“It was what we call ‘information received’,” Bobby explained. “A reference was made to that picture.” He indicated the ‘Girl Peeling Apples’ as he spoke. “Has Mr. Atts spoken of it recently?”
“It was always on his mind,” she answered. Her nervousness under this questioning was becoming marked but her voice was still steady. “I rang up a friend of his to see if she knew anything. I asked her to meet me here. There was something I had to say.”
“That would be the lady I saw,” Bobby remarked. “I noticed she went away rather quickly. Was that because of what you had wanted to say to her?” When she nodded but did not speak, he went on: “Will you tell me what it was you said?”
“I asked her,” Mrs. Atts replied slowly, “I asked her if she thought her husband had murdered mine.”
CHAPTER V
CRESCENT COURT
THEY WERE WORDS that had come very softly, yet very clearly. When they had been uttered, Mrs. Atts sat down again, again with that air of extreme exhaustion she had shown before. To give her a few minutes in which to recover herself, Bobby turned away to look once more at the ‘Girl Peeling Apples’, though now he knew he had no hope of ever recovering the magic that in earlier days he had found in it. By this time more people were appearing in the gallery. A man and woman paused near Bobby. The woman, consulting her catalogue, said:
“It’s by Rembrandt. Rather a dreary subject, don’t you think?”
The man said:
“A photograph, that’s all. Not like the new modern art that makes you think—think out its meaning for yourself.”
They moved away; and Bobby reflected it was just as well Hyams had not been near enough to hear these comments or perhaps he might have given way to more homicidal thoughts.
Again a little depressed to think how much of its earlier magic had now been lost for him, and reflecting that for him at least art had always meant a deeper insight, a heightened sensibility, not in any way a sharpening of the intellectual faculties, Bobby turned to sit down by Mrs. Atts. He said:
“We can’t talk here. Too public. What you have told me is very serious. It can’t simply be left there. Will you come back to Scotland Yard with me?” She shook her head. “Or may I come to see you?”
“The reporters would find out,” she answered wearily. “Then it will all start all over again. I’ve been living in a state of siege. I’ve had to ask the Exchange not to put any more calls through and I told the porter to try to keep them away, but I think he takes their money. That is why I asked Mrs. Bardolph to meet me here. I couldn’t think of any other place where there wouldn’t be reporters and I knew she and Mr. Atts met here sometimes.”
“Could you give me your address?” he asked.
“It’s Crescent Court, Mayfair Crescent,” she answered. “No. 19. If you come the reporters will know at once. They find out somehow. I don’t answer knocks now.”
“I’ll handle them,” Bobby told her. “If there’s a knock between five and six this evening—one, pause, two quick, pause, one, you will know it’s me. At present the less publicity, the better. Is there any back way into the flats?”
“I’ve been using it sometimes,” she said. “Tenants aren’t supposed to. It’s round the corner. There’s a notice: ‘No admittance’ or something, and ‘Service Only’. There’s a service lift they keep locked and there are stairs. If they see you they will stop you.”
“That’ll be all right,” Bobby answered. “I’ll use the stairs and I’ll try to avoid being seen. If I have to, I’ll tell them it’s a police matter and they’re to hold their tongues. Not that they’ll take much notice of that. Now I’ll be off, but remember—a knock like this, one, two, one—will mean I’m there. Very likely by that time you’ll have heard from Mr. Atts or perhaps he may have returned.”
But this he only said in order to try to calm her, for he could see—could not fail to see—what a highly nervous state she was in. He went away then, and later on, soon after five, the ‘In’ basket being clear and the ‘Out’ basket full to repletion, he took a brisk walk to Crescent Court—probably the quickest way of getting there in this rush hour. It was a new, imposing building, no uglier than most of its kind. The rents probably ranged from £400 upwards—chiefly upwards—and bestriding the entrance, like a minor colossus of Rhodes, so tall and broad was he, stood a resplendent figure, his chest adorned by many ribbons, his bristling moustache a challenge to this clean-shaven age, his expression an unpleasant mixture of the obsequious, the sly, and the bully.
