his aspect as sinister. Perhaps it was no more than this that had set Lady Clancarron at her imaginings.

  Rain was falling, and not many people were about. Suddenly the man appeared to come to some resolution. He looked swiftly up and down the street; Judith was aware of his glance
pausing on her, ever so briefly, before running on into darkness. He was sinister. He had a habit of making warily sure of his surroundings. As a matter of mere routine, he had noted her for future reference. It would be only for a very short distance, she realized, that she could follow him without incurring his suspicion. Now he had turned away and set off at a sharp pace. She waited a moment, crossed the street, and followed on the other side. The man walked on without looking back.

  It was time – Judith told herself – to decide what, if anything, all this was about. From Lady Clancarron she had heard a great deal of what was almost certainly nonsense. And, even if not nonsense, it was irrelevant to her own concern at the moment. Secret agents don’t steal Old Masters – or at least they are no more in the way of doing so than other among the more adventuresome sections of society. But the old schoolfriend whom Limbert had undeniably met shortly before his death, and the group of men with whom this harried person had been obscurely involved, might well be the thieves, nevertheless. The fact of their having become involved in the fantasies of an eccentric old lady made this neither more nor less probable.

  These people had at least been about on the night on which Limbert was killed – and one of them had been in contact with him. This would constitute a less tenuous link with the Vermeer and the Stubbs if the Vermeer and the Stubbs could be more clearly related to that killing. The outstanding fact about Limbert before his death, surely, was his possession – whether innocently or not – of two stolen paintings, one of them of immense value. Almost certainly the thieves had known where they were; there was no other likely explanation of the conversation and dispute reported by Grace Brooks. Hard upon this Limbert had been killed and his studio ransacked. But both the Stubbs, and the Vermeer as it lay concealed under The Fifth and Sixth Days of Creation, had been untouched. It was only later – on this very afternoon, indeed – that the thieves had got back the Vermeer by raiding the Da Vinci Gallery.

  Judith had progressed as far as this in the recapitulation of her problem when she realized that the man she was following had turned down a side-street and disappeared. By the time she had again got him in view he was in the act of making a further turn, and it occurred to her that he was employing himself in simply walking round a block. In this there would be support for the notion that he was still minded to keep some appointment. The road in which she found herself was poorly lit and quite deserted. She proceeded with considerable caution. If the man looked back and was able to distinguish her, he would now at once know that he was being followed.