‘I see.’ Honeybath wasn’t sure that he did quite see. ‘You think he may have left useful traces of his presence?’
‘Most certainly he did. Theoretically speaking, it’s impossible for any man to come and go anywhere without leaving the next best thing to his signature behind him. Only, of course, theory and practice are not always the same thing.’
‘I’d suppose not.’
‘But, in this case, we do quite certainly know of something our wanted man left behind him. And he is our wanted man. I can’t emphasize that too much. And my colleague Mr Keybird agrees with me.’
‘Definitely,’ Keybird said – distinguishably on his dogmatic note. ‘Frankly, there’s nothing else to go on. Or not yet.’
‘I’d have thought’ – Honeybath spoke from an obscure sense that he and his adventures were again being undervalued in this appreciation of the matter – ‘I’d have thought that my Mr X, and Arbuthnot–’
‘Yes, indeed. We shall have to come to all that. But it is certainly Peach we must go after first.’ The co-ordinating character got to his feet. It was plain that he had turned up simply to lend weight to this contention. ‘And I’m off on the job now. It’s most satisfactory that you and Mr Keybird understand each other so well. There’s a great deal in hitting it off in situations like this. But, of course, I do myself hope to see you again.’
With these bland remarks Commander Berry departed, although not without first gravely shaking hands. Honeybath watched him go in silence, and then looked around him. The room was familiar; it was his bank manager’s office. He wondered what had happened to the manager – and indeed to all the branch’s staff and all the branch’s other customers. The robbers had presumably cleared out cash, securities, safe-deposit stuff, everything. There must be the devil of a mess to sort out. But all that was not of the first relevance at the moment. He turned to Keybird.
‘Your colleague said something that puzzled me a good deal. It was something to the effect that Peach had, to your positive knowledge, left something behind him. Of course he left those banknotes. Was the reference to that?’
‘Well, no – although they are certainly important. Keybird paused for a moment, rather as if hesitating before something delicate. ‘You know about the identikit technique, Mr Honeybath?’
‘Fudging up something said to resemble a wanted man, on the basis of people’s descriptions of him? Certainly. I can’t say I’ve ever thought much of them. Tailor’s dummies are a lot more individual and expressive.’
‘I’d hesitate, sir, to deny an element of truth in that.’ Keybird again hesitated after this judicious concession. ‘But here we have a very special factor indeed. What Peach has left behind him is his own likeness inside the head, so to speak, of the most accomplished portrait-painter in England. I hope it isn’t a liberty to express the fact that way.’
If Honeybath was disconcerted it was perhaps because Keybird had here dropped into something very like the idiom of Peach himself. But he also, if rather unaccountably, took alarm at what was coming. For of just what was coming, he hadn’t the slightest doubt.
‘Do you think you could sketch him for us, sir? I’m aware that it is quite something to ask.’
Honeybath wondered how a policeman was aware of this. But the fact was certainly true. There are purposes to which one doesn’t bend one’s art without misgiving. And thief-catching was one of them. It would be like painting something to advertise a detergent or a bed-time drink. He had, it was true, every reason to wish Peach and all his company put well and truly inside. They had exploited him, and in the end (he still felt) they had gratuitously mocked him as well. Even that second payment had been a mockery. But he still didn’t want to draw Peach for the police.
‘Very well,’ he said. ‘I’ll try.’ A moment’s thought had shown him that he couldn’t really decline. ‘And it won’t be all that hard. In fact, Mr Keybird, I can pretty well promise to sketch him with tolerable fidelity full-face, half-face, in profile, or upside down.’ Honeybath paused for appropriate signs of merriment from Keybird. ‘But it will take me the better part of the day. You may find that odd. But one works towards a likeness, you know, by quite humble trial and error. And when one’s subject is a memory–’
‘Quite so, sir. And could you make a start on it here?’ Having gained his point, Keybird wasn’t for wasting time. ‘The materials are available in your studio?’
‘Of course they are. But it seems to me–’
‘It’s the villain’s Achilles heel, sir. The one thing he didn’t think of. If Peach is known to a single police officer in the kingdom, we’ll establish his identity within twenty-four hours of your playing your part, as one may say.’
