‘For smoothing the way of bank robbers?’ It was impossible to be certain whether this from Keybird was an outrage or a joke. Honeybath decided to ignore it.
‘In fact,’ he said, ‘it is nearly double my usual fee. I felt entitled to push up the figure, simply because the proposal was such an extraordinary one.’
‘A proposal made to you professionally as a portrait-painter?’
‘Of course. And by a man calling himself Peach, and representing himself as a rather mysterious agent or go-between. He handed over just under half of the stipulated sum, there and then. You’ve just removed it from that drawer.’
‘I see. You are quite right that it will interest the fingerprint people. And that reminds me to give you a receipt.’ Keybird produced a small, official-looking form and scribbled on it. He thus owned, Honeybath thought, to the same book of rules as the rural sergeant. Then he paused and gazed at Honeybath in a brooding sort of way. It was hard not to feel that he was trying to make up his mind as to whether the cock-and-bull story this rascally artist would put up could be the least worth listening to. ‘Mr Honeybath,’ he then said politely, ‘I shall be most grateful if you can provide me – more or less as a sustained narrative – with whatever information you feel may be useful.’
‘Very well – and I’ll begin at the beginning.’ Honeybath checked himself. ‘But – do you know? – I won’t. I’ll begin, as long as I remember it, with what strikes me as the oddest part of the whole affair. The place, so to speak, where the emphasis should lie.’
‘A sensible plan, sir.’
‘It’s about the money. What you found in that drawer, they had to pay. There would have been no deal without it. But the second instalment – what was taken off me in that confounded country police station – they paid me, under no compulsion at all, that I can see, just before chucking me out.’
‘Chucking you out?’
‘It came to that. I was driven away from a totally unknown house and locality, tricked into getting out of the car, and then simply left by the roadside. And yet I was given the balance of my fee. Don’t you think that odd?’
‘A little confusing, no doubt.’ Keybird was looking hard at Honeybath. ‘Honour among thieves, perhaps?’ Keybird smiled again. ‘But, of course, I express that badly. And now, sir, your story. By the way, I have a tape recorder here. You won’t mind if I switch it on?’
‘Not in the least.’ It came to Honeybath as a sudden and wonderful thing that he had nothing but truth to tell. It was possibly going to be rather dull for Keybird, whose métier was so clearly catching out liars. But he suspected that, to date, the Crime Squad or whatever it was called hadn’t made much progress with their investigation. He was their substantial hope. And he’d do his best for them. After all, running the robbers to earth appeared to offer the only possible chance of recovering The Portrait of an Unknown Gentleman.
Half an hour later Keybird switched off the tape recorder.
‘What first strikes me about your story,’ he said easily, ‘is that it hangs together quite well.’
‘Thank you very much. But of course it may have been carefully rehearsed, may it not? Don’t be taken in, Mr Keybird, or in too much of a hurry.’
‘That’s a fair warning, would you say?’ Keybird had received this resentful and sarcastic speech as a mild whimsy. ‘On the other hand, it doesn’t ring a bell.’
‘Just what do you mean by that?’
‘Well, here’s a large-scale robbery – not twenty yards from where you and I are sitting now. That rings a bell, only a bell with a lesser timbre, so to speak.’ Keybird paused on this enigmatic remark. ‘I’ll tell you what quite often happens. A gang of burglars – for that’s what they are – scouts around until they find a bank, or some such promising prospect, next door to an uninhabited house or an untenanted shop. They gain entrance to house or shop unobtrusively, and then they go to work. In some respects the tunnelling technique is child’s play. You’d scarcely believe it, but half the banks in London have strong rooms or the like almost completely vulnerable from down below. Such folly’s enough to break a man’s heart, trust me.’ Keybird made one of his pauses on this sudden human note. ‘What is tricky, is the time factor. Tunnelling and boring, avoiding pipes and cables, shoring up weight-bearing areas, and all the rest of it: these things can’t be done in a hurry. Then again, really worthwhile targets with empty premises next door aren’t to be found in every street. So there’s a second technique. You actually take on a tenancy, and boldly appear to be setting up a new business, or moving into a new house. Very advantageous that can be, in some ways. You can move in a whole gang of navvies, and pretty well demolish what you please in full view of the world, and have the whole job finished before local authorities and the like begin to think of inquiring about permits and licences and planning permissions and the rest of it. Keep a line of pantechnicons in the street, if you care to. Slackness all round, you know. Heartbreak again. Ours can be an uphill job.’
