A Private View

by Michael Innes

  And by the time he reached the yard it was empty. The gates were open. From the lane he heard the rumble of a lorry and then a grinding of gears. He dashed out in time to see a covered van of considerable size disappearing into the darkness. The position looked bad, but he knew that he had a chance yet. The van was moving in the direction of a main road. However reckless the driver might be, or however skilful, he would have to slow down – even stop – if there chanced to be a stream of traffic blocking his path. Appleby ran.

  The van was slackening speed for the corner. He heard the grind of gears again and saw it lurch almost to a stop; ahead, there was a constant flicker of lights from close travelling traffic into which the van was unable to filter. He was almost up with it when it moved again, swinging left hazardously under the nose of a bus. In front of him Appleby saw a handle and grabbed. A door swung open, and simultaneously the van checked its pace. He heard brakes scream behind him. In a second he might be pinned between van and bus – and a good deal more uncomfortably than between old Moe Steptoe’s wardrobes. Appleby jumped; the van jerked forward again; the door swung to behind him. Without precisely intending it, he was actually travelling with his enemies in their own conveyance.

  It was an odd achievement, and Appleby wanted to laugh. But he had had enough, he reflected, of carefree amusement for one night, and his behaviour from now on had better be entirely policemanly and rational. He still had his torch, which he had slipped into his pocket when the man in the junk shop sprang at him. And he had Steptoe’s pistol. He produced both, placed himself in a posture of preparedness in the swaying van, and snapped on the light.

  For a moment his heart sank. It was hard not to believe that he must have made a mistake – that he had risked his neck to no better purpose than to have boarded the wrong vehicle. For what he appeared to be in presence of was an orthodox, small-scale removal. The van was, in fact, a sort of pantechnicon. And about two-thirds of it was packed in a fully professional fashion with carpets, furniture, and small crates – with everything, indeed, that goes technically by the name of household effects. The remaining third, in which he found himself, was empty except for a pile of sacking and some wisps of wood wool. From the driver of the van, and whoever might be with him in his cab, Appleby was cut off by the entire bulk of stuff being transported. Unless and until the van stopped in some isolated situation, he was now free of any threat from his antagonists.

  And they were his antagonists. The notion that he had made some absurd mistake was one that he could put out of his head. For this – when one came to think it out – was precisely the safest way in which to make off with a valuable picture. Stuff it into the middle of a genuine removal – or of something having all the appearance of being that – and only a very pertinacious hunt would be likely to run you to earth. The conviction grew on Appleby that for the second time that day he was virtually within arm’s length of Vermeer’s Aquarium. In other words, the stolen picture would be back at Scamnum Court tomorrow.

  A sudden apprehension assailed Appleby even as he reached this comfortable conclusion. The door through which he had leapt had swung to behind him. Had it thereby, by any chance, closed itself more securely than when he had managed to tug it open? If so, could it be opened from the inside? Was it conceivable that he had made himself a prisoner?

  He swung his torch on the door. It was in two halves, vertically divided. One of the halves had bolts engaging with the roof and floor; the other had no visible fastening at all. Neither of the bolts was thrust home, yet the whole had the appearance of being firmly secured. This looked bad. Appleby, with difficulty balancing himself on the swaying floor, gave a cautious shove. Nothing happened. He thrust harder, and both sides of the door gave, so that he expected the momentum of the van to send them flying open with a crash. But nothing of the sort occurred; a gap of less than a couple of inches appeared between the two halves, making it possible to take a squint at the outer world; and at that they obstinately stuck. With growing misgiving, Appleby investigated further. By straining hard it was possible to increase this gap by something like a to further inch at the bottom. But at the top nothing whatever could be done. He guessed that some lateral bar had there fallen into place, and that he was in consequence himself as firmly imprisoned as a lion or tiger in a zoo.

