A Private View Read online

  Appleby looked up suddenly. ‘There’s more to it than that. In fact, there’s a point of some significance there. But it will keep for the moment. We have to get back to thinking about Limbert. There he was – apparently with the Duke’s Stubbs displayed on his wall, and the Duke’s Vermeer in process of being put into hiding on his easel. And then somebody kills him. Well, there were high stakes involved.’

  ‘That’s all very well. But whoever killed Limbert failed to get away with either the Vermeer or the Stubbs.’

  ‘The affair must be admitted to have its puzzling features.’

  ‘It doesn’t seem to me to have anything else.’ The Duke’s tone was both exasperated and plaintive. ‘If one of you could possibly explain–’

  ‘Let me try.’ And while Judith launched out upon an account of the death of Gavin Limbert and its sequel at the Da Vinci, her husband filled a pipe and abstracted his mind. The whole affair badly needed ordering.

  The most plausible hypothesis was simple enough. Young Gavin Limbert had been at once a thoroughgoing and a foolhardy criminal. He had been sufficiently thoroughgoing to become a party to a skilled professional theft – one that had involved, among other things, the forging of a letter from an Italian aristocrat, the transmission of a valuable and bulky piece of antique furniture from Rome to Scamnum Court, and some knowledge of the domestic habits of the Duke of Horton and his household. He had been sufficiently foolhardy to expose a minor fruit of his criminality, the Stubbs, upon the walls of a room apparently familiarly visited by all his acquaintance. To this one might add that he had been sufficiently unwary to get himself killed.

  But – to take up this last point – why had he been killed? The answer ought to be in terms of thieves falling out. Yet thieves when they fall out commonly remain thieves; and on this view the death of Limbert ought to have been accompanied by the disappearance of both the Scamnum Court pictures from his studio. Why had the opportunity been missed? And how was one to relate that missed opportunity to the daring coup brought off at the Da Vinci that afternoon?

  Limbert, moreover, had been curiously dilatory. The pictures had been removed from the Scamnum gallery on the night of Sunday the 14th of October. Limbert had been killed eight days later. At that date the Vermeer, masked by a modern abstract painting, was still in his studio. Judith had just remarked that it was easy to take such paintings out of the country, since there was always a substantial traffic in them to the United States. That was true – more or less. But in this regard the situation would decidedly change as soon as it was known to the police that one of the most important privately owned paintings in England had vanished. And the substitution at Scamnum Court of the colour print for the original Aquarium had afforded the chance of a day or two’s elapsing before the theft was discovered and announced. The thieves had everything to gain by rushing the picture out of the country at top speed.

  And the theft had almost certainly been planned with an eye to this time factor. It explained the choice of the Vermeer from among half a dozen paintings in the Scamnum picture gallery of almost equal value. The colour print, although it would not deceive an expert eye for a moment, might pass muster with guides and visitors for some time. And of none of the other paintings, probably, would a full size colour print have been available.

  But then there was the additional theft of the Stubbs. Even a person familiar with the Duke of Horton’s habits in relation to the little room where it hung would be aware that its removal would increase the chance of early discovery. Why had it been taken too? Its value was very considerable – and the more so because it could be sold virtually on an open market. But it was chicken feed compared with Vermeer’s Aquarium. The best guess seemed to be that the Stubbs had been taken upon impulse: suddenly come upon, it had proved not to be resisted.

  If this was a good guess, a point of some significance followed. The man who had lurked in the Spanish chest had been himself either a painter or a person knowledgeable in painting. Had it been Limbert? Suppose that it had. Suppose that Limbert had been the principal agent in the theft, and that he had then nonchalantly hung the Stubbs above his mantelpiece and proceeded to conceal the Vermeer beneath a rapidly executed composition of his own. There was nothing against this – or nothing except a mere impression of Limbert’s personality – an impression which Appleby acknowledged as having come to him on very slender grounds. And it was a supposition with which a good deal fitted neatly in. For instance, one might ask oneself this question: Would Limbert be concerned to give any special character to a painting simply intended to conceal what lay beneath it? And the answer was obvious. He would make it unlike his own normal work, and thereby be the better able to disown it if there was later any question of tracing it back to him.

