A Private View Page 20

  The quarry was semicircular in form; a broad, rough track entered it at one end, curved to where the van stood, and then curved again to find its way out at the other. At each end of the track stood a car: to Judith’s left was the green Humber; to her right, a large, black saloon with its bonnet hidden from view. And from behind both cars came the same little spurts of fire, the same reports – first sharp and then muted in echo within echo. There could be no doubt of it; she was watching a gun battle.

  And suddenly she saw Cherry. He was standing with another man close by the black car, protected by an outcrop of rock. The two seemed to have paused in the battle to argue. Almost in the same instant that Judith spotted them, the second man turned and ran – ran headlong for the Humber. She realized that it must be Zhitkov – whose voice she had heard, but whom she had never seen. Zhitkov ran; he was shouting to his own people; perhaps he was appealing for some sort of covering fire. He had gone half the distance when Cherry whipped out a revolver and shot him in the back. He threw up his arms and Judith could see him scream. But before the sound reached her ears he was sprawled motionless on his face.

  There were shouts of anger, fear, surprise. The spurts of flame changed direction. War had broken out between the two cars. But each continued its war with the van. The whole scene was like an allegory of the senseless history of human violence. Judith wondered what had become of Cadover, but even as this question entered her head she heard a single shrill blast on a whistle and saw the middle distance transform itself into an almost solid semicircle of advancing police. Something drew her eye down again to the van. One of time men defending it had fallen back across a pile of stones. His face, covered with blood, stared up at her fixedly and meaninglessly. But it was not this that had attracted her attention. Among the little spurts of flame she had distinguished something different and even more sinister. Somewhere under the furniture van there was a red, angry glow, and even as she looked at this it grew, and sent up first one and then another licking tongue of fire. She cried out in horror, remembering the nameless police station where there had enacted itself in her head just such a ghastly fantasy as was actually before her now. The flames clutched, spread, soared. There were double doors at the back of the van, and now she could see that they were being violently shaken. She cried out she didn’t know what – her husband’s name, an appeal for help – and dropped on her hands and knees at the edge of the quarry. There must be some way of getting down…

  She felt a hand on her shoulder; a mild voice uttered an indistinguishable but curiously authoritative dissuasive word; with eyes only for the horror below, she was aware of the presence beside her of some elderly man who appeared to have sprung from nowhere. ‘Revolvers,’ he said with disapproval. ‘Dangerous without being useful.’

  ‘John…my husband – he’s in the van…the doors–’

  The elderly man dropped flat on the lip of the quarry, and Judith suddenly saw that he was armed with a rifle. ‘Sort of bolt affair at the top,’ he said. ‘Tricky.’ For two, three – perhaps five – seconds he became absolutely immobile, as if transformed into stone. Then he fired. The report mingled with a sharp clang of metal down below. The doors of the van flew open, and a man leapt out and flung himself upon one of the two remaining defenders. They rolled over and over in a cloud of dust – and then policemen were all around them. And the van had gone up like a torch…

  Judith gave either a gasp, or a sob, and turned round. The elderly marksman had risen and was placidly dusting down an antique knickerbocker suit. ‘Reliable weapon, that,’ he said casually. ‘Took me a long way at Bisley once… Morning, m’dear.’

  ‘You!’ Judith stared at the Duke of Horton with rounded eyes. ‘How ever did you get here?’

  The Duke looked surprised. ‘Odd question, ’pon my soul. Don’t you know that you’re on Horton Hill? Turn round… Nice view, although I say it myself.’

  Judith turned. The mist had cleared from the broad, shallow valley beneath them. And there, beyond a wisp of blue-grey smoke from the hamlet of Scamnum Ducis, beyond a stretch of park and a long vista of formal gardens, beyond its ornamental waters and above its marshalled terraces, gleaming in the low October sunlight like some pristine toy from a transcendental toyshop, was all the serene, severe magnificence of Scamnum Court.

