The Mysterious Commission

by Michael Innes

  ‘I don’t see why a bunch of crooks should want you to paint a portrait.’

  ‘No more do I.’ Honeybath was impressed by the immediate clarity of Miss Mariner’s observation. It came, he supposed, of a severe academic training. ‘It’s what I’m trying to find out. And I want to get back my portrait. That’s why I’m on this confounded train.’

  ‘You mean you’re coming to visit us?’

  ‘Well, not exactly. Obviously not, in a way, since I haven’t been aware of your existence.’

  ‘I think you’d better, all the same.’ Miss Mariner said this decisively and almost threateningly. ‘You owe my father an explanation, it seems to me.’

  ‘A good many people are owed explanations.’

  ‘Including the police, I’d think. Are you just doing this on your own, Mr Honeybath?’

  ‘Well, yes – so far as this particular move goes.’ The girl had again been unnervingly quick on the ball. ‘The police don’t seem to be quite so interested in my portrait as I am. So–’

  ‘That’s natural, I’d say, if they have a big robbery on their plate. But will you come and see my father – now? Just to explain things a little.’

  ‘Yes, of course – if you want me to.’ It didn’t appear possible to give Diana Mariner any other reply than this. ‘But if you think, in the light of what I’ve told you, that you should go first to the local police–’

  ‘I shouldn’t think local police would be much good in an affair like this.’

  ‘You’re probably right.’ Honeybath had his own unfortunate encounter with a rural constabulary still freshly in mind. ‘How do we get to your house?’

  ‘They’ll have left my Mini in the station car park. It’s our usual arrangement. And here we are.’

  There were two car parks, it seemed, and Miss Mariner’s modest conveyance might be in either. She went off to hunt for it, leaving Honeybath with a brisk injunction to stay put. So he stood in the big station yard and waited – much occupied with his own reflections, and not greatly attending to what went on around him. He had a strong but confused sense that just these few minutes were affording him a useful chance of working out the implications of his abruptly transformed situation. His quarry had fled and only their late domicile remained – a domicile now returned to its just proprietor, a respect able and indeed no doubt eminent public servant, to whom he, Honeybath, was going to have an uncommonly unlikely-sounding story to tell. But what was not unlikely-sounding in this whole affair? And even when anything did sound likely ought he to think of accepting it without a good deal of caution? For instance –

  Honeybath found that something which had been hovering in his head was eluding him, and that what he was chiefly conscious of was a slight chill in the air. He was standing in shade, and the station yard was being visited by an unfriendly breeze. But there was sunshine only a few yards away, and a high brick wall which probably caught and radiated an agreeable warmth. He strolled over to it. The girl – Miss Mariner, Diana Mariner – was taking rather a long time to find her car. He wondered whether it was refusing to start, or had been pinned in by some unscrupulous fellow-motorist. The station yard itself was fairly busy, but so large that the traffic seemed able to charge around in rather a carefree way. Directly in front of Honeybath now, a heavy lorry had begun to back with surprising speed out of a bonnet-to-pavement row of similar vehicles. He speculated, quite idly, on whether it would wheel to left or right. He saw that it was doing neither, but simply continuing to back – and at a speed which could only be judged not so much dangerous as completely mad. Unless–

  Honeybath found that he had achieved a miraculous sideways jump, and had done so in the split-second of realizing that sudden death was hurtling at him. But the jump didn’t get him clear by any means. He was conscious of a terrific force catching him he didn’t know where. Tumbled to the ground, he was aware for a moment only of similarly tumbling bricks. Then he saw a gaping hole in the wall against which he had been standing. The tail of the lorry was in some way jammed in it. The lorry was screaming in rage or agony – presumably because it was frantically trying to extricate itself and get away. The lorry suddenly clanked and clattered instead of screaming, and then fell silent. The driver jumped from the cab, and for a moment stood halted and irresolute. He was dressed – Honeybath’s senses were at once acute and chaotic – as the drivers of such vehicles commonly are dressed. But, in fact, he was Mr Basil Arbuthnot’s (or was it Mr X’s?) chauffeur. The chauffeur glared at Honeybath. Honeybath, still on the ground, glared at him. And then the man turned and vanished.

