The Case of the Flying Donkey: A Ludovic Travers Mystery

by Christopher Bush

  “Upstairs,” he said. “Come along and let’s hear all this important news.”

  Pierre was looking out of the studio window, and what struck Travers about him that morning was not that he was ill at ease but that he was trying not to appear so. He held out his hand to Travers, and it was somewhat awkwardly that he took the seat which Henri indicated.

  “My news is about Braque,” Travers began.

  “Braque? You have discovered something?”

  Travers began to tell him about the smuggling theory. Pierre was listening with such a strained intentness, that Travers realized he was being left somewhat out.

  “Will you put up with my French? Your brother might be interested.”

  “But you speak an admirable French,” Henri said. “One makes one’s self understood, and there is nothing else needed.”

  So Travers began again and went on with his story in French. Even before he had finished, Henri was shaking his head.

  “I’m afraid we can’t help. Neither of us has any recollection of any dealings with a Spanish client. You understand, of course, that we shouldn’t be aware of the fact if a picture had been re-sold privately.”

  “Then there’s no use asking you for records,” Travers said. He smiled as he got to his feet. “That was really all I came for, so I’ll leave you to prepare for your American.”

  “No, no,” Henri said hurriedly. “There were other things I wanted you to hear.” He clicked his tongue exasperatedly. “Ever since that affair last night I haven’t been able to think clearly. You wouldn’t believe what a shock it was to me to discover that I knew Braque. Ah!”—his face lighted up—“now I know what it was that I wanted to tell you. Isn’t there a perfectly good reason why he should be interested in my pictures?”

  “I quite agree,” Travers said. “Naturally he’d he interested in you as an old contemporary at the Académie Poussin.” He smiled disarmingly again. “You understand, of course, that all these questions belong to M. Gallois. He did not wish to encroach on your privacy, so he sent me.”

  Henri smiled. “He is an exceedingly amiable character.” The look became somewhat quizzical. “It was a surprise, however, to find you in the company of the police.”

  Travers explained. He said also that he was hedged in with confidences.

  “M. Gallois knows nothing, for instance, of those strange happenings you told me about. The attempted burglary and so on.”

  “My friend, I hope you would never dream that I should suspect you of betraying a confidence,” Larne said. “You are a man of honour, and you are my friend, but now you mention that attempted burglary, or whatever it was, there’s something else you should hear. At half-past five last night—”

  “It was later than that,” broke in Pierre.

  Henri turned almost angrily on him.

  “That clock there”—it was the clock on the studio mantelpiece that he was indicating—“was under my eye. I tell you I had just begun to work when you drove the car in.”

  “Listen one moment,” Pierre said patiently.

  “First there is something I do to the car, then I come to the door and it is locked and I remember that I cannot give you the message as you are to be undisturbed. Then I go to the car again, and then I think that I will leave the message with Hortense, since I do not return. It is while I speak with Hortense that I hear this noise and I investigate. Hortense hears it too, and when I call out, ‘Who is there?’ she hears the men running.”

  “It was dark. How did you know they were men?”

  “I hear one speak to another, then they disappeared through the hedge.”

  Henri’s lip drooped. “And naturally you did not follow. The mouse does not suddenly become a lion. And what was it that Hortense heard?”

  Pierre shrugged his shoulders as if the affair, as far as he was concerned, was over.

  “You permit?”said Henri exasperatedly, and called to Hortense from the door.

  She looked distinctly disquieted. Henri repeated to her what Pierre had said, and there was almost a contempt in his tone as if Pierre were unreliable and she was well aware of it. But she bore out the story. She had heard men’s voices and had heard the crashing through the hedge.

  “And what time was this?” asked Henri, with scarcely veiled incredulity.

  “I had given Bertrand his medicine,” she said, “so it was after half-past five. It was about a quarter to six. There is something also that I wish to say.”

  “Well?”

  She spoke more and more rapidly, and soon Travers was understanding nothing, but from the gesticulations and a chance word or two he gathered that these affairs were frightening her, and she was refusing to stay. Henri joined in, hands quivering with anger, and when Pierre put in a word, he was contemptuously silenced.

  Then the storm ceased as suddenly as it had begun. Hortense departed with thanks for something that Travers had not gathered. Pierre rose too and said he would he going. Travers rose also, and once more Henri insisted that he should remain.

  “Things become wearisome here,” he said to Travers when they were alone.

  There followed an explanation about Hortense. She and her husband occupied the kind of chalet beyond the trees at the extreme end of the villa garden. She was general domestic of the villa, and her husband, who had been badly gassed in the war, pottered about in the gardens. Now he was tubercular, and in a serious way.

  “Do not repeat these apparent generosities of mine,” Larne said to Travers, “If people attach these bourgeois virtues to my name, before long everyone will say that after all I am a bourgeois, which will be the end of me. But to-morrow I am sending Bertrand to a place where he may have more care, and everything here will be shut up. Where I shall go I do not know. Perhaps I shall remain in Paris.”

  “I’m sorry about it all,” Travers said. “I don’t think the police will trouble you any more.”