‘I sympathize with you,’ Honeybath said.
‘I’m much obliged to you, I’m sure.’ Keybird’s smile came again. ‘But there’s a third technique. You do a deal with some seedy little man, known to be hard up, and hopefully none too scrupulous, whose shop or whatever–’
‘Whose studio, for instance.’
‘Why, yes.’ Keybird appeared innocently surprised. ‘A studio it might be. And you provide him with a colourable excuse for making himself scarce – say taking a fortnight at the sea to visit his old auntie. Of course the fellow’s accepting a certain risk. Eventually, awkward questions will be asked. So you have to make it well worth his while.’
‘Two thousand guineas.’
‘Well, no.’ Keybird was at his easiest. ‘Precisely not that. Not money of that order at all. So that’s where any bell of this sort doesn’t exactly ring true. But another thing. You mustn’t mistake me. These chaps who conveniently take themselves off are sometimes quite honest. Only, perhaps, a bit thick.’
‘Do I understand, Mr Keybird, that you’re prepared to be rather charitable, and lump me in with the thickies?’ Honeybath thought his employment of this demotic idiom rather neat.
‘Well, sir, the simplest reading of this affair is to accept it as more or less in that area. They got you away on this fool’s errand of a portrait commission. Only, the scale of the operation rather baffles me. This great house, and all that affluence, and parade of what you might call pomp and circumstance. I recognize that you’re a big man in your line, and that something fairly impressive – imposing, even – would have to be laid on. Still, what you describe remains a bit steep. And another thing. This Peach: was he a gentleman?’
‘No.’
‘But the man calling himself Arbuthnot?’
‘Yes. Decidedly yes.’
‘And the madman, or pretended madman, that they called Mr X, and who liked to be called Mon Empereur: what about him?’
‘Well, yes. And then some of the men I told you I heard and glimpsed as they left their meeting. They weren’t what I’d myself think of as convincing big-time East End crooks.’
‘Then it grows more and more puzzling. I know of more than one gang that could mount a robbery like this. But not with that kind of background or hinterland. It makes me feel we have a long way to go.’
There was a silence. Honeybath no longer felt he simply wanted to tumble into bed. But he did feel he wanted a drink.
‘There ought to be some whisky around,’ he said. ‘Except that I’ve been told burglars commonly polish off anything of the kind. Do you mind if I look?’
‘Far from it, sir.’
Whisky proved, in fact, to be available.
‘Will you join me, Mr Keybird?’ Honeybath asked. He had a notion that even the higher ranks of the police were obliged austerely to decline such refreshment when on the job.
‘That’s very kind of you. Neat.’
They drank. Honeybath reflected that the last man with whom he had
indulged in such compotation had been the treacherous Mr Basil Arbuthnot. He wasn’t altogether clear that Detective Superintendent Keybird need be beyond certain treacheries himself. One felt him to be not at his least dangerous, certainly, when he was being most amiable.
‘A long way to go?’ he said. ‘You can track down that house, I suppose.’
‘And find an empty shell.’ There was a hint of what Honeybath felt to be the dogmatic in this reply. ‘It remains important, of course.’
‘If my story isn’t moonshine, and the place does really exist.’
‘But I think we have to begin at this end.’ Keybird had ignored the consideration just advanced. ‘That’s how we’ll recover all that money.’
What Honeybath wanted to recover was his picture. But he didn’t advance this fact. And now Keybird went off at a tangent.