  ‘Are you badly hurt?’ Diana Mariner was bending over him.

  ‘No, not badly.’ It was by some mysterious intuition that Honeybath knew this. ‘But get the police. Get the police, after all. I’ve been murdered. I mean, I’ve been–’ Honeybath was incoherent.

  ‘Can you get up?’ Miss Mariner was less concerned than peremptory. ‘This place just isn’t healthy. Get into the car. We’ll beat it before the fuss starts.’

  Not unnaturally, this wouldn’t have been easy. In fact, a fuss was starting. One or two people had paused near by, and were staring in the passive and unready way into which unexpected exigency tends to precipitate modern urban man. But from a little further off there came more purposive shouts, and Honeybath fancied he glimpsed a couple of uniformed men who might be either railway officials or policemen. By this time, however, he had actually been bundled into the Mini – a process making him aware that, if not hurt in the sense of being a mass of broken bones, he was certainly going to find himself atrociously bruised all over. The Mini was in motion, and he knew this to be quite wrong. Even if one has been only at the most sheerly receiving end of an accident, one certainly mustn’t bolt from it. One explains things to a constable, gives one’s name and address, is dusted down and handed one’s umbrella or whatever by sympathetic persons. One–

  He realized his mind was wandering. He hadn’t been involved in an accident. They had tried to murder him. Perhaps the girl felt that a second attempt might follow at any moment. Yes – this must be why she was hurrying him from the scene.

  He was conscious of being glad it was happening that way, but he didn’t at all know why. Then in an instant he did know why. Since childhood he had owned an irrational fear of hospitals and nursing homes, and what he chiefly associated street accidents with was the horror of suddenly finding oneself being borne away to such a place in a hideously ululating ambulance. Even if nothing much had happened to you, they snatched you up, hurtled you dangerously through the traffic, decanted you into a casualty ward, and treated you for shock – whatever that might be. He didn’t believe in shock, and from this it logically followed that he didn’t believe in treatment for it either. So it was just as well that this remarkable young woman had taken such decisive action.

  The Mini cornered so sharply that Honeybath was bumped against its side, and thus abruptly made aware that his numbed body would soon be aching all over. He was also made aware that his mind wasn’t working very well, and even that something physical seemed to be happening inside his head. Had he, perhaps, suffered a stroke? Was cerebral disaster of some sort a common concomitant of such an accident as he had just suffered? Would he presently develop a blinding headache, and be dead in the morning?

  But there hadn’t been an accident. They had tried to murder him. As this fact came back to Honeybath he understood that what was building up inside his skull was nothing more sinister than a large and legitimate indignation. And it wasn’t so much the attempt itself as its utterly unaccountable character that outraged him. He had done his job for these people (and thoroughly inexplicable the job, for a start, had been), and they had then merely turfed him out contemptuously, with his money in his pocket. Now – only minutes ago – they had done their best to pound him to a pulp between a lorry and a brick wall.

  Perhaps it was simply spite. The bank robbery had failed, and it was conceivable they knew it to have been throu
gh his instrumentality that this had happened and that Crumble had been caught. They were simply determined to get their own back. That was it. Or rather it wasn’t – Honeybath’s perturbed mind abruptly contradicted itself – since professional criminals don’t work that way. They don’t go in for vengeance, or if they do so it is only between themselves. They had tried to eliminate him because they knew he was on their track. They must have been trailing him wherever he went. One of them must have been on the train, and tumbled to the significance of his sheaf of maps. Perhaps even the extraordinary coincidence of his encountering Diana Mariner and conversing with her had been a point that had instantly got home. And at Swindon some swift signal had been given–

  Charles Honeybath shivered. (Since he was in fact in a state of shock which any ambulance man would have identified instantly, this was natural enough.) Had he bitten off more than he could chew? He had certainly got into deep water – and for the moment, at least, it felt uncommonly icy water as well. And it was sink or swim now. For he wasn’t going back. He wasn’t, for example, going to insist on being taken straight to the nearest police station, where he might contact Keybird and be placed under adequate protection until the whole affair was cleared up. On the contrary, he was going to go straight ahead.

