The Mysterious Commission

by Michael Innes

  The pursuing vehicle screamed and jerked to a halt, baffled. Its searchlight swung upward on an arc, and for a moment searched the skies in vain. Then it found the helicopter, and held it – a fast diminishing object, soaring into the pale-grey dawn. The roar of its engine grew fainter. The roar of the engine abruptly stopped; there was a brief splutter again; the helicopter vanished from within its halo of light. A moment later, and from ground-level, came a crash, a shattering explosion, a leaping sheet of flame. And within the same fraction of a second it was just possible to distinguish another and totally different sound. In itself this sound would normally have been quite something, since it represented the shattering of every pane of glass on the vulnerable side of Imlac House.

  Finally, there was Detective Superintendent Keybird’s voice. It spoke close to Honeybath’s ear, but might have been a dwarf’s.

  ‘Poor bastards,’ Keybird said. ‘No time to warm up their bloody bus.’

  From this appalling spectacle Honeybath turned away – literally and through an angle of 180 degrees. The result was not exactly relaxing. Imlac House was on fire too.

  And it was quite an independent affair. For a moment, indeed, it was natural to suppose that the one disaster was a consequence of the other; that incendiary material from the helicopter had somehow transmitted itself to the building. But this was impossible. The helicopter’s fate had overtaken it only seconds ago. Imlac was already well alight. Honeybath remembered the dull glow he had remarked in the windows of one wing. That had been the start of what he was witnessing now. The gang, in fact, had fired their stronghold as they left it. It was an awesome thought. To kindle one conflagration and be destroyed by another almost at once was as macabre a feat as could be conceived.

  But for what rational purpose had Arbuthnot and his crew paused to effect the immolation of Imlac? The answer was clear. They had been determined to leave as few intelligible traces of themselves as possible. And the best means of securing that end had been indiscriminate destruction. There would be things impossible to carry away in a hurry which might yet–

  Charles Honeybath found that he was running again.

  So, whether in one direction or another, were most of the policemen. They were being required, he supposed, to turn themselves into impromptu firemen as best they could until the real Fire Brigade arrived. It was as a consequence of this necessity, no doubt, that his immediate conduct went unremarked.

  There could be little chance of the fire’s not rapidly spreading through the entire extent of Imlac. It had been started with calculated skill at the windward end of the house, and dawn was bringing with it a freshening breeze which must already be assisting the flames on their way. But what emerged from the central block at present was mostly smoke. Rather a lot of smoke, it was true. But smoke incinerates nobody, and you can probably make a dash through quite a wall of it, if only you treat it as a diver treats water. Or so Honeybath speculated, and decided that the speculation was to be acted upon.

  Unfortunately he had to waste time in getting round to the farther side of the house. That open front door, glimpsed as he had been driven up, represented his only notion of how to get inside. On the other hand there was just a chance that by entering that way he would find himself on not totally unfamiliar ground. He did have a dim memory of a large hall, and also a curiously sharp visual impression of that lift and its immediate surroundings. And the lift, could he gain it and operate it, would take him to territory his knowledge of which was not in doubt.

  He rounded a corner, gained a terrace, and raced along it with the main façade of the mansion on his right hand. Somebody shouted at him – warningly, he supposed – but from quite far off; there wasn’t a chance that he could be intercepted now. Electric lighting was still on all over the place, and as he dashed up a short flight of steps and through the front door he was for seconds more conscious of being blinded by the glare than suffocated by the smoke. In fact there wasn’t much smoke – not here as yet. And in another second – quite wonderfully – the lift was before him. He pressed a button, and its door opened; he entered, pressed another button, and the door closed and he began to ascend. It was as easy as that. He felt ashamed of being disposed to import a certain element of bravado into so little hazardous an operation. He would be out again within ten minutes. And with him would be the portrait of Mr X – if, that was to say, the scoundrels had abandoned it to the flames. He didn’t now kid himself that they were likely to have done anything else.

  Nor had they. What he thought of as his own corridor was brightly illuminated; so was his painting-room through its open door; and there his canvas was, negligently perched against a wall. He grabbed it, turned, and ran. He found himself running towards a sheet of flame.

