The Case of the Flying Donkey: A Ludovic Travers Mystery
Page 1
Christopher Bush
The Case of the Flying Donkey
As Travers’s finger touched the dead hand, he felt the warmth, and wondered if the man were still alive. Then he saw the knife that stuck sideways in the ribs.
It was three years after Ludovic Travers had acquired a painting by the famous contemporary French artist, Henri Larne, that a mysterious art dealer named Braque turned up, showed great interest in the picture, and invited Travers to visit him in Paris. But all Travers saw of Braque in Paris was his dead body: a knife—almost warm from the murderer’s hand—was stuck in his ribs.
Travers and his old friend Inspector Gallois soon found some very pertinent questions to answer. What was Braque’s “gold mine”? Why had he been so interested in paintings by Larne? What were his relations with Pierre Larne, and with Elise, the model? But not until Travers suddenly realised the significance of the flying donkey was the murderer’s astonishing identity revealed.
The Case of the Flying Donkey was originally published in 1939. This new edition features an introduction by crime fiction historian Curtis Evans.
TO
PHILIP
(PHILIP W. COLE, R.B.A.)
WITH GRATITUDE AND GOOD WISHES
Contents
Cover
Title Page/About the Book
Dedication
Contents
Introduction by Curtis Evans
Author’s Note
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
About the Author
Titles by Christopher Bush
The Case of the Climbing Rat – Title Page
The Case of the Climbing Rat – Chapter One
Copyright
INTRODUCTION
Before the Blitzkrieg: Christopher Bush’s Little Murder Tour in France, 1939-1940
In June 1939 and January 1940 respectively, Christopher Bush published The Case of the Flying Donkey and The Case of the Climbing Rat, both of them detective novels set in France before the outbreak of the Second World War. Bush, who was fluent in the French language and had visited France many times, held the country and its people in great affection; and it is hard not to see these two crime novels—both of which reunite Bush’s series amateur sleuth, Ludovic “Ludo” Travers, with Inspector Laurin Gallois of the Sûreté Générale (the two men had worked well together before in The Case of the Three Strange Faces, published in 1933)--as a heartfelt tribute to a nation that soon was to be mercilessly scourged by German invasion and occupation. A little over two months after the publication of The Case of the Flying Donkey, Germany would infamously invade Poland, precipitating much of Europe into a state of war. Less than four months after the publication of The Case of the Climbing Rat, France herself would be overrun by a seemingly unstoppable Nazi war machine, leading to the fall of Paris on June 14 and the surrender of the country less than two weeks later. Some 600,000 French people would be killed in the Second World War, nearly two-thirds of them civilians.
For his part Christopher Bush, a veteran of the First World War, at the dire advent of the second one went back into military service on behalf of his nation. While France was collapsing under the unbearable weight of the German blitzkrieg and the British Expeditionary Force was desperately attempting to extricate itself from seemingly certain doom at Dunkirk, Bush was administering a prisoner-of-war and enemy alien internment camp across the Channel in a Southampton suburb, an experience the author would partially incorporate into his next Ludo Travers detective novel, The Case of the Murdered Major, which was published in 1941. Neither Christopher Bush nor his series sleuth would see France again for the duration of the war. Doubtlessly for Francophile detective fiction fans like Bush, the charming Gallic glimpses of a peacetime world provided in The Case of the Flying Donkey and The Case of the Climbing Rat brought back better and far less jaded days, when death could still be treated as a game.
The Case of the Flying Donkey (1939)
Christopher Bush dedicated The Case of the Flying Donkey, his first detective novel set entirely in France, to close contemporary Philip W. Cole (1884-1964), an accomplished painter and stained glass artist and principal of the School of Art in Hastings, Sussex, located about a dozen miles from where Bush resided at the village of Beckley with his companion, Marjorie Barclay. The next year Bush would dedicate his first wartime detective novel, The Case of the Murdered Major, to Scottish painter Josephine Haswell Miller, whom he may have met while stationed at Camp No. 22 (Pennylands), in Ayshire, Scotland. These nearly back-to-back book dedications suggest the author’s more than passing interest in painting, the central subject of his ingenious The Case of the Flying Donkey, which after the passage of six years felicitously reunites Bush’s series sleuth Ludovic “Ludo” Travers with French police inspector Laurin Gallois, who in mental acuity if not in physical appearance might justifiably be dubbed the George Wharton of the Sûreté. (Scotland Yard’s Superintendent Wharton, aka the “Old General” is, incidentally, absent from this tale.)
Three years before his marriage to Bernice Haire (this would be sometime around 1936), Ludo Travers on a visit to Paris fatefully purchased, on the advice of his friend Inspector Gallois (“lean, mournful, with the face of a dreamer and the long, sensitive fingers of a violinist virtuoso”), a small still life: a cozy kitchen scene which Ludo christens Pot au Feu after the French beef stew that is, according to chef Raymond Blanc, “the quintessence of French family cuisine . . . which honors the tables of the rich and poor alike.” Ludo’s prized picture, which to him symbolizes the “kitchens of all peasant France, and the peasantry which are France,” was painted by Henri Larne, “a new, tremendous figure in French art,” who drolly signs his name to his work with the image of a winged donkey (a play, Travers speculates, on the surname Larne, the French word for donkey being “l’âne”). After his marriage to Bernice, Ludo’s proudly-displayed purchase was briskly banished by his unimpressed spouse to Ludo’s den in their roomy flat at St. Martin’s Chambers; yet although Ludo acceded to a wifely whim in this case, he never doubted for a moment that the 300 guineas purchase price for the picture was a steal—though that price, Bush wryly observes, prudently “remained one of the secrets of his married life.” (One has to wonder whether this amusing fictional domestic incident is actually drawn from the author’s real life relationship with Marjorie Barclay.)