  But at least he now had a view. The van had as yet not gone far. It was trundling up Sloane Street in the direction of Knightsbridge, and had just passed the intersection of Pont Street. Immediately behind it was a pale green Humber saloon. Appleby wondered whether, by shouting or by waving a handkerchief through the crack, he had any chance of securing the effective intervention of the driver of this vehicle. The idea, on the whole, seemed a poor one, and he paused to think again. His object must be to have the van stopped by the police, and this he had better achieve as soon as possible. Amid the traffic of central London, indeed, the job might take a lot of doing, whereas if the van moved out through the suburbs it must come to districts the quiet of which would make attention easier to secure. On the other hand, central London is the place for policemen. The theatres would be out by now, the taxis at their busiest, and plenty of constables about with an eye on the traffic. Ten to one, the van intended to swing right for Hyde Park Corner, and the chance of its being brought to a standstill there was a substantial one. Even so, it was doubtful if anything could be done by thumping and shouting. But he still had Steptoe’s gun.

  As the van turned into Knightsbridge Appleby brought the pistol from his pocket. His hand grasping it would certainly not go through the crack, but at least the muzzle could be made to protrude. And a pistol spitting fire from the back of a closed van was a device admirably calculated to attract police notice.

  Unfortunately Appleby could not see it as being other than uncomfortably dangerous. It was not even as if one shot would do. A number would be required, if he was to make certain that the origin of the disturbance was located. And there is no method of projecting a stream of lead into a London street without causing grave hazard. Bullets discharged high in air descend when spent with lethal momentum; bullets aimed at a highway ricochet unpredictably. Appleby took his time at this problem. He had found no solution when the van successfully negotiated Hyde Park Corner without a stop and moved at an increased speed up the Ring. That meant that in the way of major hold-ups there was still Marble Arch. Appleby peered out. The green Humber was still close behind. Hard on its tail was a muffled figure on a motor bicycle, and behind that again was an old Austin Seven.

  They were running past Grosvenor Gate when a new set of considerations presented themselves to Appleby. Earlier in the evening he had been in much of a hurry to secure a little quiet fun on his own, to take a dip into his less unadventurous past. Was it really necessary now to scramble out so quickly? Rescued from a closed van by a couple of coppers on point duty, he would become for a time a very sufficient figure of fun – even if the Duke of Horton thereby got back his Vermeer. There was no harm in that. But still – why not carry on? More closely scrutinized, was carrying-on not, after all, the most rational course to adopt? Helpless in this van, he might exhaust the automatic pistol without in fact attracting any attention at all – or at least without securing any effective interception. On the other hand, if he stayed put until the thing had reached its destination and was opened up, he would be armed, and his position would have all the strength of complete surprise. He had successfully confronted tougher situations often enough.

  And Appleby let Marble Arch go by. The van turned into the Bayswater Road. That almost certainly meant that it was seeking one of the western arteries: the Exeter road, the Bath road, or perhaps up through Uxbridge for Beaconsfield and Oxford. He peered out once more. It was raining and the street and pavements were beginning to shine beneath their lamps. The van was still heading both the green Humber and the motor bike, and behind these he could just glimpse the little Austin. Presently he had better extinguish his torch. This journey might go on into the sma
ll hours, and it was essential to conserve the battery. But first it would be a good idea to inspect the mechanism of the automatic. Appleby sat down on sacking and put this resolution into effect.

  The pistol was empty. The cartridge fired in old Moe Steptoe’s office had been the last in the magazine.

  7

  The brandy had sunk remarkably low in its bottle before the Duke of Horton was ready to depart. Dismissing the Scamnum Vermeer from his mind without the least discernible effort, he had embarked upon an extended description of the present state of his Large Blacks. Large Blacks, it appeared, were exceedingly docile, a quietness of habit attributable to their ears, which hang well forward over the eyes. The Duke’s main concern was to obtain a heavy jowl, and well-developed hindquarters with an abundance of fine hair. The subject was one which Judith Appleby judged decidedly soporific, and she found it increasingly difficult to repel from her mind a disquieting vision of gigantic Negroes, with all these attributes prominently displayed, placidly grazing the fields of Scamnum Ducis. But when her guest had finally taken his leave, with Goldfish and Silverfish tucked nonchalantly under his arm, she found herself abruptly awake again. The last thing she wanted to do was to go to bed.