  And he was running amid uproar. He recalled from the era of the blitz how nothing is more terrifying about a large blaze than the sheer racket and crackle of it. You used to imagine that paratroops had descended and that there was small-arms fire going on all around you. But at least he had regained the door of the lift, although the hot breath of the monster was now on his brow.

  And then he remembered the Monet.

  It would have been silly to pretend that going on to his bedroom was other than the act of a lunatic. But no – it could in a fashion be rationalized. For some weird reason this seemed important to Honeybath as he plunged on. There would still be towels, running water. You soaked something and wrapped it round you…that sort of thing. But, in fact, a Monet was a Monet (which didn’t mean it was a Cézanne). And a Honeybath was just a Honeybath. He’d rescue both, but he wouldn’t just rescue his own damned masterpiece alone. Perhaps it was equally rational simply to stand by the way you were made. The way God had secretly made you – deep inside Honeybath, successful RA.

  For the inside of a couple of minutes more God seemed to be approving of this romantically disinterested performance. Honeybath was conscious of a singeing smell, and suspected it came from his own hair. But he had a picture under each arm, and the lift was yet again before him. Then God switched off. It was almost literally like that. All the lights went out. Presumably the Fire Brigade had arrived – or the police had remembered the first thing the Fire Brigade does: cut off the power-supply at its source.

  Not in complete darkness, but to a lurid flicker, Honeybath pressed the button. Not unnaturally, nothing happened. And he wondered where, in this damned house, the staircases lay.

  He was lying on grass, bathed in the hard light of arc lamps. He heard the crash of a falling roof, and then the voice of Detective Superintendent Keybird. Keybird, in one of his furies, was yelling something about his being a bloody fool. He recalled the mildly comical fact that ‘bloody’ was the strongest swear-word this top cop allowed himself. Keybird was pointing.

  ‘What the hell is that?’ Keybird yelled.

  ‘It’s the Portrait of an Unknown Gentleman.’

  ‘And that?’

  Honeybath rolled over and glimpsed Claude Monet’s Water Lilies. Just one among industrious old Monet’s innumerable expanses of the things.

  ‘Il miglior fabbro,’ Charles Honeybath said, and fainted away.

  22

  It was a very good breakfast – or very good for a casually chosen country pub. Honeybath was doing justice to it; he found himself much more hungry than tired. But Keybird was letting his coffee (and even the coffee wasn’t bad) grow cold. The files which had arrived (in a more dependable helicopter) from New Scotland Yard were absorbing him completely. But eventually he looked up.

  ‘You began from the portrait,’ he said.

  ‘Yes, of course. After all, I’d painted it.’

  ‘It strikes me, if I may say so, as pretty good. Not that I’m an expert, Mr Honeybath.’

  ‘It’s not painted for experts. It’s painted for posterity – just like the Monet.’

  ‘Yes, of course. I understand the feeling. But you began from it right at the start?’

  ‘I think I may be said to have
begun from The Red-Headed League.’

  ‘From what?’

  ‘One of the earliest of the Sherlock Holmes stories. I can recall it perfectly clearly, although I haven’t read it for forty years. Jabez Somebody is a pawnbroker with red hair. He’s lured away from his shop for a considerable period of time in order to sit somewhere or other copying out the Encyclopaedia Britannica for quite good pay. He’s been told a fantastic story about an American millionaire who has left money to benefit red-headed men in this absurd way. It was really because a band of crooks wanted to operate from his cellar – ‘running a tunnel to some other building’. I believe these are dear old Conan Doyle’s ipsissima verba. Well, I just saw that I was not a Jabez. The proportions of the whole thing simply didn’t admit of the bank robbery’s being the main thing. It was a sideline – as we now know.’

  ‘We do, indeed.’