‘Talking of money, sir. Has it occurred to you to wonder about the present legal ownership of that two thousand guineas?’
‘No, it has not.’ This was an honest reply. ‘It hasn’t entered my head. Only I’m very sure that I don’t own it.’
‘The point could be a tricky one.’ Keybird appeared genuinely interested. ‘Wouldn’t you say that, whatever its source, it has come to you as a return upon the legitimate exercise of your professional skill?’
‘Of course it has – in a sense. But it is corrupt money, passed in the prosecution of fraud and crime. I should hope for legal opinion to the effect that the bargain is therefore void. What remains my property, therefore, is the portrait.’ Honeybath had got this out, after all.
‘It’s an interesting point of view.’ Keybird was looking at Honeybath with a fresh curiosity. ‘It was a success, your portrait of Mr X?’
‘In my judgement, decidedly yes.’
‘Even although executed in what must have been very taxing circumstances?’
‘Certainly, Mr Keybird. These things can be quite as mysterious as any bank robbery. And I want to recover my portrait.’
‘Yes, of course. Most natural, I’m sure.’
Charles Honeybath was offended, for he had detected a perfunctory note in this response. It was a moment from which, although neither man was aware of it, momentous consequences were to proceed.
One of these, indeed, arose before the night was out. It didn’t seem possible to sleep in the studio. There was that uncomfortably gaping hole, for one thing; and for another, the whole place (which consisted only of one big room and two little ones) appeared to have been pretty well taken over by the police. In this matter Honeybath simply didn’t know what his rights were. The assumption seemed to be that, as a law-abiding citizen and loyal subject, it was up to him to put up with whatever came along. But at least the police couldn’t camp in his flat, which clearly had nothing to do with the case, and he allowed himself, gratefully enough, to be transported there in the same car that had brought him back to London.
It was in the last half-minute of this short drive that he recalled a curious fact. He had given Keybird a very full account of his adventures and misadventures over the past fortnight, and without the slightest consciousness of holding anything back. But he had held something back. When he had said to Keybird ‘You can track down that house, I suppose’, he had failed to add just how Keybird could start in on the job. This, he now saw, had been because Keybird had immediately suggested a certain lack of interest in that aspect of his case, or at least a sense that it was less pressing than other matters.
But wasn’t it almost certain that, if Keybird had been told about the train saying Swansea and the clock that habitually went wrong on the ninth stroke of an hour, vigorous investigation would be set going at once? And Keybird had given a very positive impression that in affairs of this sort time was a factor of enormous importance: you got somewhere before the trail went cold, or perhaps you didn’t get anywhere at all.
He ought to ask that the car be turned round, so that he could make his way back to Detective Superintendent Keybird at once. Or at least he ought to communicate this significant recollection of his to the subordinate officer who was now acting as a sort of escort.
But Charles Honeybath did neither of these things. Quite unaccountably, he sat tight and kept his mouth shut. Yet even so, and at one o’clock in the morning, his bedside telephone reproached him. He could pick it up and dial 999. He had always owned a childish ambition to have some legitimate occasion to do that. He could dial 999, explain himself, and then – no doubt by some complex piece of radio technology – speak to Keybird direct.
It is conceivable that Honeybath was about to stretch out his hand and fulfil this intention when, instead, he fell fast asleep.
10
Two letters arrived for Honeybath by the first post on the following morning. They had been directed not to his studio (which was the address he provided in Who’s Who) but to the flat because both were from familiar acquaintances. But both were about professional matters. They conveyed requests, most agreeably expressed, for the arranging of portrait commissions. The Governors of a famous public school wanted him to paint the retiring Warden, and an equally famous City livery company, the Honourable Guild of Higglers and Tranters, besought him to perform the same service for their Master. It was at once evident to Honeybath that the recent hiccup in the pipeline which had panicked him into accepting the proposal of the wretched Peach had constituted an entirely false alarm. He was still in the swim, after all.
