A Private View

by Michael Innes

  ‘The Duke of Horton called. He wanted to see you, and wouldn’t talk to anybody else. I suggested the Commissioner, but he said he didn’t like him. He must be very eccentric.’

  ‘Because he doesn’t like the Commissioner?’

  ‘I hadn’t that in mind.’ Cadover stuffed his own pipe with a steady hand poised beneath a poker face. ‘The Duke left you a message to say that somebody had stolen his aquarium and goldfish and silverfish. He must be very eccentric to come up from Berkshire just to report a thing like that.’

  ‘It seems a bit odd.’

  ‘I ventured to say that I didn’t know he was an ichthyologist. He gave me a queer look, and said that we seemed to keep some odd fish in the CID. But his manner was extremely courteous.’

  ‘Was it indeed?’ Appleby appeared interested. ‘That means he must be really perturbed… Anything more?’

  ‘Old Lady Clancarron.’

  ‘Oh, dear!’

  ‘Yes. She said that her Council was increasingly concerned over the present immorality and profaneness of the English stage. I suggested she see the Lord Chamberlain. She said the Lord Chamberlain was little better than a reprobate, and in the pocket of the Archbishops, who are fanatical playgoers. So I advised trying the PM. She’s probably in Downing Street now. I don’t think there’s been anything else. Except something about a picture – the theft of a picture from some gallery or other this afternoon. It seems to have happened’ – Cadover was at his most inexpressive – ‘in the presence of quite a distinguished gathering.’

  ‘And also of Judith and myself?’

  Quite faintly, Cadover smiled. Then he fished from his pocket a folded evening paper. ‘Wonderful likenesses these fellows manage to get nowadays.’ He smoothed out the paper and handed it to his chief. ‘They actually got you while you were looking at the very picture that was going to be stolen a few minutes later. A stroke of luck, that.’

  Appleby studied his own likeness on the open front page before him. It might be a good likeness, but he felt that the expression had got somewhat out of hand. He had the appearance of contemplating The Fifth and Sixth Days of Creation with something between large admiration and holy awe. Judith was not in the photograph, nor Mervyn Twist. But Hildebert Braunkopf was well to the fore, in a pose judiciously compounded of massive mercantile probity and delicate artistic feeling. Appleby handed back the paper without visible emotion. ‘Stolen?’ he said. ‘Isn’t that jumping to a conclusion? This little Brown or Braunkopf is playing up the Limbert affair for all it is worth. It struck me that this was just his notion of keeping the pot boiling.’

  Cadover shook his head. ‘We sent a man along – and he reported to me before I came in. His guess is that the picture really has been stolen… Look at the middle page.’

  Appleby took the paper again and looked. Another press photographer, it appeared, had enjoyed a profitable afternoon at the Da Vinci. This picture was of an elderly and respectable tradesman, dressed in a white apron, engaged in hoisting what was discernibly The Fifth and Sixth Days of Creation into a covered van. A small crowd of curious spectators watched him. And these were being somewhat officiously held back by a policeman.

  ‘It was quite simple,’ Cadover said. ‘This fellow simply walked into the gallery, took the picture from the wall, and walked away with it. Nobody thought to question him. And the police, as you see, can be represented as having pretty well bowed him out. The papers will make quite a thing of it.’

  ‘I’m sure they will.’

  ‘In fact, it’s already fairly brightly written up in this one.’ Cadover spoke with mournful satisfaction. ‘Listen. “It is understood that the authorities at Scotland Yard are somewhat baffled by the problem of issuing a description of the missing Limbert. It is a very modern and highly abstract work of art, which may now be described as elusive in more senses than one. When traced, however, there should be no difficulty over identification, since the Yard’s own Sir John Appleby, now an Assistant Commissioner of Police, happens to have been inspecting it closely only a few minutes before the theft (see picture). It is understood that Sir John was proposing to purchase the work for presentation to the National Gallery, Millbank.”’ Cadover paused. ‘Now, that’s a very interesting thing. Had the Tate agreed to take it?’