  And he had, after all, enjoyed one enormous piece of luck. Had Arbuthnot’s tenancy (or Colonel Bunbury’s tenancy) not expired when it had, and had he rediscovered the place of his late incarceration on his own, he might have plunged in with a stupid hardihood which could have been fatal. As it was, the respectable Admiral Mariner was in front of him and the resourceful and beautiful Diana Mariner was at his side. Imlac House would no longer be a prison. It would be a fresh base for a decisive move against the villains.

  This was a comforting thought. Because comforting, it was relaxing. Honeybath felt tension drain out of him. Just for the moment, he need badger his brains no more. He closed his eyes; he shivered again; and, as usual, he fell asleep.

  16

  ‘And here we are,’ Diana Mariner said.

  ‘Yes, of course.’ Honeybath jerked this reply out of himself. He wasn’t sure whether it was the girl’s voice or the distant sound of a railway-train that had roused him from some obscurely stupefied condition; both hung momentarily on his ear now. ‘So we are.’

  ‘Then you recognize the house?’ Miss Mariner seemed gratified that this should be so.

  ‘Not exactly.’ Honeybath looked vaguely at what appeared to be a modern wing added to the large Georgian mansion. ‘You see, from the garden–’

  ‘Yes, I see. This is just our family Lebensraum at this end. They’ll have been putting the rest in mothballs until there’s another tenant. I say, can you get out?’

  ‘Certainly I can get out.’ Honeybath made a big effort, and did so. He found that he was quite steady on his feet, but that few joints in his body were much disposed to perform their normal offices without fuss. One painful movement brought him against the side of the Mini with a bump – and the bump produced a muffled clank. He remembered the bizarre circumstance that he had a revolver in his coat-pocket. He wondered whether such weapons ever discharged themselves accidentally. Something of the kind might well have happened when he was struck that glancing blow by the lethal lorry. If one had been a soldier one would understand these things. He had not.

  ‘And here is Daddy,’ Miss Mariner said. ‘Won’t this be a surprise for him?’

  It showed no sign of being anything of the sort. A grey-haired and distinguished-looking man had indeed appeared in a doorway. But it was at once clear that if Miss Mariner chose to decant from her car a dusty, dazed and crumpled stranger, that stranger would instantly be received as a guest, and without flicker, by Miss Mariner’s father.

  ‘I am so very glad to meet you,’ Admiral Mariner said, and shook hands. His tone was properly formal; he wasn’t in the least suggesting that his words should be taken literally; they were to be construed in some such sense as ‘You seem a perfectly reasonable chap and I don’t at all mind offering you a cup of tea.’ Honeybath approved of this. He felt secure with Admiral Mariner. It was odd that the Admiral should be an ambassador. Presumably it was to some predominantly maritime power.

  ‘Mr Honeybath is the portrait-painter,’ Miss Mariner said.

  ‘How very interesting.’ The Admiral’s manner of saying this was highly commendatory; he was acknowledging not only his guest’s known eminence but also the propriety with which his daughter had signalled it by her employment of the definite article. Honeybath was further comforted. He was sensitive to subtleties of this kind. ‘If I may say so,’ the Admiral added, ‘I look out for your work every year.’

  ‘Thank you very much.’ This further civility clearly referred to the Royal Academy’s annual jamboree at Burlington House. Honeybath received it gratefully.

  ‘That supermarket fellow who calls himself – what is it? – Lord President of the Council. To my mind, you had him to a T. And – talking of tea – come on in.’

  This, to Honeybath’s mind, was highly felicitous. Mariner actually did have his work in his head. He had proved it by the lightest of allusions. And then he had added that small, unassuming joke.

  ‘I’d like some tea very much,’ Honeybath said. ‘I come to you – and wholly through your daughter’s kindness – after rather an unnerving adventure.’ He was keeping his end up. ‘It’s why I need a clothes-brush first.’

  ‘As you certainly do, my dear sir.’ Mariner allowed himself to be sympathetically amused. ‘But has there been an accident? You’re not hurt? Our GP lives no distance away. Send for him in a moment.’

