A Private View Read online

  10

  The tiny sound was a challenge. It was a challenge because it was frightening, and it was frightening because it was tiny. Judith was never to get further than this in explaining to herself what she now did. A revolver shot, a cry, the sound of a heavy fall: any of these would have scared her in her present situation, and sent her precipitately out into Gas Street looking for that overdue police car. What she had in fact heard – this scarcely distinguishable click of a key turning, once and once only, in its accustomed wards – came to her, for some occult reason, as far more alarming than that. And at once she turned towards it as if she were no more than the needle on a delicate acoustic instrument. She turned and went up the stairs in the darkness, past the invisible mural with its London policemen blasphemously posed, up to where she had never been except in imagination, up to Gavin Limbert’s studio.

  The sound of the turning key, she realized, had operated like a symbol; it had been the very signature of a man returning home. A scratch or scrape, a fumble, would have given quite a different impression, been wholly without power to give that particular prick of fear. But the practised movement, the one deft twist that said Home –

  She was going up fast, and in total darkness. Anything – a cat, a milk bottle, an unexpected twist on the stair – might have brought her down with a bump, painfully and ridiculously bruised. But it didn’t occur to her that it is usually with the aid of some sort of light that one undertakes to mount a strange staircase. She went up without consciousness of muscular effort, as if on an escalator. On the first-floor landing she expected a square of light, and beyond it a dead man pottering idly in his own room…

  But that was absurd, and of course there was only more darkness. Judith felt cautiously about her. It was a restricted space. Very soon her hands had travelled all over it. There was only the one door, and that was firmly locked. Moreover the whole place had a deserted feel. Under her fingers she could sense the film of dust which had begun to accumulate as soon as Limbert died. She had played herself a foolish trick in imagining that turning key.

  Suddenly she became aware of movement somewhere above her head. It was a movement only of light – a broadening beam of light through an opening door. There was another flat; she remembered that she had forgotten that. Mary Arrow’s flat. She turned her head and looked up the further narrow staircase. The light was a feeble one. But she could distinguish in it a pair of trousered legs, standing quite still on the upper landing. Then a deep voice said, ‘You’d better come up.’

  And again Judith climbed. When she got to the landing the legs had disappeared. But there was an open door. Through it she heard the faint hiss of a gas lamp and the stronger hiss of a gas ring. She walked straight across the threshold into a sparsely furnished room. A woman of about her own age, dressed in black corduroy slacks and a grey jersey, was standing before the empty fireplace. Her face was drawn and haggard, with dark rings under the eyes, and her body beneath its mannish clothes could be discerned as nerveless and limp. The woman was either sick, or exhausted, or worn down by some stubborn despair. And the woman took one look at Judith and said in her deep voice, ‘I don’t know you. But you look ill, or desperately worried, or tired out.’

  Judith was able to laugh – weakly but without incivility, for the woman in slacks had disappeared into a small kitchen.

  ‘I’m only just home,’ her voice said. ‘I’ve done no more than change into these pants and put on a kettle. It must be late. But not too late for a cup of tea.’

  ‘Home? Are you Miss Arrow?’

  ‘That’s right.’ There was a pause, and the sound of boiling water hissing into a teapot. ‘Are you somebody looking for Gavin?’

  Judith felt an odd pricking sensation in her spine. ‘No,’ she said. ‘I wasn’t looking for Mr Limbert. I know about–’

  ‘He doesn’t seem to be in.’ Mary Arrow had reappeared, carrying a tray; she seemed to accept Judith’s visit as wholly natural. ‘I gave a bang on his door as I came past. No reply.’

  Judith had been standing in the middle of the room. Now she very much felt that she wanted to sit down. For this she had recourse to the nearest object, which was a music stool. ‘Have you–’ She hesitated. It had been her intention to add ‘been away long?’ But even this oblique approach appeared insufficiently cautious in face of the queer situation confronting her. ‘Have you really made tea for me too? That’s very kind.’

  Mary Arrow set down the tray on the room’s only table, and then looked at it as if she were seeing it for the first time. ‘Tea,’ she said. ‘Yes – tea.’