  ‘I didn’t ask. The business of my thinking of buying the picture is pure invention by this enterprising Braunkopf. Or rather’ – Appleby was candid – ‘not pure invention, because I was playing the fool rather, while the chap was showing me round. In fact, it’s a fair cop. And as I look like hearing a good deal about Gavin Limbert, perhaps you’d better tell me about him. You remember I haven’t been into the case in any detail.’

  ‘There isn’t much detail.’ Cadover set down his pipe and fixed his gaze upon the ceiling. He enjoyed exposition. ‘And if it wasn’t for this girl who has disappeared – her name is Arrow, Mary Arrow – there would hardly be a case either. Limbert may very well have shot himself. Artists do that sort of thing from time to time.’

  ‘I doubt whether many do it more than once. Had Limbert?’

  ‘Had he shown any disposition to take his own life before? Well, no – not that we’ve managed to hear of. But it’s not much of a point.’

  Appleby nodded. ‘I agree. Only, in this Da Vinci place, they have a photograph of him that I happened to take a good look at this afternoon. I judged it more informative than his paintings; and it suggested a lad whom the world wasn’t treating at all hardly. Was there any occasion for suicide – disease, debts, trouble with a girl?’

  ‘It doesn’t appear that there was. I was thinking that he might have felt that he had come to the end of his inspiration – that sort of thing.’ Cadover advanced this hypothesis without much confidence. ‘But I’ve made inquiries; and I’m told that when a young painter feels like that he doesn’t often do more than go out and get drunk.’

  ‘Had Limbert been out getting drunk?’

  ‘There was no alcohol in the body. For that matter, there was none in his studio either. But it did look as if he’d had some sort of brain-storm. Everything all over the place.’

  ‘Artists are often untidy – much oftener untidy than suicidal.’

  ‘But Limbert was an exception there. I’ve checked up on it. People say that he was an orderly young man. He’d been two years in the navy, and they say he took back into civilian life the sort of habits you learn there. Everything having its place.’

  ‘Even a girl?’

  ‘Even this girl Mary Arrow. No evidence that he was badly worked up about her. The man down below told me that Gavin – that’s Limbert, you know – had liked her thighs. I felt a bit out of my depth’ – Cadover was still staring at the ceiling – ‘so I gave the point particular attention. This man down below felt that it was what you might call a purely artistic liking. Were there any – um – undraped studies at the Da Vinci?’

  ‘Were there any nudes? If there were, they had been decidedly disintegrated in the interest of the syncretic principle. That’s the current phrase, by the way, for banishing anything recognizable from a painting. You’d better know.’

  ‘I’ll make a note of it.’ Cadover was seriously interested. ‘Well, Limbert painted this girl – or anyway her thighs – and sometimes he took her out to a meal.’

  ‘She’s a professional model?’

  ‘No. She’s by way of being a musician, and she lives – or until she disappeared she lived – right at the top. You ought to come and see the place.’

  ‘We’ll go now. I’ll get a car.’ Appleby picked up a telephone. ‘Carry on.’

  ‘I thought you’d be expected home to dinner.’ Beneath the faint irony of a bachelor Cadover masked considerable gratification at this alacrity. ‘I asked if it was usual for girls who weren’t models to be painted in that way. This man – the man down below – said No, not very. But he supposed Miss Arrow to be a perfectly respectable person. She just dropped in on Limbert from time to time to lend a hand – or
, as you might say, a thigh.’

  ‘It all sounds quite freezingly innocent. But Mary Arrow has nevertheless vanished?’

  ‘Completely. She seems to have walked out of her flat with no more ado than if she had been going round the corner for half a pint of milk. There are relations beginning to make a fuss – and quite rightly. Of course this isn’t so very long ago. Limbert has been dead just ten days. The girl may simply have lost her nerve and bolted somewhere for a while. She may have reckoned that she might have to appear at an inquest and explain about acting as a model. And modesty–’

  ‘Perhaps so. You mean she may have felt that it would distress her old father, the clergyman – that sort of thing?’

  Cadover was surprised. ‘I hadn’t gathered that you knew–’

  ‘They are usually out of country rectories, girls like that. But presumably she would have reckoned that her old father would be even more upset when she just vanished.’ Appleby got up and moved over to his hat and coat. ‘I think it queer.’