  “I don’t mind the police.” He gave another gesture of weariness. “It is these other things that disturb my work.” A shake or two of the head and his lip was drooping ironically again. “You also suffer from relations?”

  “God forbid,” said Travers. “But I know what some kinds can be.”

  “I have this Pierre—”

  Then he broke off. “But I will not bore you with my private affairs. Besides, I have come to the end. After to-day there will be a different arrangement. That is why I ask you should still not mention to a soul this curious affair of last night.”

  His eyes narrowed and he was looking thoughtfully across the room, then he turned to Travers as if he had made up his mind about something.

  “In confidence, my friend, you believe this story that you have just heard?”

  “But why not?” asked Travers, surprised. “The woman heard things as well. Undoubtedly it was the men who broke in here before. There was no light and they thought the place was shut up.”

  “Yes, and suppose that no thieves broke in here at all last time. Suppose that was a—a fake. Suppose these noises last night were also a fake, to give a reality to the first affair, of which, perhaps, I have shown signs of doubt.”

  Travers raised his eyebrows. “But there was no fake about that attempt on your life?”

  “You are right,” he said slowly. “That was no fake. But I beg of you forget all about this. I had no right to trouble you with my affairs.”

  He walked with Travers to the gate.

  “Good luck to the picture,” Travers said. “I wish I’d been able to see it again.”

  “At the moment I am a Philistine,” Larne told him, with something of his old careless good-humour. “The picture has ceased to interest me. The important thing now is the cheque.”

  Travers looked back along the road, and Larne was still at the gate to give him a last wave of the hand—a gesture so English and so friendly, that Travers felt a tremendous sympathy. And he was also profoundly puzzled, and it was Pierre who was the enigma. In his mind’s eye he could stil
l see him, weak-chinned and with well-fed face, sitting there and taking without protest the sneers of his half-brother, uttered though they were in the presence of a guest, and the woman Hortense.

  And then Travers began to see daylight. Gallois had been accurate in his description of Pierre Larne. He was a parasite and Henri had grown tired. He had warned him that he was at the end of his tether, and when the cheque of the American was received, then Pierre would receive a final paying-off.

  But Pierre had seen that danger approaching, and he had already turned in other directions for money. He had faked a burglary, and this business of last night was, as Henri Larne had revealed, merely another fake to bolster up the first. It would have been easy enough to convince Hortense—hard-bitten though she looked—that there were voices, and, as for the crashing through the hedge, that could have been done by Pierre himself.

  Henri Larne had also lied, but to shield his half-brother. When he said that nothing had been taken, he was hiding the truth. What had been taken was one or some of those sketches and studies. Anything by the great Larne was of value, and collectors would be glad to buy it. And the selling agent for these purloined pictures had been Braque, and it was a study by Henri Larne that he himself would have been shown by Braque at the flat in the rue Jourdoise.

  That those deductions were correct, Travers had no vestige of doubt. One difficulty remained. Who was it that had murdered Braque? Then even about that Travers began to have ideas. There must have been a third party to the thefts, and it was this third party who had double-crossed both his confederates, and who now knew that Pierre would be too terrified to talk.

  But Travers’s report to Gallois was necessarily guarded, for there were the confidences of Henri Larne to respect. He did, however, mention the cleavage between the brothers, and the probability that Pierre had already been kept short of money.

  “You think of him as a likely confederate of Braque,” Gallois said with a directness that Travers once more found disconcerting.

  “The mere fact that he was who he was, would bring him into contact with dealers,” hedged Travers. “But it wasn’t he who did the killing. He has an alibi which two witnesses can back up. Henri Larne himself, and the woman domestic at the villa, can prove he was there at about a quarter to six.”

  “This Pierre is not the type that murders,” Gallois said. “But about this afternoon, my friend. I have business which is official. I explain the conduct of this affair to my superiors, but meanwhile the affair must not rest. You would wish to see the good Cointeau, perhaps, who might reveal to you things he would not reveal to us.”

  “I think I would like to see Cointeau,” Travers said. “What I’d rather do first is to go to that flat in broad daylight, to see things and fix them in my mind.”

  Gallois smiled. “And when you go to the rue Jourdoise, you also go with ideas?”

  Travers shook his head amusedly.

  “You’re an uncanny sort of bird, you know, Gallois. Perhaps I have got ideas. All the same, I’m not telling them to you till I see how they work out.”

  CHAPTER VIII

  DISCOVERIES

  THE front door of the flat was sealed, and the door of the empty shop as well. Travers took a first view of the back where there was a tiny yard which led direct into the rue Robertin. A gendarme was on duty at the foot of the short stairway that led to the flat, and Travers found the door open.

  “Qui est là?”

  There were steps in the passage, and in came Charles.

  “Ah, monsieur, c’est vous.”

  “What are you doing here?” Travers asked. “I thought you had temporarily broken off relationships with the police.”

  Charles grinned. “One uses care, that is all.”

  “And what are you actually doing here?”

  There had been no finger-prints, no incriminating papers—nothing, he said. He was now searching the flat in case by chance something of value might have been overlooked. Travers mentioned his own wish to see everything by daylight, and said that he and Charles would not disturb each other.

  “But I have finished,” Charles said. “If you wish me, I am at your service.”