Three years later Ludo finds to his astonishment that it is this perceptive speculative purchase upon which he prides himself so much which pulls him into the investigation of yet another case of murder, this time in France, when a shady art dealer named Georges Braques, who in London evinced a great deal of interest in Travers’ Pot au Feu and another Larne picture on exhibition at the Tate Gallery, is found knifed to death at his home in Paris. With Inspector Gallois and Gallois’s boyish young protégé Charles Rabaud--“One day this little Charles becomes a someone,” avows Gallois sentimentally to Ludo. “When I retire and devote myself to literature and art, there is someone who fills my shoes, as you say.”--Travers tries to crack a complex case that seems somehow to involve masterworks painted by the great Monsieur Larne, as well as illicit picture-smuggling from war-ravaged Spain. Ju
st what do Braque’s partner, Cointeau, and Larne’s brother, Pierre, know about the affair, not to mention that alluring and enigmatic artist’s model Elise Deschamps?
Working together again after six years, Ludo and Gallois piece together a highly perplexing crime puzzle in time to allow Travers to salvage some of his Paris holiday with Bernice, who throughout the novel frets that she is doomed to live out her days with Ludo as a “detection widow.” In the closing lines of the novel, Ludo promises Gallois--poignantly in the face of the awful fate which soon was to fall like lightning on France--that “the best is still left. The future . . . for us all.”
Curtis Evans
AUTHOR’S NOTE
It may be objected by a purist that the translation of French conversations—between Frenchmen—are not the most perfect of colloquial English.
While such translations are by no means pidgin English, it was felt that too perfect a translation would destroy atmosphere and verisimilitude.
C. B.
CHAPTER I
MYSTERY OF A PICTURE DEALER
WHEN Ludovic Travers came to look back upon the events that preceded the affair that was given the name of The Case of the Flying Donkey, they had an air of hurry and unreality, like events in a dream that arbitrarily change from place to place, with new characters and designs.
It was queer, when he came to look back at things, that he should, for instance, have ever purchased a picture by Henri Larne at all, even though the purchase had been an uncommonly lucky one. It was about three years before his marriage, when he had happened to be in Paris, that he had heard of Larne as a new, tremendous figure in French art; but the strangest thing of all was that the one who recommended to him the acquiring of some small work by the new genius was no other than his old friend Inspector Gallois of the Sûreté Générale.
Whenever Travers recalled Laurin Gallois, it was with a smile that had in it a kindly humour and a considerable affection. Gallois—lean, mournful, with the face of a dreamer and the long, sensitive fingers of a violinist virtuoso—would always protest with much shrugging of shoulders and a spreading of palms, that he had been ill-cast as an inspector of police when at heart he was really an artist.
It was on the advice of Gallois, then, that Travers made an appointment to see the famous painter at his studio, the Villa Claire, 40 rue Colignot. Henri Larne himself was a surprise. He was an older man than Travers expected—about forty, in fact—and looking as much unlike a painter as one could conceive. Then it turned out that his mother had been Irish, which accounted for his perfect English, and possibly—as Travers, the ready theorist, assumed— for his delightful charm of manner and his unconventionality.
Larne had few things on view, but Travers stayed for half an hour, talking about everything but art, which, for a painter, was also a queer enough thing. Out of the friendliness that immediately arose came a change in the nature of Travers’s purchase, for whereas he had intended to try to obtain some quite minor work at a modest price, Larne himself expressed the wish that he should take a much more important piece—the picture which Travers immediately christened Pot au Feu. And Travers did buy it. Though he had no need to worry over money, he had intended to spend no more than fifty pounds. Now he had spent three hundred guineas, and he knew he had a bargain. And he knew, if pleasantly vaguely, something else: that in selling him that picture at so reasonable a price, Larne was giving a tangible expression of genuine friendship. It was not a large picture—roughly twenty inches by fourteen—but Gallois was ecstatic when he first cast eyes on it in Travers’s room at the hotel. Those sad, soulful eyes lighted up and he raised hands to heaven.
“There,” he said to Travers, “you have not a picture, my friend, but the—what you call?—the soul of France.”
He said a whole lot more, and Travers was in agreement. The plate of steaming soup on that rough unpainted table was indeed somehow a whole nation, and what that nation was, what it felt and what it thought. In Victorian eyes the picture might be crude in colour, hopeless in drawing and childishly naive, and yet that table with its homely meal of soup and bread and wine was infinitely more than a mere still-life. In it one saw the kitchens of all peasant France, and the peasantry which are France: a peasantry of simplicity, patience, carefulness and homely dignity.
