The Mysterious Commission

by Michael Innes

  At the last moment chance provided him with a fellow-passenger, after all. Almost as the train moved out of the station, a young woman tumbled in on him. A very pretty girl, he told himself – and was then surprised at his own momentary impercipience. She wasn’t a very pretty girl; she was that vastly different and much rarer thing, a very beautiful one. In his professional character, he knew perfectly well that it is pointless, or at least hazardous, to declare one woman more beautiful than another: the mysterious attribute can vanish even as you pause to admire; can declare itself suddenly in what you would think to pass by unregardingly. Still, this girl was beautiful. It even occurred to him that she might prove undesirably distracting later on. But until Didcot, at least, he could glance discreetly at her now and then. In fact, he presently discovered, he could sit and stare at her if he wanted to. For she was not the sort of girl who sits idly in a railway carriage, dividing her time between turning over the pages of a rubbishing magazine and glancing – or staring – at you. She was of a studious habit; and, indeed, you quickly saw that her beauty itself was of a somewhat severe and intellectual order. Her travelling impedimenta consisted of two books: a big one and a little one. She had put the big one down on the seat beside her; it had a sombre cover on which was pasted the label of the London Library. The little one was a paperback of the egghead sort, and Honeybath saw that it was called Keynes and After. This the young woman had opened near the middle and became absorbed in. So Honeybath was able to observe her. He observed that her skirt came almost to her knees and that her shoes were of a conjoined plainness and elegance not readily to be come by very far from Rome or Milan. (He had to be something of an expert in such matters: feet, like hands, are expensive extras.) Honeybath saw that he was probably in the company of the daughter of a duke, making off for the weekend to the parental home, but only on the basis of having so far broken free of its influence as to pursue rigorous if sadly plebeian studies at the London School of Economics.

  These reflections, together with a little more or less covert fiddling with his maps, took our investigator through a pause at Reading and on to Didcot. Throughout this period the girl didn’t look up from her treatise except to check the names of these railway stations. At Reading, indeed, she did accompany this exercise with a glance at Honeybath. It was an impersonal and almost unflatteringly uninterested glance. She might have been checking on him too, and deciding that he was the sort of little man who came to wind the clocks or tune the pianos or carry out minor dental operations without any impertinent suggestion that these might be more readily achieved in his surgery – or in his dental parlour, as the girl’s father would doubtless phrase it.

  Honeybath had just arrived at this assessment of himself in the supposed regard of the young woman sitting diagonally to him in the compartment – had arrived at it, naturally, without gratification, even if with no particular resentment – when the young woman looked up once more and gave him a brilliant smile. It wasn’t a smile that seemed occasioned by anything in particular, and it somehow carried the suggestion of being definitely not intended as a prelude to even the most casual conversation. It was almost as if she had realized that her first glance might have occasioned misapprehension and she was now anxious to make a brief amends. If the smile had been motivated in any way it had been by that. Honeybath preferred to think that it had been an entirely spontaneous – as it was certainly a merely momentary – thing. He felt as if he had been glancingly well-regarded by a passing goddess.

  But now he had to apply himself in earnest to his task. The Swansea train, having turned away disdainfully from the line to Oxford and other obscure cathedral cities, was heading for the estuary of the Severn and the Principality of Wales. The Vale of the White Horse and much more or less open country lay immediately ahead, and most of the railway-stations (being small and helpless ones) had been closed through the zeal of the celebrated Lord Beeching. Wantage Road, Challow Station, Uffington Junction: little, if anything, would prove to be going forward in these former busy haunts of men. And haunts of racehorses, Honeybath recalled, since it was a region given over rather to quadrupedal than to bipedal forms of life. But this uncrowded character made the region, for him, a promising one. He got out his first map.

  The proceeding left the young woman incurious. In fact it now became possible to believe that the young woman was rather sleepy; she had closed her succinct exposition of recent economic theory, and was now closing her eyes as well. This wasn’t entirely a gain. It did mean that Honeybath wouldn’t be embarrassed by the consciousness of being observed as indulging in eccentric behaviour. On the other hand it made an absorbed contemplation of beauty into a possibility entirely devoid of offence. So long as the young woman slept he could goggle at her as he pleased. Moreover there is something peculiarly seductive about a sleeping girl. The spectacle releases fancies not conducive to edification. Honeybath realized that he must keep his eye resolutely on the ball.

  The ball was whatever dwellings of the more imposing sort presented themselves at only a moderate remove on the left as the train hurtled west. Honeybath quickly came to realize that there weren’t going to be many of them. When the Great Western Railway had first been laid down it had been taken for granted that the line wouldn’t venture into the near vicinity of the territorial nobility or the landed gentry. Later on, people with the money and ambition to build themselves big new houses had naturally kept away from it. More often than not, the really grand places had the Thames between themselves and this all but modern means of vulgar locomotion.

  And what exactly was he looking for, anyway? A private park of modest proportions, fairly densely wooded on its northern boundary, but with a gap in the trees through which it ought to be possible to view a mansion the dimensions and exterior appearance of which were almost totally unknown to him. It should be no farther away than would enable a man to decipher, through good binoculars, a small placard exhibited, say, in one of its windows. And before this scene it seemed that, just occasionally, an express train such as this made a brief and grudging pause.