‘Wouldn’t the same apply–’
‘He can’t have been disguised to any significant extent? An eye like yours would instantly have been aware of anything like that?’
‘I’m pretty confident it would.’
‘Then we’ve as good as got him. And he’s the key to the whole affair. Peach has a familiar smell, sir. And there’s nothing other than run-of-the-mill about this bank robbery. It doesn’t take us out of our depth.’
‘And perhaps Arbuthnot, and Mr X, and that house, and that board meeting do do that?’
For the first time in their acquaintance, Honeybath had the pleasure of seeing Detective Superintendent Keybird halted in his stride. But his response was that of an honest man.
‘Well, sir, yes – in a way. But first things first.’
11
It was only when Honeybath took a first serious glance at Peach – at Peach, that is, as Peach existed for Honeybath’s inward eye – that a certain element of difficulty in fulfilling his new and odd commission revealed itself. He could see Peach perfectly. Yet Peach, thus viewed, was uncommonly like one of those identikit dummies that Honeybath had made fun of. Peach was (and Honeybath now recalled this as having been his earliest impression) one of nature’s faceless men. He suggested himself as the very type of the obscure little clerk who, just because he sits on a particular stool among innumerable other obscure little clerks in some government or municipal office, can suddenly assume enormous nuisance-value in one’s entirely private affairs.
For a brief space, Honeybath’s first sketch from memory pleased him very much. Then he realized that his satisfaction was a malicious satisfaction, and that what he had produced was a caricature of Peach. It was possible to imagine circumstances in which it would be precisely this that was useful. Accentuation and enhancement were probably what the genuine identikit people at New Scotland Yard went after. If you were drawing a pig in order to assist visiting Martians to be quite positive that their first real pig was a pig, you would make your pictured pig just as piggy as you could manage. But this wasn’t Charles Honeybath’s notion of portraiture. That notion was a very serious one. You didn’t get at the essence of a man – his quiddity, whatness, or whatever – through clever travesty. You got at it through and beyond absolute fidelity to what your visual faculty reported to you. Being incapable of violating this rule, he tore up the paper tainted by a personal dislike and started again.
In the issue, he worked all day – and policemen brought him, not once but twice, sandwiches and a half pint of bitter from the neighbouring pub. He worked with as much concentration as if he had been summoned to Number 10 Downing Street to limn his old schoolfellow, or even to Buckingham Palace itself. He had boasted foolishly to Keybird (presumably a complete Philistine) of what he could with practised facility achieve. He sweated this vainglory out of himself now. When Keybird returned to the bank at nine o’clock that night (doubtless from a refection of chops and tomato sauce) Honeybath had two sketches which he could show. Keybird took one glance at them, and instantly made as if to speak. Then he checked himself, and engaged in what appeared to be a steadying walk round Honeybath’s bank manager’s colourless room.
‘Glory, glory!’ Keybird then said.
These were surprising words. H
oneybath still felt a certain antipathy towards Keybird; the man had been too abrupt with him in pursuance of his own vision of the affair. And he didn’t now suppose it to be a hitherto unsuspected connoisseurship lurking in him that had prompted the exclamation. Had it been educed, nevertheless, from a committee consisting of Lord Clark and the ghosts of the late Bernard Berenson, Clive Bell and Roger Fry, he could scarcely have felt more overwhelmed for the moment. And it was for no better reason – so strange are the vagaries of the human heart – than that he had at length, in some mysterious fashion, gained merit with this common thief-catcher.
‘Do you mean,’ he asked, ‘that it’s at all likely to answer your purposes?’
‘Likely to? Good God, sir, it’s the whole thing! This is Crumble. Sammy Crumble himself. It couldn’t be anybody else. What a fool he was to get himself under such an eye as yours! An utterly nondescript type – and I suppose he’s come to gamble on the fact.’
‘Peach is really somebody called Crumble, who is already known to the police?’
‘Certainly he is. And all we have to do now is to pick him up.’