“A bribable face, if ever there was one,” Bobby reflected as he walked by, turned the corner, saw the entrance marked ‘Service Only’ and went in. The service lift was just opposite, and, whether in fact locked or not, its key hung near by. On his left were the stairs and using these would be less likely to attract attention. He ran up them quickly, hoping he would meet no one on the way, and arrived, a little out of breath, at the third floor where the Atts flat was situated. By way of a dark and narrow passage, cumbered with various pails, mops, and so on, he penetrated through a door, marked ‘Service Only’ to a broad landing. An indicator board directed him to Flat 19, where he gave the prearranged signal of recognition. He was admitted at once by Mrs. Atts, who looked, he thought, even more pale and nervous than she had done in the South Bank Gallery.
The flat was one of the smaller in the Crescent Court building. In the language of the estate agents—two sits, two beds, usual offices. The ‘sit’—otherwise lounge—into which Bobby followed Mrs. Atts was a fair-sized room, and Bobby’s first impression of it was that he had found his way by some accident into a modern Aladdin’s cave. For though certainly no expert he did know enough of such things to be sure that the display in this room was of high value, both monetary and artistic. In terms of money the value probably ran into five figures or more. A moderate estimate in point of fact. The Persian carpet was of such rare and exquisite workmanship as to make it seem an act of vandalism to tread on it. A bookcase was a superb example of English eighteenth-century work. Before the window stood a Buhl library table which would have put entirely in the shade the one in Sir Walter Welton’s room. There were two French armchairs with lovely tapestry coverings, and on the walls were crowded together a number of paintings that would have been a credit to any collection, private or public. Evidently Mr. Atts had a catholic taste, and could admire equally the concoctions of the surrealists, the deep tranquillity of a Constable, the lovely early Italian visions of saints and angels hymning their songs of praise. There were even one or two of those snug mid-Victorian paintings now beginning to creep humbly back into favour. Everywhere, too, were such things as collectors call ‘museum pieces’—a bracket clock of early date, carvings in ivory and jade, old silver ware, an Elizabethan salt among them, and much fine china, Oriental and European.
Bobby, slightly overwhelmed by such a display of treasures as he had never seen before in so small a space, could only wonder what it must be like to live day by day in the midst of such an overwhelming feast of beauty. Mrs. Atts had seated herself and was motioning him to a chair—it was a fine example of the early north-country ladder-back chairs. She noticed as he seated himself how he still peered incredulously around. She said, and it was spoken bitterly, resentfully:
“There’s hardly anything in the room worth less than £100 and most of it is worth much more. All—or most—genuine and all for sale. On commission. It’s a relief to be able to tell someone.”
“Oh,” said Bobby, rather taken aback. “You mean—”
“We get them from dealers,” she explained. “Twenty per cent on all sales. An antique dealer has to be sure. He has to give a guarantee very often. He may have to take the thing back. So when he is doubtful he may send it to us. We don’t guarantee anything—except our own judgment and reputation as art expert and critic. People prefer it. They like to tell their friends how they persuaded the celebrated Mr. Atts—you can see him on Television any week almost—to part with the
gem of his private collection. These art chaps let their enthusiasm for a good thing run beyond their purses, is what they say. It’s my job to put that idea into their heads. ‘Mr. Atts never thinks of the housekeeping,’ I say. Or I say that he only parts with things under pressure. It’s my job to see the pressure’s there. When a visitor seems interested in something, I have to say how Mr. Atts loves it. I laugh a little and say I believe he would almost sooner part with his wife, and then they generally go all gallant. You see, I’m well trained. Most of our visitors know a little, just enough to know nothing at all.”
When she had said all this—and it had all come out in an unchecked torrent of words—she sank back in her chair, again with that same air of utter exhaustion she had shown in the Art Gallery. Bobby was silent, too. He was asking himself what bearing this confession—it had all the air of a confession—might have on Mr. Atts’s disappearance. It was she who broke the silence.