  ‘It looks delicious.’ The idiocy of this remark – for there was, after all, nothing to see except a pot and two cups – at once struck Judith as an index of her own sense of discomfort. ‘I adore tea at night.’ She could do no better before this obscurely distraught woman, it seemed, than bolster up one silly piece of gush with another. Mary Arrow herself had made a much better show. She had said, ‘I don’t know you. But you look ill.’

  ‘I wonder if Gavin would like to come up? But I forgot – he’s out.’ She stood with the teapot poised in air. ‘Gavin’s out,’ she repeated. Her deep voice had gone dull, as if she were bent on concealing from herself her own bewilderment, or desperation.

  ‘You know Gavin Limbert well?’ Judith, coming to a straight question, looked Mary Arrow in the eyes. She saw there something that she didn’t like seeing: a flicker of terror, or of pain. But she began to feel less inadequate, all the same.

  ‘We are lovers – but hardly anybody knows.’ The woman handed Judith her cup, and as she did so her tired eyebrows momentarily contracted themselves in perplexity. ‘I wonder why I tell you that? It isn’t a thing I like or go in for – the frank and doggy attitude.’

  ‘I’d guess it wasn’t.’

  ‘However, there it is. Two flats, and a fire escape in between. Gavin likes concealment. He says it’s something about considering old-fashioned relatives. Actually, it’s something in his nature. But he doesn’t know that.’ The woman frowned again, put up a hand as if to clasp her forehead in distraction, checked the gesture and smoothed her hair. ‘Yes, I am talking strangely tonight… I think I’ve been ill.’ She looked uncertainly at Judith. ‘Forgive me. Are you somebody I ought to know?’

  ‘I’m quite a stranger, I’m afraid. My name is Judith Appleby.’

  Mary Arrow shook her head. ‘That must be right. I’m sure I don’t know a Judith. Shall I call you Judith? It’s the habit round here.’

  ‘Please do.’ Judith paused. ‘Where have you just come from, Mary?’

  Mary Arrow made as if to speak, checked herself, turned away and crossed the room. She came back holding an open tin. ‘A few ginger snaps left,’ she said, and gazed straight over Judith’s head. She had executed some mysterious retreat.

  But Judith tried again. ‘What have you been doing today?’

  ‘Oh, this and that.’ Mary’s voice had taken on a pathetic disguise of boredom, of indifference. ‘And you?’

  ‘Shopping. Then I lunched with my husband.’ It occurred to Judith that a matter-of-fact recital might help. ‘And then we both went on to a private view.’

  The effect of this was extraordinary. Mary Arrow flushed – it was like the blush of a girl – and her whole body trembled. She sat down, with her eyes now fixed on Judith’s face. ‘There’s something Gavin and I call that – a private view.’

  Judith was silent. But she guessed that this wasn’t going to be crudely embarrassing. It was going to be something critical for the queer mental state with which she was in contact.

  ‘Peeping into his studio from the fire escape. There are holes in the shutters. You see?’ The almost meaningless question was desperately urgent.

  ‘I see.’

  ‘When I was first in love with Gavin, and before he had thought about me at all, I used to do that. Perhaps it was dishonourable, or improper or indecent – I don’t know. It was just to watch him working – sometimes late
into the night. And afterwards of course I told him. And we called it my private view. I went on doing it sometimes – just for fun.’ The distraught woman before Judith was now in the throes of an uncontrollable agitation. ‘And we still call…we still call–’

  Judith, listening to Mary Arrow’s deep, slow sobs, wondered if the police car had come. And she found that she wanted five, ten minutes’ grace. A doctor, perhaps nurses, would be needed; she was very sure of that. But for the moment she wanted nothing official or heavy-footed in the room. Fate had brought her to this woman in this moment, and it was up to her to go through with it herself. It was like the sleuthing she had attempted earlier that night. She didn’t know the technique, and she might well come a cropper. But even without knowing whether the right thing was to be slow or sudden, sympathetic or impersonal, gentle or incisive, she must have a go. She got up, went round the table, and put an arm on Mary Arrow’s shoulder. ‘Mary,’ she said, ‘this is no good. You know it’s no good. Everything is coming back, everything must come back. It’s coming back now only because you’re strong enough for it. Think. There’s one thing you must face. What is it?’