  And John, she well knew, might be away for hours. The affair of Gavin Limbert had got a grip on him. For that matter, it had got a grip on her too. She was wondering if her knowledge of artists and their ways could somehow be exploited to produce a fresh line on the mystery, or if she could think of some likely personal contact of Limbert’s, when she was disturbed by the ringing of the telephone bell. On picking up the receiver she was greeted with what she at first took to be a terrified scream, followed by a high-pitched gabble in Chinese. A moment later she knew that she was merely listening to the excited voice of Mervyn Twist.

  ‘Dear Lady Appleby, what a pleasure to run into you this afternoon! But have you heard the terrible news?’

  ‘You mean the theft of that picture from the Da Vinci?’

  ‘Yes, indeed. But of course you have. You were still in the gallery when it happened. It makes me quite ill to think of it.’

  ‘My being in the gallery when it happened?’

  ‘No – no indeed, dear Lady Appleby… Judith.’ Twist’s voice rose to yet a higher pitch, so that Judith wondered if it ever became blessedly inaudible except to the very young, like the squeaking of bats. ‘I am so upset – and positively épuisé. With horror. And with uneasiness. I feel there is something that I might have done.’

  ‘About Limbert?’

  ‘Yes, indeed. I wish I could confide in you. Is your husband at home?’

  ‘No. He’s had to go out.’

  ‘Dear Judith, might I come round?’

  ‘No.’ Judith found that she had given this uncompromising answer before thinking of any reasonably civil sequel to it. ‘The dog is rather upset,’ she said. ‘I suppose these things are catching. It might bite you.’

  ‘Oh, dear!’ Twist gave a squeak of alarm. ‘Could you come out somewhere and have a drink? Could you make the Thomas Carlyle?’

  ‘The place at the bottom of Gas Street?’

  ‘Yes, indeed. But that’s not the entrance. You go–’

  ‘I know. Yes, I’ll come. Thank you very much.’ Mervyn Twist, Judith thought, might really have something to tell, since he was an indefatigable hanger-round in the studios of advanced painters. Moreover the Thomas Carlyle, although not known to be actually implicated in the Limbert mystery, was, topographically at least, intriguingly peripheral to it. ‘I’ll come right away,’ Judith said. ‘Are you a member?’

  ‘Indeed, yes – isn’t it absurd?’ Twist produced a piercing self-conscious giggle. ‘May I come and fetch you in a taxi?’

  ‘Thank you very much – but please don’t.’

  ‘The dog?’

  ‘Yes. He’s producing an odd sort of foam at the mouth and seems very excited. Of course if you know about dogs, and would care to have a look at Tiger–?’

  ‘That’s the dog?’

  ‘Yes. We call him that because of his being so fierce even at ordinary times… But what was I saying?’

  ‘Dear Judith, you were saying that you would hop into a taxi and come straight along to the Thomas Carlyle. Just ask for me at the door and I’ll be there in a jiffy.’ Twist giggled again at the skittish phrase. ‘It will be a comfort. To tell you. Yes, indeed.’

  ‘I’ll be glad to listen.’ And Judith hung up, scribbled a note for John, and called a taxi.

  The Thomas Carlyle proved to be a period piece of rather a complex sort. The basic idea, clearly, had been a nightclub with a Victorian décor. Had the later nineteenth century achieved the idea of such an institution, its appearance – the proposition seemed to run – would have been like this. But this had been somewhat uncertainly conceived. There were curtains and heavy furniture that would have satisfied Mr Gladstone, or even the old Queen herself; there was a buffet with young ladies dressed to recall Manet’s celebrated picture of the bar at the Folies Bergères; the walls were lavishly plastered with the work of artists ranging from Landseer and Alma-Tadema to Beardsley and Toulouse-Lautrec; the company sat for the most part at small glass-topped tables upon which some artist of no very refined talent had executed a series of large-scale cartoons of Victorian notabilities. One set down one’s glass on Tennyson’s nose or tapped one’s cigarette ash into Browning’s ear. But the laboured jocularity of all this had itself a period air, and it was necessary to suppose that the Thomas Carlyle was either the recent creation of some elderly person emotionally fixated in the nineteen-twenties, or an actually surviving institution from that conscientiously frivolous era.