That picture was hung in Travers’s study in the roomy flat at St. Martin’s Chambers. When the Traverses returned from their honeymoon, Travers rather forgot the picture in the excitement of home-coming, and it was somewhat by chance that Bernice cast eyes on it. Travers caught her surveying it with an expression of very pained surprise. When he asked what she thought of it, he gathered that she thought it the kind of thing one would hand cheerfully to a rag-and-bone man in exchange for a pot-plant. Thereafter the picture remained in Travers’s den, and the price he had paid for it remained one of the secrets of his married life.
Then the day arrived when Travers could afford to refer openly to his bargain. He opened his paper one February morning to see that the Tate Gallery was about to place on special and immediate exhibition a still-life by Henri Larne which had been bequeathed to it by the late Lord Draigne. Later that morning, when he was working in his den, he passed the paper to Bernice, finger on that announcement. Bernice failed to understand. Travers tactfully explained, and tried not to be triumphant.
“Then it’s a valuable picture,” Bernice said, bending on the Pot au Feu a much more friendly gaze.
“I don’t think it would be dear at five hundred guineas,” he told her. “The time should come when it’s worth very much more.”
“But, darling!”
“Well?”
“Isn’t it wrong of us to have such a valuable picture here? Couldn’t anyone steal it?”
“I doubt it,” he said. “Larne isn’t well enough known to the picture thieves. Also, I don’t think more than two or three people know that I own it.”
Bernice was peering carefully at the picture again, and pointing to a tiny painted something in the bottom right-hand corner.
“What is that queer-looking thing? It’s almost like an animal.”
“It is an animal,” he said. “It’s also the painter’s signature, so to speak.”
Bernice failed to follow.
“You remember Whistler’s butterfly signature,” he said. “Well, Larne puts what you might call a painted jackass to everything he paints, which, by the way, is very little.”
“Yes, but why a donkey?”
“Larne,” he said. “I know the pronunciation isn’t the same, but think of your French.”
She stared for a moment, then smiled.
“But, of course. L’âne is French for donkey. A funny name for anyone to have, don’t you think?”
He smiled. “Perhaps it is. Still, we have people called Bull and Bullock, and Mutton, and Fox. Heaps of others, I expect, if we began to think of them.”
But Bernice was looking at that tiny painted donkey again.
“What’s that funny thing over its back?”
Travers polished his huge horn-rims, then took a quite unnecessary look for himself.
“It’s a wing,” he said. “It’s what you might call a flying donkey. Its legs are stretched out to give the impression of flight.”
“Yes, but why should it be flying?”
He shook his head. “I don’t really know. Between ourselves, I rather think it’s some expression of Gallic wit. It’s a kind of ironical allusion to Pegasus, the flying horse. Sort of putting one’s finger to one’s nose.”
Bernice nodded. “I see. Laughing at convention. But it’s very crudely painted, don’t you think?”
“Heaps of people don’t take the trouble to write their signatures distinctly,” he said. “But this isn’t what you might call a picture of a flying donkey. It’s just quick strokes with a brush to give a rough representation.”
So much for the very preliminaries. A day or so later, however, Travers went to the Tate to inspect the Larne that w
as on exhibition, and he was there a minute or two after the Gallery opened, with a view to having the picture to himself. It was for the Van Gogh room that he made, but just as he was in the act of entering, he saw he was not the first of the morning’s visitors to be interested in the new acquisition. There stood the picture on an easel in the middle of the room, but bending down before it in the closest of examinations was a man in dark clothes.
Travers withdrew again, and in a moment or two saw the head of the man appear round the opening. It was not Travers’s way that he was looking but towards the farther door where the attendant usually stood. A quick, almost furtive glance, and the man was darting back to the picture again, but Travers had seen enough of his face to know that he was certainly a foreigner, and almost as certainly a Frenchman.
Travers, always one to strain at the leash when he scented anything of a mystery, shifted ground till he had both the man and the picture in view. The man was now bending down as if scrutinizing the bottom of the picture, and at the same time referring to a piece of paper he held in his hand. Then he looked suspiciously round again. Travers turned at the same time, and the man saw nothing but his back. But it seemed to be enough, for the man straightened himself, and then with an air of exaggerated interest began looking at the other pictures in the room. Travers moved on out of sight, and when he came back in a minute or two, the man had gone.
Travers, somewhat puzzled, took his own good look at the Larne. It was a picture much larger than his own, and, as usual, a domestic kind of still-life. The unusual part about it was that it had also a human figure, if only as a kind of background, for the black of the woman’s dress set off the colour of the copper pan which she was polishing, and the other brass and copper that stood on the table by it. A somewhat earlier picture than his own, he thought, and more carefully painted than in Larne’s latest manner. As for that foreigner and his strange secretiveness, Travers thought he knew just what had been happening. To photograph the pictures was forbidden without special permission, but the foreigner had been doing some surreptitious photographing for reasons of his own. Why he had been so interested in the lower half of the picture was probably something to do with light and focusing, with a view to getting in his photograph a clear reproduction of one essential thing—the signature of the flying donkey.