  ‘No, no – only a bruise or two.’

  ‘Mr Honeybath has been pretty lucky,’ Miss Mariner said. ‘They tried to murder him.’

  ‘What’s that?’ Mere urbanity dropped away from Admiral Mariner. He was instantly alert and formidable. It was evident that he could trust his daughter not to be merely silly. ‘Who are they, my dear?’

  ‘Daddy, I think you ought to prepare yourself for a shock. It looks as if your Colonel Bunbury was not what he appeared to be.’

  ‘Bunbury?’ Just for a second, Admiral Mariner was at a loss. ‘But, yes – of course. I’ve been doing my best to drive the fellow out of my head. And precisely because I’ve been suspecting there was something damned fishy about him. Mr Honeybath, tea will be ready by the time you’ve had a wash.’

  If tea was no great success, the fault wasn’t the Mariners’. There were still only the two of them, so that Honeybath conjectured that the Admiral must be a widower. They both worked hard, and on the principle of refreshment first and serious talk later. But Honeybath found his shivering fits coming back to him, and the clink of a tea-spoon could make him jump. Being upset in this way because of his near shave infuriated him; he had always cherished a myth of himself as inwardly quite a tough character. He still believed it to be true that in a crisis he would stand up and be counted. But at the moment he was behaving like an old wife. It was only when tea gave place to brandy – this through some unobtrusive exercise of tact on the Admiral’s part – that he really found his tongue. And, when he did so, it was with awkward abruptness.

  ‘Has everything gone?’ he asked. ‘Everything that was in any sense those people’s property, I mean. For example, my portrait.’

  ‘Your portrait?’ Admiral Mariner was perplexed. ‘They had a portrait of you? How very odd!’

  ‘Daddy, do think.’ For the first time, Diana hinted impatience with her parent. ‘You know Mr Honeybath paints portraits. He came to Imlac to paint one. But not, it seems, of Colonel Bunbury. And he’s anxious about it. It was got out of him, I think, by a kind of fraud. He wants to get it back.’

  ‘It isn’t likely they’ve left anything of the kind behind them.’ Admiral Mariner thought for a moment, and then distinguishably hesitated, as if before a delicate point. ‘Unless, of course – and I haven’t yet got the hang of the thing at all – unless the painting of a por
trait was a mere pretext for detaining Mr Honeybath at Imlac, and they simply shoved it aside when it had served its turn. If there’s any possibility of that sort, we had better hunt through the whole house. But it will take some time. If I might just be told–’

  ‘Yes, of course.’ And Honeybath took a deep breath (followed by a little more brandy) and told his story. He found it hard to organize at first, even although he had a sense of his own mind as clearing rapidly. It isn’t easy to render lucid an account of matters which have to be admitted as in essence inexplicable. But at least he had the advantage of an attentive auditory. The Admiral might well have felt that he was suffering politely a narrative of absurd events his own implication with which was accidental and a matter of mere bad luck. But in fact he listened with what was plainly intense concentration throughout. Honeybath, who was professionally alert to small muscular movements, was conscious of both father and daughter, indeed, several times tautening as if before an expectation of crisis. Neither of them interrupted until he had finished. When he did so, it was to hear from the Admiral something like a long, gentle sigh, and to observe that he was somehow sitting more easily in his chair.

  ‘You relieve me,’ the Admiral said. ‘A great deal of money has been stolen, and you yourself have been most outrageously treated. But at least nothing really horrible has occurred.’

  ‘It nearly has,’ Diana Mariner said. ‘There in the railway yard.’

  ‘Perfectly true.’ Her father nodded soberly. ‘The picture changes at that point. There is something almost engaging – you won’t misunderstand me, Honeybath – about the ingenuity, almost the fantasy, of the main plot. But when the epilogue turns out to be attempted murder we have to take another view of the thing.’

  ‘I’m not quite clear,’ Honeybath said, ‘about what was the main plot. The proportions of the thing disturb me. Renting this large house of yours for a long period, and putting up that whole sustained charade of the portrait-painting just to get me out of the way: I have an obstinate feeling that it doesn’t make sense.’