“I have become a kind of intellectual harlot,” she said, “selling my soul, not my body.”
“A severe judgment,” Bobby said, touched by the, he felt, somewhat exaggerated self-scorn he seemed to sense in her words.
“One judges oneself,” she said.
“Do you think it has anything to do with Mr. Atts’s going away?” he asked.
“I don’t see how it could,” she answered, a little surprised evidently by the question. Then she added: “If he doesn’t come back soon the dealers will take it all away. In a few days there may be nothing left but four bare walls.”
“When you were talking to Mrs. Bardolph,” Bobby said, “you used the word ‘murder’. Why?”
“I don’t know,” she answered. “I think it came of its own accord.”
“It is not a word one uses without a cause,” he told her.
“No,” she agreed. “No. It was something she said. No, it wasn’t. It was how she looked. Because she was afraid, deep down in her. As if she had seen a ghost.”
“Yes,” Bobby said. “Yes?” And he remembered that Private Detective Groan had used much the same expression. “Why should she?”
“I think Mr. Bardolph suspects there is something between her and my husband. So do I. When they were here together I could see how he was watching them both while he was talking to me. John—Mr. Atts—made him a present of quite a good piece of jade he had been admiring. I noticed he took care to leave it behind. Perhaps he thought it was a kind of bribe. I think inside him he was angry. Angry. I think he is a passionate man. I think he cares a great deal for his wife. I think at that moment he was near to killing John. I don’t know. All at once, there, in the Art Gallery as we were talking, it all came back to me, all at once, all of it. So I said what I did. It seemed to come of its own accord. She didn’t say anything. She just went away, very quickly. I wish I knew. Thank God I don’t. I wish he would come back. Why doesn’t he?”
CHAPTER VI
THE HEAD PORTER’S STORY
BOBBY MADE NO attempt to answer this question, to which indeed he knew no reply save one he did not care to give. However, the emotional outburst to which he had just listened seemed to have relieved Mrs. Atts’s feelings, lessened the strain under which she had clearly, and not unnaturally, been living. It was in a much quieter and more ordinary voice that she said now:
“Will you please excuse me for just a moment?” She got up and left the room. Soon she returned. She had evidently been tidying her hair, attending to her make-up, though of that she wore comparatively little, and now her eyes had become red and inflamed. She said: “I’m so sorry,” and sat waiting, her hands folded in her lap. “Yes?” she said, when Bobby did not speak at once.
“When did you see Mr. Atts last?” he asked then.
“The day he was to have given his lecture at the Royal Arts. In the morning. He was busy with it for a time. Then he went out to keep an appointment he had at the Tate. With Lord Derrytoms. John—Mr. Atts—was advising him about his Picassos on loan there. There’s a bid from America to buy them. From the Tate he was going on to the South Bank Gallery. He told me he would be back for lunch. He didn’t come. I thought he had probably lunched at the South Bank. There are quite good restaurants at some of the museums now.”
“Did he keep his appointment with Lord Derrytoms?”
“Yes, I rang up the Tate to ask. They said he and Lord Derrytoms left together. I rang Lord Derrytoms up. He said he offered John a lift back here, but John said he had an appointment at the South Bank Gallery. Lord Derrytoms said he got the impression it was in connection with his lecture. He had the script with him. Something he wanted to check up on. I rang up the South Bank but no one had seen him there. I thought perhaps it was really Mrs. Bardolph he was going to see. I knew they had been meeting there recently.”
“You don’t know anything about his movements after he left Lord Derrytoms?”
“No,” she said at once. “Nothing at all.”
“Did he take anything with him?”
“Only what he had in his pockets. All his things are still here—his toothbrush and razor and so on.”
“Money?”
“I don’t think so. His cheque-book is still there, in the drawer where he kept it. I looked. And about ten or twelve pounds, I think.”
“His passport?”
“That’s still there, too.”