  ‘But one can’t call it much to go on. The probability is that Limbert did shoot himself. He was shot through the roof of the mouth, almost at point-blank range, and the revolver was lying on the floor beside him.’

  ‘Navy type?’

  ‘No. And nothing else to connect him with it either.’

  ‘Fingerprints?’

  ‘You may remember one doesn’t often get anything one can call a print on those things with heavily cross-hatched bone butts.’ Cadover spoke as to one who had long passed lamentably above and beyond the practical investigation of crime. ‘And there weren’t any unexplained fingerprints anywhere in the studio either.’

  ‘In fact your guess is suicide in a fit of depression?’

  ‘It’s certainly what the coroner will put into the heads of his jury at the adjourned inquest.’ Cadover was cautious. ‘I wouldn’t say more than that it’s the superficial picture, however. There may be something quite different beneath the surface.’

  A low purr came from an instrument on Appleby’s desk.

  ‘There’s the car,’ he said. ‘Limbert’s place was in Chelsea? We can be there in ten minutes – and give the Tate a wave on the way.’

  Gas Street is a cul-de-sac running parallel to King’s Road, and is approached from a quiet street which itself comes to a dead end before reaching the river. Despite the utilitarian associations of its name, it is far from being deficient in a sense of style. One side, indeed, is frankly a line of mews, and at the bottom is nothing more striking than a high, blank brick wall pierced by a single small and unobtrusive door. The remaining aspect, however, is attractive – and attractive after a fashion characteristic of the district. It is a terrace of diminutive, high, narrow houses, with frontages which are neither drearily identical nor planned in disregard each of the other, for they belong to a period of admirable taste in the unobtrusive domestic façade. Moreover Gas Street is inhabited by people decidedly proud of their proprietorship of these mild architectural amenities. In the whole street there are no two front doors painted in the same hue. But – correspondingly – there is no jarring note from end to end – the colours blending or contrasting with each other and with the mellow brick or clean stucco around them in an exhibition of the nicest taste. In Gas Street, in fact, a good deal of fuss is made over that sort of thing. Areas that are in themselves no more than narrow and gloomy pits are turned ingeniously into miniature shrubberies, and up the railings that guard them interesting creepers ramify from gaily painted tubs. Frequently small objects of statuary, valuable whether from their antiquity or their intrinsic merit, are boldly exposed upon the very fringe of the footpath, just as if they were of no more account than the gnomes and frogs and rabbits similarly obtruded by other classes of society. And it is plain to the most casual passer-by that the Gas Street interiors must exhibit an answering refinement. Most of the lower windows are seldom curtained, and one may peer – perhaps over a line of diminutive cacti, or of delicate fantasies in finely blown glass – into tiny rooms where every object is the fruit of vigilant artistic consideration. Provincial persons, seeking to gratify their young with a view of the red-coated pensioners of Chelsea Hospital, and taking the single wrong turning that lands them in this impressive blind alley, are frequently so overawed by its pervasive refinement that they may be observed retreating from it on tiptoe.

  There must be much quiet prosperity tucked away in Gas Street. On a Friday evening it is lined with cars of all but the most expensive sort, and into these the inhabitants may be seen packing themselves and quite surprising numbers of children in preparation for departure to some weekend cottage adapted to the same species of comfortably Lilliputian housekeeping. It was this spectacle – that of the sardine era in the history of the English upper middle class – that greeted Appleby and Cadover as they approached their destination.

  ‘It doesn’t look at all like what they call the scene of the crime.’ Appleby peered out at a chromium-plated baby carriage being hoisted to the roof of a large black saloon. ‘Too overpoweringly respectable altogether. I don’t feel that policemen have any business here.’

  Cadover chuckled. ‘There’s a funny thing now,’ he said. ‘As it happens, Gas Street was stuffing with police on the very night that Limbert died.’

  ‘Stuffing with police?’

  ‘Yes. The fact is going to emerge a trifle uncomfortably if the coroner really spreads himself. A policeman, you might say, at the bottom of every area, and another perched up on every lamp-post.’

  ‘Why on earth–’

  ‘Lady Clancarron.’

  ‘Bless my soul!’