  ‘Gavin’s dead.’

  The admission had come with the effect of being dredged up from an immense depth. Or it was like a birth. Mary Arrow was lying back in her chair, trembling but relaxed, sweat on her forehead, but with a sort of peace achieved. Prosaically, like an old midwife, Judith poured her out another cup of tea.

  ‘It’s all I remember – that Gavin’s dead. He’s not downstairs at all. It was stupid to knock on his door. As stupid as knocking on a grave… You knew he was dead?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Yesterday?’

  ‘He – he died ten days ago.’

  ‘I don’t remember. I don’t remember anything. I must have lost my memory.’ For a moment, and with an effect of the grimmest comedy, a look of large surprise replaced the stupefied grief on Mary Arrow’s face. ‘I never thought those things really happened.’

  ‘I believe they do – even to people who have never shown any sign of anything of the sort. There have been all sorts of fantastic cases of loss of memory. My husband has told me about them.’ Judith had a feeling that talk, somehow, was useful, was serving to recreate a normal and solid environment for Mary. ‘His work has brought him into contact with that sort of thing.’

  ‘You are married… Judith? To a doctor?’

  ‘Not a doctor. My husband’s a policeman.’

  ‘I don’t believe that.’ Mary’s voice was uneasy, and she looked at Judith with something like swift reproach. ‘That’s the worst of being ill – ill in the head. People talk rubbish to you.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Mary. It’s a way we have of speaking. My husband is responsible for the CID at Scotland Yard.’

  ‘Now you’re talking.’ Something like a tiny bubble of humour rose and broke on the surface of Mary Arrow’s mind. ‘You look as if you might belong to that sort of person, Judith. And I don’t belong to anybody at all. It’s pretty grim.’ Mary’s face was going white. ‘And it seems I wasn’t able to take it – Gavin’s death. That’s stupid, I suppose. Other women’s lovers have died, and they haven’t made showpieces of themselves, to be docketed and chatted over by policemen.’ Her voice failed and she wept again. Judith remained silent; she knew that now there was no need to break in. And presently Mary raised her head. ‘I’m sorry I said that about chatting policemen. I expect your husband’s all right, Judith.’

  ‘Yes – he’s all right. Only–’

  Powerfully there had come back to Judith a sense in which her husband might not be all right. Mary Arrow’s lover had been brutally killed – as a mere move, it seemed, in an obscure battle into which John had thrown himself now. For a moment she forgot Mary Arrow and her grief, and sat in frozen panic. She found that the sense of time had deserted her; the police car might have been delayed for hours; she might have been struggling with this stricken woman for hours. She looked across at Mary, and felt compunction for her own impatience, her own absorption in a mere nervous anxiety. For Mary’s flicker of vitality had gone out again; she looked as if she had once more turned away from the struggle; she looked like a mere piece of machinery that has run down for the last time. She could be roused again. There was little doubt about that. But somebody would have to work at it – quite hard.

  Judith raised her head. There were voices down below, footsteps, a measured knocking at a door. And the knocking sent her blood racing strangely. Order, security, swift and effective action were coming back with that knock. The footsteps sounded on the stairs, the knocking was repeated almost at her elbow, there were uniformed policemen in the room. Behind them came a figure in plain clothes – clothes which showed evidence of having been hastily put on in some suburban dormitory. And now Detective Inspector Cadover was looking at her with evident relief – with equally evident disapproval. It was only a question of whether he would blow her up now, or wait and take it out of John – respectfully but implacably.

  She jumped to her feet. Mary Arrow looked up at her – apprehensive but also dazed and listless. ‘Judith,’ she asked, ‘who are they? What is it?’

  Gently, Judith took her by the arm. ‘It’s the world getting going again, Mary. It has to.’

  11

  ‘A green Humber?’ Cadover scribbled notes as Judith talked, and constables took them out of the room.

  ‘Yes. Zhitkov said his people were following the van, and Cherry rather scored over him by showing he knew it would be in a green Humber.’