‘Which is an entirely easy task?’ Honeybath, although still a little overcome by the unexpected degree of his success, managed to import a mild scepticism into this inquiry.
‘Easy? Why–’ Keybird checked himself in what was clearly to have been a brusque retort. ‘Look, sir, have you a few hours to spare?’
‘Certainly I have.’
‘And you wouldn’t mind cutting short another night’s sleep?’
‘Not in the least.’
‘Then I’ll show you.’
It had been designed, Honeybath was later to conclude, as a reward for good conduct, as the kind of treat given to a child who has been unexpectedly well-behaved and helpful. At the time, however, it was his thought that he was being kept an eye on. He hadn’t quite recovered from being a suspected criminal. Perhaps he was still a suspected criminal. It was this that had made him – by way of showing the flag – so roundly declare that, even at the end of a day’s stretching and unusual professional labour, he was fit for anything that was on. And it was thus that he came to spend a long night at the very heart of the search for Sammy Crumble.
It was an absurd name. It was even more absurd to be called Crumble than to be called Peach. Perhaps the respectable and disagreeable confidential person who had lured him into his adventure was no more a Crumble than a Peach; perhaps Crumble was merely the particular alias under which one who was really a Smith or a Brown happened to be known to the police. Not that it mattered very much. Smith or Brown or Peach or Crumble, Scotland Yard was sure that they could get him.
There was nothing particularly spectacular about the start of the operation. Keybird picked up the bank manager’s telephone, dialled a number, asked for an extension, and then said ‘Keybird, locations, priority Crumble S’. He listened for a moment, said ‘Confirm Crumble S’ and put the instrument down again.
‘That will take half an hour,’ he remarked apologetically to Honeybath. ‘So shall we just check up on the day’s work here?’
Honeybath had always vaguely supposed that his bank – this particular Chelsea branch of it, that was to say – must extend in dimensions not immediately apparent to a customer. It did so, he now discovered, in the main on a subterranean level. There was no ramification beneath his studio, since that possessed its own cellarage. But this cellarage had long since been boarded over and sealed off from the studio in the interest of housing some Tartarean electrical device the existence of which Honeybath had known nothing about. Here was the reason for the thieves having had to break through his floor. They had then, working in a constricted space, been obliged to dig down a further six feet, and so arrive at a level below those basement regions of the bank which spread extensively at the rear of the premises. Even then, there had still been much tunnelling to do, since there were four consecutive strong-rooms which could be broken into only from below. The entire operation, it seemed to Honeybath, must have been almost as highly organized as the operation going forward in the same region now.
For these industrious persons were certainly not bank staff. Nor were they – although it was what their white overalls and caps suggested – a high-powered research unit in a hospital. Perhaps they should be called forensic scientists, although it was simpler to think of them just as a new sort of policemen on the job. The evidences of what they were up against stood ranged all around them: two cavernous safes agape through doors so massive as to suggest the interior of an obsolete battleship, and which were probably equally obsolete themselves; row upon row of steel safe-deposit boxes every one of which had been cut open with the identical ruthless efficiency. On an otherwise empty table stood a small, neat pile of £5 notes. Honeybath supposed this to represent the total booty recovered so far. Or perhaps it had been deliberately left there by the thieves as an ironically conceived pourboire for all these toiling detectives.
‘Are these fellows,’ Honeybath asked, ‘hunting for that signature?’
‘Signature?’ Keybird seemed at sea.
‘I think one of your colleagues said that nobody can be physically present in a given place without leaving–’
‘Ah, yes! Well, that’s certainly what’s going forward. And you notice that they pretty well bring their own mobile labs with them. Much more efficient than caning off samples of everything under the sun to our headquarters.’
‘And what sort of form is the signature likely to take? Cigarette-ends disclosing the presence of rare tobaccos?’