  14

  ‘Spot more coffee?’ The Duke of Horton fussed amiably about his breakfast room. Anne, he explained, was so excited that she would be down before nine o’clock – an unprecedented event. Meantime, he was concerned himself to do all honour to his guests. Judith gathered that it was not easy to set a decent breakfast before them. The Government denied the proprietor of Scamnum Court either the butter from his own famous Jerseys or the bacon from his scarcely less celebrated Large Blacks. This butter was national butter, and this bacon was national bacon. Judith might put tooth to them if she could. The Duke seemed so sure of his facts that Judith concluded it would be untactful to question them. And this seemed to be the opinion, too, of the Duke’s butler, Bagot, who was himself presiding over breakfast in honour of this sensational occasion, and who served Judith with a further rasher of incomparable bacon while studiously preserving an expression of abasement and shame.

  ‘But at least the marmalade is from our own oranges.’ The Duke brightened as this struck him. ‘A man should always insist on his own oranges in the marmalade. Madness to do anything else.’ He had drifted over to one of the lofty windows and was peering out. ‘Quite like a meet of the Horton – eh?’ The long line of powerful police cars parked round the Great Court clearly intrigued him immensely, for he made this drift to the window every five minutes. ‘One of those fellows promised to show me how that walkie-talkie business works. Good name – what? Yankee, no doubt. Capital at names, the Yanks. But can’t raise hogs.’

  Judith, while dutifully listening, let her glance stray to the other end of the long table, where John and Cadover were absorbedly comparing notes. They were like two small boys, happy over a puzzle. She found herself hoping, for their sake, that it would come out nicely. At the same time, her own indifference to it was complete. She felt – she acknowledged to herself – like a mother who has watched her small son’s first rugger match. It was necessary to be politely interested in the result, but all she really had room for was immense relief and happiness. Her glance went back to the Duke and followed him to the window once more. A breakdown lorry had appeared in the Great Court, towing in the blackened shell of the burnt-out van…

  The Duke had turned from the window and walked over to the fireplace. He stood facing the warm glow, his eyes directed to the mantelpiece. And Judith saw that he had perched there George Stubbs’ painting of his great-grandfather, seated in a curricle drawn by Goldfish and Silverfish, with his favourite groom, Morgan, holding Silverfish’s head, and betraying, perhaps, the satisfied consciousness that here, celebrated by the latest fashionable painter, was an equipage not easily to be overgone even by so formidable a rival as his Grace of Richmond… The Duke was thus regarding his Stubbs extremely contentedly – nevertheless Judith felt compunction for her own happiness as soon as her eye fell on him. He turned, glanced at her, and saw the state of the case in an instant. Crossing the room, he patted her on the head as if she were a small child. ‘M’dear,’ he said, ‘it’s a great pity that picture has gone up in smoke, of course. But a live man is a lot more wonderful than any number of queer fish on a canvas.’ He wandered round the table and brought her a jar of honey. ‘Come to think of it, we’ve had our fill of queer fish in this affair.’ He chuckled. ‘Can’t make head or tail of them myself, and I think it’s time we had an explanation. That fellow, Cadover, is your husband’s Number Two?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Asked me if I was an ichthyologist when I told him about the Aquarium. Clever of him – eh? Good joke. And now let’s tackle both of them.’

  Appleby in his turn had gone to stare out of the window. He still looked anxious, Judith thought – but apart
from that his night’s adventures appeared to have left no mark on him. ‘Clear the thing up?’ he said in reply to the Duke. ‘Yes, I think we’re in a position to do that in no time. Shall I fire away?’

  The Duke gave another serene glance at the Stubbs, and then nodded to Appleby. ‘Yes, my dear fellow, please do. If you’ve had a tolerably decent breakfast, that is to say.’

  ‘I’ve had a capital breakfast, thank you.’

  And Appleby sat back and explained.

  ‘In puzzles of this sort it’s not always the conscious mind, if you ask me, that works most rapidly and efficiently towards a solution. We know very well in the police that successful detection is often a matter more of intuition than of anything else. That simply means that the unconscious mind is making all the pace. And occasionally, of course, it throws us out hints. Cadover’s did that on an occasion you already know of, when he talked about Limbert’s death in terms of a superficial picture with something quite different beneath the surface. By that time, you remember, he had heard of the disappearance of the Aquarium – and in the depths of his mind he no doubt knew at once that the Aquarium was a famous picture that would need disguising, and not just an ichthyologist’s tank.’