  Mervyn Twist conducted Judith on her arrival to a table in a corner, where they sat down at opposite ends of the long and lugubrious face of the late Mr George Moore. At similar tables around them people were eating oysters or dressed crab, drinking champagne, staring glumly into one another’s eyes or vacantly into air, and generally behaving in ways expressive of the hectic nightlife of London. In the middle of the floor a gaunt girl, dressed with ingeniously dissimulated decency in a species of black lace curtain, plodded her way, unintelligible and disregarded, through a succession of French songs.

  ‘Quite, quite absurd,’ Twist was saying. ‘And rather horrible – don’t you think? I should suppose she was as tubercular as an old cow. And look at her midriff.’ He glanced uneasily at Judith during these random remarks, and she supposed that he was ever so slightly drunk. The girl sang mechanically, like some contrivance into which a penny has been dropped.

  Papa, je ne comprends pas un mot.

  Ma chère, c’est ce qu’il faut?

  ‘Deplorable,’ Twist said. ‘Not even honestly peuple, not even authentically canaille. I expect she’s really quite bien élevée, poor little brute. How horrible life is.’

  Mais Papa, qu’est-ce que ça veut dire?

  Moi qui croyais que j’allais rougir.

  The singer had begun to move between the tables, making perfunctory and conventional gestures of enticement, modesty, lubricity. It could be sketched, Judith was thinking. But it would need a first-rate pencil to get in the nullity, the emptiness of the performance. She turned her glance back to Twist. ‘I don’t know that a place like this gives life much of a chance.’

  ‘Quite right.’ Twist gave a nod which was at once emphatic and maudlin. ‘Most of these people are beyond resuscitation. I can’t think why we came.’

  ‘Did Gavin Limbert often come? He lived within a stone’s throw.’

  ‘Look – they’ve brought us some horrible drink.’ Twist stared in unnecessary perplexity at the bottle which had been planted on George Moore’s drooping moustache. Then he filled two glasses and emptied his at a draught. ‘Oh, dear, oh dear – I believe it’s made out of rhubarb. Life is grim.’ Suddenly he looked at Judith in immense surprise. ‘Do you know? Those were Gavin’s last words. Spoken just like that. “Life is grim.” He knew, you know. For he was a great genius. He
and I were the only two people who properly understood the – the–’ Twist frowned, perplexed. ‘Do you know – I can’t remember what? But something terribly important.’

  ‘Would it be the disintegration of reality in the interest of the syncretic principle?’

  ‘That’s it. And now there’s only me. “Life is grim.” That’s what Gavin said. In this very hole. And then he went off and they killed him.’

  ‘Here?’ Judith was startled. ‘Limbert was here on the night he died?’

  ‘Yes, indeed. It was quite early – some time before those ridiculous police came in. But what has worried me is the hunted man. I’ve wondered whether I should tell the police. But police are so horrid.’ Twist recollected himself. ‘Except, of course, your husband – dear Judith. I’m very fond of Robert.’

  ‘John. But who was the hunted man?’

  ‘Somebody Gavin turned out to know. He had an old school tie, and a twisted lip, and he kept on saying that he was a seedy sort of failure–’

  ‘Nonsense. I don’t believe a word of it.’

  ‘My dear, it is perfectly true. I thought he might be a kind of Grahame Greene turn put on by this absurd club. I suppose he must have gatecrashed. And he was tremendously hunted. Trembling in every limb. And starting at every sound. And looking furtively round. And then Gavin recognized him. They’d been at school together and had even been pals for a bit, because this chap had done a little painting. Gavin got him a couple of drinks.’