But he ought to fix up the preliminaries for both these jobs right away. It was a well-known point of etiquette that one did this. Like a top consultant physician approached on behalf of an adequately affluent sufferer, you offered to get things moving within the next couple of days.
Yet just what was his position studio-wise? There was that great hole in the floor, and the whole place was in the mess one would expect after tons and tons of earth and rubble have been shovelled around. And the police might be proposing to go on mucking about happily for days or even weeks. He hadn’t so much as gathered whether his own mere presence would be treated as an intrusion. Fortunately the head Higgler and Tranter was a baronet, an Alderman of the City of London, and a number of other things equally august. Dropping his name would probably occasion quite an impact. Hadn’t Honeybath himself, moreover, been to prep school with nobody less than the Prime Minister? Honeybath saw that the inherent modesty of his nature and demeanour had been in danger of letting him down. He’d go straight back to the studio and, if necessary, chuck his weight around a little. For the moment, at least, any sense of being a suspected pensioner and confederate of atrocious criminals blessedly departed from him. So he substituted for his accustomed artistically ample and flowing neckwear a faded old school tie (it was a pity prep schools don’t much go in for old school ties) and sallied out into London. It was a delightful morning and he didn’t take a taxi – although with a further £2,520 virtually on the books he could well have afforded to do so. The exercise of walking put him in mind of the fact that he was running a little short of shoes. He called in at his bootmaker’s and gave instructions that the fashioning of a couple of pairs should be put in hand forthwith.
The front door of the studio stood open, a circumstance no doubt regularized by the presence of a constable standing guard before it. As he approached, two men emerged staggering under what appeared to be a crate or portmanteau constructed out of plate armour. They were followed by another man carrying an outsize camera. Perhaps this was a terminal stage in the purely local investigation.
‘Mr Keybird’s compliments, sir.’ The constable had stepped briskly forward. ‘He’s in the bank, and would be obliged if you could call on him.’
‘Ah, yes.’ Honeybath was resolved to be firm. ‘Presently, then. I must just look into one or two things in the studio first.’
‘And the Assistant Commissioner, sir. “C” Department, of course.’
‘What the deuce is that?’
‘Criminal Investigation, sir.’ The constable had stared at such
ignorance. ‘And Commander Berry too, I believe.’
‘And who may Commander Berry be? Salvation Army?’ Honeybath at once rather regretted this witticism, which might have been described as not quite on.
‘National Co-ordinator, Regional Crime Squads, seconded to Home Office, sir.’
Honeybath decided that it would be civil, and indeed politic, to succumb gracefully to all this top brass.
‘Very well,’ he said. ‘I’ll go in at once.’
At least he didn’t find a kind of tribunal of inquisitors. The Assistant Commissioner’s job turned out to be the uttering of expressions of polite if formal concern. He shook hands and went away, rather with the air of a man who has another precisely similar assignment next on his list. The Commander, although he stayed put, remained respectfully standing until it pleased Honeybath to sit down. The Metropolitan Police Office, it seemed, had decided to lay on a red-carpet turn. Only Keybird remained distinguishably his old self.
‘Mr Honeybath,’ the man who co-ordinated things said, ‘we have been very much hoping to vacate your studio by midday, but it now looks as if it won’t be before late afternoon. Can you bear with us so long?’
‘Oh, most certainly. That seems entirely reasonable.’ Honeybath was much relieved. ‘You must have a great deal to see to,’ he added vaguely.
‘Well, of course, we have to try to see to that floor. I’m afraid that permanent repair can’t begin just yet. But something which I trust will be not too inconvenient can certainly be fixed up fairly soon.’
‘That will be excellent.’ Honeybath paused on this, and then ventured on a tentative note of jollity. ‘Just so long as I can’t fall into the cellarage.’
‘Quite so. Mr Keybird is going to arrange something at once. But you are quite right that there is a certain press of technical investigation. This man who called himself Peach, you see. It was only last night that we heard of him as coming to your studio, was it not? And that means a fresh sniff around.’
The Mysterious Commission Page 8