  Was he to expect any signs of life? It had been ventured by Detective Superintendent Keybird, in one of his pooh-poohing moods, that the mysterious domicile of Mr X would by now be an empty shell. The whole show had merely been briefly mounted, that was to say, to take Honeybath in. Most of the house would have been empty and untenanted all the time. Just a few rooms would have been rigged up for occupation. Honeybath had vaguely heard of film companies doing something like this: taking over, briefly and on the cheap, some useless and abandoned mansion with the object of using such bits and pieces of it as they required.

  Suddenly (and as he briskly substituted one large-scale map for another) he became aware of a circumstance that seemed decidedly to support this hypothesis. He hadn’t thought of it before. Peach-Crumble had been part of the entourage to be met with chez Arbuthnot. But in almost no time after Honeybath’s own departure from the place Peach-Crumble had been reduced to cowering in a miserable dockside dwelling in the East End of London. That did rather suggest, so to speak, a folding of tents like the Arabs, silently stealing away.

  Yet this was really no argument at all. The booty from the bank had been hidden in London. Crumble, as a responsible member of the gang, had simply been despatched to look after it as soon as he no longer had a role as one of Mr X’s attendants or warders. Then again, there had been all those cars, and all those men – after some quite noisy conference – piling into them and driving away. Unless Honeybath had positively dreamed up all that, it blankly contradicted the proposition that the entire charade had been mounted, in the most ephemeral way, for his, Honeybath’s, sole benefit.

  And here he was on the verge of a much larger consideration. It might be called, without pretentiousness, his own deepest intuition about the whole affair. Or not exactly an intuition, since it was something for which there existed a thoroughly intellectual basis. What in general is called proportion had been one of th
e main studies of Honeybath’s life. And the Keybird vision of the thing violated his sense of proportion. As a mere means of securing, for the space of a fortnight, the absence from his studio of an artist of the most modest fame, the imposture in which he had been involved was just too elaborate by half. Contemplate it fairly and squarely, and it simply didn’t stand up. The bank robbery had been only a venture, after all. It might have been wrecked, well or merely immediately before its successful accomplishment, by any sort of mischance or miscalculation. Yet very large sums of money (not even counting that second dollop of his fee) would have had to be staked on it, and it alone, if Keybird’s theory were the valid one. Reflect on this, and you came upon a very surprising conclusion indeed. The Arbuthnot set-up was not an ephemeral, an ad hoc affair. It subserved other and larger ends than the single coup which had met disaster at the efficient hands of Detective Superintendent Keybird and his 200 constables. What Honeybath RA was himself now hunting down could be nothing but the permanent headquarters of some vast criminal organization.

  Rather unexpectedly, and in the middle of nowhere, the train had come to a halt.

  15

  It was like a dream – a through-the-looking-glass dream. Everything was there, but everything was the wrong way round. There was the train, but he was looking from the train. There was the house, but he was looking at the house. There was the gap in the trees, hut it was quite close up on him instead of quite far away. And the house was just a house, precisely as the train had been just a train until he got those binoculars on it. A large house, but totally anonymous. It rang no bell with him. But then there was no reason why it should. He had never once been able to stand back from it and view it coup d’oeil before.

  All this – if only in the suddenness of its appearing – was disconcerting and confusing. Honeybath sat goggling through the window, with his litter of abruptly needless maps around him. And then the train – which, after the habit of pausing trains, had not quite lost momentum after all – the train gave itself an indignant twitch, and within seconds had achieved an accelerated motion in the direction of the now westering sun.

  The scene had rung no bell, Honeybath repeated to himself, and was conscious of the phrase as carrying some obscure ambiguity. The scene had vanished – and now, in no time, its entire rural context would for a while vanish too. What lay ahead must be the shocking city of Swindon – full, no doubt, of enjoying and suffering human beings much like himself, but decidedly without marked aesthetic appeal. He would get out of the train there, possibly hire a car, and then–

  And then what? He had really made no plan; hadn’t thought beyond just locating the enemy on the map. And he hadn’t even done this – although it would be only a moment’s work now. He knew to within half a mile the position at which the train had paused seconds ago. His finger was still on the spot. And there – precisely at the tip of a well-tended nail – was the conventional representation of a small piece of parkland, and in the middle of it a black rectangle and the words Imlac House. An odd name, but that was it. Imlac House. He peered backwards through his window, on the off-chance that a glimpse of this residence might still be offering. But, naturally enough, it had vanished from view. It must now be at least a mile away.

  And the girl was looking at him curiously.

  ‘Excuse me,’ the girl said. ‘Are you making some sort of survey of English country houses?’ She spoke rather as if she expected Honeybath would reveal himself as having an American accent, but at the same time with a polite confidence which somehow made her barging in like this quite inoffensive. Honeybath had an impulse to agree that he was doing just that. It wouldn’t be a bad cover for the eccentric show he had been putting up. And it looked as if the young woman hadn’t been so sound asleep as he had supposed.