‘Not exactly.’ Keybird laughed genially, as if in high good humour. ‘I’m afraid fiction has made them rather chary of dropping anything of that kind. But smoke, now, is another matter. You wouldn’t believe it, but many of them chain-smoke while on the job. The atmosphere can end up like cotton wool; you collect the stuff, shove it in a bottle or straight into a test-tube, and apply a technique of micro-analysis. Most informative at times that can be. Then again, the heat built up by their apparatus is tremendous, and they sweat like pigs. Swab themselves down, often, with a bit of cotton waste, and then chuck it away. A mistake – as are some other not very refined personal habits. Human secretions and excretions–’
‘Most interesting,’ Honeybath said. He could only conjecture that this fantastic talk was designed to make a fool of him. ‘But I’d suppose other forms of investigation to be more promising. Do particular gangs going after this sort of thing have their regular and identifiable techniques?’
‘Good question.’ It was to be presumed that Detective Superintendent Keybird was in the habit of conducting seminars at police colleges. ‘They certainly do, although they’re smart enough to try to obliterate the traces of it. But their equipment is a limiting factor. They can’t always be replacing it, and close analysis can get us quite some way. The kind of tool that cut into those boxes’ – and Keybird pointed to the wall – ‘well, we are often able to say where it was manufactured, to whom it was first sold, and on what occasion it was first employed on a job like this. Wonderful, wouldn’t you say?’
‘Oh, undoubtedly. But has any progress actually yet been achieved by these methods in this particular case?’ It seemed to Honeybath that this was a fair question.
‘Well, no – you have to give them time. Or they would have to be given time if I wasn’t enjoying the good fortune of your co-operation, sir.’ Keybird lowered his voice. ‘So let’s leave them to it,’ he murmured. ‘We’ve better things to do than hang around a bunch of boffins.’
This unexpected remark gratified Honeybath as much as it surprised him. Art, he felt, was carrying the day over science. His production of an identifiable Sammy Crumble had seen to that.
They drove through London – not, this time, to the accompaniment of any wailing of sirens, but making a fair speed, all the same. Within ten minutes they had reached Whitehall and the unobtrusive turn off Whitehall up which all well-informed tourists glance with quite as much interest as,
a little farther north, they glance in the other direction up Downing Street. Honeybath couldn’t recall having been at school with the Chief Commissioner of Metropolitan Police. But he had no doubt that, if he met the chap, they would prove to be approximately out of the same stable. So Honeybath (unlike some visitors) felt tolerably comfortable as he was driven into New Scotland Yard. It was so pervasively lit up that he wondered whether any of its inhabitants ever went home for the night. But probably they worked in shifts. There seemed to be a great many policemen in the world. There had been any number of them in that single small bank.
‘We’ll go right up,’ Keybird said – and added mysteriously: ‘It ought to be mounted by now.’
More policemen – and policewomen too. They sat in rows before switchboards in an enormous room, and as Honeybath was led past he could hear them saying into microphones things like ‘Over’ and ‘Message timed at twenty-two hours twenty’. In fact it was so like something on television that a dispassionate spectator would have had to pronounce the spectacle somewhat banal in effect. But Honeybath was not exactly in the condition of such a spectator. He had recently been through strange and unnerving experiences, in the course of which he would on several occasions have been very glad to know that even the humblest officer of the law was at his call in case of need. Now he had been invited, through some caprice, as it seemed, of Detective Superintendent Keybird, to participate in what he realized was to be a man-hunt. His presence, it was true, could not be other than slightly otiose; he was to be like one of those devoted but dismounted persons who pant after a pack of foxhounds on foot, or stand peering over hedges in the hope of some distant prospect of a kill. But here he was, and he felt the first excitement of the chase.
There was another room. It was smaller, but still very large. It was also lofty – so lofty that it must have been almost a cube. Little furniture was visible: not much more than a table and a few upright chairs facing a huge and seemingly blank wall, hovering in shadow beyond some source of subdued light. But as Honeybath and his formidable cicerone entered, the wall itself lit up. What was revealed as occupying its whole extent was a map of London. This had the appearance of being etched upon a single sheet of glass or of some glass-like substance. Keybird motioned his guest to a chair, and himself sat down before the table. He gathered writing-materials to his hand.
The Mysterious Commission Page 9