  But here Appleby pulled himself up. The Fifth and Sixth Days of Creation – if by that plain improvization of Hildebert Braunkopf’s the composition was really to be known – was acknowledged to be in a new manner so far as Limbert was concerned. So far, so good. But Zhitkov had claimed to have seen Limbert at work on it more than once. Limbert had gone openly about the job, just as he had openly displayed the stolen Stubbs on his studio wall. Unless, that was to say, Zhitkov was a liar – as he very well might be.

  What other factors had to be considered? There was the girl called Mary Arrow, who had been on terms at least of friendship with Limbert; and who, ten days ago, had picked up a toothbrush and vanished. There was Zhitkov himself, who had been the agent in the discovery of Limbert’s body, and who had crept up the fire escape to spy upon events in Mary Arrow’s room. There was Boxer, the other regular inhabitant of the house in Gas Street, together with his massive model, Grace Brooks. There was the unknown man with whom Limbert, on the day of his death, had been involved in a row. There was the topography of the house, and the odd fact of its virtual isolation during the raid upon the Thomas Carlyle. Last of all, there was the abstracting of the disguised Aquarium from the Da Vinci that afternoon. And this, in a sense, brought the inquiry round full circle, since it reintroduced what was surely the crucial question of all: Why were the two stolen paintings left undisturbed in Limbert’s studio upon the occasion of Limbert’s death?

  One very simple answer was possible. Limbert really had committed suicide. Caught up in a criminal enterprise alien to his character, and realizing its folly, he had taken a quick way out. This, it appeared, was not inconsistent with whatever medical evidence there was. And it would explain the subsequent history of the Aquarium. As soon as Limbert’s body was discovered, his studio had become inaccessible to his confederates. They had been obliged to bide their time, and now they had repossessed themselves of their booty by raiding the Da Vinci. Moreover the disappearance of Mary Arrow could be plausibly explained within this framework of supposition. Aware in some way of what had happened – perhaps having been, through her association with Limbert, directly implicated – she had been constrained to take to panic flight. In this reading of the matter, the toothbrush could be viewed as a demoralized young woman’s last grab at self-respect.

  But outside all this there remained one obstinate fact. The dead man’s studio had been ransacked – and ransacked by somebody unconcerned to carry off the stolen pictures. The treatment of Limbert’s books, moreover, was significant; it suggested a hunt for something far from bulky. What was involved might be some species of compromising document. Limbert’s killing himself might have made the finding of this urgent. Perhaps it had been the missing woman who was concerned. Her flight might have been a consequence of failure to discover something that she considered vital to her safety or her reputation.

  Appleby realized that in all this there was too much of mere supposition. From the puzzle before him too many pieces were still missing. Until they turned up – until he was possessed of a little more simple factual information – nothing much could be done. Having acknowledged this to himself, Appleby emerged from his abstraction and took notice of the world around him. As he did so, J
udith looked up from her colloquy with the Duke. ‘John,’ she said, ‘isn’t that the front-door bell?’

  Appleby nodded. ‘I’m expecting a call.’ And he added drily: ‘A friend of yours, my dear, who will be delighted to meet our guest.’

  Mr Hildebert Braunkopf or Brown, although evidently not altogether at his nervous ease, advanced into Lady Appleby’s drawing-room in a highly professional manner. ‘Peautiful!’ he exclaimed on the threshold. He raised both hands before him, rather like a traveller in the age of sensibility when suddenly confronted with the prospect of the Alps. ‘A peautiful residence and a most puffik peautiful room. But jus there’ – and Braunkopf interrupted the bowing and bobbing process habitual to him in order to shoot out a fat white finger dramatically at a vacant stretch of wall – ‘jus there, Lady Appleby, is one voonderble obbortunity to hang some puttikler fine chef-d’oeuvre yunker art of today I find you very choice cheap.’

  Appleby nodded. ‘What we want, Mr Brown, is acid greens and strong diagonals. But that must wait. Let me introduce you to the Duke of Horton. Mr Hildebert Brown.’

  ‘Goot Lort!’ Braunkopf stood up to this moment well. His eyebrows, indeed, arched themselves abruptly – but his words were apparently designed as an appropriate and respectful appellative rather than as an expression of surprise. ‘Goot Lort, how you do – yes?’