  Travers inspected the flat with Charles at his elbow. In each room he cast a look at the ceiling. When they reached the living-room, Charles said gently that there was no communication with the attic that belonged to the former junk-shop.

  “You also are a reader of thoughts,” Travers told him amusedly. “What other ideas do you think I’ve got?”

  “You permit?” said Charles. “In the room from which one has now removed the new furniture, you look out of the window and you nod appreciatively to yourself. You say to yourself, perhaps, that Elise is right to be indignant at the offer of a flat with so bad a view.”

  “Right first time,” Travers told him cheerfully.

  “It is nothing,” Charles told him. “One is taught to observe, but there is a pleasure in observing monsieur.”

  “And what have you observed in this particular room?”

  Charles shrugged his shoulders as much as to say that if Travers wanted to hear the obvious, he could be told it.

  “You look at the floor, monsieur, and that mark on the boards, and one gathers that you do not like too much the sight of blood. Then you look round the room and it is the pictures that interest you, as they did last night.”

  “Yes,” Travers said, “and in this light they look more atrocious than ever. Shall we take that one down?”

  It was the landscape he meant, which was about three feet by two. Together they lifted it off its hook and laid it face down on the table. In a moment Travers was opening a blade of his penknife.

  “You are going to cut the picture from the frame?” Charles said.

  Travers wrestled with technicalities in French. One did not cover the back of an oil-painting with paper, as one covered a water-colour. And in spite of its dust, this paper looked curiously new.

  “There is something beneath the paper?” asked Charles, eyes agog.

  “We’ll see,” said Travers, and was ripping it off.

  Beneath was a thin backing of wood, which was most certainly new, and the small iron sprigs that held it were new and scarcely rusted. Travers snapped the blade of his knife in his impatience at getting them out, and Charles was also wrenching them loose with his fingers. Then at last that backing came out and beneath it was a canvas, fixed to a thin wooden frame.

  “It is this that you seek?” Charles said, eyes still agog.

  “Yes,” said Travers, “and shall I tell you what I think it is. It is a picture that is modern, and in the corner will be a small donkey that flies.”

  He hoisted the frame and shook that hidden canvas out. Charles grabbed it as it fell, and was taking the first look.

  “Monsieur, there is no donkey.”

  The face of Travers was comical in its dismay. What he was looking at was no study by Henri Larne. Nor was it some study in pornography. It was a picture of a bull-fight, and nineteenth-century at that.

  Then he smiled, even if it was ruefully, and his hand fell on Charles’s shoulder.

  “We’ve shot the wrong bird.”

  “But it is a bird?”

  “Oh, yes,” said Travers. “It’s a bird, and a valuable bird.”

  He took it nearer the window, polished his glasses and had a good look at it. Then suddenly he thought of something.

  “When this house was searched, was there by any chance a pair of pincers?”

  Charles stared, then looked annoyed.

  “What a fool I am! There were pincers in his bedroom.”

  “You see the point?” Travers said when Charles came back with them. “Kept in his bedroom, in a drawer. If I, or someone, came to whom he thought he dared exhibit, this hidden picture, the pincers would be handy. Out would come the sprigs in no time, and, if necessary, back they would go again.”

  “And this picture, monsieur, what is it?”

  “A Goya.
Francisco Goya.”

  Charles looked blank, then his face brightened.

  “There may be a picture behind that other also.”

  “Just what I was thinking,” Travers told him. “Which is one reason why I asked about the pincers.”

  The second picture was much smaller, and behind it was a panel: the bust of an ecclesiastic in his robes.

  “Spanish, and seventeenth-century,” Travers said. “I’d almost be inclined to say Velasquez, but I didn’t know that he painted anything as small.”

  “These are the pictures that were smuggled from Spain?”

  “It certainly looks like it,” Travers said. “They’ve probably been hidden here for some time while Braque looked round for possible clients. What he did was to look out for two pictures—and the more rubbishy, the better—which would exactly fit; then he covered the backs with paper and threw plenty of dust on.” He was suddenly looking up. “I wonder. Would these be the only pictures, do you think? The wallpaper’s discoloured—look!—where these two were. What about trying to find if there’s a discoloration anywhere else?”

  But there was never a trace. Charles asked why Travers was shaking his head.

  “Things don’t quite fit in,” Travers said. “If there was no other picture, then what did the murderer come here to get? Also, if Braque expected a possible customer for a picture, why hadn’t he the picture out of its hiding-place and ready?”

  “He was waiting until he had made sure of that customer,” suggested Charles. “The customer who was to come before you yourself arrived. The customer who happened also to be the assassin.”

  “I expect you’re right,” Travers told him. “Will you arrange for a taxi while I telephone?”

  He rang up the only picture dealers he knew in Paris—the Schiffler Brothers—and asked for Joseph Schiffler. Joseph was out but expected back by the rime Travers would arrive. Then Travers remembered something else.

  “There is no necessity that you should remain here?” he asked Charles. “If not, may I advise something? That you go to Cointeau’s shop and examine every picture. If there is one oil-painting whose back is covered, then make your examination. In half an hour I hope to be there too.”