“Has he drawn anything from the bank recently?”
“Not for two or three weeks. Not for any large sum for much longer. He might have had some I didn’t know about. Sometimes dealers paid him in cash. Not often, but it did happen.”
“We could make inquiries,” Bobby said.
“Oh no,” she protested. “John would be furious.”
“We should take every care to see it didn’t become public,” Bobby assured her. “But when a well-known art critic vanishes in broad daylight, between the Tate and the South Bank Gallery, just before he was due to give an important lecture, I think inquiries must be made. In fact they are being made, very searching inquiries, too. Not by us but by reporters. Every man jack of them pretty well. And reporters are hard to dodge, harder still to choke off when they are after what they call a scoop. You said yourself you were living in a state of siege. I think I must ask you to give us your authority to make all necessary inquiries. Reporters don’t need authority. They just go ahead, even if they do keep one eye on the law of libel. We don’t meddle with what’s private. If Mr. Atts had eloped with Mrs. Bardolph, as he certainly hasn’t and probably never meant to, it would be no business of ours. But it would rate a big lift up for any reporter who could locate him anywhere on the Continent. Preferably with a woman. There is no other woman?”
“Not at present,” she answered bitterly. “There have been—before Mrs. Bardolph, I mean. Most likely there will be again when he gets back. He will return. Won’t he?”
“We must hope so,” Bobby said gravely; and she made no answer, but lifted one hand to her face as if to hide her eyes. Bobby went on:
“You said he had the script of his lecture with him, didn’t you?”
“Oh yes, he never let it out of his sight.”
“Has he left no notes, no memorandum of any sort?”
“Oh no, he never did. He made very few. He used to say he had every word complete in his mind before he began to write a lecture out.”
“He never said anything to you?”
“No. He was very excited about it. One could see that. I never knew him like it before. He often said ‘blabbing’, he called it, had cost him enough and it wasn’t going to happen again. It was almost a mania with him.”
“Was that a reference to the ‘Girl Peeling Apples’ affair?”
“Oh, you know about that?” she asked in return. “John always claims that but for some chance remark of his Sir Walter Welton would never even have known that it existed at all, and that it was only by getting hold of information John had collected and by working on it that Sir Walter found it first and that’s why Sir Walter is a knigh
t and John isn’t, and why Sir Walter was appointed Curator-in-Chief of the South Bank Gallery instead of John.”
Bobby asked one or two more questions of small importance, routine questions, and then departed, saying as he did so that he hoped there would be good news for her before long.
She made no answer, no comment, and the thought crossed his mind that it was by no means certain what she would regard as good news—news that her husband was returning at once or that that would never happen.
Outside, on the landing, was a tall, good-looking, well-built young man of dark complexion, with noticeably clear, bright eyes under lashes a good many girls might have envied. A virile, striking, perhaps aggressive personality, Bobby thought, and one well likely to impress itself upon women. As the door of the flat was opened to allow Bobby to come out, he almost ran forward, but it closed again before he reached it. Either Mrs. Atts had not seen him or else she did not wish to admit him. He turned angrily on Bobby.
“Are you one of those damn reporters?” he demanded.
“Dear me,” said Bobby who was accustomed to claim that questions of that sort, in that tone, always drew out the best in him; “do you often talk to perfect strangers like that?”
“Well, are you?” the other insisted, his tone and manner that of unappeased hostility. “Driving her out of her mind. I’ve had them after me as well. I threw two out one after the other this morning.”
“A great mistake,” Bobby assured him earnestly. “The protocol with reporters is to stand them a drink, two drinks, three, and talk loud and clear about something else. Do I take it that Mr. and Mrs. Atts are friends of yours? Is that why reporters have been getting themselves thrown out by you in such swift succession?”
“I didn’t say anything about swift succession,” retorted the other, still more angrily, for he was beginning to feel he was being laughed at, which is always intolerable. “Who are you, anyhow?” he demanded.
Triple Quest: A Bobby Owen Mystery Page 5