  Judith stretched herself lazily. She was beginning to feel beautifully sleepy. ‘I don’t believe a word of it.’

  Her husband smiled. ‘The particular instance may be far-fetched, but the general proposition is sound enough. And one consequence is this: when you find yourself saying, or even thinking, something quite unusually vague and casual, listen in hard. After dinner last night, I made just such a remark about what we then believed to be Gavin Limbert’s last painting. Do you remember? I was being thoroughly philistine, and suggesting that the picture was so meaningless that you might give it pretty well any fancy name you chose. And I suggested a couple of examples. One of them was Project for a New Satellite Town. Well now, that was a quite wonderful instance of what they call parapsychology. Because, you see, that was pretty well what the painting is. The thing came to me, I may say, in the darkness of that van. I saw the painting again with a sort of hallucinatory vividness – and in a flash I realized that it tallied with something very secret indeed that I’d been given a glimpse of some weeks ago. Limbert’s supposed chef-d’oeuvre was nothing more or less than a large-scale, very detailed plan of Waterbath.’

  ‘Waterbath!’ Surprise brought Judith abruptly to her feet. ‘Oh, what an ass I’ve been! And Waterbath is a small new town. But of course, as everyone knows, it is something else as well.’

  Her husband looked at her sharply. ‘Just what do you mean by that?’

  ‘I actually overheard Zhitkov and Cherry mention Waterbath. But because of some nonsense old Lady Clancarron had talked about baths, and because I was in a bit of a state, I got it the wrong way round. And rubbish about the bathwater has been haunting me ever since. The unconscious mind again, no doubt.’

  ‘Demonstrably so. And now, begin at Waterbath. The mere detailed layout of the Research Station could be so informative that it is among the country’s top secrets at this very moment. Only yesterday, Cadover was telling me about a scare there – a tale of small boys having managed to take photographs of bits and pieces of it. But the man who, you say, was called Crabbe, had more than that. On the night of Monday, the 22nd of October, he was in the Thomas Carlyle, waiting to hand over a complete set of plans of Waterbath to a fellow spy – none other than our friend Zhitkov. But Crabbe was being trailed by a rival organization, which we may call Cherry’s. And Zhitkov didn’t come.

  ‘Crabbe, I don’t doubt, had been forbidden to contact Zhitkov in his studio. He hung about the club for a bit, happened to run into Limbert, who was an old schoolfellow, and learnt that he had the flat immediately above Zhitkov’s in Gas Street – which was no distance away. When Cherry and his friends arrived, Crabbe realized that his position was desperate, decided to contact Zhitkov at all costs, and headed for his studio. But Zhitkov, I imagine, wasn’t one for courting danger, and had pretty well barricaded himself in. And now Crabbe’s pursuers were on top of him; things looked so ugly that he took the first course to enter his head; he dashed upstairs to find shelter with Limbert. Limbert’s studio was open and empty – Limbert, in point of fact, being upstairs with Miss Arrow – and Crabbe entered and secured the door. Probably he hoped to have given Cherry the slip altogether, and we can’t tell just when he discovered that this wasn’t so. For now an odd factor came into play. The police arrived in force to raid the Thomas Carlyle, and as a result the whole Gas Street set-up went into a sort of freeze. Zhitkov, who was a poor sort of creature, was cowering in his room; Crabbe had taken refuge in a strange, empty studio; Cherry and his confederates were lurking in force – and prepared to go to any lengths to get what they wanted.