  ‘The Duke has come up to town in order to look about for some pictures.’ Appleby was unable to resist this somewhat disingenuous, if literally true, statement.

  Braunkopf threw up his hands again, this time in vast dismay. ‘And the goot lort had no cart my most important liddle private view today attended lonk list of other nobilities! This choking omittance due my princible secretaries absent on continent arranging large exhibitions modern masters.’

  ‘The Duke’s pictures at Scamnum Court are mostly old masters, not modern ones.’

  Braunkopf bobbed. ‘I know very well that monster national treasure-house genuine old masters.’

  ‘Nothing national about it.’ The Duke, touched upon a point of strong conviction, spoke abruptly. ‘Or nothing except the butter and the flour in the kitchens. And they’re poor stuff.’

  ‘I know very well that puttikler perfek room all hunk extra large genuine Van Dyck.’ Braunkopf, unaware that this confounding of the splendours of Scamnum Court with the modest pretensions of Wilton House must appear highly absurd to his new acquaintance, beamed happily on the Duke. ‘You in residings at Claridge’s – yes?’

  ‘Eh? Oh, I see. I generally put up at Brown’s.’

  ‘I send there, time you name tomorrow, my big Daimler.’ Braunkopf frowned, as if reproaching himself for this altogether inadequate flight of fancy. ‘I send one my three four new big Daimler cars bring you to my historical important exhibition entire surviving work Gavin Limbert.’

  ‘I’m afraid I shan’t be able to manage it, Mr – um – Brown. I go back to Scamnum tonight.’

  Braunkopf did not allow himself to be cast down by this. Indeed, his predatory eye brightened. ‘Then better I send to Scamnum this whole extravagant important collection of Limberts for liddle private view. The Da Vinci is always doing pig affairs that sort. I got three five pig pantechnicons perpechal carrying selek private views gentlemen’s and nobles’ bottoms.’

  ‘Bottoms?’ The Duke was rather dazed.

  ‘The Limbert private view arrive Scamnum, your stately bottom, middle nex week. No deposit, and carriage and insurance paid. You keep the whole lot as lonk you like. Settlement at your conveniences later.’

  ‘It’s a pity you can’t include Limbert’s last work, Mr Brown.’ Appleby at this point thought it desirable to come to the rescue of the Duke. ‘It’s a pity The Fifth and Sixth Days of Creation has vanished.’

  Braunkopf was dismayed. ‘Your police not yet found that, Sir John? When you runk up asking me call on puttikler important matter, I thought you found my picture.’

  ‘Well, I haven’t. And it’s not your picture. It’s the Duke’s picture. And it isn’t in any substantial sense a Limbert at all.’ Appleby was watching Braunkopf narrowly. ‘Didn’t you know?’

  It looked as if Braunkopf had not known. His bewilderment appeared genuine. And there was, of course, very little reason to suppose that it would be otherwise. ‘The Duke’s picture?’ he cried.

  ‘Yes. From what you are pleased to call his bottom – his country seat. Limbert’s picture is no more than a skin of paint over another picture, stolen from Scamnum Court. In fact, Mr Brown, what you were trying to sell me this afternoon was Vermeer’s Aquarium.’

  ‘Jan Vermeer of Delft!’

  ‘Yes – and pretty well what you would call his chef-d’oeuvre. A number of factors make it virtually certain that Limbert painted that abstract picture on top of it in order to smuggle it out of the country. That, of course, is why the thing was stolen from your gallery this afternoon. Gavin Limbert was no doubt an interesting young painter, and the mystery surrounding his death has made your show something of a sensation. But nobody would go to the trouble of stealing a Limbert. Would they now, Mr Brown?’

  Astonishment for the moment brought Braunkopf to terms with simple veracity. He nodded his head in mute agreement. ‘A puffik genuine high-class Vermeer of Delft!’ he presently murmured. Then he turned to the Duke. ‘But Sir John will recover it. And I shall find you a purchaser, goot lort, at two three hundred thousand dollars.’ Braunkopf was himself again. ‘Commission only five per cent. And I give you liddle discount entire works yunk genius Gavin Limbert.’