  ‘Unlike the handwritten Encyclopaedia, the portrait of Mr X was really needed. But why? Well, a portrait by me – to say nothing of accompanying sketches with the sitter’s thumbprints on them – is evidence of the sitter’s being alive. But there are less oblique, laborious, and expensive ways of proving a man alive. You can just exhibit him. But it wouldn’t be easy to exhibit Mr X – William Mangrove, that is – convincingly without exhibiting something else as well: Mr X’s hopeless imbecility and pervasive amnesia. “We’ve got Mangrove. Pay up, or we use the information he can provide us with.” That, roughly speaking, was the formula I seemed to see.’

  ‘Mr Honeybath, you’re wasted as a portrait painter. If you’d taken to another line of business, you’d have beaten Dupin, Holmes – the whole lot.’ Keybird had produced this outrageous sentiment on a note of unflawed admiration. ‘For how right you were.’

  ‘But my understanding of the affair – the role of the twin brother, for example – stops just there.’ Honeybath pointed to the files. ‘And, if it isn’t too irregular, I’d like to know.’

  ‘Regularity be damned,’ Keybird said. ‘Listen.’

  ‘Things were a bit primitive back in the fifties,’ Keybird began in a reminiscent tone. ‘There was only a single really big gang – the one run by William and Henry Mangrove. It was formidable enough, largely because they were men of education and had several of their own sort around them. But the Great Bullion Robbery broke them. At least, it seemed like that. William was gaoled for a long term of years, and Henry bolted abroad and was never heard of again. Not that there wasn’t a fly in the ointment. The bullion was never recovered.’

  ‘Not a scrap of it?’

  ‘Not a scrap. And we only knew two things. The first was that there were enough villains living in unobtrusive affluence to show that a certain amount of it had been successfully marketed. The other was that the original Mangrove gang had split in half. And both halves prospered. Where there had been one big criminal organization there were now two.’ Keybird chuckled. ‘And you’ve passed the time of day with both of them.’

  ‘Quite so.’

  ‘We’ll give these two rival gangs your own names: the Arbuthnot gang and the Mariner gang. Well, the next publicly known facts are these: William Mangrove escaped from gaol and vanished. His charred remains were recovered from a burnt-out house in Manchester some weeks later.’

  ‘But they weren’t really his remains at all.’

  ‘Obviously they were his brother’s. Now, what seems to have happened was this. The Mariner gang controlled by far the greater part of the booty, and they became nervous that William Mangrove, locked up in gaol as he was, was going to be got at in some way and persuaded to talk. So they decided to spring him.’

  ‘To what?’

  ‘To effect his escape – which they did. But villains sprung in that way are never very good lives. As often as not, they’re got out only to be effectively silenced for good. Murdered, in fact.’

  ‘Good God!’

  ‘As you say – good God.’ Keybird was faintly amused. ‘But the Mariner gang reckoned without the extreme cunning of the Arbuthnot gang. Henry Mangrove was back in England by this time, and the Arbuthnot gang contrived to switch brothers at what might be called just the psychological moment. So when the Mariner gang thought they were liquidating William they were in fact liquidating Henry. And, of course, the Arbuthnot gang had got William. He looked like being an immensely powerful weapon in the bitter struggle in which the rival gangs were by this time engaged. Only, of course, here’s something psychological again.’ Keybird grinned. ‘William Mangrove turned out to believe himself to be the Emperor Napoleon. And he remembered nothing that could be of either the slightest use or harm to anybody. It became the tactic of the Arbuthnot gang to prove they held the authentic William Mangrove while concealing this awkward mental deficiency. And that’s where your portrait came in.’

  ‘A damned expensive dodge, if you ask me. And they paid me the whole fee! I can’t get over that.’

  ‘Vanity. Impossible to overestimate the vanity of those cattle. And they really did want a slap-up portrait of their former admired chief. For their boardroom, no doubt. Aping their betters.’ Keybird paused. ‘If they are much their betters,’ he added cynically. ‘Big business and big crime – you can have the lot, so far as I’m concerned.’

  ‘It’s a point of view.’ Honeybath was a little startled by this heterodox flash from a pillar of the law. ‘But what then?’

  ‘When the Arbuthnot lot discovered that the Mariner girl had contacted you they promptly tried to kill you instantly. Failing at that, and knowing the Mariners had carried you off, they realized that their whole plan was a frost, since your account of your adventures would reveal the complete uselessness of poor old Mr X. So they mounted what may he called a counter-offensive in a great hurry – contacting the treacherous Sinon and arranging their raid.’