  ‘Well, no,’ Honeybath said (thinking better of this). ‘But I am quite interested in the place we have just passed. It’s called Imlac House.’ The girl, it occurred to him, might well live in the district, and have some useful information to give. ‘Do you happen to know anything about it?’

  ‘Well, yes – I think I can say I do.’ The girl was looking at him oddly. ‘Just why are you taking an interest in it?’

  ‘I was there quite recently – professionally, and for nearly a fortnight. I happen–’

  ‘That hardly explains why you should be concerned to spot it from a train with the aid of a map.’ The young woman had produced this challenge crisply. It was to be feared that she was rapidly coming to view Honeybath as a highly suspicious character. ‘Did you take a great fancy to it?’

  ‘Nothing of the kind. In fact, I can hardly be said to have seen it at all.’

  ‘In a fortnight!’

  ‘It certainly sounds odd. But the circumstances were unusual. I arrived in the dark, and came away in the dark too. And all I saw of the house was the rooms I lived and worked in. That, and a walled garden. Oh, and a lift. By the way, may I say my name is Charles Honeybath? I’m a portrait-painter.’ Honeybath rather hoped that the girl might be familiar with his name, and find it reassuring. But this didn’t happen. On the contrary, the girl’s glance was now positively hostile.

  ‘And my name is Diana Mariner,’ she said. ‘Mr Honeybath, is this some sort of stupid joke?’

  ‘Nothing of the kind.’ Honeybath was indignant. ‘Why should you suppose anything of the sort?’

  ‘Simply because I live at Imlac House. I’m going home there now.’

  ‘How very interesting!’ If Honeybath had been dumbfounded he supposed he had successfully dissimulated the fact. Could this upper-class female economist in whom he had so rashly begun to confide be a daughter of the unspeakable Arbuthnot, and perhaps wholly ignorant of her father’s evil ways? A crucial question occurred to him. ‘May I ask, Miss Mariner, whether you have been away from home for long?’

  ‘For two years, as a matter of fact. From this home, that is – the one you seem to have been staying in some rather odd way. We have a smaller house somewhere else. Daddy lets Imlac when he has to go away for long periods. He’s an ambassador, you see – although really he’s an admiral.’

  ‘An admiral?’

  ‘Admiral Mariner. So you can tell – can’t you? – that he’s only a sort of amateur diplomat. Not what they call a career one. And about Imlac – well, he only got possession again a couple of days ago. I expect the place is in an awful mess. Not that the man who rented it didn’t have all the right references. And we only use one wing when we’re there ourselves. I suppose it’s because Daddy hasn’t got very much money. Anyway, I’m longing to get back. I love Imlac, and wish he didn’t have to turn an honest penny that way.’

  ‘Most understandable.’ Honeybath was probably staring stupidly at Miss Mariner. She was no longer hostile; indeed, it must be said that she had turned surprisingly, if ramblingly, communicative. And that such invaluable information as this (which he dimly began to see as fitting into the entire mystery plausibly enough) should tumble by sheer coincidence into his lap was a gift of fortune such as he could scarcely have hoped for.

  ‘But I still find something rather odd in what you’ve told me, Mr Honeybath. About hardly moving freely around Imlac at all. Were the people very eccentric or something?’

  ‘Decidedly so. Or at least it may be expressed that way.’

  ‘I just can’t understand it.’ The largeness of Miss Mariner’s astonishment before the not very striking facts which had been communicated to her might have struck Detective Superintendent Keybird (had he been present) as almost obtrusive. ‘And do you mean you were there to paint a portrait?’

  ‘Certainly I was.’

  ‘You were painting Colonel Bunbury himself?’

  ‘Colonel Bunbury?’ Honeybath was aware that he was feeling slightly giddy.

  ‘That’s the name of our tenant at Imlac – the one who has just quit.’

  ‘No, I wasn’t painting anybody with that name. I was painting–’ Honeybath broke off. If he announced that he
had been painting somebody called Mr X it was probable that Miss Mariner would conclude him to be mad (he was rather wondering about this himself) and make a dive for the communication cord. ‘Imlac seemed to be in the possession of a man called Arbuthnot – Basil Arbuthnot.’

  ‘I don’t understand it at all.’ Diana Mariner was looking perplexed, but fortunately not alarmed. ‘It seems to me that something uncommonly funny has been going on. I’m not sure that my father hasn’t been wondering a little, as a matter of fact.’

  ‘It’s a pity that he hasn’t wondered to better effect.’ Honeybath judged it fair enough to offer this astringent remark. ‘Something very funny indeed has been going on.’ He looked steadily at Admiral Mariner’s learned daughter – so recently no more than a young stranger with an interest in economic theory. ‘And connected with a very big bank robbery, I think I ought to say. Brutally put, Miss Mariner, your father has been renting Imlac to a bunch of crooks.’

  There was a moment’s silence. Honeybath wondered whether he had done very wrong in thus so abruptly introducing an innocent child to the horrors of criminal life. The train rattled through a station which he vaguely supposed to be Shrivenham. They would be in Swindon in a very few minutes.