  ‘It’s Limbert we have to talk about.’ Appleby motioned Braunkopf to a chair, at the same time treating him to a grimly professional glance. ‘This stolen picture, which is certainly of very great value, has been in your possession; and there are one or two questions which I must ask you to answer now. First, there is your association with Limbert. Am I to understand that you knew him personally?’

  ‘Knew Limbert personally?’ Braunkopf licked his lips. He had quite suddenly become a very shifty and defensive person. ‘You mean, Sir John, was he a goot freunt of mine?’

  ‘You know what I mean very well.’ Appleby spoke with brusque impatience. ‘I want to know all about your dealings with him. He brought you pictures to sell?’

  ‘To try to sell. It is very hard to sell the works of the yunker painters. Even the Da Vinci finds it hard. And with Limbert and his whole group it has been very hard.’

  ‘Limbert belonged to a group – he had associates? That’s just the sort of thing I want to know, Mr Brown. I see that you are going to assist us greatly.’ Appleby was urbane again. ‘And, as a group, they were unrecognized, as far as a market went?’

  Braunkopf nodded. ‘Until there was this pig strike of luck, Sir John–’

  ‘A big stroke of luck?’

  ‘Until Limbert died with such pig sensations’ – Braunkopf was recovering tone – ‘nothing could be done. I showed paintings and carvings by Limbert and his freunts regularly in the Da Vinci. But nobodies ever wanted to buy them – or nobodies who could pay.’

  ‘Would you say that the group felt any sense of grievance over that? Did they feel that they were up against a hard world, and must grab what they could from it?’

  ‘But of course.’ The question clearly puzzled Braunkopf. ‘Everybodies feels that. Life is crab. Life is crab what you can when you can – no? But I forget. Life too is art. And peauty.’ At this last reflection Braunkopf, with fine presence of mind, remembered to cast an admiring eye upon both Lady Appleby and her drawing-room.

  ‘Were Limbert and his friends a bit wild? Did they talk about taking action against society – that sort of thing? For instance’ – Appleby glanced at the Duke – ‘did they denounce wealthy people who prided themselves on collections of old masters but never thought of doing anything for artists who still had the job of keeping themselves alive?’

  ‘Poxer talks like that.’

  ‘Poxer? You mean Boxer, the painter who has a studio in the sam
e house as Limbert’s in Gas Street?’

  ‘That is correk, Sir John. Poxer.’

  ‘And Limbert himself?’

  Braunkopf shook his head. ‘Limbert never talked about the wronks of artists. You must reklekt, Sir John, his fambly support him handsome. Limbert crabbed, but when he crabbed he paid. Like I remember once–’ Suddenly Braunkopf stopped. ‘Like I remember nothink.’

  ‘Come, come, Mr Brown. I can see that you have recalled something important.’

  ‘A liddle mistakings, Sir John. Now I tell you more most importantest informings on Limbert’s other freunts.’

  ‘We’ll come to that. But it’s not what I want at the moment.’ Appleby was inexorable. ‘Limbert took what he wanted without ceremony, but what he took he paid for. You were saying something like that, and you were going on to speak of an actual instance. It sounds like linking up with something else about Limbert – something I have heard about the last day of his life. So I must have it. Speak up.’

  But Braunkopf was now engaged in odd contortions, conventionally to be described as struggling for breath. Under the stress of some obscure emotion, moreover, the complexion of the Da Vinci’s proprietor had become tinged with an appropriately Leonardo-like shade of green. Suddenly – and even more surprisingly – he gave vent to a dismal howl. And this presently modulated into a semi-articulate wail. ‘The Jan Vermeer of Delft, Sir John, Lady Appleby, my goot lort. I could have had it…in old Moe’s…for fifteen shillinks down.’

  Judith – whose protégé, after all, Braunkopf was – charitably provided brandy. But at the same time she addressed him with some sternness. ‘Old Moe, Mr Brown? Do you mean old Moe Steptoe?’

  ‘Yes, Lady Appleby. It is not that I do businesses with Moe. All the business connectings of the Da Vinci are most puttikler respekful and high-class. It was just that I met Limbert looking in Moe’s window.’