  ‘What good was it going to do them?’

  ‘They were going to carry off Mariner as a hostage, I suppose. And, no doubt, deal with you more effectively, second time round. You knew too much.’

  ‘Well, well, well.’ Honeybath made to pour himself another cup of coffee, and then paused. ‘They took William Mangrove on the helicopter with them?’

  ‘Yes, they did. I suppose they didn’t like to think of such an eminent old wreck being returned inside. A humanitarian thought, you might say.’

  ‘Everybody in it died instantly?’

  ‘Everybody. Six men, all told.’

  ‘Able was I ere I saw Elba.’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’ Keybird was puzzled.

  ‘Oh, nothing. Just something Mr X once said.’ Honeybath’s glance went to his portrait, which stood against the wall of the pub’s little coffee-room. ‘I suppose my painting will have to be produced in evidence?’

  ‘Definitely, I’d say. The Mariners, so called, will be going on trial. And Crumble and Sister Agnes and several others.’

  ‘I don’t like the idea of it.’

  ‘Of these people getting their deserts?’ Keybird was astonished.

  ‘Not that. And I shan’t mind figuring at the Old Bailey. Only, I’d rather my painting didn’t.’

  ‘Now, that’s a very odd thing.’ And Keybird shook his head uncomprehendingly. ‘I’d suppose it to be a very good advertisement, Mr Honeybath. A very good advertisement, indeed.’

  Honeybath Titles in order of first publication

  These titles can be read as a series, or randomly as standalone novels

  1. The Mysterious Commission 1974

  2. Honeybath’s Haven 1977

  3. Lord Mullion’s Secret 1981

  4. Appleby and Honeybath 1983

  Synopses (Both Series & ‘Stand-alone’ Titles)

  Published by House of Stratus

  The Ampersand Papers

  While Appleby is strolling along a Cornish beach, he narrowly escapes being struck by a body falling down a cliff. The body is that of Dr Sutch, an archivist, and he has fallen from the North Tower of Treskinnick Castle, home of Lord Ampersand. Two possible motivations pr
esent themselves to Appleby – the Ampersand gold, treasure from an Armada galleon; and the Ampersand papers, valuable family documents that have associations with Wordsworth and Shelley.

  Appleby and Honeybath

  Every English mansion has a locked room, and Grinton Hall is no exception – the library has hidden doors and passages…and a corpse. But when the corpse goes missing, Sir John Appleby and Charles Honeybath have an even more perplexing case on their hands – just how did it disappear when the doors and windows were securely locked? A bevy of helpful houseguests offer endless assistance, but the two detectives suspect that they are concealing vital information. Could the treasures on the library shelves be so valuable that someone would murder for them?

  Appleby and the Ospreys

  Clusters, a great country house, is troubled by bats, as Lord and Lady Osprey complain to their guests, who include first rate detective, Sir John Appleby. In the matter of bats, Appleby is indifferent, but he is soon faced with a real challenge – the murder of Lord Osprey, stabbed with an ornate dagger in the library.

  Appleby at Allington

  Sir John Appleby dines one evening at Allington Park, the Georgian home of his acquaintance Owain Allington, who is new to the area. His curiosity is aroused when Allington mentions his nephew and heir to the estate, Martin Allington, whose name Appleby recognises. The evening comes to an end but just as Appleby is leaving, they find a dead man – electrocuted in the son et lumière box which had been installed in the grounds.

  The Appleby File

  There are fifteen stories in this compelling collection, including: Poltergeist – when Appleby’s wife tells him that her aunt is experiencing trouble with a Poltergeist, he is amused but dismissive, until he discovers that several priceless artefacts have been smashed as a result; A Question of Confidence – when Bobby Appleby’s friend, Brian Button, is caught up in a scandalous murder in Oxford, Bobby’s famous detective father is their first port of call; The Ascham – an abandoned car on a narrow lane intrigues Appleby and his wife, but even more intriguing is the medieval castle they stumble upon.