  ‘And this is the point at which I begin to admire Crabbe – to see him as a good man of his kind. He doesn’t see himself as very likely to get out of his fix alive, but he’s not going to be beaten, all the same. He’s the sort of spy, we must suppose, who is supported through danger by some strong political passion – not, like Zhitkov and Cherry, of the purely venal kind. He knows that if Cherry breaks in he will be killed, and the whole studio ransacked for the plans he is carrying. Well, perhaps he’s a bit of a reading man; perhaps he remembers Poe’s Purloined Letter. Certainly he has once been a bit of a painting man; that was what had once got him friendly with Limbert. His eye falls on a large blank canvas, and a brilliant idea comes to him. Transpose the stolen plans to that, preserving some approximation to Limbert’s authentic abstract designs, and leave the result bang in the middle of the studio. Ten to one, the searchers simply won’t glance at it.

  ‘So that is what our resourceful friend addresses himself to. Unfortunately, as well as being resourceful, he is utterly ruthless. When Limnbert pops in unexpectedly through a window, Crabbe simply takes him by surprise and shoots him dead at point-blank range. For this is a big thing, you see; and one can’t even trust an old school pal.

  ‘Crabbe now has some hope of getting clear, since there is this new and unsuspected factor of the fire escape. But it is a slender chance, and he decides to carry on with his plan. So he closes and bolts the shutters, and then finishes his picture. It won’t be much good, of course, if his friends don’t know about it. But there is a telephone in the studio; Zhitkov is on the telephone too; Crabbe simply rings him up and explains. Zhitkov, still hiding in a funk in his own room, now knows how to find out all about Waterbath when opportunity comes. And then Crabbe finishes his painting. It has involved – as I noticed when I first set eyes on it – the working in of a great many intricate forms – Waterbath is an intricate sort of place – but he has done the whole thing with a rapid touch, giving some impression of an excited painter working as fast as he can in a free, bold technique. Crabbe burns the plans, and turns to give the thing a few final disguising touches. This is the point at which Mary Arrow appears outside the window and has her private view. She realizes that the man before the easel is not her lover; she gives a scream; Crabbe pitches away his brushes and turns round in alarm; by this time the police have taken their departure, Cherry has got hold of a key from Boxer’s room, and Crabbe’s enemies are upon him just when he is caught off his guard from that direction. They kill him, search the studio, find nothing, and presently depart, taking Crabbe’s body with them. Limbert’s body they don’t bother about, simply leaving beside it the pistol with which Crabbe had shot him. And now Zhitkov plucks up courage to make an appearance – presumably, as later, with some notion of a parley and a bargain. They slug him and pitch him back into his studio. And I think they probably slug Mary Arrow too. And that concludes the events of the night of October the 22nd in Gas Street.’

  Appleby paused to fill his pipe. ‘There is a certain intricacy about all this,’ he said. ‘But I hope I make myself clear so far.’

  The Duke of Horton, who was once more in communion with Goldfish and Silverfish, nodded amiably. �
��Capital power of exposition, my dear fellow. Would do well in the Lords.’

  ‘And now consider the position next morning. The door of Limbert’s flat had, of course, secured itself when Cherry and his friends left. Zhitkov’s best plan, when he again became an effective agent, would have been to break in and grab the picture straight away. But his nerve failed him there, and he probably reckoned that he could come by the thing in some more or less regular way quite soon. So he went to the police, Limbert’s body was found, and we reach the point at which we make contact with the affair ourselves.

  ‘It was an odd situation. Consider in turn all the parties concerned. Limbert and Crabbe were dead. Cherry knew nothing, except that he had been baffled in some way; his guess was that Crabbe had simply destroyed the plans without anybody benefiting; but he couldn’t be certain, and he was still on the prowl. Zhitkov knew that what he wanted was spread broad over a canvas in the studio above his head. Mary Arrow, who had gone to earth with a lost memory, knew that the work on that canvas was by some sort of impostor. But none of them then knew about the really queer thing: that this canvas had first been used three hundred years ago by Jan Vermeer of Delft. That knowledge was confined to the gang – represented, for us, by old Moe Steptoe – who had originally made away with both the Vermeer and the Stubbs from this house. And, conversely, Steptoe and his friends had no idea that the canvas now showed anything other or more than an abstract composition by Gavin Limbert. In other words, the canvas had a completely different significance and value for two groups of criminals, and neither had any notion of the existence of the other. A certain amount of bewilderment was bound to be the result.