  ‘You see that brick wall at the end of the road? There’s a nightclub through there – the Thomas Carlyle.’

  ‘I think I’ve heard of it. But it seems a queer name for a night-club.’

  ‘No doubt it’s felt to be rather a smart joke.’ Cadover made this sage observation bear the air of a sombre rebuke of the frivolous classes. ‘Of course there’s nothing Turnell and his people don’t know about it. But Lady Clancarron got it into her head that the place is a haunt of the most extreme vice. And she worried the Home Secretary until he begged the Commissioner to lay on a really big show. So that night the place was sealed off as if it contained Guy Fawkes and a whole Gunpowder Plot. And Lady Clancarron and poor Turnell directed the raid between them from a radio-equipped car on the Embankment. It was while the whole police force of the division, more or less, was poking into dustbins in search of half a bottle of whisky that this chap Limbert was coming to his mysterious end. If you hadn’t been off hobnobbing with foreigners you’d have heard about it.’

  ‘I’ve noticed the Commissioner being mum about something.’ Appleby reached for the door handle. ‘And Limbert had his studio in one of these natty dwellings? Not quite the sort of Chelsea I’d imagined for him.’

  ‘It rather breaks down at these last two houses.’ Cadover climbed out of the car after Appleby. ‘Limbert’s flat is in the one at the end – one floor up. The house hasn’t been modernized or improved at all, and the rents are quite low. Counting Limbert and Mary Arrow, there were four tenants in the place. And all artistic.’

  Appleby shook his head. ‘Surely not. It’s the dressy people up the road who are artistic. Limbert and his friends I take to have been artists.’

  ‘Wouldn’t it be the business of artists to be artistic?’ Cadover looked at his chief with all the appearance of serious inquiry.

  ‘They leave that to the mugs. Do we go straight in?’

  ‘Straight in, sir, and up to the first floor.’ Without ceremony, Cadover threw open the front door of the last house in Gas Street. ‘What they call bijou.’

  To Appleby the gem-like quality of the place was scarcely apparent. But it was certainly on a small scale. There was a door on the left, a door straight in front, and a narrow staircase edging its way up the wall on the right. On this wall the presence of creative activity at once declared itself, since somebody had e
nriched it with a rapidly executed Crucifixion in modern dress. Cadover eyed this with disfavour – as well he might, for the Roman soldiery were represented by a variety of criminal types in the uniform of the metropolitan police. ‘You might gaol the chap who did that,’ he said. ‘It’s uttering an obscene advertisement. Six months.’

  Appleby shook his head. ‘I doubt it. We’re in a private house.’

  ‘It’s what you might call a common staircase.’ Cadover was obstinate. ‘Six months, or even–’

  ‘Dead common.’

  They turned. The door on the left had opened, and displayed an unshaven man in a blue blouse. Cadover looked at him with a sort of modified rancour. ‘Good evening, Mr Boxer. The Assistant Commissioner is in charge of this affair now.’

  Mr Boxer, rightly interpreting this as a form of introduction, nodded affably to Appleby and then turned again to Cadover. ‘Lot of jaw,’ he said.

  Cadover frowned. ‘I’m aware that a good many questions have had to be asked–’

  ‘No, no. Your friend the commissionaire. Lot of jaw, and that long upper lip. Velasquez – in modern dress too.’

  ‘Commissioner.’ Cadover was incensed. ‘From Scotland Yard.’

  ‘You don’t say so?’ The unshaven man showed interest. ‘They keep one at the door of the Thomas Carlyle. But I didn’t think you’d have them at the Yard – just use bobbies. Won’t you come in?’ And Mr Boxer stepped aside with the most perfect friendliness. ‘I’m a bit stuck, to tell you the truth. And Grace is beginning to sulk. You may clear the air.’

  At this Appleby took the initiative. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I think we’ll come in. Got a good light?’

  ‘Damned awful – see for yourself.’ They had entered a room of something less than moderate size, appropriated to the uses of a painter’s studio. ‘I have to break it in through all that gauze. And that’s why the values keep going wrong, if you ask me. Just take a look at them.’ And Boxer pointed in gloomy distaste at a large canvas standing on an easel. ‘Pitiful.’