  ‘It’s not the most common of colours, and that’s something. We’re sure to pick it up by daylight, but with luck we’ll have it long before then. And the fellow who called himself Cherry, Lady Appleby – he hinted that his people were in turn following the Humber?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But he didn’t say what in, or on?’

  ‘No. He wasn’t giving anything of that sort away. It was what impressed Zhitkov – the discovery that Cherry’s people were right on top of his. He seemed to decide that he must come to an agreement with Cherry, after all. And it was then that they went away together.’

  Cadover looked at his watch. ‘That was nearly an hour ago. They may be slugging each other again by now. I wouldn’t give much for their precious agreement.’ He scribbled another note. ‘An hour’s a long spell for a patch of honour between thieves.’

  Judith looked across the bare room at Mary Arrow. ‘You think they are thieves? I can’t understand it. They seem so – so unnaturally thick on the ground.’

  ‘It’s a big affair, Lady Appleby. I’ve known rival gangs cutting each other’s throats over hauls far less considerable than this of one of the world’s most valuable pictures. And now I think we’d better be getting along.’

  Judith had thought of Detective-Inspector Cadover as a slow-moving and even somewhat ponderous man, but now she was becoming disabused of this notion. Making notes on one pad, scribbling and detaching a stream of messages on another, asking questions and weighing answers, he even had some reserve of mental energy for the framing of occasional moral sentiments. She wondered whether he was anxious about John. Certainly he showed no signs of it. Now he had stood up, and appeared to be sparing a moment for a glance of disapproval – perhaps ethical, perhaps aesthetic – at Mary Arrow’s black slacks. Judith stood up too. ‘What about Miss Arrow?’ she asked. ‘She can hardly be left here.’

  ‘I suppose not.’ Cadover spoke as if this were striking him for the first time. It seemed that he had a little to spare too for a very private fun. ‘No – it would hardly do.’

  ‘I thought perhaps I might take her home with me.’

  ‘That’s an excellent suggestion, Lady Appleby.’ Cadover scribbled another note and handed it to a sergeant beside him. He was like a celebrity, Judith thought, giving autographs. ‘She still seems very distraught. Perhaps you’d get her down to the car.’ He turned and rattled out a quick series of commands to a man standing at
the door. ‘A woman’s touch,’ he added. ‘A true solace on sad occasions like this. See if you can put her into a coat. And her bag, Lady Appleby, if you can find it. Powder, lipstick – that sort of thing. They talk better when they can do a bit in that way… You, my man – don’t stand about like a fool.’

  ‘Talk?’ Judith was startled. ‘I’m sure she’s not fit to talk. The first thing I shall do is to call a doctor.’

  ‘Fishguard.’ Cadover had swung round on another of his assistants. ‘I never like to have Fishguard forgotten. Quite as important as Holyhead or Liverpool or Heysham… A doctor is a very good idea, Lady Appleby. And now we’ll go down. The cars are waiting.’

  They went down. And once more Judith had no consciousness of muscular effort in treading Mary Arrow’s staircase. Only, this time, the effect was less of being on an escalator than on a conveyor belt. And Cadover, she felt, now had similar conveyor belts in operation all over the south of England… Gas Street was still ill-lit and silent. She could hear no waft of music from the Thomas Carlyle, so perhaps it had packed up for the night – or for the morning. Possibly the place was scared of another raid, for there were certainly plenty of police in evidence. Two big cars had been turned about, and were facing up the street with their engines running. She had the impression that in the more respectable stretch of Gas Street a good many doors and windows were open, and that people were peering out to see what was up. She heard further swift, unhurried conference in the darkness around her, and then she was sitting beside Cadover in a big, dark car. They were moving. ‘But Mary,’ she said. ‘She ought to be in here.’

  ‘Miss Arrow? I’ve put her in the other car, Lady Appleby. On second thoughts, she’ll be better going straight to the Yard.’

  Judith was indignant. ‘But you said I could–’

  ‘It was your remark about a doctor ma’am.’ When Cadover used this form of address Judith knew he was adamantine. ‘Most judicious. And at the Yard there’ll be a doctor on call. With wide experience of these distressing conditions.’